Colin Fletcher – R.I.P.

Friday 5 October 2007
0730


Colin Fletcher 1922 - 2007
Originally uploaded by hkp7fan.

“Now shall I walk, or shall I ride? ‘Ride’, Pleasure said; ‘Walk’, Joy replied”
- W.H. Davies

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
- Henry David Thoreau

These two quotations were on the first page of “The Complete Walker”, by Colin Fletcher.

I wrote some time ago that you know you’re getting older when your heroes start dying. Well, it’s happened to me again. I opened up an issue of Backpacker Magazine that arrived while I was gone, and found that Colin Fletcher had died in June.

Although I had not previously thought of him as a “hero”, as soon as I began thinking about his passing I realized that he was in fact one of the most important heroes in my life. He changed my life in a very profound way.

In about 1971 or 1972, my parents gave me his book “The Complete Walker”. It was a very comprehensive and well-written how-to book on backpacking. I was a Boy Scout and already very comfortable in the outdoors, but my knowledge of camping was mainly “old school”, i.e. campfires, hatchets and sheath knives, canvas tents, etc. The modern backpacking movement was in its infancy, and Fletcher’s book really helped it gain momentum.

There were (and are) a lot of how-to books on backpacking. But Colin Fletcher’s was (and is) different. It was so engagingly written that you almost felt you knew him personally. It contained many passages excerpted from his two previously-published books: “The Thousand Mile Summer” and “The Man Who Walked Through Time”.

“The Thousand Mile Summer” was about Fletcher’s walk up the length of California from Mexico to Oregon in 1958. “The Man Who Walked Through Time” was about his walk through the entire length of the Grand Canyon in 1963. (I thought it was in 1966, but the obituary said 1963. And since I seem to have a penchant for misremembering important personal history, I’ll say it was 1963…). Both books were essentially journals of backpacking trips, but they were also very thoughtful and introspective, revealing his own intellectual and spiritual journeys as well as his physical journeys. He had a talent for observation of the natural world and for describing it in such a way that you could imagine yourself being there in his place, and that made you want to get out and do it yourself. And a lot of us went out and did just that.

“The Complete Walker” was in many ways an extension of these books. It was definitely a “how-to” book in the sense that it systematically and exhaustively addressed all the nuts-and-bolts aspects of backpacking. He analyzed the backpack as a “house on your back”, and the chapters had titles like “The Kitchen”, “The Bedroom”, etc. This is such a logical and useful way of thinking about the subject that I borrowed his organization when I taught Boy Scout Backpacking Merit Badge classes (with due credit to The Master, of course). He surveyed the equipment available at the time, with explanations of the various design alternatives and the pros and cons of each. When applicable, he included test data (such as how long each model of stove would burn on “x” amount of fuel, and how long each took to boil a quart of water). He included detailed explanations of his own reasons for choosing the equipment he chose.

For the first few years after I read his book, anyone who had read it and saw me backpacking would have recognized me in an instant. From the Stetson “Open Road” hat on my head through the Trailwise Model 72 pack on my back containing my tarp, Svea 123 stove and SIGG aluminum pots, to the Sierra Cup on my belt, the walking stick in my hand, and the Pivetta Eiger boots on my feet, I looked like a Colin Fletcher clone literally from head to toe.

I bought and used much of the equipment he recommended, not in a spirit of slavish imitation (which he loathed) but because his choices were so logical and his reasons so persuasive that it seemed silly to do otherwise. Although I have replaced the equipment over the years as it wore out or better equipment became available, I still have most of my original outfit. The items in it are old friends with many miles on them, and I just can’t part with them.

Colin Fletcher gave me much more than just guidance on how to choose equipment. He gave me a glimpse and an ideal of what backpacking could be. In a sense he didn’t just write a “how to” book – he wrote “why to” books, one of which happened to contain a lot of practical advice. The equipment was merely a means to an end, namely getting out into the wilderness. In his view, the equipment and its use are just housekeeping. The actions of setting up and running your camp should be as automatic as possible, meant to keep your body functioning and to free your mind to enjoy the wilderness experience.

"The important thing about running your tight little outdoor economy," he wrote in 'The Complete Walker', "is that it must not run you. You must learn to deal with the practical details so efficiently that they become second nature. Then, after the unavoidable shakedown period, you leave yourself free to get on with the important things -- watching cloud shadows race across a mountainside or passing the time of day with a hummingbird or discovering that a grasshopper eats grass like spaghetti or sitting on a peak and thinking of nothing at all except perhaps that it's a wonderful thing to sit on a peak and think of nothing at all."

His philosophy was to let as little as possible come between him and the wilderness. And I have followed his advice. Whenever possible, I sleep in the open without a tent, and even if I need a roof I nearly always just use a tarp. I’ll never understand why people go to all the trouble of getting out into the wilderness and then shut themselves inside a tent. There is something magical about sleeping outside under the open sky, where you can simply reach out of your sleeping bag and touch the grass and flowers, and you feel as if you could do the same to the stars. You hear the night sounds, feel the breezes and smell the smells, and occasionally even see the creatures.

I have spent countless nights out in the open, falling asleep watching the stars and awakening to breathtaking mountain vistas, lush forest settings, and even thick blankets of new-fallen snow. For these priceless experiences I thank Colin Fletcher.

Another of his peculiarities was his penchant for traveling solo in the wilderness. Many people find this horrifying, and it goes against all the received wisdom of responsible outdoor groups and schools. But there is nothing quite like it in my experience. It is exhilarating, liberating, empowering, and humbling all at once. You feel very close to nature because there is nothing around you to disturb the rhythm of the natural world. I have spent many weeks alone on the trail in some very wild places, and wouldn’t trade those experiences for anything. For the knowledge and inspiration to enable me to enjoy this, I thank Colin Fletcher.

While my wilderness experiences are very personal, and were a fundamental building block for who I am today, I was hardly alone. The backpacking movement exploded in the 1970s. One of Fletcher’s obituaries observed that he helped people to discover backpacking as a way to fill a spiritual void. While I am not religious, it is certainly true that the closest I come to religious experience is when I am in the wilderness. Perhaps it’s my pagan Germanic ancestry (after all, my name is derived from the German for “Forester”). I feel a sense of reverence and peace in the woods and mountains that carries over and helps me to stay centered in the rest of my life. And when I feel the need to re-center myself, I know where to go and how to get there.

When my children were very young, I could hardly wait to get them out on the trail and introduce them to backpacking. When I finally couldn’t wait any longer, I outfitted them with backpacks and the other stuff they needed, and took them out for a weekend. Watching them on that first trip walking down the trail carrying their little packs was a very moving experience for me. When I got home I wrote Colin Fletcher a long-overdue letter thanking him for his guidance and inspiration. I had to send it to his publisher, but I hope he got it. I like to think that he did.

Colin Fletcher helped me and the many thousands of other people who read his books to discover the joys of wilderness backpacking. Although he had no family, we are all his heirs, and we should be eternally grateful for the priceless gift he gave us.

Thank you and Rest in Peace.


Mood: Sad but grateful
Music: Silence