Saying Goodbye to Gear (and Identity?)

I sold my sea kayak yesterday morning. It was gorgeous: red, sleek, fast, light. Fiberglass, just under sixteen feet. It paddled like a dream, but despite my aspirations of getting lost in long expeditions in the Sea of Cortez as giant rays glided in silence beneath the bow, I’d owned it for seven years and had only taken it out a half-dozen times. I had good intentions, but the kayak inertia was high, while that of mountain biking, trail running, and bodysurfing was low.

When Joni got home in the afternoon, I told her, “I sold the kayak.”

“Oh?” she said. “Are you sad?”

Well, now, that’s an interesting question. Selling a boat that gets wet less than once a year should spark no particular feelings except perhaps relief, but she knows and I know and you know that gear is bound so tightly with our identities—not just who we are, but who we think we are and who we want to be—that the arrival or departure of a piece of kit isn’t necessarily a simple transactional event.

About two years ago, when my first child went to college, I began purging myself of gear. The process turned out to be more complicated than one might have thought. Getting rid of corduroy ski pants? That was easy. But what about the full-suspension single-speed mountain bike? Or the fat skis mounted with tele bindings? These turned out to be surprisingly difficult to pass on, and the reason wasn’t sentimentality, it was that key components of my self-image were tied to the knowledge that having fun ripping on a single-speed and shredding with teles is who I am. At points in my life, I craved doing those things, and if my interests had moved on, parts of my soul hadn’t. I might no longer own a single-speed, but I’m still a single-speeder, you know what I mean?

The reluctance to abandon parts of yourself can be inhibiting, even paralyzing, and it wasn’t a coincidence that I started confronting this when my son went off to college. It’s a major milestone, a time to take inventory, and I decided to get real with myself, to be honest about who I am as an adventure athlete now and how I want to spend my time in the future. As time has grown ever more precious, do I want to dabble, or go deep?

In this issue, we feature three people who chose simplicity and focus. Although drawn to great heights, Leath Tonino turned away from technical climbing and its clanking racks and heavy coils of rope, instead embracing scrambling, using just hands and feet as a way to better feel the topography of the land. Hendri Coetzee ran the Kinsuka Rapids on the Congo River, at the time the biggest whitewater ever run, wearing plastic disks on his hands to be closer to the river. Lael Wilcox, the newest star in endurance cycling, owns just one bike at a time, though her sponsor would happily give her more, and she doesn’t even carry enough gear on her continent-crossing tours to fill her panniers. “The rest of the stuff,” she said, “I don’t really care.”

I love that—that Leath and Hendri and Lael chose to strip away everything that stood between them and the purest of experiences, that they went their own ways rather than conform to what tradition or culture expected of them. Modern life has accreted layer upon layer of sediment—obligations, expectations, all manner of entertainments and distractions and trivialities—and some of it’s worthy and much of it’s fun, but in the end, where does this accumulation leave you? As my kids have gotten older and I’ve listened to my heart change and I’ve better understood how all adventures are journeys of the self, I’ve committed to going down the same path: to do with less and in return, I hope, to gain more.

Joni was waiting for my answer. I thought about it for a second.

“Nope. I’m good with it.”

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