I am Col’s pack.
He doesn’t like to dwell on it too heavily,
But he knows, out here, I am his life-support system,
Shrunken from the size of a city to a humble sack, that’s me.
Bushwalking is the name of the game of course,
But Col is good to me, he takes me nearly everywhere,
Which is great because I’m something of a shopaholic:
I love the supermarket (that paradise of
Packageable and packable commodities) –
How I love being paraded in there,
And when I see all those flimsy plastic carry-bags
How I pity them for what they are;
Both Col and I know what a superior artefact I am.
But it’s on our bush trips we two really hit our straps:
Those days of pure joy being carried along
Almost effortlessly like a feather in a breeze,
Taking all obstacles in our stride:
What a confident and competent unit we make,
The natural alliance of man and pack.
Yet there are those who would assert
That I am an instrument of torture
And a burden too painful to bear –
I flatly deny this outrageous accusation!
Col does not believe it for one minute,
He has more respect for me than that.
He knows how much freedom I allow him
And how much I make it possible for him to broaden his horizons,
And he knows it would be hypocritical of him to complain
How heavy I might be – my natural state is empty
Until he fills me up with whatever he thinks is necessary.
Anyway my weight is more than matched by his strength
And resilience; he would never abandon me,
If he leaves me and wanders off to investigate something
He’ll always come back. I contain and he carries,
I provide him the capacity to provide the power.All the same, I
do suspect he privately has
Some misgivings about me on occasions.
You see, I’m pretty good at reading his mind,
I’m in the perfect position to do so,
And sometimes when I peer into his mind
All I see is an assemblage of objects almost identical
To the jumble of my own contents.
And then, when I have a big load up
And Col is labouring like a convict doing hard labour
Up some horrendous slope, and its hot work
And he’s sweating like a steam-engine
And his blood temperature is through the roof,
I know he might well harbour unkind thoughts about me.
He’s thinking he exists only to serve as my slave –
Can you believe that!
Yet, often I feel more a part of his body than he himself does.
He could no more bring himself to dispose of me
Than he could willingly part with a limb.
At the top of the haul he shrugs me off
Burrowing inside me for the water bottle;
He smells like canvas and I smell like sweat
As the march-flies attempt to bite us both.
Sure, it can be a love-hate relationship at times,
But overall it’s a happy symbiosis,
Product of the loyalty that binds us.
Yes, he might be his own man, but I am Col’s Pack. |