zombie: A soulless corpse said to be revived by witchcraft…. (Oxford American Dictionary)

zombie product: A soulless product revived by corporate witchcraft.

zombie surprise: What the hapless purchaser receives on opening a package containing a zombie product. (With apologies to the Grace & Favour writers, whose inspired coinage I’ve taken the liberty of repurposing.)

Nothing lasts forever, and when a much-loved (and much-used) item of gear packs it in, you’ll need to replace it. In fact, if you’re like me, you won’t always wait for gear to die. Some things are so useful that you’ll want more than one of each, if only to avoid having to shift them around from pack to pack. Of course, if the piece of gear in question is over 20 years old, you can’t count on finding it on any outfitter’s shelves. (Truth to tell, if it’s more than six months old, it may already have disappeared without trace, so frenetic has the pace of “product development” become today—what the auto industry used to call “planned obsolescence.”)

Which is why it’s always a pleasant surprise to discover that something you’ve come to rely on is still for sale, undefiled by questionable improvements. And that explains why I was overjoyed when I found that the little Silva Huntsman compass—a long-term resident in my ditty bag and getaway pack—had not vanished from this earth. It’s never been my principal compass, but it has been a first-rate backup: accurate, sturdy, and compact. Nor is that its only role. Farwell carries one in his bicycle’s ‘bar bag, and he finds it very useful, especially when trying to decide which way to turn at rural intersections on days when the sun refuses to shine. So I’d decided I wanted one for my ‘bar bag, too. I like my Garmin GPS, but I don’t like being completely dependent on any electronic tool. (There’s also some doubt about how long our GPS receivers will work.) In any case, map and compass are as vital for venturesome cyclists as they are for paddlers, hillwalkers, and mountaineers. Sooner or later, all batteries die, but the earth’s magnetic field just keeps on going. And going…

You can imagine, then, just how glad I was to see my Huntsman compass displayed in all its glory on a retailer’s webpage. And I lost no time in ordering one. But I was destined to be disappointed. When I opened the box, just one week after I’d placed my order, I found a Silva compass labeled “Huntsman,” but it was not the Huntsman compass I’d come to know and love. It wasn’t the Huntsman compass shown on the retailer’s webpage, either. It was a Huntsman in name only—a zombie product, in other words—and I’d just received a zombie surprise. It was not a happy day.

Is this much ado about nothing? Well, see for yourself:

My original Huntsman is the little fellow on the left—a miniature sighting compass, whose diminutive size belies its considerable utility. The zombie Huntsman, on the right, is larger, occupying the dubious middle ground between the original Huntsman and a full-fledged orienteering compass like my Silva Ranger. Why “dubious”? Simple. It embodies neither the compactness of the original Huntsman nor the adjustable declination scale and transparent baseplate of the Ranger.

True, the zombie Huntsman’s graduations are in increments of 2° rather than 5°, and the compass can be made to lie flat on a map, but neither of these is important for general orientation and on-the-move navigation, tasks at which the original Huntsman excels. (Five degrees is the practical limit of accuracy for all but the most careful compass users, in any case.) Yet, as I just noted, the zombie Huntsman isn’t a substitute for a true orienteering compass like the Ranger, either. For one thing, the zombie Huntsman’s declination scale, which appears at first glance to be adjustable, is in fact fixed, and the opaque baseplate makes transferring bearings to and from a map something of a hit-or-miss proposition, at least when compared to the transparent protractor baseplate of the Ranger.

There are other problems with this zombie product, too. The graduated housing advances by fits and starts. I think the intention was to have tactile detents at the four cardinal points, but if so, this intention wasn’t realized in practice: the stops come at the wrong places. And the hinge—it’s not a true hinge at all, just a plastic extrusion (see photo below)—though indeed allowing the compass to lie flat on a map, springs up as soon as it’s released, effectively negating even this small advantage.

And that’s not all. As this bottom view of the zombie product shows, the “sun watch” feature—one of the hallmarks of the original Huntsman—is missing. This isn’t really much of a loss, however, since the sun watch was never more than an approximate timekeeper. Still, it was better than nothing for the watchless traveler in the midlatitudes, at least when the sun shone. And it was a great subject for round-the-campfire conversation. But the sun watch is no more.

The bottom line? If, like me, you’re looking for the old, tried-and-true Silva Huntsman, this zombie product isn’t it. It’s a good enough compass, to be sure, but it’s no substitute for the original. So don’t rely on catalog photos or website images. Accept no substitutes for the Real Thing—if you can locate it anywhere, that is. Good luck! And what do you do if you still find yourself on the receiving end of a Silva zombie surprise? You may have no choice but to wail and gnash your teeth. The small print on the retailer’s webpage from which I placed my order noted that compasses were not returnable. It seems they incorporate hazardous materials. So there’s another zombie surprise for you. Or have we now moved on to a zombie apocalypse? I’m not sure. But I do know I miss the old Huntsman. Is anyone at Silva listening? I hope so.

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Bicycling and recreational paddling came of age at roughly the same time, and at the outset, they were seen as natural complements. But that was before the coming of the automobile, when bicycles were still considered transportation, rather than toys. Times have changed, of course. Still, I think a great deal was lost when the happy partnership of pedal and paddle was dissolved. Which is what led me, a while back, to talk up something I christened “amphibious paddling.” The germ of the idea most likely originated with my early solo trips on the fast‑flowing little river I’ve called the ‘Kill. Since I worked rotating shifts, I had trouble finding a canoeing (and car‑shuttling) partner, and at the time I hadn’t mastered the art of poling upstream. Yet I hated to let a week go by without spending a few hours on the water. So I got into the habit of dropping my bike off at the take‑out before I headed to the put‑in. Then, when I reached the end of the day’s run, I had only to hop on the bike and pedal back to the old Jeep that was my principal — if less than reliable — transport. The bike went into the Jeep, and I drove down the road to pick up my canoe. It seemed a straightforward solution to the problem, and it was.

But I never saw any other paddlers doing as I did. Maybe they were worried about having their unattended bikes stolen or vandalized while they paddled. (They had reason to worry, in fact. Farwell once lost a lovely Dawes Galaxy touring bike in just this way — and on the selfsame ‘Kill, no less.) Or maybe the idea simply never occurred to them. In any case, the notion had lodged itself firmly in my consciousness, and when, some ten years ago, I got back on a bike after a two‑decade hiatus, it wasn’t long before I’d begun rediscovering the possibilities of amphibious travel. Usually this meant hauling a boat in a bag on a trailer behind my bike. And I was soon adding a pedestrian component to the mix, using my boat to take me to remote jumping‑off places for a bit of hillwalking or backcountry scrambling.

What’s the attraction? Well, I get to thumb my nose at the gas pumps, for one thing. But economy isn’t my first consideration. The real draw lies in the fact that the adventure now begins at my front door. Instead of a long — and often tedious — drive to a distant put‑in, I get a bike ride, much of it on little‑traveled rural roads. And in an age when jet‑assisted tourism and electronic communication are shrinking the world to the size of a microchip, the bicycle’s slow pace pushes back my horizons, in effect making my world bigger. It’s much the same sort of thing that leads me to prefer canoeing to driving a jet‑ski. Life lived in the slow lane has many attractions.

Amphibious trekking also breaks down artificial barriers. For many years my recreational activities were confined to what might just as well have been walled compounds. I paddled my canoe and kayak. I climbed mountains. I fished. I rode my bike. I watched (and photographed) birds. But with the exception of the hours that I snatched away from camp chores while I wetted a fly or snapped a few hasty photos, I seldom melded my pleasures. Then a metamorphosis of sorts took place, triggered by a chance meeting on an Adirondack lake. I described this epiphany last summer in an article entitled “Discovering the Freedom of the Hills“:

[The] encounter got me thinking, and two things followed in due course. One happened almost immediately: Both Farwell and I bought pack canoes. The second took a little longer to reach fruition, but it was worth the wait. The seed that ripened into the notion of “amphibious” adventures was planted in our minds.

Of course, nothing is really as simple as this. And my love affair with amphibious adventuring owes as much to my early paddles on the ‘Kill as it does to a single fortuitous encounter. My Grandad played a role, too. While he never, to my knowledge, rode a bicycle, I often used my own bike to reach his battered Grumman where he’d beached it on the shore of a remote beaver pond at the end of some abandoned Adirondack logging road. The trips in and out along these rutted tracks were rich adventures in themselves, even if they weren’t always easy, and I enjoyed the rides as much as I did the paddling.

The bottom line? My days on the ‘Kill, a chance encounter on a lake, and my adolescent jaunts to my Grandad’s favorite fishing holes all played their part in nudging me toward becoming a complete amphibious trekker… Read more…

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Big‑ticket items almost always hog the limelight when we draw up equipment lists and talk about our gear. Boats and paddles probably get the most attention, followed closely by tents and sleeping bags. This is only natural. These things aren’t cheap, and if any of them lets us down in the backcountry, the result can be more costly still. A similar logic also operates in the middle tiers of the gear list. Compasses command attention, as do GPS receivers, despite the lingering uncertainty about the future of the Global Positioning System in the States. In fact, we’re infatuated with electronic gadgets of all descriptions, from digital cameras and e‑book readers to MP3 players and smart phones. Certain tools seem imbued with special appeal, as well — especially knives of all types. This, too, makes a certain sort of sense. Compasses and knives embody both capital‑R Romance and capital‑T Tradition, and both have undeniable real‑world utility. As for electronic gadgets… Well, who among us is immune from the siren song of the Next Big Thing? Few paddlers I know, at any rate. A broken (or misplaced) digital camera may not constitute an emergency requiring evacuation, but it can certainly put a damper on the fun.

Yet the little things at the very bottom of the gear list also mean a lot, and cost is a pretty poor indicator of absolute value. More than one life has been lost for want of a match, after all, and there are many small items whose practical importance belies their diminutive size. These accumulate in the dark recesses of pack or pocket, and we seldom think about them at all until we need one and can’t find it. That’s when we discover just how thin a line separates roughing it from smoothing it. Which is why I long ago assembled my own collection of vital trifles and packed it away in a small sack, which I dignified with an old nautical tag: “ditty bag.” I first wrote about my ditty bag back in 2001, and I’m almost never without it. But there’ve been some changes made in the intervening years. In short, this isn’t my old ditty bag… Read more…

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