A mid-life transformation
By Cam Burns |
Dig, Jacob, dig.
Dig deeper, Jacob, deeper.
Get the Caterpillar backhoe,
Jacob.
Tunnel to China, Jacob.
Then back again.
I’ve been indoctrinated. I drank the Kool-Aid. I’m now a believer. For years, I thought Black Diamond’s Megamid was a silly idea, some kind of kiddy whimsy dreamed up by the company hippy — an obsession relating to the pyramids and positive transformation or something along those lines. The thing shoulda been scented with Patchouli oil. It reminded me of all my architecture school classmates and their obsessions with round houses.
Who the hell cares if the house is round, other than the designer, of course? They certainly don’t transform the occupant. They piss him off because the storage spaces are bloody useless.
Having once slept in a Megamid — or at least its very ancient predecessor, an old Chouinard product, I believe — in the late-1980s, on a back lawn in Bishop, Calif., I found the pyramid- shaped tents low, unstable, poor protection against the elements, and, honestly, after the thing flopped around in the breeze, a really strange creation. I went away unconvinced, and, honestly, not giving the proper thought to the device and its potential. Did I mention it had no floor? Who makes a tent without a floor?
You see, I’d never been introduced to a pyramid properly. On dry land, they stand only a few feet above the ground — high enough for a midget tailgate party, maybe.
But on a recent climbing trip to try an Alaskan classic, I was properly introduced. Within moments of landing on a glacier, fellow climber Jacob Schmitz had dug a pit about twice as deep as your garden-variety hot tub. About twice as wide, too.
What he intended was a bit of a mystery until he told me to pin the Megamid out, with wands, and to start shoveling snow onto the lower sides of its walls. Within a few moments, we had a spacious hole. Jacob then went to work building snow benches, shelves, a cooking platform, storage spaces — an entire kitchen, including a dispose-all (a hole for a trash bag pinned to the snow with wands). It was surreal. A real chef’s studio in the snow. We then sat down to a meal of processed flour and sugar foods, and stopped up our bodies for a week. “Welcome to ‘Mid’ life,” Jacob said.
After a blowy, stormy night, we emerged from a sleeping tent ready for a plug of breakfast starch. The Mid was still standing, not just barely as I’d expected, but nearly exactly as we’d erected it. I was amazed. How could an oddball tent like that, with one pole, make it through a storm? As the week dragged on, and several hundred feet of snow halted all activity except repeated readings of James Michener’s “Alaska” and Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace,” the Mid remained stoically upright in the savage alpine weather.
But after about seven nights, our chef’s studio was starting to look more like an artist on LSD’s rendition of a molten toilet bowl than a habitable room.
So, we dug a new hot tub. And I paid attention this time. Dig, Jacob, dig.
The key to a pyramid-shaped tent is using it creatively. A simple shallow hole is okay, but the real potential comes from the space underneath. Dig the hole deeper for more space, more occupants who want to stop themselves up with General Mills products.
In snow, you can dig for miles; on rocks, you can build a ringwall, then stick a pyramid atop it and give even the worst Jenny Craig-program drop-outs a decent berth; in dense jungle duff, it’s possible to shovel out foliage and commune with weird insects that want to burrow under your toenails.
Simply put, a Mid needs to be thought of as a starting point for entering the earth in the downwards direction. Dig, Jacob, dig.
Jacob had sewn an eighteen inch- wide strip of nylon along all four edges of his Mid, giving the shovelee a wider area on which to heap snow, thus making his Mid more stable and making possible a much larger interior space than simple pics of the Mid on dry land might suggest. And he’d adapted a non-standard pole — a great Visigoth castle-ramming job — to the tent so he had the celestial option (pushing it higher), or, as noted, the converse (digging even deeper).
Our second kitchen was even better, a real galley, with the kinds of accouterments that would’ve had turned Paul Prudhomme green (much like our latrine would have).We lounged away our Alaskan days and nights, watching the snow fall and the route get more and more questionable, while devouring unhealthy quantities of noodles and bread, and discussing the merits of improbable architecture.
On the flight out to Juneau, our pilot, a Texan named Bob, decided to buzz several other expeditions he’d recently deposited in the white wilderness. In remote valley after remote valley of the Chilkat Range, we zipped over clusters of expedition tents surrounded by waving skiers and climbers, all smiling up at Bob. In the center of each cluster was an ugly purple and gray square — the Megamid. I reckon these Alaskans know what they’re doing. I’m transformed. Pass the Patchouli oil.
Burns wonders why, if Wile E. Coyote had enough money to buy all that Acme crap, he didn’t just buy dinner. He can be reached at jonathanhemlock@ hotmail.com.
