The paddle has a crack that runs from the throat toward the tip, hairline, following the grain, and I have been going to replace it for four years. Every spring I take it down and look at the crack and decide it has not grown. Maybe it hasn’t. Maybe it has, by the width of a thought, the way a person’s face changes without ever changing on any particular morning. I dip it, it pulls water, it does the one thing a paddle is for. The obituary is written. I keep declining to publish it.
This is the trouble with gear that still works. It refuses to give you a clean reason to be done with it. It just gets a little more itself every year, a little more marked, until throwing it out would feel less like housekeeping and more like betrayal.
The bike pump has electrical tape wound around the handle where the plastic split. I wound it there in some year I can’t name, and the tape has since gone tacky and gray and collected a fur of shed dust, and it is now more tape than handle, and it holds. It builds pressure. It complains at the top of the stroke, a wheeze from somewhere in the barrel, but it delivers the sixty pounds and the tire goes hard and we go. A new pump would do this silently. That is precisely the problem with a new pump. It tells you nothing. It has no opinion about the stroke you are on.
Old gear talks back. The enamel mug is soot-black on the bottom from a hundred fires, and the black comes off on your hand, and the rim has a chip that you learn to drink around without deciding to. It holds heat wrong and cools coffee fast and I know exactly how fast, which is a kind of relationship. The wool blanket smells faintly of shed even after washing, a low animal smell that the wet brings out, and it is scratchy in a way that newer wool has been engineered out of having, and it is warm when it is damp, which is the whole reason to keep wool in a country that gets you wet.
The dry bag is no longer entirely honest. It says dry on the side, in a stamped word that has half rubbed off, and it means it about seventy percent of the time. The roll-top has lost some conviction at one corner. I have learned to pack the things that truly cannot get wet in a second bag inside the first, which is to say I no longer believe the bag but I keep using it, the way you keep listening to a person who is usually right. It floats. It keeps most of the lake out. Seventy percent is a passing grade in weather.
The tent zipper only closes if you speak to it right. There is a technique — you hold the fabric taut with the left hand, feed the slider slow, and if it snags you do not force it, you back it off one tooth and come again gentle. Force is what killed the last two teeth. Patience is what keeps the rest. In the dark, in bugs, this is a negotiation, and I have lost it enough times to have gotten good at it, and a good zipper would have taught me none of this.
The life jacket has faded to the color of old carrots. It was orange once, a loud safety orange with intentions, and the sun has pulled the loudness out of it season by season until it is the soft dead orange of a root cellar in March. The foam inside has gone a little stiff. It still floats a body; I have not tested this and do not want to, but the buckles snap and the straps hold and it does the one job, and the color is only vanity, and vanity drowns no one.
I understand what all of this is. It is the postponement of endings. Each of these things has earned its retirement and each of them keeps showing up for work, and I keep letting it, because the replacement would be quiet and blank and would have to earn everything from scratch. There is a cost to knowing a thing well. You cannot easily let it go.
I took the paddle down again this week. Same crack. I ran my thumbnail along it, the way you check a board for a split, feeling for the place where the fiber has given up and the place where it still holds. It holds. Most of the way. There is a spot near the tip where the two edges of the crack sit a hair apart now, wider than a hair, where they used to sit closed, and I pressed them together with my thumb, and they came back apart when I let go.