My old friend

When I saw the long, jagged rip across the formerly pristine face, I cried out…

She lay there, unconscious on the rug, staring blankly at the ceiling.  I knew she was gone.  Rushing to her side, my worse fears were confirmed.

A glimmer of recognition briefly flashed then faded into unseeing blackness.

My Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver was dead.

OK, I’ve overplayed the incident a tad but I needed a bit of melodrama to attract readers away from the bowling league news brief.  The editors are getting surly because the volume of hate mail from both regular readers has diminished, but I digress.

I didn’t really cry when I saw the heavy paperweight fall squarely onto the GPS but did say a bad word loud enough to startle the dog when I saw the smashed screen of my beloved navigation instrument.  To Yours Truly, there is nothing worse than losing a valuable piece of equipment to the whims of common stupidity, in this case by simply being too lazy to put the receiver away after my last outdoor jaunt.

Because of the annoying habit of allowing things to accumulate on my desk, one of my favorite pieces of outdoor equipment is now sitting on the closet shelf, as useful as a personal flotation device in the middle of the Mojave Desert.

I was unhappy but tried to move forward onto the next lurking crisis of everyday life by placing the incident squarely in the mental “dumb things I’ve done” file.  I had successfully moved past that aggravation until my deer-scouting trip of this past week when hunting partner Ken and I ventured out into the big woods to see what changes had taken place since last December.

Among the abundant sign, rubs and scrapes in the forest, we also found treestand of a possible trespasser.

It was the discovery of this last item that had me involuntarily reaching into my jacket pocket for the GPS that normally accompanies every trip.  I intended to mark the treestand in order to verify with the landowner that we were indeed on his property.  As my hand reached the bottom of the empty pocket, I felt a sudden sense of loss that hadn’t occurred days before when the accursed paperweight had fallen.

We moved onward but I commented later to Ken that for perhaps the first time, I actually felt a deep and emotional tug at the loss of a piece of equipment.  It was as if my favorite hunting dog had run off.

As I have noted many times, I don’t get all warm and runny about equipment.  To be sure, I am a major “gear-head” as my overflowing garage, barn and assorted closets will attest.  However, I have never felt the deep emotional connection that some people have for outdoor gear such as firearms.

The closest I have come to this is when shooting one of my grandfathers’ guns.  The rifle and shotgun that I acquired after their passing are some of my most priceless possessions but the deep feelings involved come from the connection with their spirit rather than the rather nondescript firearms themselves.

Now, I found myself in the rather odd position of mourning a black plastic box full of integrated circuits, diodes and batteries.  At that moment I realized how much our world had changed, possibly not for the better.

On the other hand, I could understand my feelings.  That particular GPS was elderly, bordering on senile compared to current models but it had seen me through so many incredible adventures that it truly seemed like an old friend.

That black box had gotten me back to port from the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico, helped find my way in a sudden dense fog on springtime Lake Monroe and navigate through the watery expanse of sprawling Lake Moultrie in South Carolina.

The GPS had extracted me from the wilderness so many times that I couldn’t begin to count all the “saves” that had occurred.  It had accompanied me from the high desert outside Las Vegas to New York City to the most remote corners of Hoosier National Forest.  The receiver had ridden too many airplanes, bicycles, backpacks, fishing boats, canoes, kayaks, passenger trains and whitewater rafts to count.

The collection of coordinates stored in the memory serves as a chronicle of my journeys over the last ten years and I enjoy periodically browsing the list of waypoints locked into the receiver.  In case you are headed that way, I can supply the latitude and longitude for Hoover Dam, Greyhound Bus Stopper rapid on the New River and The House of Blues in New Orleans.

Darn; I just remembered that those coordinates are gone forever.  Here’s a tip of the AA battery to my lost, lamented microprocessor friend.

The outdoor life has sure changed, hasn’t it?

photo:  Garmin

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