Comfy

 

May 24, 2021

 

Greetings from the cocoon,

 I’d like to introduce a friend of mine. About my size, very warm, a comfort to me for decades.  And even though our relationship has had gaps of many years where we didn’t spend time together, when we are reunited, it’s like we were made for one another.  A perfect fit.

 I had to travel to the exotic city of Ann Arbor to find what I needed.  It was only an hour away, but almost like another world.  One of those diverse college town that spawned Earth Shoes and English Racers and, in that time, the closest town that had shops which sold outdoor gear.

 I don’t remember what else I was tempted by, but only came prepared to buy one thing; a goose down sleeping bag.  And I laid down all the money I had, maybe a hundred dollars, and left with one of the best investments I ever made.

 That was nearly five decades ago.  I confess that many of these intervening years it has been packed in its original stuff bag, resting among unused luggage and tents with missing poles and boxes of things that we haven’t admitted we won’t open again.

 But for many, many years, it was my closest companion.  It was the first thing I felt when I woke, and the last thing I knew as I fell asleep.  This sleeping bag, a perfect fit, kept me warm, and often dry.  It protected me, or so I naively believed,  from spiders and snakes and scorpions, from curious night animals.  It kept out the cold, provided me a place to rest.  It was my home wherever I was.

 I traveled around the country on my bicycle, tens of thousands of miles, sleeping in fields, on picnic tables, under bridges.  Some nights in my tent, occasionally in my hammock, but most wherever I could find a flat place to lay out my sleeping bag.  I slept in mechanic’s bays, in farmer’s yards, in soggy bayous, empty deserts, on frozen mountainsides.  And nearly every night, I slept surrounded by goose down, held in place by my companion. 

 A thousand days began this way:  I would open my eyes, peeking out from bag to see if it was light enough.  I would sit up, and let the morning wake me.  I would sit with the nylon shell wrapped around me and start my breakfast.  There would be a stray feather stuck to my skin.

 I put a lot of miles on this sleeping bag, and not all pretty miles.   I sweated inside it, some nights, it was my only protection from swarms of mosquitoes. I slept in dirty places, in snow, on gravel. The bag absorbed my life, and coffee, and bug spray, and peanut butter and calamine and spit.  I slept in the clothes I rode in, so the bag slowly took on the character of the man inhabiting it.

 One morning I woke in the yard of a family that had taken me in.  I had hung the sleeping bag up on a tree to dry the dew.  After a little while a young boy came to where I was sitting on the ground by my bike.

“Why does your sleeping bag smell funny?”

Which was not really ‘funny’ as in amusing.  More like ‘funny’ as in ‘I wonder what died in there.’  Funny.

 The bag was made by the Seattle Quilt Company, founded in 1915, maybe the first makers of goose-down quilted sleeping bags in this country.  They called these bags ‘Comfy’.  I can testify, they are.  Somehow, the feathers they collected and sewed inside this shell, created a sanctuary for me for all these years.  And not just me.

 My daughter used it.  She packed it on her own bicycle tour across the country, adding her own story to the quilt.  My son used it, usually without consulting me, on various camping outings.  Somehow, it made its way back to me.  And now I’m taking it on another adventure.

I picked it up from the dry cleaners a couple of days ago.   As I left, I turned and told the woman behind the counter a little of the history of this bag, and as I started, my eyes filled, and my voice broke.  I can’t imagine what she must have thought, this man who thought of an old sleeping bag with such emotion.

 This morning, before I wrote these first words, I took my old friend outside in the cool morning air.  I laid it out and slipped inside it and felt the familiar warmth, the fabric soft from countless nights of use.  I zipped up the mummy bag, pulled it close around the top, and my body relaxed.  I listened to the morning, felt the cool air on my face, remembered this exact sensation from the myriad experiences before.  And I slept.

 When I woke, there was a stray feather stuck to my skin.

 Hope this finds you comfy,

 David

 

 

 

Copyright © 2021 David Smith