Lost Virtues: Taking Care of your Gear

I grew up with a mantra, “Take care of your gear and your gear will take care of you.”

The world seems to have lost its mind with the number of disposables or things that don’t need maintenance: disposable razors, disposable napkins, disposable cameras, Ziploc bags, plastic water bottles. I’ve witnessed hunters use disposable blades for their knives and wonder, “Now why not just learn how to sharpen your knife.” Everyone knows a sharp knife is a safe knife. Not only that but a good knife can be handed down as an heirloom. A good sharp edge can build a civilization. It was Lincoln himself who said that if given 6 hours to cut down a tree he would spend 4 hours sharpening the axe. These important skills of maintenance have been lost.  Everything has gone disposable or maintenance free, and then it breaks, usually fairly quickly. “Cheap” is the word of the day. “They don’t make em’ like they used to,” You mumble to yourself. But cheap is what the American consumer wants, isn’t it? Or is cheap simply what they are offered?

I grew up different and I am sure many others did too. When my father would take me camping, he beat it into my brain that if I took care of my gear then my gear would take care me. Meaning that your shoes needed shined, the rifles need cleaned and the cast iron needs seasoned. If these tasks were done, and done well, the equipment would do their job and their job was to make my life easier. The flip side of that coin is that if they were not taken care of, life in the woods would be miserable. You would have wet feet, a rifle that was unreliable and cast iron that was rusted and possibly broken. Best case scenario you would be miserable. In worst case scenario these combined could be catastrophic.

 I often think of the frontiersman who lived day in and day out with these simple tasks being what separates them from life and death. Maybe you think that it isn’t relatable or it is extreme to think this way, but consider Louis Lamoure’s Hondo. Or something more familiar, the film starring John Wayne.  In the film, Hondo (played by John Wayne) stumbles across a woman and her child living on the frontier in the wild west. He notices many things about the home.

All the man’s work was not done; the axe went unsharpened, the horses needed to be reshod and many things about the house were out of place. The woman had told Hondo that her husband was only gone for a short time but Hondo knew better. He calls out the woman for lying to him and does what a man is supposed to do. He stays. He sharpens the axe, shoes the horses and takes care of the homestead so that the homestead could take care of the woman and child. 

Hondo (John Wayne) knew the importance of keeping up with the routine maintenance of equipment. He knew that it was a man’s job to care for the things that made their lives on the frontier possible and he displayed a lost virtue among Americans. It may not be life and death in modern day America, but it could mean being stranded on the road or financial trouble if things are not maintained well.

 The mundane tasks of keeping up with good equipment that our modern world seems to hate, isn’t just a chore, but a way to thrive. It is slower, but it’s also steadier. It isn’t flashy but it is sure. Men used to know this virtue of taking care of what was theirs but it seems to be a lost virtue. I certainly am not without guilt. I’ve had wet feet from not taking care of my boots, rusted knife blades, and cracked leather. This old adage can be applied to many things in life: gear, tools, machinery, guns and knives. It can also be applied to the less concrete but more real like your health and your relationships. As I get older the truer the words ring, “Take care of your gear and your gear will take care of you.”