Taking A Walk

by Dwayne Phillips

I am an engineer. I like the design of things; I like to see lots of different things so I can study their designs. That is a big reason I loved taking a walk. I could see all the roads, fences, houses, barns, tractors, cars, trucks, silos, and everything else in rural America that has been designed, tested, and used. Great things everywhere produced by great engineers.

I have written several posts about the equipment I used while taking a walk. Note how I use the word “equipment.” That is how I see it – equipment. Something that an engineer designed, tested, made, and used.

All this appreciation of finely designed and made equipment brings me to an embarrassing description of the pants that I wore every single day of walking (not half of the days, not three-fourths of the days, every single day).

I wore a pair of pants that my wife bought for me eight or ten years before taking a walk. I don’t know where she bought them, maybe K-Mart or some place like that. The name of the maker faded away from the little white tag on the inside of the pants. Also faded away were the materials used, the size, and everything else that an engineer would note when describing the equipment to readers.

Here is all that I can write about them: they are dark blue, they have six pockets with the fifth and sixth being on the thighs, you can remove the bottom halves of the legs to turn the long pants into short pants. I never did that as I always wore them as long pants for warmth in the cold and protection from sun burn in the heat.

The pants are made of some type of synthetic material. I don’t know what it is, but two things of note: (1) they never snagged and never tore and (2) they dry quickly. I would wash them in the sink in the evening, hang them in the bathroom, and they would be dry the next morning. Wear, wash, wear, wash, repeat every single day for 1,100 miles.

The moral of the story: you don’t need name brand clothes to wear. Simple, inexpensive ones will work just fine.