Ippity Bippity Boo (Or, What's the Right Word For a Male Backpacking Fairy Godmother?)

Talk to Shane.
Not Shane, my martini-swigging, alarmist, professor friend, but Shane-at-Herb-Bauer's.
Everybody - Mark Grossi, my backpacking-experienced JMT co-conspirator, Marek, the wilderness guy, the ladies in my ceramic tole painting class (OK I'm joking , I'm not sure what ceramic tole painting is), but almost everyone told me: "Talk to Shane before you go backpacking."
And so I tried. I would call Herb Bauer's Sporting Goods only to be told "Shane? He said he was coming in, but I haven't seen him" or "He was supposed to work today, but he decided not to." Time is running short and I have a lot of equipment to line up, so I memorized Shane's schedule for this week.
On Monday I went in, on the off chance that he'd show up for work when scheduled.
And I doubted it, because I'd already formed a picture of this Shane character in my mind.
He'd have wild hair, or a moth-eaten beanie. I wasn't sure if it would be surfer, snowboarder, skater, or a combination thereof, but I knew "Dude" would follow. He was obviously a Something-Dude.
I was annoyed, but not the least suprised, when on Monday they told me Shane was in the back eating his lunch and I would have to wait a bit. I pictured the cocky hooligan, feet up, munching his fish tacos while stressed, exhausted reporter me, cooled her heels.
But Shane-dude turned out to be Shane Krogen, who runs High Sierra Volunteer Trail Crew. I knew all about trail crew from Das, a friend of mine who once went on one of their trips and told me about how he helped clear trails with chain saws and ate barbecued salmon flown in from Alaska and in three days met people from all over California.
Not-a-dude Shane, who is the master of ceremonies on these trips, is a slim man in his early fifties. But the slim is new. I told him about how I'd been expecting Bill or Ted fresh off of an excellent adventure, and he told me how his doctor told him he would die if he didn't lose weight. So, in the past year he took off more than 100 pounds and changed his life. He sold his own gear store, started working part-time at Herb Bauers, and now spends more than 100 days each year in the mountains, which is why I'd had a hard time tracking him down. He was busy with his new lease on life.
I filled him in on our John Muir Trail project.
He listened. He listened the way very few people are good at listening: completely and compassionately focused. At first it was a little unnerving, because it was such an unfamiliar experience for me. I explained that I was the one that had never been backpacking before and while I knew that held great comical writing possibilities, everyone kept telling me that I didn't understand what I had gotten myself into, and I was becoming, shall we say, daunted, unless you preferred the term "fairly freaked out".
"They're only saying those things because they underestimate you," said the man who had known me less than three minutes.
Then he turned into Shane--well, what's the version of a male, backpacking, fairy Godmother?
We're talking ippity, bippity, boo, magic. There really should have been singing and cartoon mice.
First, the minor parlor tricks: without ever having seemed to have looked me over that closely, he correctly said what size clothing I wear. I'd brought my beloved Ecco hiking boots in to see if he thought they would suffice. He bent them in half and said they were too flexible for backpacking and that he was pretty sure I'd spent too much money on them.
(Boy, did I). He took out their sole liners , studied them and said "O.K. you're right-handed, no signs of pronation, and so, what kind of dog do you have?"
(Mac's hair ends up everywhere, including the bottom of my shoes, but, still, very C.S. I. of him)
He had me walk. I felt inordinately pleased to have him pronounce that I have a good gait. So what if I felt like a pony on the auction block. I was a pony with smooth footwork!
Then he was on the phone, to I don't know who, saying things like: "Well, she's short in the torso, long in the leg." "Tall, but not big, maybe five or ten extra pounds and that'll come off on the trail."
Once I stopped inwardly sputtering over the pronouncement of extra pounds, I realized he was giving my physical stats to a backpacking manufacturer and I tried to wave him off. I frantically whispered that reporters don't do trade-outs, we can't advertise products, we're not like baseball stadiums.
So he says into the phone: "Now, you are going to get absolutely nothing out of this. She won't mention your product. But did I mention you look beautiful today? And that she's going to be writing about the wilderness maybe for people who have never been, and that's really cool, so we need to keep her warm and dry and light. You in?
Every one of his friends that he called (and he seemed to have an endless supply of them ) was willing to loan me gear. I told him the paper would pay for me to rent stuff, and that I'm a sucker for spending my own money on anything deemed "gear". ( Oh the damage, "Best of" lists, can wreak on my finances, as I found out during my bicycle phase. And I think the real reason I was yearning for Tango class there for a while, was that I wanted to buy beautiful shoes from Argentina.)
But Shane said a journalist doesn't make enough money to buy the stuff he was talking about, and the stuff available for rent wasn't good enough to leave my mind free to concentrate on my job, and he wanted me to do my best job.
I don't know enough about outdoor gear to be familiar with the names he was lining up, but I'm pretty sure it was the outdoors version of "This woman needs a Donna Karan cashmere coat, Burberry classic trench, Hermes scarf, Jimmy Choo heels, and lets add a Kate Spade handbag to make it all fun."
He is borrowing for me a tent that weighs less than 3 pounds, but could keep you warm on Everest. Can you even get your mind around that? Think about it. Three pounds is like $1.99 worth of on-sale tomatoes. And he's trying to arrange a down sleeping bag that is made entirely in the United States. As opposed to the shell being sewn by slave labor somewhere else then stuffed here so they can say USA manufactured. I'll be able to sleep warm and with a clear conscious.
After he took about, oh five minutes, to round me up free use of the best outdoor gear made, we got back to hiking boot shopping. This consisted of me walking up and down a slanted plank while he watched and then told me which boots I needed.
As I'm walking around in the boots, he tells me that on Thanksgiving 1992 he stood in an ice-cold wilderness lake in his underwear and everything around him was beautiful in a way that he would never forget and that he has carried that moment ever since. He still flashes to this pinpoint of time when he needs to.
"You might not like backpacking, you may never go again. But you are going this time," he tells me. "And no matter what, you will have that one moment that matters and stays with you. And that will be what matters most."
So what's the right word for a male, backpacking, fairy godmother?
I'm glad I talked to Shane.