Patina is a physical memory, one that you can touch, you can take a moment and hold, to feel that emotion you had in that moment. The Bridger, our notebook, is a living memory you can hold.
A Throw Back to the Past
My wife is an analog person. From hating Alexa to mechanical watches, if it’s electronic, she seems to avoid it. A PhD in aerospace engineering, you would think she would be immersed in technology. Instead, as an engineer, she is the opposite.
She’s a throwback – making furniture for our house with her saws in the workshop, making clothing, writing in diaries and not on laptops, she is off the technology radar. When she wanted to create leather goods, I encouraged it.
As I watched her build her first prototypes, with no knowledge of what she was doing, I became even more encouraging.
And soon, Powell Supply Company was born.
As we did our first arts and crafts show, I looked back on the past months of her working hard, I couldn’t help but smile the biggest smile ever…she had done it. She had brought her dream to life.
Her designs, hand-crafted, made in our workshop, Powell Supply Company is her exploration of what she can create. These days, it’s everything from hats to leashes, she goes to outdoor shoes and collects fur from traders to make her goods.
When I began packing for what was to a life-long dream of mine, to go on a hunting safari in Africa, she gave me few of her items – a hat, a bracelet, and a notebook. I had been talking about how I didn’t want to be looking at my phone all of the time (yea, right!) and I wanted to just enjoy the trip electronics free. The hat, it was for promo shots lol. The bracelete, so I would have something I could bring back, wear, and be reminded of that magical moment in my life when I was achieving a dream. And the notebook – well, whatever I wanted to use it for, as she said, ‘just text it out, see if my design is any good.’
There were elements of the notebook I simply wasn’t sure about, and I told her, so there is no ‘don’t tell my wife’ here. The primary thing I didn’t like – the long straps to close it. I had used it hiking here in Utah and I wasn’t sure I liked them, they always seemed to catch on my pocket or clothing. I had wanted snaps or something else but she was dead-set on the straps and saying they were much more utilitarian – if someone wanted to add more notebooks, it would increase the mass of the notebook and the snaps would eventually…well, you get the point, she has a PhD in engineering. I trusted her design more than my own preference, so in to my bag the, what she calls the Magellan notebook went. And I was off to Africa.
Breaking an Addiction
At first I just took photos with the Bridger notebook. I wanted her to have plenty of promo photos for the notebook…eye catching, ‘tested in Africa’ kinds of photos. So, I began just taking photos with the notebook. To be honest, I didn’t know how addicted to my phone I was. In Vietnam, my phone had become water-logged and non-functional and it ended up being a blessing. Sure, I got less photos, and couldn’t listen to music on long bus rides, but I also wasn’t looking at my phone all the time.
I had over the months forgotten that feeling and it wasn’t until my phone overheated in the African sun and I wanted to write something down that I actually used the notebook. I wanted to write down how to pronounce something that the PH and tracker were saying – one of those Green Fields of Africa moments, when you know Hemingway was jotting everything in a notebook to remember the words Pop spoke, most likely to Pop’s chagrin. As I put pen to paper, it felt…natural. It felt like the way it was supposed to be.
The reality is that everytime you pull out your phone, you use battery life, and I prioritized the battery life for photos and not taking notes. Each time I came out of airplane mode I was inundated with emails, texts, Teams notifications. So, the phone stayed in airplane mode and I went to scribbling, and each night, got back to my hut and trasnscribed my written notes, and my memories, into the notebook. My addiction to using my phone for everything waned and soon I only used my phone for the most important of photographs, thinking of having a roll of film, not an endless supply of cloud -based rolls of film that never end. I was in Africa, and damn it, I was going to be in Africa, exist in Africa, for every moment and the phone was going to be a tool, not a tether.
Reliable.
One thing about a leather notebook, pen, and paper – it’s reliable. While the iPhone is the most reliable piece of electronic hardware you can have, it does overheat, it does have issues when it can’t connect to the cloud, and btw, the addiction is reliable as well. The notebook has none of those bugs. It’s distracting to the world around you, and as I watched our tracker never look at a phone, and instead look at the world around him, I wanted to do the same. My eyes, my senses, those are reliable.
Now, the question became – is this notebook my wife so lovingly made: is it functional?
Instead of the 5F’s, I want to take you through using it and this began with my second hunt, on a hartebeest. When we began tracking the hartebeest herd, we were in the truck. I was busy taking photos when we bailed out and began the stalk. The day before I had taken for a wildebeest but I did not have the notebook with me – it was in my hut. When I had gotten up the next morning, I made sure I grabbed the notebook to make my notes. I had put my phone down on the seat to get my binos out , so, when we bailed out to go on the stalk, I was phoneless. We sprinted behind the crest of the hill, darting between the rocks to ensure that we were not seen.
Popping our heads up like giant, camouflaged prarie dogs, between the rocks, behind the rocks, watching from two-hundred yards away. They spotted us and began to trott away and as I sat on the rock, positioning myself and taking my first shot, I was filled with adrenaline and awe. In the misty dreary mountain morning, this felt like home, running along in the rocks hiking, but a completely different experience…I was out of breath, I was gasping for air, and my heart was pumping to the point I could, in between the gasps of breaths and the breath hold, I could hear my heart in my head. Wow.
I won’t go into the details, that’s for another story, but one thing I wasn’t worried about – was I going to drop my phone and break it, or, ‘where is my phone?’ Well, that’s unreliable to me – if it can be broken, it can be unreliable. We hiked the 400 yards down to the old bull and I reached for my phone – it wasn’t there. It was habit, I was an addict, and as I searched for my phone in my pockets, I remembered leaving it in the truck. Instead, I reached into my thigh pocket of my Kuiu Attack Pants and pulled out the notebook. As I unwrapped the cord, opening the notebook up, a feeling of, well, authenticity, came over me.
I felt like I was a hundred years in the past.
The leather in my right hand, the pen in my left, it felt…right.
When the truck arrived, I grabbed my phone, I placed it next to the amazing, ancient horns of an animal on another continent, and took a photo. It wasn’t a promo shot now – it wasn’t for her – it was a memory, a thank you, to the amazing animal, and to God for allowing me to be here. And, most of all, it was a thank you to my wife for making it. I remember saying to myself, ‘Steph, thank you.
When the truck arrived, I grabbed my phone, I placed it next to the amazing, ancient horns of an animal on another continent, and took a photo. It wasn’t a promo shot now – it wasn’t for her – it was a memory, a thank you, to the amazing animal, and to God for allowing me to be here. And, most of all, it was a thank you to my wife for making it. I remember saying to myself, ‘Steph, thank you.’
Functional
Over the next 8 days, the notebook came out of my pocket constantly.
The leather is excellent – it’s not too thick, but it’s not flimsy. If a leather notebook is too thick, you can’t get it into your pockets. If it’s too flimsy and cheap, it folds and squishes. Her leather selection was perfect, and while I had tried it in Utah on hikes, now I recognized why she had selected the leather she selected.
The cords, which were such a question for me, as the days went by, they broke in perfectly. Instead of fumbling with snaps and folds that other ‘field note books’ have, I would just wraps the cord around, fold the knotted edge into the cord, and shove it in my pocket.
The cord never hung up on any items, not on my pockets, they pull close to the leather cover.
The other concern I had on the cord was it would simply yank out at some point. Well, when the adrenaline was pumping and I pulled the cord hard to close the notebook up, it never pulled out – the leather, as it absorbed more dirt, more water, more blood, the more than leather cord tightened to the anchor point.
Each time I needed to take a note, I pulled the notebook out. The first couple of pages were for my notes on my hunts – date, animal, distance, approximate weight.
The other pages were soon filled with small notes. The two 3.5” x 5.5” Bridger notebooks are perfect size.
Any larger and this notebook wouldn’t fit in pockets – any smaller and I’d be on post-it notes. The size of the pages are perfect for what this is – a field notebook. You can get the notebook with regular notebooks, water proof notebooks, or you can switch out to calendars and other kinds of 3.5” x 5.5” notebooks you can find online.
The two elastic cords that hold them in hold them snug, but you can easily switch the notebooks out.
Patina: A Memory You Can Touch
If you have ever had a nice watch, that you wear on trips, you look at the scratches not as damage, but as a record. You remember, ‘oh, I was at ____ when that scratch happened.’ I have a watch like that, it’s my Seiko SRPD31J lol. Patina is not about aesthetics, it’s about memories.
Patina is a physical memory, one that you can touch, you can take a moment and hold, to feel that emotion you had in that moment. It’s character, it’s that lesson you learned, it’s that moment you will hold forever. Nylon doesn’t have patina, it doesn’t have character. The older I get, the more I like leather in my gear because of this reality of physical memory.
The Bridger notebook is a patina magnet – the leather, the cord, the pages, it’s a memory you can hold. If there is one reason, for a hiker or a hunter, to have this notebook it’s patina. It’s that moment, making it to the summit and pulling out the notebook and getting mud on it. It’s that moment, finishing the stalk and making the kill, and the blood on your fingers getting on to the leather. If you want to hold that memory in your hand, this notebook is it.
The Bridger
As I held the horns of my final partner in this trip, a blesbok who had alluded me for days, I was overcome with emotion. He was my partner, he was my teacher, he had taught me so much about myself – lessons that are easy to forget. I was silently singing to myself a song called Gratitude by Brandon Lake, and I look at my blood soaked fingers, as we processed a friend I had never met, and I placed a cross on the notebook. I thought about home, my amazing wife, and my dog, Bridger, named for Jim Bridger. I watched my PH’s dog, Bandit, sniffing around and I wished Bridger was with me.
I had some feedback for my wife, on changes I wanted to the Magellan, and realized that it wasn’t going to be a Magellan – it was going to be something different, something that was attached to me and my experience.
The reliability, the functionality, the patina – it was now the Bridger.
