CHAPTER THIRTEEN
DRYING AFTER RAIN
WET weather is not the tramp’s worst enemy, but it leaves him with the problem of drying his clothes. It may not damp his spirits, but will probably damp his attire. The walk in the rain, or worse than that, the walk through rain-laden thickets after the rain has ceased, the night slept in the rain when it begins to drizzle at eleven and you think naught of it, and to rain steadily at twelve and there is no refuge, and to pour gently at one and in torrents at two, and it is all the same because you are already as wet as can be—these are modifications of Nature’s blessings, pleasant or unpleasant in themselves according to taste and breeding, but having, as a natural sequence, the common duty of drying.
The wet dawn peers through the trees; pale morning looks faintly upon a washed-out camp, and two Rip Van Winkles, feeling a hundred years older, lift up heavy and rusty limbs, and reflect that it has been a wet night. The problem is to get dry.
The first means is a fire. Grant the matches have kept dry; or if they have not been kept in a canister, that one of the tramps happens to have a briquet! With a petrol lighter one is independent of wet matches. Then the fire must be carefully begun, nursed and nourished. Perhaps one can find an old ruined and red-rusty bucket on the waste—a gift of Providence. The fire may be well started in that. If you feel cold you may bring fuel to the fire spot on the run—dead fuel of branch and withered weed, heaps of it. One needs to get a good fire going, a big fire, a drier. “It can be done,” as a millionaire self-made man used to say. “Can’t must be overcome.”
You know at sight when your fire has got the upper hand of the surrounding damp. That is your moment for executing a war dance around it. The longer you dance the quicker you dry. But do not forget reserves of fuel. You need a fire on which you could roast a sheep. For you have to dry, not only your clothes, but the blanket, the knapsack, and your spare linen. You find a corner for your pot. It will boil and provide coffee while you are engaged with drying.
Somehow or other the blanket has to be hoisted up on to a line. You need string, which I hope you have brought. If there is a tree or a telegraph post or any other post, or preferably two convenient trees, two convenient posts, you can tie up the blanket and let it dry in the heat of the fire. If these are absent there may be a corner of a wired enclosure. You must shift your fire to the place where you can rig up the blanket. It is seldom that absence of uprights of any kind reduces you to holding the blanket in your own hands in front of the fire and drying it so.
Indeed, if no convenience offers, you may simply dry off your clothes and then tramp on till you find a spot better equipped for blanket drying. You will not, as a rule, have to tramp far.
Clothes, however, do not dry as quickly as expected. Especially the tweed jacket and its shoulders take an unconscionable time a-drying. It is not good for one’s health to tramp with a heavy knapsack on wet shoulders. The weight drives the damp inward, and as the back warms and perspires it takes potential rheumatism from the steam of the jacket. A night out in the rain will not give you rheumatism; many nights in the wet will not give you rheumatism. It is not getting wet which gives you these pains, it is the way you dry. You are, in fact, safer scampering naked in the wet than drying slowly in a heap of wet clothes. Perhaps it is not amiss to remark here that a waterproof worn over wet clothes is a sure way to cultivate rheumatism. The damp cannot escape outwards—and so goes inward to your very bones.