A Daypack with Stories to Tell

July 2025

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From Northern Minnesota to South America to Europe to the Middle East to Central Asia to life as a backpack for a college student in the Twin Cities, my old daypack can be considered high mileage.

 

The Frost River pack I refer to as “the Old Campaigner” was purchased in 2001 from Steve Piragis in Ely, Minn. I bought it during one of my summers helping college students in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. (Another of my students, from Duluth, was an early Frost River employee and she was a born salesperson.) For more than 15 years, it was my daily driver; then it became my daughter’s college backpack, and she was responsible for keeping it running, sewing its numerous patches. Finally, in 2022, we reluctantly retired it. The danger of a laptop or camera sliding out through a repair and bouncing off a concrete floor was more risk than we wanted to take.

 

The Old Campaigner lived through several memorable moments. There was the (alleged) Russian mobster who admired it and wanted to know where I bought it. (I referred him to Piragis. “What is a Piragis?” he asked.)  An Englishwoman complimented me on my retro canvas style. There was the bear who gave it a good sniff in the Northwoods, and the stinging red ants (they bite and spray acid on the wound, the rascals) whom I stumbled into on the Gulf Coast. Plus the dirt, smoke, bug spray, sunscreen, disinfectant and hand sanitizer from dozens of campsites.

 

The OC carried books, of course, but also the tools of my freelance trade as a journalist. Cameras, lenses, laptops, batteries, reporters’ notebooks, writing implements of all kinds, an old digital audio recorder, a microphone, an extension cord, an AC adapter, a GPS device, a solar charger, and pockets full of trail mix, jerky, granola bars, hard candy and a small water bottle all fit at one time or another.

 

One moment that stands in my memory happened in Central Asia. It was a cold and blustery November day in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, where my colleague Eric Freedman and I were working on a book about environmental issues in the “Stans”. We had a Sunday off – no interviews, no research – and so we wanted to explore the city.

 

Bishkek lives on a branch of the old Silk Road, the route Marco Polo made famous to Westerners in his 13th-century travels to the Far East. The man at the Bishkek hotel front desk couldn’t believe we Americans wanted to visit the Dordoy Bazari (World Market) instead of the shiny new town mall, but he gave us walking directions, nonetheless. Shouldering the OC, off I went.

 

The Dordoy Bazari is one-of-a-kind. Made up of thousands and thousands of shipping containers – estimates are at 6,000 or more – as many as 20,000 people are employed in its orbit. Many of the containers are double-stacked, with the shops below and storage above. The containers are in rows, which make for walking lanes between them. The whole giant clutter is a bizarre, Lincoln Logs/Legos, post-Soviet, welcome-to-capitalism phenomenon, although it is on the Silk Road, a route 2,000 years old.[1] [MN2]  One of the largest economic generators in the country, the market runs more than a kilometer northeast of the central city. (There are no fences, so where it begins and ends is muddy.) One pathway might be all clothing, while the next is nothing but car parts, followed by rows of containers full of shoes. Most consumer items come from China or Turkey; Kyrgyz is spoken by most, although Russian is commonly heard. At one stall, a stout woman with a sharp knife and a bloody apron butchered a cow.

 

To a first-time visitor like me, the layout was befuddling. As I wandered past the consumer goods, into the spices, apple juices, hanging meats and baked goods, an old man walked behind me, carrying a bucket and leading a horse. Kyrgyzstan is a horse culture, so an old man and a mare was not an unusual sight. What happened next was, at least for me.

 

The man looped the reins around a post. He stepped to the side of the horse, dropped to one knee, balanced the bucket on the other, upright, knee, reached around behind a rear leg with his right arm, and milked the horse.

 

I gaped. Growing up in Iowa, I had been around a lot of farm animals, but never a mare being milked. One grandpa was a dairy farmer, and he never mentioned horse milk. I had not thought that horse milk must come from …. horses. I had not thought about horse milk at all.

 

I looked around. I pointed. I blinked. No one but me took even the slightest notice. I don’t even know what the old man did with the milk. I didn’t even think to grab the camera. Later, as I asked my friends about what I had witnessed, the lack of a foal nearby (to start lactation) puzzled them. But perhaps I did not see a young horse among the herds at the bazaar.

 

The next day, Eric and I were on the road again, with our Kyrgyz guide and translator. We stopped at a yurt for a traditional midday meal and there was horse milk, fermented, on the menu. (It was right below horsemeat steak. As I said it is a horse culture.) Our guide insisted on a goblet of mare’s milk for each of us. “It is part of our traditional hospitality,” she said.

 

Called kumis (sometimes spelled koumiss, kumiss, or kumys), fermented mare’s milk is like kefir, but produced from a liquid starter culture and with a higher alcohol content. Breakfast kumis is close to 0.7 percent alcohol and supper kumis checks in at 2.5 percent, our guide said. It was available at every meal.

 

Kumis has a slightly sour taste with a bit of an alcoholic tinge. I thought I tasted a touch of salt. It is more translucent than cows’ milk. My sips were out of politeness, as I am not much of a cows’ milk drinker, either. (Sorry, Grandpa.)

 

Kumis is said to have benefits for dry skin – Queen Cleopatra bathed in donkeys’ milk – and can be found in some cosmetics. Anton Chekov took it to cure his tuberculosis (didn’t work). Genghis Khan surely downed a shot or two galloping around Asia.

 

Later investigation revealed that the city of Bishkek was named after the type of paddle used to churn the kumis. A local legend is that a pregnant woman once lost her milk paddle. As she searched for it, she gave birth to a boy, whom she named after the lost paddle, bishkek. He grew up to be a great leader, loved by all.

 

Had the OC daypack been made from horsehide, the circle would have been complete.

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