I Hate My North Face: An Ode To Spring

BY Led Black (@Led_Black)

Fort Tryon Park Holiday Card Photo Competition

I have a love-hate relationship with my North Face. Let me explain: I don’t have one of those thin, lightweight – walk in the park on a slightly brisk morning North Faces. No, I have a climb up Mt. Kilimanjaro (pre-global warming) North Face, the type of North Face that you can wear outside on a frigid day with a soaking wet wife-beater underneath and not feel a thing. I wait until all hope is lost and the real cold weather has set in to pull it out of the closet. It is a weapon of last resort. Speaking of pulling it out the closet, it literally takes up my entire closet.

It must take a whole school of geese or whatever you call a bunch of geese to supply the feathers to fill my coat. I’m serious, a good dozen v-formations of geese is necessary just to pad this monstrosity. It is heavy, cumbersome and completely impervious to the elements, I think it might even be bulletproof. Once I was driving with it on and it took me about 5 minutes of hard fought struggle to remove it as I drove, I almost crashed. If I had crashed, I’m sure I would have survived unscathed because my North Face is way better than any airbag.

Another thing about my North Face is that it has mad pockets; it has pockets inside of pockets under pockets. On one occasion in Washington Heights a cop harassed me because I “fit the description.” He proceeded to illegally frisk me; dude got tired from fruitlessly searching through the countless pockets on my North Face. I actually felt bad for the guy. Needless to say he didn’t find the twenty sac of high-grade I had stashed, to be completely honest, neither did I. I still haven’t, it ended up in North Face pocket limbo.

It’s not that I really hate my North Face but I loathe what my North Face represents, bitterly cold weather and snow. I have lived in this country since I arrived from the Dominican Republic when I was 5 and I still have not completely adjusted to extremely low temperatures or as my father refers to it, un frío de película. I welcome spring every year by putting away the North Face until the next winter. With climate change being what it is, winter might arrive by June.  But in any case, spring is here and life is good. Long live spring!!!

Related:

I Am A Dominican York

Dominicanese 101: A Primer

Led Black: Un Pie Aqui y Uno Alla | Huffington Post

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  • Einstein
    March 22, 2011 at 9:05 pm

    On the coldest days of winter my coworkers would ridicule me because of the shear size of the damn thing but while they stepped out for a smoke and froze to death i walked out to the store with it unzipped and used to look at them and chuckle. I would open one of the inside flaps and say “let me turn the heat up” while making as if i turned a knob on a thermostat. Sounds like tomorrow we are going to be getting some slush so i think winter might be either leaving or arriving again in june as you said. but till then, cheers and lets hope to keep that portable heating system called a “n.f. snorkel” in the closet.

    -Einstein