Wednesday, Aug. 25, 2010

After 40 years, a personal relic rediscovered

The old Swiss Army rucksack caught Ronald Bobeck's eye, sticking out of the flea market clutter like a childhood friend spotted in a ballgame crowd.

Forty years ago, he'd carried a pack just like that in the Civil Air Patrol, before he'd joined the Air Force and gone to Vietnam, before he'd spend Sundays at the N.C. State Fairgrounds sporting a shirt that says "Old Guys Rule."

The sack was field gray and white, made to blend in with snow, and Bobeck pointed it out to the vendor, calling, "Oh wow, I used to have one of those."

Then something crazy happened. Maybe a star fell, or a time warp opened, or some magical wind blew through Raleigh's big flea market, but for whatever reason, the vendor Mark Aman picked up the rucksack, opened its flap and said, "There's a name inside and it says Bobeck."

Bobeck got quiet, and his jaw dropped a little, but he managed to fish out his driver's license and show Aman that his old rucksack had indeed managed to cross three state lines and come to meet him after four decades.

"It wanted to get back to me," said Bobeck, who lives in Holly Springs. "It was one of those strange karmatic events. The universe made it happen."

The odds of Bobeck's pack landing back in his hands rank roughly equal with the chances of Bilbo Baggins stumbling across the One Ring.

He'd last seen it near Wilkes-Barre, Pa., in about 1970, when he worked on search and rescue teams for the CAP, hunting for lost hikers, scouting the remains of downed planes, carrying food and extra uniforms inside his Swiss Army pack.

"People from New York City would go to the resorts," he recalled. "Trees and woods, if you don't know nothing about them, they all look the same to folks."

He'd paid about $25 for the pack and scratched his name inside with a Magic Marker, but once he went active-duty with the Air Force, he turned it over to the CAP so the next guy wouldn't have to buy a new one.

Who can say where it went, what trails it saw, what supplies it carried, whose shoulders it hung from in the time it took a baby to become a middle-aged man?

Aman sells mostly military items, and this was his only pack. He'd had it for about five years, bought from another collector at a show in Raleigh.

The coincidence makes him shudder. He only sets up shop at the fairgrounds on occasional weekends. Bobeck just happened to walk past on the same Sunday, notice the pack among all the other paraphernalia and ask about it out loud. Bobeck didn't even seem that interested, and Aman almost didn't read the name out loud. If he hadn't, the man-and-pack reunion wouldn't have happened.

"It had just been wandering around in the ether," Aman said. "It made the journey not to Arizona or California. It came right to the spot where he was walking by."

Bobeck paid $10 for his old pack, a bargain for such a relic. He'll hang it in his garage, or maybe give it to his granddaughter, or maybe just say thanks for the reminder of the days when camping meant more than a weekend stay at a roadside Howard Johnson, and that friends who took divergent roads can still collide.