The following dispatch from Daniel Heimpel was originally published here. Heimpel is a correspondent and photo model for the Iceland Review.
Dear North Face,
I hit kilometer 36 of a mountain bike race in Iceland. The sky drew black. It started to rain and didn’t stop for 19 kilometers and over an hour more. ‘D_mn this sucks, I thought, ‘but I have a North Face jacket on. At least I’ll be dry.”
But twenty minutes later I felt myself all wet underneath the $220 shell I had bought on sale from the famed North Face outlet just off of Gilman Street in West Berkeley. As the water percolated through, turning my thin stretchy long-sleeved undershirt and tee shirt wet, I became angry.
Not because I was wet. Well yes because I was wet, but moreover because a vanguard of my youth, one of the only brands I firmly believed in turned out to be such a crock. But as I slogged through the rain, my wetness becoming an obsession, I managed to think back and find evidence that the North Face would fail me when I was still in high school.
Berkeley was a medium warm kind of place. It rained and got foggy, and in high school you needed a North Face otherwise ? well – you were just wearing a rain jacket. At one of your sales at the fore mentioned North Face outlet I bought a jacket for maybe $100. It was green and I loved it.
My friend Jesse coveted this jacket. And when it came time for me to leave Berkeley High School for college he gave me a proposition.
“Let me buy that off you for $75,” he said. Continue reading “Dear North Face”
