Why It’s Better to Carry Weight on Your Head
A young girl stands alongside a wood-canvas canoe. She wraps the tails of a long, leather strap around one of the canoe’s horizontal struts in preparation for a two-mile portage to the next lake. She swings the 100-pound, waterlogged canoe up over her head in a single fluid motion, resting it upside down on her shoulders, one end pointed toward the sky. Then she pulls the leather strap behind her hairline like a bandanna, adjusts her stance so the weight of the canoe is channeled smoothly down her neck and spine, and starts walking the rocky trail.
Methods of “head carry,” or weighting a load on top of the head, are standard across the developing world. The best-known images of the technique show African women trekking miles to and from water sources. Despite 10-gallon buckets balanced precariously above them, their backs are straight as a rod and their chins lifted. Often, heavy loads aren’t only the heads, but suspended from it by a strap, called a tumpline. Light, internal-frame backpacks have largely replaced tumplines among modern folk who carry loads outdoors. But when done properly, head carry can be safer, more efficient, and more functional than supposedly better, newer technologies.
