Trip: slang, a light or nimble tread; a certain way of living
I've always been thin and not particularly strong, so I'm not really suited for carrying heavy loads. When friends arrive in from other cities I usually reach for their lightest bag—they understand. I identify with nimble movement, speed over strength, and the clean lines of modern architecture. I admire the normally aspirated engine over the cheating punch of a turbo. I love the zero-g spirit of a jazz ballad. I'm not a minimalist, which to my mind strips life too much to the bone, yet I point in that direction.
So there I was, in New York City, out of work and bouncing around town from room to rented room. Nearly all of my possessions—books and CDs, chairs and tables, a sofa, a bed, clothes and electronics, and also pots—were in storage 1,000 miles away. All I had with me were three heavy duffle bags, two or three jammed backpacks and one large suitcase. These contained a laptop computer, a dozen books, and enough clothes for two or three weeks. Sixty pounds, maybe? It had been at least 10 years since I'd had so few things in my possession. Maybe 15. I couldn't remember. Unfortunately, what constitutes a light load depends on the circumstances, and New York was always the wrong circumstances.
I thought the hard part of moving to the city would be finding a job and overcoming the ridiculous cost of living. It turned out that moving around the city was worse. I stumbled from one end of town to the other, from Harlem to the heart of Brooklyn, back to Manhattan, back to Brooklyn. My bags were too cumbersome to transport single-handedly around the subway system—many trips entailed a murderous, block-long transfer at 14th Street, with enough stairs up and down to fill a small building. Cabs between the boroughs were prohibitively expensive. I dreaded the planning for a move, or the lack thereof, the subways, the stairs, the turnstiles, crowds, money, the sense of dislocation, and the weight of the bags battering my slight frame. Obviously I didn't make friends with enough people who owned cars.
So, somewhere along the way, I began to daydream about packing light, about casting away all my bags. These were lovely dreams, full of grassy meadows and easy blue skies and endless full-body massages. Packing light felt environmentally green. It felt as supple as a yoga posture. In other words, vaguely enlightened. I came to believe that if I could only master packing light, negotiating New York City (not to mention the rest of my life) would become easier. At the least the knots in my shoulders would go away.
On the other hand, I didn't really want to pack light at all. After more than a year of not sleeping in my own bed, I wanted desperately to be settled. I wanted to find a job in New York, dig in, plant my feet, sign a long lease and bare my teeth against the flesh of the city. I wanted to find a tribe of long-lost friends and quickly build a long and dense history of adventures. I wanted to sink into the steady weight of accumulation, to be surrounded by the comfort of all my things. I wanted my bed and my sofa, and a stable view out the window. Was it possible to be settled and to pack light? Could one live lightly settled? When another move loomed, that question weighed on me.
We pack too much because we don't want to leave anything behind that we might need or want. We want control over every anticipated variable and fear being caught in some crucial moment with our pants down or with the wrong pants on. Every time I pack my clothes for a trip, I come face to face with the modern world's hall-of-mirrors, and it's malleable, multiple self-identities. Each identity, it turns out, needs its own wardrobe. Must pack for the night out, the workout, the casual afternoon. Must have the right look for a multitude of potential interactions. It all gets heavy fast, since each persona requires its own pair of shoes.
When I drove from Chicagoland to my first job, in Denver, all my belongings fit snugly in my tiny, four-cylinder Hyundai Elantra. Though the car sat low on its 14-inch wheels, this was the lightest, easiest move I ever made. At 21, anxiety was only hypothetical, like some massless subatomic particle.
I found my first apartment and enthusiastically began to fill it. Over the next six years, there was a bulky 25-inch TV, a bed, a sofa, a desk, bookshelves, end tables, a kitchen table, chairs, two TV stands, a computer with a heavy 17-inch monitor. The job moved along, a raise here, a raise there, friends came and went, and life revealed traces of a particular purpose—the steady accrual of quality goods, a streak that, once identified, began to grow. The things weren't rooting me to the city as much as they were rooting me to some conception of growing up. I stayed in Denver long after I was ready to go, because I didn't know where to go, what to do, or what to do with all of my stuff. What were the alternatives? Sell it? Yes, but only to buy something new. Throw it away? Why? Why on Earth? Put it in storage? The idea of simply beginning anew, throwing it all away, felt so instinctively and thoroughly like a waste that I never really considered it. When I was finally offered a transfer to Kansas City, a city I didn't want to move to, I said yes in part because the company offered to pay for the move.
Mobility is part of the American Dream, and I felt the old tingle of possibility as my Hyundai retraced part of its old journey through Colorado and Kansas. Still, like Thoreau's walking, the myth of the road resonates more strongly facing west or southwest. Those are the directions of packing light. Heading east and stopping in Kansas City—a city that you can often find right on the crease of a two-page road map of the U.S.—was not. K.C., a friend once told me, had a particular sort of heaviness about it—you could see it in the wild foliage and the rough-hewn limestone, and you could feel it—practically smell it—on a humid summer night.
The other part of the American Dream is material accumulation. Time was beginning to lay its hands on me. My friends were all making more money. They were beginning to buy houses, new cars, better clothes, cooler gadgets. They could take trips. What I had bought to that point was ephemeral. Freedom and wealth are not mutually exclusive for some, but each needs the other to make much sense. Freedom of the road only matters if you can make a better buck at the end of it. Wealth only matters if it gives you freedom to come and go where you want, as you please. In America, you must often choose which fork of the dream to pursue.
In Kansas City, I took on—courtesy of Mom and Dad—a huge new desk, a large two-drawer lateral file and two bookshelves to match the pair I already had. I was leery of the desk. It was too big, really. Eventually it would have to be moved. But my computer monitor was large and heavy, and the fit on my old desk had been tight. I passed a year in Kansas City before deciding to leave my job and move to New York. At last my stuff became, at least for a little while, dead weight. I enthusiastically began to purge my belongings. I threw out most of my clothes and pitched my New Yorkers. I sent boxes of important papers to my parents' home, sold a bookshelf to a friend who was helping me move and warehoused the rest in a climate-controlled 10-by-10-by-10-foot compartment at U-Haul.
I had a chance to get rid of the desk then and there. I knew it would not fit in any place I was likely to be able to afford in New York. It wouldn't even fit in the U-Haul space; we'd have to disassemble it, and since I'd lost the instructions, putting it back together again would take ingenuity. But, like an idiot, I kept it, broke it into three pieces and shoved it in. Going to New York signaled a bellwether shift in character, an embrace of change and risk. Yet the desk reflected an equally strong contradictory desire to make a smooth transition to New York. This required a continuity with the past, a changelessness that would be provided, as before, by my things. For weeks after the move, I was on the phone with my friends. "Yeah, should be about two months before I've got a gig and a place. You free to help me out?" Piece of cake. Get established. Get my stuff. Resume new and improved faux-adult, faux-furniture life in New York, just at a space reduction of 25 percent or so.
I was trying to hold onto the lightness of my youth, where get-up-and-go was as natural as breathing, while accepting the gathering weight of age, which brought a bit of wisdom but also the looming, demanding gears of choice, which spun out a clockwork of possible lives. Choice was the heart of lightness. Heaviness was having made a choice. In the first I could consider my dreams in their nascent form, gauzy and half-real, more dream than Dream. With the second, the tick-tocking of time growing louder, my dreams of being a good writer began to feel denser, because now was the moment to tackle them. I didn't know what I would become if they went unfulfilled; at the same time I felt I would become entirely too light—I would disintegrate—if I were to cut them loose.
A few months later I sold my car and took a plane to New York.
My days of living lightly settled in New York began in my friend's Chelsea studio. I arrived in Manhattan on a warm night in May, loaded down with my six bags. They contained, let's say, 10 percent of all my belongings. By weight it was insignificant. All I had were clothes, basically, the suitcases they came in, and some books. I could fit everything into one room, into a corner of a room, into a car. Much work had gone into the packing, many items had been left behind. Yet the look on Melissa's face was clear as I hauled in my stuff: You brought too much. She did her best, deftly squeezing my clothes within the multitude of shelves running around her closet. She also gave me a small space between the wall and her sofa for my books and back packs. After I moved out a month later, I realized she was right. Way too much stuff.
Over the next 16 months, I bounced around so often that I devised a rule that distinguished places I could say I actually "lived" in versus those I only passed through. This was the rule: If I made one trip to a grocery store and did one load of laundry, the place counted.
Finding new digs became easier with time, but the Holy Grail of living in New York sat unmoving on the horizon—to have my own place. I didn't like the indeterminacy of having my things—my life—stuck in limbo in Kansas City, so I tried to elevate the importance of what I had brought. Whenever I moved into a new room, I set up shop as fast as possible. Within minutes I scoped out the shelves, the closet, the windowsill, desks, nooks, corners, the tops of speakers, chairs and tables. I assigned a place for my cell phone, coins, pens, keys, wallet, notebook, iPod, books, checkbook, headphones, lotion, watches, envelopes, magazines, bags, glasses, flashlight and my moustache trimmer chargers. I tried to assign my belongings in a manner so systematic it would be like they had always been there, an instant lived-in familiarity.
As part of my duck-and-dodge strategy of paying as little rent as possible in New York, I spent two weeks staying with a friend in Connecticut. I had planned to travel lightly for the trip, but wound up carting around nearly half of my New York stuff—two of my three duffle bags and two overstuffed backpacks. Everything I needed for the trip would have fit in the suitcase. It was the only bag with wheels, and I don't know why I left it behind. All I remember now is that I was in the final weeks of training for a marathon. I needed the multiple changes of clothes and shoes, I told myself, for a sport that requires virtually no equipment. It was because of the shoes.
Two weeks later, I returned to Grand Central during rush hour. The place hummed with a furious atomic energy, like time-lapse photography, and the Waltz of the Heavy Bags resumed. Walked a bit. Stopped. Readjusted bags. Staggered a bit farther. Stopped again. Put down bags and massaged my trembling shoulders. Wiped sweat from brow. Twisted and turned to leverage weight from my lower body to my upper body as the bags continually slammed into the sides of my knees. Struggled down an escalator to the subway entrance. My pants began to slide (just a bit) down my hips.
I paused only long enough to plot a course through the turnstile. When there was a brief lull in the crowd I waddled forth as fast as I could, kicked one bag underneath the turnstile, finagled my body so I could swipe my Metrocard in one pass, and then bogarted my way forward so that any bags caught in the entryway would be yanked through. By the time I reached the shuttle train to Times Square, the city's busiest station, my body felt like a badly bent tuning fork.
I was heading uptown to Harlem to spend the night at my cousin's, since she was closer to midtown than the room I was renting out in Brooklyn. At Times Square, I started down a flight of stairs to catch the uptown train. I unslung my heaviest bag from my shoulder, placed it on the stairway and began to slide it down the stairs. For a moment, I thought I had hit upon a great idea, and my body seemed to release its tension like a spring. Then I lost my footing. One foot swept high into the air, my body toppled back, and the bags lurched forward. My head stopped a foot or two short of hitting the concrete steps; the bags might somehow have prevented full impact, an irony I was not grateful for then. I slowly righted myself, answered an unseen "Are you OK?" with a puzzled nod, and then squeezed onto the subway before the doors closed.
A New York subway car is a difficult place to deal with a lot of luggage. I couldn't sit down without my bags hogging the adjacent seats (which is illegal and terrible etiquette on all but empty trains), but today that was academic, because there were no empty seats. I staked a position near the end of the train and stacked the heaviest bags between the pole and me. The other bags pressed down on my shoulders.
Twenty minutes and one final, three-block walk later, I fell onto my cousin's couch, by now thoroughly wrung out. I tried to savor being off my feet while giving no thought to having to move all those bags to Brooklyn the next day.
At some level I couldn't get settled in New York simply because I couldn't get a regular job, despite my best efforts. On the other hand, maybe some part of me didn't want to be settled. It was no fun being broke in New York, but it was a lot of fun, in its way, to be unemployed. My lazy days there were like a dream from which I would eventually awaken—nostalgia suffused my vision even when I was there—but that didn't make the dream any less sweet. I went from being depressed about not having my stuff to being depressed about the headache of having to retrieve it all. I decided I would have to dispose of the desk, or give it away (provided I could actually reassemble it). But mostly I began to forget what it was I had spent nearly a decade accumulating. More and more I wanted to go back and throw it all away. (Well, not the audio gear ...) I have failed to divest my possessions from any meaning whatsoever, to see them in the strictest utilitarian terms. My things still, collectively, meant something, but no longer did they mean consistency and stability. Now they were a burden from the past. I wanted to unchain myself and cast them off.
So I had externalized my own insecurities onto my belongings—put my baggage on my baggage. I had finally reached a point where life without them (or without most of them) was conceivable and desirable. The longer I was away from my things, the stronger this new formulation could take hold, and I wanted it to take hold. I was secretly worried that as soon as I returned to Kansas City and opened all those boxes I had forgotten about, they would scream at me with the obviousness of their importance, and I would be unable to throw them away.
New York was heavy in expectation—the city's imagery and iconography were packed tightly on top of its real steel and stone, flesh and blood. Separating the reality from the dream was impossible. And undesirable, because any outsider who comes to New York comes not for its steel and stone, not for its freeways and large hospital complexes and billboards and radio stations, not for anything that feels provincial and ordinary, but because of the idea of the place. It's one of those towns you know before you get there.
New Yorkers delighted in the city's weight. People referred to street names and street corners with the reverence you'd associate with temples. Nevertheless, despite the self-importance that New York wore like heavy armor, the city was, in many ways, a great place to be lightly settled in. People were out of work, or temping, or struggling to get by. It was a world—like Las Vegas—where people weren't surprised that you had come to seek your fortune, a city that didn't think much about you at all. It was a world of floaters, and my modest bouncing about hardly put me at any cutting edge. There was no stigma to bounce from place to place, to land in someone's bedroom or couch this week, to house-sit for a person you've just met the next. That was the city. You could be settled. Or you could float. It wasn't a big deal either way.
Yet, much as I loved not having to go to a job I hated five days a week, I wasn't a natural itinerant. I had a tough time finding comfort in my unsettledness. Usually I wound up feeling like a phantom as I wandered New York. I saw the living patterns of my roommates, of course, of my friends, and felt disappointed with my own. The fragile stability I clung to was so pedestrian. I made lots of trips to the bookstore, frequented a handful of reliable pizza joints that served up the same maddening slice of pepperoni/slice of sausage/20-ounce Coke. Often, I went on Friday nights to catch a movie in Times Square, that most gauche of places, the place where New York grandly and impersonally welcomed the world the way you would a slobbering relative, with all his or her favorites: Applebee's and TGIF and Red Lobster and ESPN Zone and Madame Tussauds. The movie theaters themselves had beautiful lobbies, but I went for the same multiplex crap that everyone else did.
My life was one of tourism, not residence. Fittingly, then, I window-shopped for lives in my favorite neighborhoods. A quick visit to some house or other was all my imagination needed: A modernist townhome in the East Village. A baroque Sex and the City super-loft in Queens with an unbelievable view of Manhattan. An elegant and large apartment in a beautiful building on the Upper West Side, watched over by a friendly doorman and a long awning. I strolled many blocks. I peeked in many windows. I felt the stultifying plainness of barren light sources and flat white walls, and the exhilaration of stainless steel appliances, shiny pots hanging from the ceiling and vibrant orange or sleek red or martini-cool blue walls.
Like many people, I think, I experience the alienation of the modern world as a fierce desire to not be bound by the past—either by geography or religion or family. The promise of modernity is continuous self-reinvention, a world as marketplace from which we can assemble any identity we wish. At the same time, such freedom comes at the price of being cut off, from those same traditions of religion and geography and family, and finally cut off from ourselves. This is the story of every immigrant moving to a new land, and of every wandering soul packing his bags.
In my plenty-of-time-on-my-hands schedule, I sought out the symbols of (relative) permanence. I gravitated toward Central Park and Rockefeller Center and the Flatiron Building. I found the statuary, monuments and historical district placards. I did this as a tourist might, but also in a play to move beyond tourism. I hoped some corner of New York would begin to take on the quality of the rock schist that juts out of Central Park. One day I stumbled upon the entrance tunnel to the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, which linked the southern tip of Manhattan to Brooklyn. The roadway descended down a trench lined with flagstone and flanked by a canyon of high-rises. At the mouth of the tunnel was a large and smooth limestone block of a building. On the side facing the road, its only adornment was an abstract metal clock. On the other side of the building, the side that faces Battery Park and the ocean, were engraved the words "Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, Triborough Bridge & Tunnel Authority." Below them was a copper-plated door, which in its vault-like splendor evoked Fort Knox. The tunnel opened in 1950, and for me stood for the can-do acumen of a whole country, the technological accomplishment of an age. All this, the limestone at the foot of Manhattan said, all this will last forever.
Yeah, it is kind of funny. Connection with a blank hunk of stone must be taken with a chuckle. Living lightly settled means full engagement with a place and the people who live there, yet no constraints on mobility, no impediments to starting again. Unfortunately, being settled involves the acceptance of constraint, the acceptance of conditions that would make leaving inconvenient, difficult or impossible. The value of being settled and having it feel authentic may finally depend on the inability to conveniently pull up one's roots. The essence of lightness is not having roots. I'm sure others have more success with reconciling them than I did.
Which brings us, at last, back to the running. I had never thought of myself as much of a runner. I took it up in New York to train for a marathon, one of those experiences people who are approaching 30 think to add to their lists. I began out of duty, then, but running quickly won me over. There was no tyranny of gear. I bought sneakers, some anti-chafing lotion, a watch and some water. That was about it. There was no league to join, no permits to acquire. No teammates, no uniforms, no schedules. There were the limitations of my own body, of course—I stranded myself in the middle of Brooklyn, or on the high side of Manhattan a few times—and I was not always a perfect motivator of a coach. Still, I welcomed the solitude and the freedom running brought. I ran in the sun, mostly, and run-by-run the geometric vastness of New York, its endlessly intersecting horizontal and vertical planes, unfolded around me. I tried to float over the asphalt. I got a kick out of silently passing people, like the wind. One afternoon I floated by a woman this way. After half a block she yelled out, "Don't you ever fucking sneak up on me again!"
This was the closest I came to living lightly settled. When I ran, I was settled in motion, a genuine part of the city, and I was happy. It's unfortunate one can't spend all the time running. To live light with any measure of success is to embrace change and uncertainty, to be eternally open, to everything. My heart leaned that way—everyone's heart leans that way, in their heroic moments—but my stomach was on the lookout for a decent slice of pizza and a day when maybe my roommates were out of town.
I felt a great sadness as I left the city for Las Vegas, on a beautiful fall evening, a day after my birthday. I was frustrated that I couldn't get settled in New York, because I knew that would force my exit from a city I didn't really want to leave. However, I felt an almost equal pleasure in the ease of my departure. So little fuss, so few strings to tie up ... only a few bags to pack ... one ride to the airport curb, where I turned all my luggage over to the skycaps.