Mile Zero

October 6, 2008

Next week Belle and I are taking a mini-roadtrip vacation on the West coast and up into Canada. It'll be my first time in Canada, and the fifth or sixth trip I've taken out of the country. And that means I've started rethinking the dilemmas of packing.

I have packing issues, although I hope I manage to seem more laid-back these days. But it's taken a lot of practice to beat down my pack-rat tendencies, and more specifically, my paranoid phobia of boredom. On my first international trip (to Mexico, during high school), I was terrified of ending up somewhere in the Yucatan without anything to do. I ended up with a backpack filled with books, games, and random amusements, apparently on the assumption that I was being marooned in Siberia instead of a gorgeous tropical peninsula. Two weeks of dragging all that crap on and off of chicken busses drove my mistake home.

So a few years later, on a trip to China for college, I tried to do something different. A lot of it was just the logistics: it might be possible to pack enough books for a two-week trip to Mexico, but it's not feasible for a month-long journey abroad. So I brought a lot fewer commodities, and only about a week's worth of clothing. When I ran out of clothes, I washed them in the dorm washing machine, or the sink if there wasn't a free laundry room, and dried them by hanging them over a lampshade. And without lugging a bunch of junk around, it was not just easier to travel from place to place, but it was a lot easier to get out of the room when I got bored--even if it was just to wander the streets asking people for directions in a language I barely spoke, leading to wacky hijinks and good humor for all concerned. That line about how the things you own end up owning you? When traveling, it's definitely true. I had a better trip, and it was partly because I had less stuff with me.

To be fair, it's gotten easier to pack light these days now that I've got extra income, and as gadgetry converges. I don't typically pack books when I can take the Kindle, for example. My cell phone is capable of doing almost anything I would have used a laptop for a few years back, including WiFi access, especially if I carry a folding keyboard. And if the phone has a camera, it's twice as useful--I'm not much of a shutterbug, but instead of carrying notes and maps, I try to take pictures of them for reference. Traveling with fewer devices and fewer clothes is not only easier, it's greener--it takes less energy to ship a lighter package from one point to another.

But frankly, if you're going to start thinking about traveling light, it starts to inspire thoughts of living the same way. Especially since I tend to have the same kinds of acquisition issues that led to my over-packing: a tendency to purchase shiny objects that's led to an overflowing home studio and a collection of old electronics that practically has its own gravity well. The same principles hold true: use as little energy as possible, reuse resources whenever possible, exploit multifunction devices, and rely on open-ended methods of entertainment.

The difficulty with learning to travel light, much less learning to live the same way, is probably that it fits an image of hostels and scruffy backpackers instead of vacationing. I find it helps to think of it not in terms of lost luggage, but gained freedom--appealing to the greenpunk set of aesthetics. Likewise, a big part of the problem with frugal living in the West is its association with poverty, as opposed to respect for the creativity and resourcefulness it might signal. But it doesn't have to be that way. Maybe the first step to a less crowded home is to leave it, and its baggage, behind.

Future - Present - Past