The Modern Nomad

[Adolf Konrad’s illustrated 1963 packing list from the exhibit “Lists: To-dos, Illustrated Inventories, Collected Thoughts, and Other Artists’ Enumerations.” Via The New York Times.]

I pack:

Passports (Canadian and European)

Photocopy of my citizenship papers (Britain)

Photocopy of my birth certificate (Canada)

One or two or three books (paperback, not eReader)

Laptop, fully charged

iPod shuffle filled with podcasts

Running shoes

Notebook & pens (ballpoint, as I’ve had countless of my favourite liquid pens explode on planes)

Knitting

Clothes—one week’s worth

Camera and digital recorder

Toothbrush, toothpaste, hair brush

Ear plugs

Sometimes I pack my camera but not the charger, or I pack the wrong charger and the battery expires on the first day of my trip. Or I change the settings without realizing it and, as happened in Scandinavia, come home with only a photo of a small bird trapped on a cruise ship and a pretty yellow flower.

Sometimes I forget my pajamas. Sometimes I forget my trousers. I almost always bring one pair of shoes too many.

Sometimes the airport security guards question the legality of knitting needles on planes. (Once, on a flight from Denmark to Canada a starched flight attendant stopped by my seat when we were halfway across the ocean and said, incredulous,“You can’t have those on here!” But I already did, I told her, and kept on knitting.)

I must take off my shoes at La Guardia, in New York, and Dulles, in Washington, but am allowed to keep them on in Toronto and London. In Vancouver, the American customs agent smiles and he does not seem to be trying to trick me with friendliness into admitting some immigration error. (Tip: Never joke with customs agents.) In Toronto, an agent interrogates me when I arrive, sleepless, on a red-eye from Paris. “You mean you went alone? Why would you travel alone?” It is a judgment presented as a question. She waves me through.

Every airport looks the same but different, like a brightly lit, too-clean shopping mall. The terminal in Zurich is bright and spacious and the one in Copenhagen is small and intimate. I spend five hours in an almost-deserted section of O’Hare Airport, in Chicago, and do my daily stretches. A man in a uniform sleeps on the other side of the room. Up the hallway, a queue forms in front of a flight to Guadelajara. A stream of Mexicans going home for a visit or for good. In Edmonton, I negotiate for two hours with the airline sales attendant about the matter of a refund for a cancelled flight and then walk to a competing airline to buy a ticket. Deprived of sleep, fresh off a flight from London, I begin to cry and she says, calmly, “Don’t worry. We’re going to sort this out.” I half expect her to offer me cookies and a glass of warm milk.

I have already mapped out my directions from the airport to the city I am visiting. The city is still fresh and new in those first few hours. When I arrive in a new place, I walk the streets, poke in shops, right myself. I am trying to place myself within its geography. I want to map the space, wrap my head around the city. For a long time I would immediately begin to imagine where I would live, what my flat or house would be like. I tried to picture myself living there. I don’t do that so much anymore.

But soon, after a few days, some strange emptiness gnaws at me. Even after all these years I rarely sit in a bar alone, even if I bring a book. I circle cafés in Paris unable to take a table. It takes many trips and moves to overcome what is not quite shyness but some inarticulate discomfort. The only reason I ended up chatting with a stranger from France and a few locals at a “ruin pub,” or kert in Budapest is because I was on assignment for a travel magazine and my editor would have been angry if I simply stood, like a wallflower. I needed quotes.

That emptiness is a temporary dislocation. I could probe it further, but blogs are not the place for deep psychoanalysis. And anyway, part of the beauty of a new place is that you are invisible. This is also the peril.

I rarely leave anything behind when I leave a place. Except perhaps a person I have grown fond of, or a memory. Sometimes I shed books. In a guesthouse in Prince Edward Island, on the east coast of Canada, I left a Michael Ondaatje novel, its spine uncracked, hoping that the next person along would find more in it than I did. On that trip I scraped the red Prince Edward Island sand off my shoes. But it didn’t quite come off and was the only souvenir I took home.

Further Reading

+ “Lost and Found” is a short personal essay by philosopher Mark Kingwell that I commissioned when I worked at enRoute magazine. Getting lost in a city, he writes, might be the best way to discover who you are. “Becoming strange to ourselves is the gateway to seeing how dependent on strangers we are for our own identities.”

+ “Why We Travel,” a classic think-piece by Pico Iyer, who writes “We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves.”

+ Which brings up Rebecca Solnit’s non-fiction book A Field Guide to Getting Lost, a plotless, meditative book on all kinds of ways of being lost: abandon, transformation, and self realization. (From The Guardian’s review: “reading her prose is like spending time in the company of an earnest, determined hiker who disdains maps but nevertheless knows some unexpected and fascinating fact about every house, hill or tree that you pass.”)

+ Do you, like my mother, proofread your packing list? Do you illustrate it, like Adolf Konrad, above? Do you even make one? See more lists from the 2010 exhibit on lists from the Smithsonian’s archives here on the Archive of American Art’s website.

Over the past few months I’ve visited Occupy LSX, in London, with its neat rows of tents hugging the perimeter of St. Paul’s Cathedral, and marvelled at how much of a village it had become. That village was evicted in February, long after many other cities pushed out protesters. This late eviction seems remarkable to me, and perhaps says something about London.

A core group of supporters still gather each Saturday on the steps of St. Paul’s for meetings. A few weeks ago they shared the space with a large wedding party, the groom with his top-hat and the bride impeccably groomed. They still speak about economics and social justice and the police. The rhetoric of the movement, much of it clear-minded and informed, is very prominent. But despite the broad focus (or, some say, lack of) few people observing Occupy seem to be speaking about home: questioning what it means in a city where few of the so-called 99 percent can afford to buy one, where it is a landlords’ market, where people in their 30s with full-time jobs live with two, three, four housemates. I write this having spent an intense four weeks searching for housing in every corner of the city; the frustration, anxiety and fear that I will not find something suitable is still fresh.

Home, mobility, and the fluidity and impermanence of community is one of the central themes of Occupy. Or, I think, it should be.

[Mobile Home: Illustration by Sean-Edward, via This is Colossal]

Last year, The Atlantic , which has become a forum for ideas about urbanism, cities and notions of home with its Atlantic Cities site, published a story called “The Psychology of Home: Why Where You Live Means So Much.” The author, Julie Beck, wrote that Westerners (or North Americans, if you prefer) are deeply attached to homes but do not necessarily see their homes as manifestations of their inner selves.

Home ownership is about more than mere shelter, as the subprime mortgage crisis affirms. It is also closely related to mobility: “The endless options can leave us constantly wondering if there isn’t some place with better schools, a better neighborhood, more green space, and on and on,” Beck wrote. “We may leave a pretty good thing behind, hoping that the next place will be even more desirable. In some ways, this mobility has become part of the natural course of a life.”

We are shopping for the Good Life and its various components: spouse, children, real estate, a lawn of one’s own. Real estate, like work, plays an enormous part in what course our lives take. Parents choose neighbourhoods for their access to good schools; people choose cities for a job as much as for its quality of life. How else can you explain the phenomenon that is Fort McMurray, in northern Alberta? (For a great introduction to Fort McMurray, see Dan Rubinstein’s feature for Alberta Views magazine.)

“But in spite of everything,” Beck wrote in the Atlantic, “in spite of the mobility, the individualism, and the economy—on some level we do recognize the importance of place. The first thing we ask someone when we meet them, after their name, is where they are from, or the much more interestingly-phrased “where’s home for you?” We ask, not just to place a pushpin for them in our mental map of acquaintances, but because we recognize that the answer tells us something important about them. My answer for ‘where are you from?’ is usually Michigan, but ‘where’s home for you?’ is a little harder.” I don’t quite buy Beck’s own answer, that home is where she happens to be, but I can’t quite answer her question, either. My grandparents lived in the same home for decades, and most of their children lived near by. My family is more scattered, my own flight path more diverse.

“Where are you from?” is code for “who are you?” For modern nomads, those us who pick up sticks and move across provinces, state-lines, country borders and continents, that question is probing but practically impossible to answer. It’s a question you might ask of the people taking part in Occupy. It’s a question I constantly ask myself. I have not yet come upon an answer.