My backpack

In 1986 I went to Taiwan for the first time. A few months after my arrival, I bought a blue Rhino brand backpack from a shop near the Taipei train station. I can't remember owning a backpack before that time, but I suppose I must have. Still, for me the Rhino bag was the first backpack in my life that mattered. When I traveled to China with my sister Jenny in 1988, I carried only that backpack, often with an enamel cup dangling from a clip. The bag imposed a limit on what I could take, and I respected that limit, even when I realized that I'd need to buy warm gloves and boots in Chengdu if I was going to spend time with pandas in Jiuzhaigou. The only thing I did not manage to fit into the backpack was the Tibetan coat two American women I met in the Sichuan alps insisted I buy; that was fine, since it was so cold I was always either wearing the coat or sleeping under it.

In Los Angeles the backpack served me well. Every day I rode my old ten-speed from Lincoln and Cedar to UCLA, showered, took my change of clothes out of my bag, went to class, changed back to my shorts and t-shirt, and rode home. Sometimes, on the way home, I stopped at Rhino Records, where the backpack often elicited happy comment.

In 1996 I went to Taiwan for the third time. I had no money. The point was to do nothing but study at the Stanford Center, and had it not been for my friends Jennifer Rudolph and 祝平一, I'd have subsisted on little but soymilk and rice porridge that summer. I brought the Rhino bag, carried it from Yonghe to Tai Da every day, and then, at the end of the school term, I retired a very weary backpack and, at that store near the train station, bought a second blue Rhino backpack.

The second bag has been to New Zealand with me, back to Taiwan, to France, to New York, and has carried my groceries from stores in Venice, Santa Monica, West Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Petaluma. Not just groceries: loads of laundry, sacks of horse shit, library books, duct tape and fabric for capture the flag, bottles of wine, and my pruning equipment. More than once I've repaired it, passing a very large needle through the seam where shoulder straps meet bag, and those straps are not going to come undone any time soon. I need the thing to work because I'm one of those people who rarely leaves the house without draping a backpack over my shoulders, though I'll admit it does not go well with my old Peter Tilton suits.

The zipper that fastens the main compartment is not what it once was. This may mean retiring the bag. I am loath to do this, and it is not likely that I'll be making a trip to Taipei this summer. I managed to coax the zipper into sealing a load of laundry last night, but I was anxious that at any moment my turtlenecks would spring from the bag with the impetus of a parachute. For now I'm using an old bag of my dad's to carry my lunch to work, and even that feels a bit like betrayal. The old Rhino bag, limp, a jellyfish on the beach, lies on the bedroom floor, beseeching me to make a decision. But I can't.

ADDENDUM: I bought this: