The objects that travel with us

Every traveler carries a few objects that are not, strictly speaking, necessary. They are not the passport or the charger or the toothbrush. They are the things we pack without thinking, the way we might touch a doorframe on our way out of a house we love. Ask people about them and they often seem embarrassed, as though you had caught them talking to a houseplant. Then they tell you everything.

I have been asking for some years now, in train compartments and departure halls and on the long benches of ferry decks, and I have come to think of these objects as a kind of quiet luggage: weighing almost nothing, and carrying a great deal.

A worn paperback

Mine is a novel, bought secondhand when I was nineteen, whose spine has been broken in so many places that it now falls open wherever it likes. The cover has faded from blue to the color of a winter sky. There is a coffee ring on page forty-one and, inside the front cover, a penciled phone number belonging to someone whose name I genuinely cannot recall. I have read it perhaps eleven times. I have carried it on almost every journey I have made for thirty years.

I do not always read it. That is not quite the point. It sits at the bottom of my bag like ballast, and on the first night in an unfamiliar room — when the radiator is making a sound I don’t understand, and the light switch is not where my hand expects it to be — I take it out and open it anywhere and read a page or two. The sentences are exactly as they were. Whatever else has changed, they haven’t. That is a remarkable thing for a book to offer, and I am not sure any book could offer it unless I had read it many times before.

A woman I met on an overnight train told me she travels with a cookbook she has never cooked from. It belonged to her aunt. The margins are full of the aunt’s notes — “too much salt,” “good with pears,” “never again” — and she reads them, she said, the way you might listen to a voice on an old recording. She has no intention of making the recipes. She simply likes to know what her aunt thought of them.

The pocketknife

The second most common answer, among the people I have asked, is a knife. Not a weapon: a small folding knife, usually old, usually inherited, used for peeling fruit and cutting string and opening the kind of packaging that seems designed to resist human hands.

A retired carpenter I met on a ferry showed me his, a slim thing with a horn handle worn pale where his thumb rests. It had belonged to his father, who had used it, he said, for everything from whittling clothes pegs to cutting twine on hay bales in a snowstorm. The blade had been sharpened so many times it had narrowed to a sliver. He used it to cut an apple into eight pieces and offered me one, and I understood that this was the knife’s real purpose — not utility, but continuity. Every apple he cut was a small conversation with his father’s hands.

Knives are not as easy to travel with as they once were. The carpenter told me he had surrendered two at security checks over the years and had grieved, privately, both times. Now he goes everywhere by boat or train. I asked whether that wasn’t a great deal of inconvenience for a small knife. He looked at me with real pity and said that it was a very great deal of inconvenience, and worth every hour.

A scarf for every weather

Scarves hold a particular place in this quiet luggage, perhaps because they are worn so close to the face. A scarf takes on the smell of the person who wears it and of the places they have been: woodsmoke, sea air, the inside of a bus in the rain. Left unwashed, it becomes a kind of archive.

I know a weaver, which may explain her attachment to cloth, who travels with a long gray scarf her mother knitted the winter before she died. It is not especially warm. One end has begun to unravel, and she has tied it off with a knot rather than mend it, because she wants to keep the stitches exactly as her mother made them. She wears it on planes, on cold platforms, in rented rooms where the heating doesn’t work. “It’s the closest thing I have to being held,” she told me, and then looked out of the window for a while.

A scarf is also useful, which helps. It can be a blanket, a pillow, a sunshade, a way of covering your head when you step into a place of worship. Perhaps that is why so many of us carry one: it lets us bring the sentimental along under cover of the practical, the way a child might smuggle a favorite toy into school inside a lunchbox.

Why we carry them

It would be easy to call these objects superstitions, and some of them are. A friend of mine will not fly without a particular coin in her coat pocket, and she knows perfectly well that the coin has no bearing on aerodynamics. But I think most of them do something subtler than ward off bad luck. They bring a thread of continuity into circumstances that are, by design, discontinuous.

A young musician I sat beside on a night bus carried a guitar pick she had never played with, a mottled brown thing worn smooth along one edge from being turned over and over between her fingers. Her first teacher had pressed it into her hand at the end of their final lesson. She does not use it on stage. She holds it in the wings, she told me, until the moment she has to walk out, and then she puts it in her pocket, where she can feel it against her leg.

Travel unmoors us. That is much of its pleasure: the new streets, the unfamiliar food, the sense of being briefly somebody nobody knows. But it can also be disorienting in a way that runs deeper than tiredness. The things that ordinarily tell us who we are — our rooms, our routines, the faces we see every day — are all left behind. What remains is what we carry. A worn book, a knife, a scarf: these are small pieces of home that fit in a pocket, proof that the person who left is the same person who will return.

They gather new meaning as they go. My paperback is no longer only the book I bought at nineteen. It is the book I read on a station bench in a snowstorm, waiting for a train that never came. It is the book I lent to a stranger on a long crossing and got back three hours later with a postcard tucked inside as a bookmark. Each journey adds a layer, so that the object becomes a record not of one place but of all of them — a passport of a different kind, stamped only by memory.

I sometimes wonder what happens to these things when their owners are gone. The carpenter’s knife will presumably pass to someone, and perhaps that person will carry it too, and cut apples with it on ferries, and feel their own version of what he feels. Or it may end up in a kitchen drawer, an anonymous old knife with a pale patch on the handle that nobody can explain. Objects are faithful, but they cannot speak for themselves. Their meaning lives in the hands that hold them.

Before my last journey I took the paperback down from the shelf and considered, for a moment, leaving it behind. It is getting fragile. A few pages have come loose and are held in place only by habit. Then I put it in my bag, at the bottom, where it always goes. It weighed almost nothing. I was glad of it on the first night.