Traveling Too Light
Getting caught with pants down, off, and AWOL.
I’m a second-hand shopper, always have been, clothing a favourite, and I’m good at it. On a trip to see my sister last year I was so sure I could make second-hand clothing appear from thin air that I took nothing with me. Underwear, yes, and the clothes on my back but nothing else. It was an experiment. I wanted to see what my thrifting superpowers would make of a real life challenge. See what I could pull out of my ass, as my mother would say. For this to work, however, the first stop needed to be my hometown Value Village. My sister and I would drop in on our way to her place.
Except we didn’t. It was supper time and my brother-in-law was waiting and we had to get home. Later, she said, Tomorrow. We’d get to Value Village eventually. That might have been the tip-off, the harbinger, that things might not go to plan. Wet thrifting finger to the air I might have sensed an ill wind forming. Already I’d need to start the day in the previous day’s clothing, borrowing a t-shirt to get through the night. I could have viewed this as a win, superpowering my way to sleepwear, no purchase necessary, but instead it made me uneasy. Polyester and I don’t get along.
Day Two: Value Village. Relief. Home. I breathe easier in the chemically altered atmosphere of freshly fumigated clothing. I proceed to Footwear, always my first stop. It grounds me, orients me, prepares me for the close and demanding work ahead. I exhale through the desire to be everywhere at once: the pants aisle, the light jacket aisle, the activewear aisle, the lingerie aisle. I focus. Shoes still my thrift-addicted heart. They also happen to be the section with the greatest bang-to-buck ratio: Josef Siebel, Clarks, Fluevog, Fly London, Cole Haan, Dansko, Mephisto, a $200 dollar pair of shoes routinely $15.
But, harbinger number two, there are no shoes today. Never a good sign. Shoes are a barometer for me of what I might expect from the rest of the shopping trip, my Size 8 tea leaves. No shoes? Good chance there’ll be no pants, no tops, no shorts, no sweaters, no shirts. There are, of course, literally thousands of pieces of clothing. I should know, I touch them all, but there’s nothing I want to own. I can feel it, I’m going to leave empty handed. Sometimes it’s like this, I say to my sister, I have to let it go, shake it off, not let it spook me. Let’s go to another store, she says. And we do. And another. And another. And then we give up.
I don’t get it, I say, It’s never this bad. It was like the used clothing gods were punishing me for my hubris, for thinking I could travel light, clothesless. It was a near complete shutout. I bought a couple pair of jeans somewhere along the way, my desperation mounting, to try on at home, used clothing stores having leveraged the pandemic and germophobia to remove all change rooms from their midst. If the pants didn’t fit I’d take them back. I’d definitely be back. I still had five days to go and my brother-in-law’s sweatpants were starting to look good polyester be damned.
My experiment dominated the trip. We even toyed with the idea of abandoning used and buying new but I’m ruined for new, it’s like shooting shoes in a shoebox. Traveling clothesless had seemed like such a great idea, nothing to carry, but now that I thought about it I was reminded of another of my great ideas. Let’s fly to the West Coast with the kids, I’d said to my sister years earlier, and buy a used car and drive home. Great idea, she said. She was always up for an adventure. And so I bought plane tickets and patted myself on my back for my cleverness and went back to what I was doing.
Three months later, the trip now a month away, a friend and native Vancouverite asked me, So what have you arranged for a car? I haven’t, I said, I thought I’d pick one up when we get there. Like it was coffee, maybe, or a donut. I seemed to think there’d be a car lot next to the airport and when we got off the plane we’d wheel our baggage over and pick one up. Like that. My friend was wide-eyed with disbelief. Speechless. You don’t know how you’re getting home? she asked. 5,786 kilometers. I felt a crack form in my plan where a horrible new light tried to get in. Panic. It was panic. It succeeded. You have to talk to my father right away, she said. He was a mechanic in Vancouver; he’d fix us up. And he did. What luck. He found us a car, picked us up at the airport, and off we drove. And if he hadn’t? The family and I might still be circumambulating airport hotels, luggage in tow, looking for used car salesmen. But at least we’d have a change of clothes.
I ended up spending some part of each day of my visit with my sister making the rounds of second-hand clothing stores. It was like a religious observance without the religion. I lost faith. And I observed alone. Even my sister, my wingman, was unable to maintain her optimism. You go ahead, she’d say. The experiment was an epic fail. Audacity had gotten the better of me. But I’d wanted to do it and I did it and now I know: never travel clothesless. Light? Yes. Empty-handed? No. So far as I can tell there’s nothing to guarantee it will end well. Nothing.