Strange Souvenirs: What's in Your Suitcase?

I had to wonder if the baggage scanner shook his head when he saw the outline of my suitcase contents. You see I'm a big fan of flotsam and jetsam, and even the lesser known lagan.

Certainly someone has done a study of souvenirs; the spoons, the T-shirts, the blown-glass bibelots, and on and on. While surely it's not lost on anyone that those same souvenirs are often made far from the places they commemorate

The souvenir is a material object meant to hold a fleeting memory. We might attach more meaning to such chotchkes than the well-chosen objets d'art that sit on the shelves of our homes. But then again, they are ephemeral matter that seems sillier with the passing of every season, a concrete embodiment of "What was I thinking?"; the stuff of yard sales.

A quick trip to Seattle has me wondering about the state of my souvenir shopping, or non-shopping in my case. I have come a long way in life, but really not that far at all; the scrounged items in my suitcase not much different than many decades before.

I may now stay in nice hotels, but my inner-camper is still close to my heart. The pebbles and crab shells, the feathers, the shard of honeycomb and the odd bird nest that line the windowsill at my desk are all that I might need to feel I have been somewhere.

Once again I went back to my roots when I found the objects of my desire in the great Northwest.

The roadsides were lined with the same blackberries of my childhood trips to Oregon, where my family picked and ate for innocent entertainment and also dessert. Crossing back into California a border agent once told my mother fresh produce was not allowed. On the side of the road she fired up the camper's two burners and cooked gallons of them into hot purple sludge. The same agent's glasses were fogged when he checked our provisions the second time around.

You might think all that reduce, re-use and recycle business is new. You may think it's the latest to re-purpose items for new uses. But you'd be talking to the kid who whose home featured ship's hatch-cover coffee tables and beach glass mosaic lamps all scrounged and re-crafted by my creative parents.

South of Seattle along the grassy-duned shores we passed weathered houses with salvaged buoys, driftwood and all manner of marine debris piled artfully in place of lawns and patios. My family thought it funny, and I realized my kids really don't know they are just one generation away from this quaint but somehow current way of living. Deep down I felt a combined frisson of shame and longing for that simple life on the beach I used to know.

When I lived in England, it was called mudlarking. Bits of blue and white china and old coins awaited my discovery in the streams and tidal rivers telling of those that came before me. Is beachcombing possible in Minnesota?

Before cheap flights and the internet, there was this kind of "message in a bottle" mentality for those of us lucky to live with the tides. Every day was like a scavenger hunt, wondering what the waves would bring with them that day.

So I knew it when I saw it, the perfect souvenir hidden amid a mass of kelp and sand flies. A worn and waterlogged buoy, not too old from the shade of the paint-colors, but with that patina of unknown provenance. I placed it in a plastic bag at the last minute before packing and hoped the dying-algae and dead-fish smell would stay put until we touched down at MSP.