Steamer Trunk

I bought this trunk for $25 when I was in college. Someone had found it in an old farmhouse attic and was selling it for beer money. It was not in good shape: it had been painted brown, and the leather straps were disintegrating; but structurally it was sound, and I needed a storage box. This was before Rubbermaid and all those color-coded plastic bins that the cockroaches will inherit when they are the last animal species left on earth.

I don't remember what I stored in this trunk. Whatever it was, it's long gone; the trunk is still here. Several years ago I had the trunk restored by a guy who knew enough to tell me that it dated from about 1910. Before that, he said, most trunks had rounded tops like treasure chests in pirate tales. But those earlier trunks weren't stackable, so when more people started traveling with more stuff to stash in cargo holds, form duly followed function.

Trunks like this never made it onto airport conveyor belts, but astute trunk makers adapted and survived. Louis Vuitton is still around; so is the Schwayder Trunk Manufacturing Company of Denver, Colorado-- known since 1966 as Samsonite.  

As photographers,Will and I have traveled to work in 78 countries, which should qualify us as beta testers for any maker of suitcases. By the way: "suitcase"? I wonder how much longer that word will stick, since fewer and fewer people travel with suits. Maybe we'll revert to "trunk", which comes from the Latin "truncus", meaning maimed or mutilated-- much more relevant to the experience of modern travelers! 

Maybe someday, when Will and I have retired and can travel in a leisurely and genteel way (instead of like a camera store shot out of a cannon), I will take this trunk on a trip. Perhaps it will be a cruise. Instead of jeans, Nikes, and wrinkle-free jackets, I will pack things made of silk and linen, folded between layers of tissue paper the way magazine articles were still advising when we made our first trip to Paris in 1980. I may even pack a fedora or some other fragile hat. But when it comes to lotions and colognes, I think I'll give a skip to the dainty crystal stoppered bottles of yesteryear and stick to my tried and true screw-top containers in a double zip-lock plastic bag. Because my maid wouldn't enjoy rinsing lotion out of all my clothes in that tiny stateroom sink.