Collector's Item

I’ve decided that it must be in every human being’s nature to collect. To collect odd assortments of objects, memorabilia and trinkets, tickets and shells. Perhaps it’s behavioural residue from our time as monkeys, when resources had to be pawed aside in order to outrun death for another night. Maybe we’re just weird. Either way we’re still not very good at sharing.

I, somewhat unsurprisingly, have acquired a great deal of things in my life. My bedroom shelves can testify to this, bowing under the weight of almost as many snow globes as there are countries. The drawers under my bed are suffering too, crammed with childhood toys and letters I never quite got round to sending. In recent years I’ve attempted to have several clear outs, but things always seem to reappear, and in larger quantities than before.

I blame my mother and her hoarding tendencies. She’s instilled in me a fear of throwing things away, because according to sod’s law whatever you get rid of you will immediately need. That’s probably why she’s left a pile of clothes destined for the charity shop on the bed in the spare room, desperately waiting for 1990’s fashion to make a comeback.

But then again, there are some things you just can’t let go of. Photo albums, that poncho you wore on a log flume when you were five, the cast that held your broken arm. Items that don’t just evoke memories but tell the story of your life. The most precious belongings of all, because they help you to put together the fragments of your history that were once only accessible to those watching from the outside. The stuff you can’t remember, like your first birthday, or a trip to hospital after falling out of a high chair.

You’d think that the items closest to home would have the most meaning. But I find that those from further afield are just as valuable, and more so for the miles they have travelled. One of my favourites is the Navajo Indian floor mat I found in a trading post on a roadside in Arizona. It’s a simple tapestry of brown sacking, about a foot long, but small enough to be rolled into a tube and stored in a rucksack. I am transported back to the dusty wasteland of the North American desert every time I look at it.

             

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The day is uncomfortably hot. We’ve just had lunch in Subway, grateful to be out of the van’s feeble air conditioning. We’re also recovering from seeing the first roundabout of our trip; they’re so rare in the U.S. that we nearly stopped to take a picture.

The roads here are desolate. There’s a faint haze shimmering on the horizon, making the base of the mountains wobble. Our only links to civilisation are the gas stations, dispersed evenly down the highway. We pull into one about an hour after lunch. It’s a homely cluster of buildings claiming to be a holiday park, our destination at its centre.

The trading post is a sprawling wooden structure all on one level, like a bungalow. Besides the Monument Valley and Grand Canyon paraphernalia scattered about the place, presumably to satiate the desires of tourists like me, the store is full of beautiful hand-crafted items.

Near the entrance is a four-tiered shelf of rainbow pottery, which I can’t help but think is fairly bold placement given the number of small children running amok; I have a vision of the whole thing smashing onto the dark pine floor in multi-coloured pieces. Most of the displays also have rugs underneath them, turned-up edges presenting a real hazard. With careful manoeuvring they can be avoided.

It’s a crowded space, but not overwhelming. A bit like walking into a museum. There’s barely an inch of room left on the walls, frames of all shapes and sizes filling the vast stretches of beige between the front and back of the store. Dispersed between tapestries and animal skins there are instruments and weapons hung on small pegs, including drums, bows and blow darts.

Clothes racks fill the gaps between shelves and display cabinets, every item seeming to adhere to the colour scheme of the surrounding landscape. I leaf through dozens of tawny jackets and trousers, stroking the fuzzy leather and running the tassels through my fingers. Some collections are spilling over onto side tables, arranged in tasteful layers of shawls and shirts. Their patterns remind me of the pointy-hooded poncho I bought in a shop in Santa Fe and then wore for four days straight in the desert, an item which now lies at the bottom of my suitcase due to hot weather.

Towards the back of the store are the more delicate objects, presumably to keep them out of the way of roaming children and clumsy adults. Including myself in the latter category, I make sure to look but not touch the collection of dolls, sculptures and wood carvings. I pass my hand across a row of dream catchers instead, spinning the little beads around with my index finger. I leave them alone when I see the price.

Further along, I stand and watch a woman behind a loom, making what looks like the beginnings of a rug. There’s about half a foot of progress; I wonder if I’ll be able to see the difference a few rows can make when I walk back this way. Seeing it every day is probably a bit like watching images buffering on an old computer, loading chunk by chunk.

It’s when I’m browsing the gift section, trying to choose between a shot glass and a bottle opener for my brother, that I notice the mats. I saw variants of them in the Navajo reserve, but they were hundreds of dollars (and that was pre-tax—the American habit of adding a fee at the till is my least favourite part of living in the country. That and the cheese).

I expect the mats to be very much on the wrong side of $20, and promise myself I won’t get my hopes up. Although I’m still in the ‘carpe diem’ stage of travel, buying souvenirs from every place we visit, I’m mindful of cost. I’m also aware of the amount of stuff I already have at home. For most of the journey I’ve been collecting postcards and stickers instead of magnets in an attempt to save our overburdened fridge, and to prevent my suitcase from feeling very self-conscious on the luggage scales at the airport.

It seems a strange coincidence that I’ve found exactly what I’m looking for tucked into the corner of a store I didn’t even know we were going to visit. I feel almost guilty as I pull the meagre $15 from my purse.

Other people seem less enthused by my cheap find. They’re more interested in the gun holster someone is passing around, an intricately decorated leather pouch that screams Wild West.  It reminds me of the time someone bought a digeridoo from Paignton Zoo on a Year 9 biology trip and completely overshadowed the stuffed monkeys and animal-themed stationary everyone else had bought.

 

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A few months ago I thought I’d lost the mat and unearthed three years’ worth of birthday presents in the search. Finding it again didn’t help me to figure out where I was going to put it. To hang it in a glass case would’ve been to cement its destiny as a decorative item, something to be looked at instead of used; but somehow I couldn’t bear the thought of it on the floor. Instead I settled for the middle ground, which is sometimes worse, and left it in a plastic box to gather dust for a while. I occasionally wonder what will become of it when I am gone; whether it will end up in landfill with my photo albums, dyes bleeding into each other, faces eroding in a pile of rubbish. Or perhaps next to my snow globes, tiny cities crumbling amid the shattered glass. What will there be to remember it then? What will there be to remember me?

It’s a thing I try not to consider too often. For now, I content myself with knowing that the mat came from the trip of a lifetime, a trip that reminds me of summer, and bug bites, and that somewhere, for a short time, my name was carved into the eternal sands of Monument Valley.