The Bag, The Boots, The Whole Damn Philosophy

Look, I've spent enough of my life hauling gear through customs lines and stumbling, jet-lagged, down narrow foreign streets to know a few things. One of them is this: most of what we own today is garbage. Cheap, disposable, designed-to-die-in-eighteen-months garbage. Somewhere along the way I grew tired of replacing things every couple of years.

So about a decade ago I started buying differently. Red Wing Boots, Leatherman, Crown Northampton, Filson. This is the kind of stuff that comes with a warranty because the people who make it actually believe the things they sell will exceed every expectation. If it breaks or wears out you can send it back. They'll fix it. Hmm, what a novel concept.

There's something almost spiritual about a well-made object. I don't use that word lightly. Handcrafted things carry within them something special. Every time you pick one up, it’s as if there's a little transfer of energy. It feels like whoever made the thing poured some piece of themselves into it, and it's still in there, waiting. These things earn a history. They get better-looking the older they get and the more you beat them up, which is more than I can say for myself at this point.

Yes, quality stuff costs more up front. However, if you do the math over a decade and the cheap stuff, the stuff you replace three, four, five times, starts looking like the real rip-off. I only regret not figuring this out sooner. I could’ve saved myself a lot of money, landfill contributions, and let-downs.

Which brings me to the bag.
The Satchel & Page Slim Mailbag.

Late last year I fell down a YouTube rabbit-hole, a journey sparked by Rajiv Surendra's channel. He was extolling the virtues of some custom-made leather bag he's dragged across two decades and God knows how many countries. The guy spoke of his leather bag the way you'd talk about an old friend. As if it wasn’t a product but more like a companion. That's the kind of talk that gets under your skin if you're the type who's still looking for the right bag, and I was.

After lots of research one particular bag rose to the top as one that most fit my particular preferences and needs. Amazing online reviews. Minimalist design. Great materials. I reached out to the company that made it early in the spring and they, graciously, sent me one to test-drive. Thanks to a summer full of travel I’m happy to say I’ve put it through the proper paces, it’s been a very thorough test-drive.

I travel and plan on keeping that up for a long time. The writer's life means the laptop, the cables, the notebooks, these things are constant companions, whether I like it or not. For years that meant schlepping around a backpack. Functional, sure. But backpacks have a vital design flaw nobody talks about. Backpacks have lots of room and extra room is an open invitation to overpack.

I'd cram it full like I was heading into the wilderness for six months, forgetting every time that wherever I'm landing, there are stores. These stores sell toothpaste in Lisbon, socks in London, and umbrellas in Ireland. I don't need to bring everything I own or anticipate every need that might possibly arise. On top of that, hauling a backpack through crowded and humid airport terminals and cobblestone streets turns you into a sweat-soaked mess before you've even checked into the hotel.

Enter the Slim Mailbag. This is where it gets good, because the thing that separates this bag from the plethora of pretenders is simple...it’s the leather.

Straight from the source, here's what you're getting:

• Tanned and finished in Ponte a Egola, Italy — a town that's been doing this since before anybody's grandfather was born
• Certified by the Genuine Italian Vegetable Tanned Leather Consortium
• Gold Rated for Sustainability by LWG
• Hide Origin: French cowhide shoulders
• Thickness: 6 oz. for the body of the bag, 8 oz. for the flap, handles, and straps
• Tanning/Grain: Vegetable tanned, dyed through to the core, full-grain
• Finishing: Aniline dyed, hot-stuffed with oils and waxes — no paint, no chemical topcoat hiding what the leather actually is.

That last part matters. No paint means no mask. The French cowhide shows its wrinkles, its scars, its natural color drift. These imperfections, or more like character, would get sanded out and airbrushed over on a lesser bag. It's honest material. It's going to look different in five years, and that's the whole point. It's not supposed to look new forever. It's supposed to look like it's been somewhere. Like you have. Every scar tells a story and I plan on this bag telling more than its share of them.

The entire bag is constructed with longevity in mind. Polyester 277 thread, the kind used in saddles, hand-hammered solid copper rivets, full pieces of thick leather in places you’d expect bags to be made of smaller scraps sewn together.

Enough about form and now onto function—it’s everything you need and nothing you don’t. The Slim Mailbag isn’t filled with endless pockets and compartments like most modern bags and backpacks. The inside is as straightforward as the outside. A padded sleeve large enough for a 13” laptop, pen holders, and a few pockets for essentials like keys and a passport. There’s also one, unzippered, pocket on the outside for things you need easy access to.

The bag is small enough to not make archenemies of those you’re trying to board a plane with and compact enough to effortlessly slide under the seat in front of you.

Here's the thing nobody tells you about objects made like this, they outlast the trip. They outlast the job you had when you bought them, the place you were living in, maybe even the person you were when you bought them. I'll carry this bag until the leather's gone the color of an old saddle and the corners are as buttery as a worn-in glove. And somewhere down the line, in ten years or God-willing twenty, I'll be standing in some airport I haven't dreamed of yet, this same bag slung over my shoulder, and I won't remember exactly when I acquired it. By then it'll feel like a part of me.

That's the whole deal with quality. It's not about the leather, or the copper rivets, or the certifications on some company's website. It's about betting on a thing that's built to keep you company. Most of what we buy is designed to be forgotten. This isn't. And in a life spent moving through places that don't know who you are, there are plenty of good reasons to hold onto an object made by a company who does.

All for now. Make this a wonderful day.

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www.ericvancewalton.net