The Carrier Bag Theory of Everything

Dear friend,

I spent the first three days of September in Retezat National Park with a band of friends, some old, some new, all dear to me. Now, in the first days of October, largely homebound, I can only be grateful that I was able to accomplish my most epic and most beautiful trip so far into my favorite mountains before breaking my foot.

I’m fine—really. It’s a small fracture from a lead climbing fall, and I’m truly grateful that it’s nothing serious. I’ll be wearing a boot until mid-October to immobilize it, and though I can walk on it, I have to be careful not jeopardize the healing process by overdoing it. Which means I’m getting plenty of time at home to reflect and recharge and look back on some of the nicer memories of last month.

We planned and prepped the entirety of this backpacking adventure in about seven hours, the evening before we left. Map spread out large on the dining table, the five of us making calls and writing lists. It was an ambitious route, the one we drew out for ourselves, but it was one that excited us. We were on the road early the next morning.

Our hiking days were naturally compartmentalized into distinct portions; for example, the first day looked like this: from the road up to the shepherd’s hut (Stâna Scorota), from the shepherd’s hut up to the saddle (Șaua Iepii), from the saddle down to the refuge (Buta), from the refuge up to another saddle (Șaua Plaiu Mic), from the saddle down to the meadow (Poiana Pelegii) that would serve as our base camp. It was during the second section, up to Șaua Iepii, moving slow under the weight of my back, that I turned to my friend Shanley (a former expat with me here in Romania) and asked her if she had ever read Ursula K. Le Guin’s essay called “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.”

It’s one of those things that had been swirling in my mind since I first read it just a few weeks prior, and I had read it a few times since then. It’s short and fun and profound and therefore invites multiple readings. Le Guin’s theory rests on another: the Carrier Bag Theory of evolution, which proposes that the first human instruments were not weapons or tools but recipients and vessels. Before we needed spears to thrust into mammals and hoes to thrust into the earth, we needed something in which to carry the meat and potatoes home when the day was done.

Le Guin deftly carries this theory from the world of human evolution to the world of human art. The carrier bag becomes metaphor for a distinctly feminine way of interacting with the world and of framing narratives within it. It is the way of the gatherer, not of the heroic hunter. That is not to say that there is no room for or need of the hero or the hunter. The hunter is necessary and valid. But so, after all, is the gatherer.

If it is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it’s useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag, or a basket, or a bit of rolled bark or leaf, or a net woven of your own hair, or what have you, and then take it home with you, home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people, and then later on you take it out and eat it or share it or store it up for winter in a solider container or put it in the medicine bundle or the shrine or the museum, the holy place, the area that contains what is sacred, and then next day you probably do much the same again—if to do that is human, if that’s what it takes, then I am a human being after all.

—Ursula K. Le Guin

I had called the essay to mind in that moment because I had been watching my friends leap ahead like mountain goats and there I was in the back, taking up the rear as I am wont to do. Part of this was because I tend to move a bit slower in general, placing my feet cautiously, stopping to let my lungs catch up with my legs every so often. Part of it was that my backpack was almost comically heavy, my hips were aching under the weight, and I had the impression that my feet were being pressed into the earth and with every step it got a little harder to lift them out of it. But also, part of it was my tendency to stop and stoop, to examine the flora, to look at the sky, to glance backwards at where we’d been to see how the perspective had changed, to snap a picture or two. I’m a meanderer at heart. My companions were right to be pushing forward because we had many kilometers to cover in our daylight hours, but it’s hard for me to help my pace. There’s too much to take in. It’s not enough for me to conquer the peaks, to rack up the mountain miles. I have to collect some things along the way.

And so, after sticking another interesting seed pod into the camera bag I had cinched around my waist like a kangaroo pouch, and seeing Shan smile back at me, I asked her if she had read the essay, and she had. I was unsurprised, and also happy to talk about it with someone who is also a collector, a writer, an artist, and a woman.

Le Guin wrote about the novel as a carrier bag. “A novel is a medicine bundle,” she said, “holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.” She spoke of words as vessels. She saw stories as containers. And lately I had started seeing just about everything as something with the capacity to hold something else. My apartment was the carrier bag of my belongings, a holding space I called home. My journal had become a container of our hiking time logs and pressed wildflowers. When I snapped a photograph, I saw it as a vessel, something into which I was able to pour this landscape that lay before me. The day became the carrier bag of our actions and our experiences. I became the carrier bag of my memories. I could have continued into infinity with this matryoshka doll of carrier bags.

Why did it strike such a chord with me? I think maybe it’s because, if I was being honest, lately my life had felt like a big sack of things I wasn’t quite sure what to do with. Maybe that’s why I was encouraged by Le Guin’s theory. If she said a story didn’t have to have one clear narrative arc like an arrow, didn’t need to build towards something heroic, didn’t need to conquer or control…well then, maybe my life didn’t have to either.

We filled our days in Retezat with ridges and refugius and cloud-covered peaks and sweeping vistas and cold lake swims. We drank cowboy coffee and spring water, and we ate food cooked over our tiny gas stove after long hiking days. We met up with our two dear friends Balu and Lelde, for a day, and met several kind strangers along the way—hikers, shepherds, and salvamonts (mountain rescue folks). We saw a whole herd of horses up close (they came right up to us, oversized muzzles searching our pockets for sweets) and a massive mama bear with her cub from (thank God) far enough away.

It was a special trip, not only for those experiencing these mountains for the first time but also for Marc (another former fellow expat) and I, who had spent some significant time here in the past. When we had come before, we had always come by car, which meant leaving our valley, driving up to Hateg and then entering the park from the north on one of the bone-rattling, seemingly endless gravel roads. This time, we had pushed ourselves and had crossed up and over into these mountains right from our valley with everything we needed on our backs, not in the trunk. It felt like a triumph, like we were connecting two important worlds: our favorite trails of Micul (small) Retezat—easily accessible from our valley—with our favorite trails of Retezat proper—those dreamy distant peaks that had always seemed just beyond our valley reach.

On the last day, as we stood on the crest between the two, able to see it all before and behind us, I joked that it was like “the best hits of Retezat.” Or, “the most beloved tour.”

“Yes, the most beloved,” Marc agreed. “That’s exactly what this is.” Because, he explained, it’s hard to claim with any real authority what the best is of anything. But you can always be an expert on what is the most beloved. And he was right. Best grasps at something objective. Beloved is unapologetically subjective. It’s about the way the thing sits in your own beating heart.

For those brief days, Retezat became the carrier bag of our revels and our risks and our wanderings. Our band of friends had become the carrier bag of conversations and questions and the crux of shared memories-in-the-making. Yes, everything is a recipient, and part of being human is harnessing and filling these recipients, using them to carry the important things home. Using them to carry the important things to each other.

I could see it all before me like a map on a dining table, like something that I could fold and put in my bag, and take with me always. My heart, the carrier bag of the most beloved.

With love,

Xenia Grace