When I started at UC Santa Cruz in 1995, I needed a new backpack, which my mom bought for me. It was a good, sturdy, canvas thing, and it held all my stuff admirably. It and I were nearly insepperable and it became famous for having in it everything from emergency shorts to a lock pick set and can of WD-40, to the point where two coworkers started a list of the few things they'd discovered my backpack didn't contain. And of course I took it with me everywhere - work, parties, New York, Oregon, Florida, Australia, Israel, Egypt, Ireland, Scotland, Canada.

All things move toward their end, though, and eventually my backpack started to fade. It got a couple of ripped seams, and the last straw was when the zipper started to fail. But I didn't want to just throw it away - I'd had it for almost eleven years and had taken it everywhere. I decided a fitting tribute to its travels and functionality would be to fix it up a bit and mail it to Mongolia.

I got the zipper working pretty well again and sewed up the ripped seams. You may point out that I could have done this and kept on using it myself, but by the time I got the zipper working again I had already bought a new one. So the backpack itself was ready to go, but if I was to send it to Mongolia I needed two things: an address to send it to and a note in Mongolian explaining what this was all about. I decided that it would be kind of neat if people would use it and hand it off to other people, so it could travel perhaps even beyond Mongolia. Toward that end, I decided to put in it a kind of Rosetta Stone, with a note on it in various languages that read:

I have always wanted to travel the world but I can not afford to go everywhere that I would like to, so I am sending my backpack instead. Feel free to use it or give it to someone else who will. If you get the chance, please write to me at one of the addresses below.

with my email and mailing addresses at bottom. I scoured my friends and coworkers, finally coming up with translations into Mongolian, Russian, Chinese, and Arabic (I wanted to include French but ran out of room). I copied these onto a cloth, using a lightbox for the languages I can't read, and soon the Rosetta Rag was complete!

All I had left to do was find an address. I googled "Mongolian office", "Mongolia address", and a few variations, before finding this New York Times article on an arts center in Ulan Bator. It listed an address, and I figured an artists' group might be fairly receptive to something like this coming out of the blue, so I picked that as the destination. Then it was just a matter of writing a copy of the note (along with a photocopy of the Mongolian translation), putting it in a box, and mailing it.

updates

From: artist <art@uma.mn>
To: erik@multipledigression.com
Date: Jun 08 '06 02:40
Subject: Dear Erik Fitzpatrick


Dear Erik Fitzpatrick,

We would like to note that the Union of Mongolian Artists received the backpack from you today by post within in a box.

Thank you and best wishes,

Munkhjargal


Union of Mongolian Artists
Chinggis avenue 1, Ulaanbaatar 20a
Mongolia
Tel: 976-11-327474
Fax: 976-11-320881
e-mail: art@uma.mn, web: http://www.uma.mn