Stay in Your Car Long Enough and You Can Lose Your Schlep

Not so long ago--and due to circumstances beyond my control--I found myself walking a mile, maybe two, while carrying three plastic sacks full of produce, a diaper bag and my medium-sized purse. At the halfway point, various muscle groups in my neck lodged a formal complaint, and by the time I got where I was going, my shoulders were on fire and my wrists were numb. Humiliated, I was forced to admit the ugly truth--after a dozen years in Los Angeles, I have lost the ability to schlep.

From the time I made my first solo trek to first-grade, my book bag and square metal lunch box amiably bumping my knees for five blocks, I have been an inveterate schlepper. I attended a college made up of a half-dozen quadrangles and even more far-flung buildings, and still I tended to take the long way home even when my backpack bulged with Econ 101 texts and I carried plastic bags with the still-warm chapters from Kinko’s. After that, I moved to New York.

In New York, schlepping is an art. Kids like me sail through some Midwestern town and think they can run with the big dogs, and they are just wrong. I remember the first time I noticed a woman, who could not have weighed 110 pounds, scuttle by me positively draped with bags: tote bags and oversized purses, a travel pack and what looked like a small suitcase. I assumed she was either a photographer or on her way to the airport.

But then I looked around and realized I was surrounded by these women, all moving through crowds with a speedy grace that defied the sacks and satchels hanging from their forms.

After a day or so, I realized these bags were urban necessities. It made no sense to return to your outer borough apartment after work only to return to Manhattan for dinner, so women tended to pack for the day--extra shoes, extra tights, a book or two for the subway, maybe even a change of clothes if there was a chance you might not make it back home.

It took a lot of practice, but soon I was darting through crowds with the best of them, canvas totes and straw Kenyan bags hanging from every limb. I remember once walking from 69th Street to my Park Slope apartment--a distance of almost eight miles--while carrying a purse, a backpack and two shopping bags. It did not seem at all an odd thing to do.

Now, of course, I have a car, and so I sigh for the glory years when it was nothing to walk 10 blocks decked out like a Sherpa with four bags of groceries and my laundry.

Although its very term belies it, there is a beauty to schlepping, not unlike that of a woman carrying a jug of water on her head. But after a decade in L.A., it’s not just the schlepping muscles that have atrophied, it’s the attitude.

With two children under the age of 5, I do enough bending and lifting and carrying; certainly, I’m in no danger of becoming a package-trailing “get that will you, darling?” diva. Part of it, of course, is age--about the same time you become too old to ask your friends to help you move, you also become less willing to use your body as a wheelbarrow.

But mostly, it’s L.A. Though I have yet to encounter a truly laid-back person in this town of double espressos and vibrating message centers, there is definitely a public luggage limit. Here, no points are given for the number of straps you unhitch from yourself when you land at your cubicle.

If New York leans over your shoulder in the morning and says, “You could probably return those library books on the way to the movies--you’d only need one more bag,” L.A. tosses them in the back of the car and says with a shrug, “Why schlep?”

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Mary McNamara can be reached at mary.mcnamara@latimes.com.