The art of equipping yourself for the battle of the everyday.
About four years ago, I began carrying with me everywhere I went a gentleman’s pocketknife, first-aid supplies and a small high-powered flashlight. These new items seemed a natural extension of an intensifying handiness that also had me filling tiny Muji containers with the toiletries I needed on daily trips to the pool. As my kit grew, my Internet searches began turning up people on blogs and forums who had pockets and bags full of strikingly similar gear. They called their assortments ‘‘everyday carry.’’
Everyday carry (or E.D.C.) denotes what you carry wherever you go. It is a niche preparedness culture that is lately becoming mainstream; amid the groundswell, it has been called a ‘‘movement,’’ a ‘‘mindset’’ and even a ‘‘philosophy,’’ for it also connotes a heightened consciousness about what you carry and why. The objects in an individual’s E.D.C. may be as unremarkable as keys, a cell phone and a wallet, but might be as various as a brass marine shackle or a tourniquet, a seatbelt cutter or a small multipurpose tool that looks like a seahorse, a reclining monkey or a gaping tyrannosaur. E.D.C. sites are awash in lovingly curated still lifes of all this — a murse dump with occasional Glocks.
Underlying E.D.C.’s new popularity, as the provisioner and educator Bryan Black explains, is a growing perception of risk that outpaces any growth in the frequency of actual risks that one might encounter. Disruptions of peace and public order now filter continually into our consciousness, so E.D.C. is as much post-9/11 as it is post-social-media and post-surveillance of social media. And it has particularly resonated among men for whom the observance offers totems of heroic masculinity in lives that might not otherwise incorporate it. Men for whom each day is met with the secret yearning that it might turn into a personal disaster film; for whom the most exciting moment in the unrelentingly climactic ‘‘Mad Max: Fury Road’’ came when Tom Hardy, having forethoughtfully stashed a blood-transfusion line in the second act, finally used it in the third. We remember that the fun of running away from home was all in the packing, and are lucky enough to have grown up at a time when every adult who wishes to can approximate Batman’s utility belt.
Meanwhile, for E.D.C.’s original popularizers — disproportionately current or ex-military, in law enforcement or emergency services, with self-sufficient or survivalist outlooks — the exactingly selected articles of the faith may offer, beyond utility, an opportunity to accessorize. Indeed, what unites a great many E.D.C.ers is this deep appreciation of aesthetics: a love of the just-so combination of the perfectly machined copper flashlight, the rainbow-anodized bottle-opener-cum-prybar-cum-screwdriver that attaches to a keychain, the brutally robust watch. Whatever blend of politically ecumenical anti-authoritarianism, high-minded altruism and harmless neurosis may underlie the preparedness, and whatever medical, mechanical or other misfortunes it anticipates, it looks good on everyone.
My everyday carry
has come in handy
for: a London
pensioner falling
aboard the Northern
line and cutting his
knee; a mother of
my girlfriend needing
an oversize Band-Aid
on holiday; a French
girl asking for a
fork in the library.
has come in handy
for: a London
pensioner falling
aboard the Northern
line and cutting his
knee; a mother of
my girlfriend needing
an oversize Band-Aid
on holiday; a French
girl asking for a
fork in the library.
My own neurosis has prepared me for: a London pensioner falling aboard the Northern line and cutting his knee; a roving gang of street urchins making noise in the middle of the night and needing to be blinded by flashlight; a sedentary gang of sea urchins requiring removal from my foot; a mother of my girlfriend needing an oversize Band-Aid on holiday; a French girl asking for a fork in the library. But the ability to charm women aside, an aura of competence is its own reward. According to Jason McCarthy, founder of the backpack and endurance-events company Goruck and a former Green Beret, this gear-dork mindset draws on the mystique of America’s ever more visible special-forces personnel. All that hard-edged practicality is encapsulated in the word ‘‘tactical,’’ which in E.D.C. branding is meant to suggest that you could use your toiletry bag on a manhunt across the Bactrian plain, and otherwise gets used to describe subdued greens and no-nonsense blacks, fibers and polymers from Cordura to Zytel, the MOLLE webbing that allows everything imaginable to clip, snap or strap to a bag with modular efficiency. But does a pocketful of pokeys necessarily make a fine tactician? ‘‘The confidence,’’ McCarthy cautioned, ‘‘matters more than the thing.’’
At first it seemed to me that the confidence and the thing might be inseparable — a kind of Mylar security blanket. On reflection, though, the thing has given rise to a confidence that is subtler, and truly everyday: It has refined my understanding of utility, of which functions are essential and which can be dispensed with. Or doubled up, for there is a special pleasure in discovering unlikely objects as multitools. Argan oil is the Dr. Bronner’s de nos jours. One charger can do in place of five. Components trump outfits. A formerly maximalist packer of suitcases, I have gone over to the other side.
Still, I do carry around a fair amount of weird stuff. And when I enter a secure area, the benighted will prod the hemorrhage-control compression bandage or collapsible miniature grappling hook and ask ignorant questions. Other times people just go with the flow. A friend who accompanied me to Carsten Höller’s ‘‘Giant Psycho Tank’’ at the New Museum for a go at floating in the salt pool did not ask why, semper paratus, I had with me a microfiber towel. As the staff had failed to supply any towels that day, only we could go in the tank. It was a rare place, a warm and weightless refuge, in which it felt like nothing could go wrong. Outside it, though: a dangerous world. Was I really going to depend on some sissy museum to have the necessary equipment on hand for their participatory art installation?
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