A woman stalks along the center of a jagged, geometric, acid-green landscape. She is tall, she is dark, she is mysterious. Her eyes are vacant yet focused on the path in front of her. She holds a long, wooden stick dangling a slouchy, leather handbag.

Good Lord, it’s the Louis Vuitton Fall 2026 runway show at Paris Fashion Week. And the model is carrying a $5,000 purse tied to a stick like a goddam hobo bindle. I hope there’s at least a sandwich in there.

As absurd as this image seemed, I couldn’t stop thinking about what it might mean in the context of the world we’re living in right now.

That’s when I remembered that I’d actually carried one of those myself. I was about 6 or 7 when I tied a red bandana to the end of a big stick I found in our yard and announced to my parents that I was running away. There were some train tracks at the end of our little street, but thank god I didn’t head for those. Instead, I wandered until I reached a split-rail fence that led to a barn. It was our barn. In my own backyard. I remember sitting on the cold floor for awhile, probably thinking about all of my life choices to date. From there, I’m pretty sure I just got hungry and went back home.

That’s the thing about the hobo bindle. You recognize it instantly, even if you’ve never seen one in real life. Louis Vuitton may be charging thousands for the look, but my guess is most of us pulled off our own version for free at some point. Mine probably came from watching “The Little Rascals” with my grandfather. But the bindle didn’t come from TV. It came from a very real chapter of American history, when migratory workers train-hopped from town to town, carrying everything they owned tied to the end of a stick.

Years ago, I heard about something called the Hobo Convention. An acquaintance of my ex-husband was a self-described real hobo who rode the rails and showed up at the convention in Britt, Iowa, every summer with hundreds like him. It was always a funny story. But when I finally looked it up, I realized there was something about it that was actually kind of beautiful.

Turns out hobos aren’t necessarily runaway drifters or bums. Many are just independent workers, moving from place to place, taking jobs where they can. They even have their own code of ethics. The first rule of the Hobo Code: Decide your own life. Don’t let another person run or rule you.

I know, I know. The real hobo life was far from romantic. Riding freight trains and chasing seasonal work across the country was a matter of survival, not some poetic vision quest. But the image stuck in our imaginations anyway like brushing against a cobweb.

The idea keeps coming up in American life: If things stop making sense, we can always pick up and leave. From Kerouac to Guthrie to Springsteen, we’ve long fantasized about following the road wherever it might lead. About answering to no one but ourselves.

In a world where everything feels unstable, the idea of running away and starting over someplace else really resonates. That’s how I ended up here myself six years ago, driving across country with all I could fit into my VW Sportwagon. Sure, it’s a hell of a lot bigger than a bindle, but the freedom of bringing only what you need and leaving the rest behind is more powerful than ever.

Park City has had that draw for a lot of us. Maybe we were escaping COVID or corporate jobs or crowded cities. Maybe we were fleeing oppressive heat or fires or urban sprawl. Maybe we were chasing mountains, fresh air, fresh pow. Maybe we just wanted to decide our own life.

As a ski town, we naturally have our own version of wandering workers. Ski bums, seasonal employees, lifties who follow the snow from place to place. My buddy Joel is an Aussie ski guide who travels between Australia, Utah and Alaska, always in search of work as well as the next “advencha.”

Maybe that’s why the image of the bindle feels so familiar. It could be slung across the shoulder of a cranky kid running away from home or held in the perfectly manicured hand of a model on a Paris runway. What’s inside the bag doesn’t really matter. What does is the idea that we could just pick up and go whenever we want. Somewhere down the road.