Finding My Mind and Building a Bag with San Util Design

Something has felt missing while drifting for so long on the road. Endless movement, new stimuli, a new town, a new idea, a new word—the only constant is motion. My hands become cameras, and my eyes become memory cards. I live to understand others, looking into their homes, learning their languages, piecing together how these corners of the world reflect the one I’m beginning to forget back home. It feels like long-term travel can both build and destroy the sense of self. Or perhaps it is an ulterior self, one who can dance salsa and speak Swahili but can never do the right handshake with their old college roommate and has lost the ability to navigate their hometown without Google Maps. There is no translation for suburbs in Swahili. But it is still my home. I unload my bags. I rest my feet.

Bikepacking around rural Africa, I’m struck by the lack of control. I often go where I’m commanded. I do what I’m told. Try this, come here, have tea, go see that mountain, that road is best. In setting out for this last ride, I told myself, “I want to subject myself to the world, like a limp body under heavy swell. I want to feel the thrashing of the worlds I do not know. I want to completely lose myself.” 

But now home, my sense of self recently lost, I must pick back up the pieces. Last year, after seven months in Mexico, it was gardening. This year, after nine months in Africa, I have borrowed my aunt’s sewing machine. I figured if I could sit down and trace lines and see something go from my mind to my hands, I would feel present. To hold a roll of fabric and a cutting wheel and stand on the pedal of the machine is to be in complete control of a moment. Because coming home is entering a malaise of memories and exhaustion and culture shock.

Coming home is a trance state in the driveway, staring at the oak trees, wondering why we sit in traffic and eat at In-N-Out and have collectively chosen to live like this, together and yet so alone, isolated behind our shrub fences and electric garage doors, angry and divided and tolerant but not. Yesterday, I drove to the grocery store and watched a pant-suit mother wearing AirPods scold her young child for not grabbing the organic box of PopTarts. 

I suck at sewing. Full stop. There will be no humble brag here. I watched a few YouTube videos and hacked my way through it. I re-cut my first bag so many times that it didn’t actually fit the frame I measured it for. And not even by a little, but by several inches. My second was better. Too big now. And when I first rode it, the loops busted out, and so did the zipper, and my rain jacket went flying out from the holes and into my spokes. But it was an idea I had in my mind while bumbling down boring back roads and later made into something I could actually hold. It is rare to hold an idea in physical form. How simple that is. And yet, how profound. 

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But I don’t want frame bags right now. I don’t want stuff. Stuff can empower, but also stuff mostly just gets in the way. After months on a heavy rigid bike, I just want to unload everything and go hit jumps. I want to fly through the air and leave these dusty roads beneath me. I want the flow state of steep, high-consequence singletrack to get me off the screen and out of my thoughts. I just want a hip pack and a PB&J and a full-suspension bike and a set of jumps that scare me and a friend who knows them. That is all. Is that so complicated?

While home, I used old denim patches and some random scrap fabric from Jo-Ann’s and tried to make this hip pack. I put two Klean Kanteens next to each other and chalked out an oval, cut my triangle flaps, found some belt, bought a buckle for $4.98, and the night before leaving on a road trip, busted it out. The project flew by. Hours sank away. It felt good in the moment to just focus on one thing. No distractions. No phone. No kids yelling, “Mzungu!” 

But, of course, it sucked. After two rides, the zippers busted out. I’m sure after four, it would have entirely collapsed. My keys fell out on the first ride. I locked myself out. I was hungry. I have a long way to go. 

San Util Design

This was all Adam’s idea. We were connected as riding buddies. He lived by big jumps, and he knew them well. We rode, and I found out that he also makes bags. “Big deal,” I thought back then. I made a bag, too! But I didn’t quite realize the leagues of difference between his bags and mine. A couple of pieces of fabric layered on top of each other, a needle and thread through the heart of it all, one stitch at a time, one piece, it can’t be all that different… right?

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Adam, with the salt and pepper hair, the lanky build, the casual nose-bonk to tailwhip off the stump, the slap of a berm, dirt beneath his fingernails, the raspy deep drawl, Adam is soft-spoken. He’s curious. Behind every gentle word, a few ideas clearly ruminate. Adam studied business at Colorado Christian University just down the road, the school his parents wanted him to attend. He went into project management, but he was always a hands-on kinda guy. He taught himself how to weld. Sewing was next. What naturally began with borrowing his mom’s machine has exploded into something far greater. Some years, thousands of bags, and a successful Kickstarter later, Adam has a few seamsters underneath him and a vision of expanding into manufacturing while still managing the middle area of custom one-offs and collaborations and that gritty, small town, made in the US-of-A vibe. 

Eagles caw. Fireworks. Big trucks. Mountains. Obesity. America. Welcome home. 

Adam, with the Mexican mountain bike tee, the flat brim, the skull logo, the stickers reading “sew life, not death,” saw my pathetic hip pack when we went out for our first pedal one morning. He was kind enough to fix it for me. He said I should come back the next day and rifle through the scraps and build a new one. He also offered to let me borrow his bike, to camp with him in Whistler, and to bum his couch. He’s generous. Although, honestly, I don’t think he expected me to actually say yes. 

The Next Day

To casually begin sewing one day and then be working on industrial machines on professional patterns the next is ridiculous. It’s like playing basketball for the first time, and because your uncle is Phil Jackson, getting to practice with the Lakers. These machines are not my aunt’s hobby machine. They’re heavy. They’re fast. They rattle your bones if you press on the gas, and they’ll cut through your fingers if you so much as sneeze. Adam breezes through a few examples. I’m still sleepy and confused about just how to lower the presser foot. You use your knee because it’s faster that way. 

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Adam, and San Util, have three unique hip pack designs. I, still longing for my summer of shredding my third-hand full-sus with nothing to slow me down, opted for the middle one, the Covert, which can expand open if needed but is mostly made for lighter days on the trail. The Whirlpool is much more popular, with it’s cave for storage. But that’s defeating my purpose. I am in my anti-materialism phase. And yet, here we are, making things.

I was tempted to throw my own pattern together or just remake my same two-oval, one-zipper design. But we’re here. The pattern is hanging on the wall, the fabric is under the cutting table, and the lights are on anyway. And no one else is working today. Adam says to just use his pattern. He can help if I get stuck. I laugh. How hard can it be?

Of course, it’s way harder than it looks. And I instantly gain more appreciation for these perfect-looking bags lining the shelves. There are no sideways stitches or loose threads on any of the bags San Util Design sells. Within an hour, I already have dozens. “What’s the difference between our bags?” I ask Adam. And he goes down the list: It’s all fitting together, cut well, higher-quality fabrics, all the features, sewing technique, binding, design, prototyping…

I bumble through a few trials. I swear endlessly. I stare into the bright LED lights and ask god how I went so wrong. Adam bails me out over and over again. He tells me what to do next, what I did wrong here, why this stitch will fail, why that needs to be redone. Time drags on. I enter a vortex. Picasso and the melting clock, and it’s already lunchtime. 

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We go for his normal lunch ride, a quick 30-minute loop around the flow trails. Adam is the head of the local trail-building organization in Winter Park. The night before, he was attending a meeting coordinating with the county on digging a new 11-mile, 3,500-foot descent of singletrack from the top of the nearby pass and down into town. He’s dug these trails, he’s ridden them, he knows them. It’s a beautiful microcosm of entangled community. Riders pass, and they all know each other. The businesses support each other. Friends come in to say what’s up or to work on their bikes. Yet again, I’m the traveler looking in at someone else’s community. And this one’s built around craftsmanship and bikes, action in the mountains, immersion in nature, mutual respect, and help. The pace is slow until we go downhill. Everyone is friendly. Everyone has a sunglasses tan line. It’s a beautiful town. 

Adam, now 28, drifting through his own beliefs, finding his own thoughts, pedaling toward his own balance between god and nature, battling his own demons, he’s sufficiently existential. Adam explains that in economics, they teach that a util is a measure of happiness. Economists can quantify the satisfaction of a society by the number of utils. But Adam hates this. He prefers life to be more live-and-let-live. “I like to keep it a bit chaotic on purpose around here, just to keep it interesting,” he says.

He thinks obsessive rationality—the quantifying of happiness—is just useless words filling up precious space we could instead be using to ride, ski, hike, build trails, watch movies, or read romance novels. San (from the Latin sans, without) Util is a tongue-in-cheek nod to an existence with fewer metrics and more life. More strangers on the couch, more laps at the bike park, more days in the backcountry. The things that, to him, actually matter. 

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Adam comes back over to dig jams out from my machine. He laughs with me about my mistakes. I get well practiced at ripping seams and starting over aiming to just get it close enough. Adam does the complicated bottom stitch. I jam the binding machine. I learn what a bar tack is and why it’s so important. I almost lose my fingers in the process. We cut and sew, cut and sew, change the music, cut and sew. Adam busts perfect frame bags out one after another—straight lines, no frays, matching joints—and I’m back to cutting the stuff spilling out of the sides. He is comfortable with a foot on the pedal. He is back where he feels he belongs. And I’m just a child playing basketball with Lebron James. 

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The heavy summer thunderclouds have settled over Winter Park. It is now 4 p.m., and Adam says that means we can finally drink beer. Slowly, the bag comes together. It has taken me nine hours to make this wobbly thing. All in, Adam takes about one. I have stolen his pattern, his machines, his scrap fabrics, and his entire wealth of knowledge. I am holding a copy of one of his bags. And yes, nonetheless, I am proud! As the random angles come together and the bag grows in dimension and volume and begins to make sense, I feel warmer inside as the rain begins to fall.

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I’m drained from staring so intensely at the fabric under my fingers, ripping seams, and having to do it all over again. I have a cramp in my toes, and I’m tired from the constant fear of bone rattling and finger chopping. It is shockingly exhausting to focus for so long and make these things. Although this pattern is Adam’s idea, it is still an idea that I’ve seen go from his brain waves to mine, then to words and actions, and finally to an object I can hold in my hand. And that is still just as profound. 

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Adam and I go out for one more day at the bike park. I wear my hip pack. Nothing comes loose. Nothing falls out. It holds my PB&J, some fruit snacks, the film camera, and the car keys. For a while, I will leave the bags, the tent, and the stove at home. I will focus on just the world in front of my tire. Today, it will be Adam flying down root gaps that terrify me only once we’re at the bottom of the run. Today, I will hold the bars and be in control. Today, we will just do more laps.

You can learn more about Adam’s work at SanUtilDesign.com and on Instagram.

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