Searching After Wildness - journals of a photographic artist

I replenish my raw materials every two months or so. It’s like an intermittent Christmas, with daily arrivals of shipments containing fine art papers, ink, frames, mat board, tools, camera accessories, and various other odds and ends. With all these shipments, I’ve started to become a connoisseur of packaging methods: Double boxing, bubble wrap, packing paper, stretchy wrap, foam peanuts and inflatable cushion bags.

Last week, the package pictured above showed up on my doorstep. No box, no peanuts. Just one big ball of bubble wrap, several inches thick. Two long lengths of bubble wrap along each axis. I was tired by the time the package was finally unraveled. My weary unwrapping stupor left me unmotivated to perform the ceremonial bubble wrap popping dance. The actual contents were found in a tiny core in the middle of the bubble ball, gloriously protected from the risk of a three story fall.

There’s a mischievous property of bubble wrap in that once unraveled, it takes up twice as much space as the original package.

I’ve heard of stranger shapes going through the mail. In the old days, you could send anything that you could stick a stamp on, regardless of packaging. I remember an account of someone sending a shoe (no packaging, just stamps on the shoe) through US Post. I wonder if that would still work today. I wonder how many stamps I would need to stick onto a watermelon.