New blog!
I moved all of the dumpster diving content to this blog! I want allisonburtch.com to remain a bit separated from the dumpster diving blog. Feel free to update your browsers.
Arkansas, so far
Sunset over Arkansas:
Arkansas State Fair:
Tilt-a-Whirl Up
Tilt-a-Whirl Down
Wendell Berry
If regression really is a possibility, then should we not watch for the signs of it? And should we not attempt to subtract regression from progression to get at least an approximate notion of net gain or net loss? Mr. Wilson concedes that people forget and die, but he says that “knowledge continues to expand globally while passing from one generation to the next” (p. 236). But in fact as knowledge expands globally it is being lost locally. This is the paramount truth of the modern history of rural places everywhere in the world. And it is the gravest problem of land use: Modern humans typically are using places whose nature they have never known and whose history they have forgotten; thus ignorant, they almost necessarily abuse what they use. If science has sponsored both an immensity of knowledge and an immensity of violence, what is the gain? if we “grasp the true strangeness of the universe” but forget how to farm, what is the gain?
– Wendell Berry, in Life is a Miracle, p. 91.
The ultimate manifestation of this incoherence is loss of trust – loss, moreover, of the entire cultural pattern by which we understand what it means to give and receive trust. The general assumption now is that everybody is working in his or her own interest and will continue to do so until checked by somebody whose self-interest is more powerful. That nobody now trusts the politicians or their governments is probably the noisiest of present facts. More quietly, people are withdrawing their trust from the professions, the corporations, the education system, the religious institutions, the medical industry. Perhaps no expert has yet assigned a quantitative value to trust; it is nonetheless certain that when we have finished subtracting trust from all we think we have gained, not much will be left.
- p. 94
Hern’s Santa Monica Bday Alley Cat
Some dude on lafixed was having an alley cat for his birthday and I knew a girl out there so I decided it would be fun to do, as I have never done one before. Basically, an alley cat is an informal race around a city where you have to hit certain checkpoints and either get signed off or have some other way to prove you were there. In this one, you had to take pictures of your bike at each point and show Hern at the end.
Three different races – easy, medium (15 checkpoints), and gnarley (30). I decided to do the medium because I didn’t know Santa Monica very well, and ended up riding with a cool girl named Lilly and this other guy named Tony who recently won the state championships for some track race. We stuck together the whole time but had three kids (teenagers) mooching off of us the whole time. They had no idea where they were going. I guess I didn’t either but I had already mapped it out. Anyways, we all finished and were racing to the end and I shifted from my big chain ring to small (foolishly) and completely ate it. I was going super fast too, and basically pedaled air, fell flat on my side, jacked up my elbow, road rashed my hip, and broke my helmet. But my bike/glasses are fine so I’m happy with that.
Here are some pics:
the winner:
Long Beach
If only I had this list from McSweeney’s when I started the trip. 15 Uses for Vodka.
Home
Masquerade
Nice ski shirt Clancy
Ben Graham White
Bolsa Chica by bike
Mammoth Lakes
Portfolio
resolution
i will not stalk boys on the internets
i will not stalk boys on the internets
i will not stalk boys on the internets
i will not stalk boys on the internets
Day 20 – Charlotte, NC
In keeping with the recent resurgence of creativity regarding the road trip, I thought I’d post some of what I wrote. Hope you enjoy.
Charlotte, North Carolina, on August 19th, 2007, was over 100 degrees. There are many big buildings and no redeeming qualities, in terms of my interests, anyways. The city is hot, and sterile, with many bankers wearing many suits; there is so little creativity in this revolving dance we do for the dollar, now is there?
Later, when I was in New York City, I talked to my cousin who said that when he was working in Charlotte for an investment firm he often worked 20 hour days, including weekends. This I do not understand.
Annie Dillard writes in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,
Self-consciousness is the curse of the city and all that sophistication implies. It is the glimpse of oneself in a storefront window, the unbidden awareness of reactions on the faces of other people – the novelist’s world, not the poet’s. I’ve lived there. I remember what the city has to offer: human companionship, major-league baseball, and a clatter of quickening stimulus like a rush from strong drugs that leaves you drained. I remember how you bide your time in the city, and think, if you stop to think, “next year…I’ll start living; next year…I’ll start my life.”
I know this feeling. This feeling is the conversation in your head when you know you are self-medicating, when you know that the weed or the booze or the sex or the food will not, ultimately, satisfy, and whatever you are running from inside your heart will kill you unless you let it save you.
I get this feeling in the city. I get this feeling when I compulsively eat cookie dough or cake. It is a feeling analogous to self-hatred, it is a pervasive restlessness, it is resentment with life as it is. Often times, we have this “next year, next month feeling” in August, or March, when we realize that our New Year’s resolutions to slim down the thighs or the stomach did not work and we resign ourselves, again, to next January.
Charlotte, NC was also the embarkation of a solo journey. Tiffany was on a plane back home, Kevin on a train, and I was waiting around in the Southern heat for a friend to call me back so I would know if I had a place to stay that night.
I cooked a pot of soup on my Greatland burner in the middle of a parking lot across from UNC Charlotte. I had the butt of bread with the last of the spinach and mustard. I finished off the soy milk sitting by my cooler. At the coffee shop 50 yards away were a group of men sitting in a circle, talking, probably about the Bible, and one of them kept staring at me. I hope he was impressed, or intrigued. I know I would be if I saw a blond tan girl in a maroon dress cooking on a camping stove in a parking lot.
There were two ladies sitting behind me at the coffee shop, both African –American, one overweight, the other in a business suit who said “I study Script ure too much” and “this is my fourth time being engaged.” Damn.
I bummed a cigarette from a twenty something with a wide brim hat and goatee. We talked for a while. He wasn’t very interesting. I don’t smoke. There was nothing else to do.
While waiting for my friend to get off work, I decided to call North Carolinian farms in the WWOOFing directory, an acronym for Willing Workers On Organic Farms, or World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms. It is a system set up where an individual can stay at a farm anywhere from two weeks to three months, and work around thirty hours a week in exchange for room and board. It is, in my opinion, the best way to travel, because it is free.
My plan was to eventually make it up to West Virginia. I had already connected with a guy named Dan at Claymont Community Farm in Charleston, West Virginia. Megan called me back from “Pickards Meadow” in a town called Carrboro, NC. I told her that I wanted to stay for a day or two and she was okay with that, fortunate for me because the usual commitment for WWOOFing is two weeks. She said they needed a lot of help. Carrboro was a couple hours away from Charlotte, so I decided to stop there, then eventually make my way through Virginia to West Virginia to WWOOF there.
Charlotte, but Asheville mostly, was disappointing. Ideally, angels and cherubim and saints of old would fall from the sky, their glorious light shining down on the destination, the location, the Mecca of sorts for this Southern California girl to finally rest her weary head. I was looking for home, I think, but mostly I was looking for myself.
circuitous
Fall happens every year and yet, for some reason, comes as a complete surprise. Everything gets a bit colder (Southern Californian temperature variance is minimal), some trees lose their leaves, and my roommates and I leave the house with an disproportionally excessive amount of clothing. Sweaters and beanies! “Man, its so hot!”
A year and a handful of days ago I was actually cold.
I’m not sure what prompted this remembrance. When I was writing a book about the road trip, I mainly wrote about leaving – my 45 day journey to Boston and what happened inside me through those adventures. But I didn’t write about coming home. Lately, I have been telling people these stories – about my 12 hour drive from Toronto to Chicago, picking up the Australian in Boulder, almost freezing in Utah, driving through Monument Valley and finally camping at the Grand Canyon North Rim the last night of the road trip; it was an adventure coming to a close three months later across the ridge from where it began at the South Rim on the first night.
Still, I consider it one of the best decisions I have ever made. It would not have been possible without the misery, though. Leaving for college with my parents’ marriage in tact and coming home to find them separated, becoming depressed, hopeless, my thoughts futile and sad. Best friends getting married. But all the misery spurred me on to take one of the greatest adventures I have ever been on, which, in hindsight, after having a year to contemplate, I am still grateful for and would never change.
Here are some pictures of that time:
And here’s a favorite video I took on my drive through Canada:
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