Weary, but not defeated.

I’M HOME. IN PORTLAND. I never want to leave (the pacific northwest) again. I never want to go anywhere, ever again. I never want to breathe someone else’s second-hand cigarette smoke and have to hold my pee so they can make better time across some empty desert again. And that, my friends, is how you feel after you set out to ride freight trains, realize it’s winter and also that you don’t want to go to jail in Arizona (where you have a bench warrant) (like last time) and so you hitch-hike across the country by yourself in order to get home (it makes sense at the time), even though you like to tell yourself that you don’t hardly every hitch-hike alone, because it’s dangerous.

And it turns out it’s not dangerous. People, after all, are not dangerous. People are just people. And admitting that, they can be many things- irritating, inspiring, racist, inappropriate, bored, awkward. And sure, they can be dangerous. But so can driving a car. Or eating french fries. If anything, more than ever, I’m not, and never will be, afraid of other human beings.

I just got into town, it’s late. The final leg of my random-stranger relay-race was facilitated by a nice japanese man in the most expensive car I have ever ridden in, from central oregon all the way home. This man had a boring job which required him to travel all over the world, but, maddeningly, only to the airports and hotels. This man accelerated very quickly, in his low soundless car. There was GPS built into the dash and in the GPS sky, there were GPS stars. Beside a GPS highway flowed a GPS river. As we got closer to town a GPS cityscape broke the splattering of GPS stars, brightening the GPS sky with simulated GPS light pollution. He dropped me off at the MAX (lightrail) station and in my excitement I got on the MAX going the wrong way, and had to get out at the airport (end of the line!) and get back on the train going the other way. I called Paula. She and Madeline (Madeline’s in town! !) were at a kareoke bar- could I make it? I got to my friends’ house and threw my pack down in the spare room and realized that no, I could not. I was exhausted. Not as exhausted as I might be, thanks to the zen-travelling skills I’ve been cultivating for the last two months. But pretty damn exhausted.

And with this I say goodnight. I can’t wait to tell you all about my trip. But first- sleep.

Hurrah!
-carrot

“No, I am NOT in the wrong restroom”, or- Sunny Arizona Truck-Stops and Not a Computer for Fifteen Miles

So I’ve been stuck at this truck-stop in Arizona for the last three days, trying to hitch-hike and just getting sunburnt instead, subsisting off of the insides of gas-station breakfast sandwiches and expired odwalla bars, wandering around in the desert when I get bored, finding mysterious hobo camps, packs of stray dogs, and the place where brown glass bottles go to die. And the whole time I’ve been going through the most intense blog-withdrawal you can imagine, which is almost as bad as the torment I felt yesterday morning when I finished the last chapter of my trashy vampire novel and realized I had no way to get the sequel. The nearest small town was ten miles away and finally, randomly, someone today offered to drive me here, and I took the offer, just so I could update my blog from the public library, even though now I’m ten long desert miles away from the highway. Whew.

I realize, now, that the only reason I was able to update my blog on the way east was because I took almost three weeks to get to North Carolina, stopping at friends’ places along the way where I could spend whole days updating this thing. I wish I could hitch-hike and ride freight trains with a laptop, but it would just get wet/dirty/destroyed/stolen, and besides my laptop is fucking huge and weighs like a ton.

So, I’m gonna use my last twenty minutes on this thing to look for rides on craigslist, and hopefully I’ll be in rainy, wonderful portland in the next few days- at which point I will lock myself to my computer and you all will get to hear about the time I set out to ride freight trains, but instead somehow hitch-hiked across the country alone, through the desert, where it rained almost every day, and ate thanksgiving dinner at a truckstop buffet, where they had cranberry sauce shaped like the can, just like my Grandma likes to make.

And thanks for your comments, it was extra excruciating not to be able to read them.

Sweet, sweet blog.

Lesbian truck drivers and the second coldest night of my life- Part One (or: 46 minutes to write a blog about Texas)

All the way to Nashville I never had to wait more than 30 second for a ride. Maybe because it was snowing. I left asheville in an old wool letterman jacket borrowed from Gabo (initials FP on the breast) and got picked up by a man in a souped-up neon, wearing a leather jacket, curly hair oiled into ringlets and slicked back at the sides like Michael Jackson used to do. He lost his job, he said, because of the recession, and is selling his extra cars to get by. Not too shabby. Wife ran off with another man in New Jersey so he slapped her with child support.

Next ride- still snowing and they don’t have any heat so they’re bundled up in blankets. Two women going to Cherokee something-or-other, I don’t know tennessee. “Could tell I was a girl” even through all the layers. Not going very far.

A man in a tasteful wool beret stops, clears off the seat for me, spilling his coffee. “Do you dance?” He asks.

“Um, sometimes,” I say.

He’s a dance historian. A square dance historian, to be exact. He makes a living organizing and calling square dances in Asheville and beyond. We talk, incredibly, about the constricting gender of square-dance, of which he is uniquely aware.

“I call dances for the gay and lesbian communities of San Francisco,” he says, “so I’ve developed ways to get around the binary of square-dance calls.”

First thing he does is get on the mic and give the dancers a list of titles they can identify as. The gender of squaredance (ladies and gents), after all, serves only to differentiate between the person on the left and the person on the right. So you can, if you want, just go by “left” and “right”. Or whatever.

I think this ride is fantastic. He thinks it’s fate that he picked me up (eye roll). We stop at a fast-food place so he can get a burger and he points out the “FP” on my letterman jacket. Turns out those are his initials.

“You lose your jacket?” I ask, laughing.

We drive on (he’s going all the way to Nashville) and he tells me he’s got a new house outside Asheville, built right on the continental divide.

“When it rains, water off one side goes to the gulf, water off the other goes to the atlantic. Ever heard of Utah Phillips? Recently passed away?” he asks. “Good friend of mine.” He tells me he become friends with Utah through a series of fan emails he sent. “Emailed me back right away. Met up with me when I was in spokane. If you’ve got someone you admire, you should write to them. You’d be surprised.”

I think of writing to Annie Dillard, but decide I can’t, because I’ve met her kid, and her kid is kind of like me. It’s just not the same.

FP drops me off a half-hour before dark on a concrete river too far outside Nashville to be much of anywhere. I check the weather forecast on my phone. Low of 17. Seventeen! I stand with me thumb out for another hour but no-one stops. Folks don’t like to pick you up just before dark, even when dark comes at five-fifteen.

There’s a stand of trees next to the highway I can sleep in. Fuck. It’s going to be very, very cold. What to do? Build a nest out of cardboard? Trust my sleeping bag to see me through? The coldest night I’ve spent in this bag was february of 2007, waiting for the train in North Georgia, 15 degrees, and the bag was barely a week old- it’s lost some of its loft since then, aka gotten flat as a pancake from frequent use.

Across the interstate are the comforting lights of corporate sprawl, an oasis of heat and consumer goods, fast-food spiked with gluten in every imaginable way. I stash my pack in the woods and hike in that direction, scarf wrapped thirty-six times around my face, bucket-of-warmth pulled down around my ears. It’s only five-thirty, dark, and the temperature is dropping steadily. I’ve got hours to kill before my cold bedtime in the trees.

I walk and walk, cars rushing by me, bars and gas-stations and fast-food chains, strip-malls and home-improvement stores. It is the same, the same as everywhere, like plastic buildings tumbled out of a cloth bag, taking root wherever they land. Like an invasive species, the himalayan blackberries of everywhere. And I am adapted to this new jungle, I know how to find food and shelter under its monotonous, spot-lit vines.

After a while my walking pays off. A barnes and noble. I cannot believe my good fortune. Not only is the place full of books, it’s open until eleven. I’ve been saved. Sort of.

Before making camp in the bookstore, I find a gas-station for a styrofoam cup of hot water. I’ve got this sack of dried pea soup in my backpack I’ve carried with me since portland, and I mean to eat it. I buy the water (25 cents) and sit out back of an auto-parts store, eating the soup with leaves from an adorable purple cabbage I bought in asheville.

And then my computer time at the library in Texas was about to run out, and I couldn’t finish the blog. So I logged off of blogger, frustrated that things were happening faster than I could write about them, but needing the last ten minutes of my time to look for the trainyard on google maps.

Y’all will have to wait for part two of this story. And three, and four, and five-hundred-and-ten.

Here I go again

I’m leaving North Carolina tomorrow, TOMORROW, via hitch-hiking to Tennessee. Once I’m good and in Tennessee, there’s a freight train, apparently, that will take me all the way to LA. I just have to go to this train yard my friend told me about and hide my pack in the bushes and talk to the yard workers. And they’ll tell me what train and when it leaves and then I just have to wait for it and find a rideable car and climb on, after, of course, I find a store nearby where I can buy a few gallons of water and some cans of beans, and maybe a celebrity tabloid to pass the time. I’m not exactly excited about the trip back- not exactly excited about the cold, the solitude, the walking on windy shoulders, the cloying heat of gas-stations, the endless peanut-butter, the fast-food breakfast sandwiches on stale corn tortillas, the diesel grime in the cracks of my hands, the empty gallon jugs, the sore shoulders from pack-straps, the chance of rain. I’m not excited about the rocky ground, the dusty lungs, the lack of fresh vegetables, people who chain-smoke with the car-windows up. I’m not, after all, even excited about getting back to the west coast- the rain, rain, rain, the grey concrete, the lack of jobs, the sprawling city, the central heating that makes me itch and sneeze and cough.

I kind of wish I lived in a cabin in Vermont- I kind of wish I lived in a cabin in North Carolina- I kind of wish I had someplace to write my book. I kind of wish all of my stuff wasn’t in my car parked in front of my friend’s house on the west coast (everything I own fits in my car)- I wish it was only what was on my back- except maybe my bike, I wish that was here. I’ve been away from my “stuff” for two months now and I don’t even remember what I own. Two hundred flannels of various weights, seventeen thousand pairs of shiny men’s shoes, one cowl-neck sweater in pure virgin wool with a wooden button at the neck. A bolo tie of a jumping salmon, a leather belt tooled with freight trains, a bear bell from my backpacking trip in Alaska. A puffy vest with fake fur trim, a real fox-fur trapper hat from the goodwill, very old. Six-hundred suit-vests altered to fit my shoulders, a tin of brown shoe-polish, a pocket-square with my name embroidered on it. A stuffed carrot, a knitted bear, a brown cap with red silken lining, made myself. Nineteen million half-filled journals, a Silverton man’s love-letters circa 1918, one photo of my mother taken in my grandmother’s kitchen when I was three.

I need nothing. I need three things. I need fifteen things. I need everything.

I need nothing. Everything I have I could get anywhere. Why do I need to go anywhere? Why am I here? Why am I going back to the west coast? Where should I go?

I’m not exactly excited about the trip back, but maybe that’s how I always feel. Truth is, I’m tired of traveling, and everywhere I get I just feel like staying. It’s nice cold winter here in Asheville and there are queer people and even nature- even though it feels not so much like genuine goodness as it feels like a town full of white people clawing all over each other to get at the last bits of unspoiled earth and good clean air. Walking around with their hands over their ears going LALALALALALA pretending they’re not on a microscopic island of forested mountains in a vast ocean of shitty ugly polluted places where most of the people on earth have to live. Like it’s just a choice. Like you could just up and move to Asheville if you wanted, and people just live in gross toxic places because they like it. And if I moved here I’d just make it safer for white people with more money than me to come in and raise property values and push me out, because everyone knows that queers are just the second wave of gentrification, after the poor-as-dirt accordian-playing crusty-punk footsoldiers.

Ten years ago, the neighborhood my friend lives here was all black. Now it’s almost all white and there’s a raw food café down the street. I’m sure those people of color were real happy when white people decided they wanted to live here in the nice clean mountains where all the trees hadn’t been cut down and scruffy woodsquatters played old-time fiddle on every corner, and so they started “investing” in the area and property values went up and suddenly no-one who lived here could afford to pay their property taxes anymore. And I am part of it, I am almost always part of it, as a queer person, as a poor, young, artistic queer person- pushed along in the ebb and flow of gentrification, each of us in our own strata like lines of washed-up kelp at low tide. Tale as old as time.

Everything we touch turns to white.

Basically- the world I want to live in doesn’t exist anymore. No use moving someplace like an island and pretending that’s all there is. Only thing is, I am who I am and therefore I need good clean air and trees and walking and bike lanes and queer people to be happy. So it’s all about finding a balance between maintaining my personal health and not feeling like an asshole.

I don’t know where to go.

I wish I could put an ad on craigslist that said this-

Want to live in a cabin for free. For three months, anywhere in the whole world. Need only one cord dry wood and one electrical outlet for word processing. Walking/biking distance to something other than wilted conventional produce, coffee shop with gluten-free pumpkin muffins. Non-straight young people in the area a plus.

Just kidding about the muffins. I can make those myself.

So- tomorrow I’m off. West! West through the glorious southwest! To California and finally to Portland! I’ll be updating this along the way whenever I can, lonely, drenched, at a public library in a town near you. I’ll try to take lots of train pictures too, and post them. If four of five days go by without a post, be patient! Library time is short and sometimes there are more important things to do, like gather beans and wait for trains, or walk three miles in the wrong direction, lost. Wish me luck, and safe passage through Texas, the Bermuda Triangle of train-riding!