Archive for May 20, 2008
Georgia on my mind
It is late, and I’m in Atlanta. For clarity and ease of use, we’re announcing ourselves at the beginning of our posts these days, and there will be some wholesale rearranging of the front page to reflect our newly multiple authors, if all goes according to plan. So this is Nora, and I’m sitting right now on Paris’s couch, sleepily struggling to put words together because I don’t want to miss anything, and I worry that I’ll lose things if I don’t write them down fast enough.
Yesterday I picked up my colleague Mary from PEP in Washington DC, and we drove to Chapel Hill into the night. The rain had stopped by that point, so it was hard to convey how terrifying it was driving a shuddering fifteen passenger van in the torrential rain. It was a minor miracle I got out of New York at all, though, so I wasn’t about to complain too much about a little downpour. I don’t know if any of you reading have ever tried driving a fifteen passenger van in New York City, but trust me, it’s no picnic. I had to drive downtown to pick up many and various camping supplies and then to the West Village to pick some things up from a friend’s house, and if you know the West Village, you know if makes less than no sense even on a good day. I spent a good five minutes trying to figure out which West 4th I was supposed to take, and whether, if I went down West 10th, I would hit West 4th again. My next stop was at my yoga studio to pick up the mats they’d donated, which would have been great had I not had to detour around NINE blocks of street fair, and not blocks in a row, either. The thing about New York that I really didn’t realize is that red lights take a reaaally long time to turn green.
Eventually I made it back to Brooklyn and was happily packing when I got a relatively frantic call from the guy who, at that very moment, was theoretically welding a rack to the top of the van so that we’d have somewhere to put our bikes. “We’ve got a situation,” he says, “and you need to come here right now.” So I rode over to Bedford, where the welding was happening on the sidewalk in front of his building (apparently in Bed-Stuy you can just use the sidewalk as your workshop.) The good news is that the van has a rack on top of it. The bad news is one of the windows in the van has totally shattered and is mostly inside the van, on the floor. My welder looks me in the eye and says “I didn’t do it.” which, you know, usually means he did do it and is denying it, but as I have nothing on him and he had a welding gun, I took his word for it. Keep in mind that this is happening less than twelve hours before I’m supposed to leave.
I’m calculating the possibilities in my head, knowing that I can’t leave without a window and wondering where I can find someone to fix it on Sunday. I ask “do you know anyone who fixes windows?” He scratches his head, and turns to a guy walking down the street. “hey man, you fix glass?” The guy gives him a weird look and shakes his head no. (not that I blame the guy – he’s some TOTALLY random stranger, and he could just have easily asked “hey, do you know any Ukranian square dancers?” ) I was pretty dubious about our chances of successfully finding someone to fix the window by asking random strangers if they’d do it when the welder looks up and says, “Now here’s the guy you need to talk to! Hey Peanut, you fix this window for me?” Peanut is walking by with a woman, who looks less than enthusiastic to be getting roped into a conversation with us, but Peanut stops and looks at the window. “Tonight?” “Yep” “Sure, if the price is right. $40 for materials, $80 for labor, we’re good to go.”
I’m both awed and totally stupefied by this entire interaction. Really? REALLY? You just happened to see the exact person we needed who can both get a pane of glass for a 96 Ford Econoline Van and install it at 11 PM on a Saturday?
Peanut takes measurements, we give him a deposit, and I leave, utterly convinced that I’ve just blown $20 on the deposit and ready to find places to call first thing in the morning. I go home and pack for a couple of hours, and then, around 2 AM, the phone rings.
“It’s ready.” I can tell by the tone in his voice that the installation could, perhaps, have been smoother, but I’m so relieved I don’t have to drive with a plastic bag taped over the window I don’t care how it happened.
I’m still not sure that this whole thing wasn’t a scam, but it also would have been a really elabaorate scam (involving magic fake broken windows) for not a lot of money, so that seems unlikely.
The rest of the drive has been without incident, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed for more good luck. The blogs about biking will start as soon as I get on a bike, so stay tuned.
Ready! Waiting, waiting, waiting…
Mel here, writing out of Oakland, California. Yesterday morning was our last conference call (yay! I’m tired of getting up at 8:30 AM on Sunday mornings!) and it left me feeling calm. I suddenly realized all the things I’ve been stressing about- equipment, my return plane ticket, fund raising and money, my roles for the trip, not enough training- are completely extraneous. I AM going on Wanderlust, I HAVE raised a lot more money than I thought I would, I RODE almost 30 miles yesterday, and all the other stuff is totally manageable. So, here I am all stoked to finally meet the other participants, rather than just hear their lovely voices on the telephone every Sunday morning.
Well, that’s when I got a little bummed, cuz I remembered that I’m not leaving until June 13th. Boo. Almost everyone else leaves this Friday May 23rd for New Orleans, and I’m not meeting up with them until Charleston SC in almost three weeks. Why? I work at a school, and way back in February when I heard about Wanderlust from Nora, I told her I really wanted to participate but couldn’t leave until my students got out for the summer. I am just lucky, though. In the end, I AM going, even if not for the whole time.
Yesterday I biked with another Wanderlustian, Miss Elisa. She calculated that we biked about 30 miles, but neither of us have our cyclometers yet- they’re travelling in the SAG wagon with Nora- so maybe we’re overly optimistic. Regardless, it was a lovely sunny Sunday afternoon of anticipating Wanderlust, sharing excitement, and contemplating many random thoughts such as: degrees of tiredness of my thighs, degrees of pain in my nether regions from 3 hours in the saddle, whether or not traffic would hit us since the Bay Trail we were on goes through an awful lot of streets with fast drivers, the tweet-tweet-tweeting of songbirds at the Berkeley Marina, a crunched little gopher snake on the road side, and the spectacle of the Port of Oakland’s cranes rising like giant giraffes on the horizon. Or are they horses or egrets? I know they’re a looming herd of animals roaming the shore, but I haven’t exactly decided what species. They’re kindof an entity unto themselves. This might be a good time to mention that one of my trip roles is “Naturalist on the Road.” Yes, I go a little overboard on the animal observations. And likening mechanical things to animals.
To bring it back to Wanderlust…being at work today reminds me what I’m going on the trip for: to listen, to speak, to share, to learn, to remember. Presently, my job consists of acting out these verbs, as I’m a classroom counselor working with emotionally disturbed kids, so I have a lot of practice. I’ve also had a lot of experiences teaching sex education in one form or another in the past few years, so I consider myself knowledgeable about the politics of sexuality. Meaning, I think I’m prepared psychologically for this trip.
More importantly, though, I’m a body situated within a complicated network of legal codes, social constructs, and realities. On the trip, I’ll be exposing myself to being changed by the realities I travel through, and I’ll also be changing those realities by exposing them to colorful little me (I mean this literally- I’m short and I have purple and orange hair). I’ve been thinking about ways Wanderlust will affect me, and ways I will affect it. Of course, it’s all a big unknown until I’m actually there doing it. But I do know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Wanderlust will change and grow me. I’m ready! And waiting for June 13th….
