Wanderlust

Ready! Waiting, waiting, waiting…

May 20, 2008 at 1:12 am melpreston 1 comment

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….

Entry filed under: Mel Preston, Wanderlust 08. Tags: .