Posts filed under ‘Nora Dye’
More from Georgia…..
Tuesday, Hard Labor Creek State Park
It’s Nora again, bringing you morning group blogging from Hard Labor Creek State Park, which was a Civilian Conservation Corps project during the Depression. After a much needed break, we finally rolled out of Atlanta Monday morning, through some serious suburban sprawl and at least one unfortunate sharp object that attacked Heather Mooney’s wheel. We also got Megan diagnosed, and although she did break the arm, it’s not nearly as bad as it could be.
We’re in the market for a tandem, preferably a recumbent tandem, that Megan and I can ride from Charleston to New York City, so if you have one we can borrow we’ll pay for shipping!
It’s striking how much wealthier Georgia is than Alabama, and how much development there is. What were recently forests have been converted into tract homes that advertise “granite countertops” and “side by side washer and dryer!” It’s much harder to find covert places to pee, leading at least some of us to semi-traumatic dreams about peeing in public. We spend more time than you would imagine thinking about places to pee, and the development has led to some close run-ins with homeowners to whom we’d rather not explain what we’re doing in their front yards.
We’re moving into Georgia pine forests, on our way to Augusta tracing the footsteps of General Sherman’s march to the sea. Although I thought that the South was just always hot, apparently this heat is more oppressive than usual. It was easily in the triple digits yesterday, and we spent a good bit of time resting in the shade.
It’s been interesting traveling through the places we’ve read about in textbooks, seeing for ourselves the landscapes that are overlaid with the story of this country. We talk as a group about the ways in which we are playing out history, both the valuable, empowering traditions of women and witches and mothers and the negative, debilitating history of mistrust and isolation that is part of our legacy. We struggle with the ways that we are not as good to each other as we should be, and we are working to create a space and a group that honors each of us, our histories and our truths.
What a wonderful world
There are more stars than you would believe overhead, and well fed campers are climbing into bed. We just got back from the Stagecoach Restaurant in Stockton, Alabama, which is full of some of the most warm, generous people we’ve met so far. Today was our day off the bikes, so we took advantage of our leisure time to get to know each other more and break out the costumes (and the fire dancing equipment). We were probably the biggest show that Stockton has seen in a while – Erin broke out her Dolly Parton costume, circa 1985, complete with frizzy blond wig and heels. The rest of us were dressed in an array of brightly colored wigs, boas, and assorted accoutrements. We walked into the Stagecoach and a woman poked her head out. “Ya’ll the ones that’s biking to New York City?” she asked. We told her we were, and she said “You go on in now. It’s on the house.”
We paraded inside and proceeded to stuff ourselves with one of the best seafood buffets I’ve had in my lifetime- boiled shrimp, catfish, clams, and all the fixin’s a group of hungry cyclists could dream of – slaw, grits, green beans, baked beans, and peach cobbler for dessert.
On the way out, we stopped to take a picture at the buffet, which was in the shape of a stagecoach (complete with awning, or whatever you call the thing on the top of a stagecoach), and Miss Nancy, the piano player, broke into “what a wonderful world”. All twelve of us linked arms around the piano and sang together “I see skies of blue, and clouds of white, the bright blessed day and the dark sacred night, and I think to myself, what a wonderful world.”
I feel so incredibly lucky to be on the road with these women – I have already learned far more about myself than I ever thought possible, and we are already so much deeper into this living, this life on the road, than I thought we would be only five days in. It’s funny how hard it is to anticipate what it will be like, because it’s always beyond my wildest expectations. Tomorrow we hit the road again, and I can’t wait.
For those of you who are reading this before June 4th, we’re still looking for a place to stay in Birmingham, Alabama, next Wednesday June 4th, so if you know someone who can host email me at wanderlust at protectchoice.org
And so it begins
It’s Nora, perched on a bunk bed in an air conditioned quonset hut the likes of which we hadn’t seen in days. It’s sort of incredible, really, that the twelve of us seem to be getting along given that we’ve spent the last three days in 90 degree heat without any air conditioning whatsoever. We were talking earlier about how much air conditioning changed life in many parts of the world, brought people in off their porches and closed doors, divided neighbors. Was it worth it? Right now, my answer is a big emphatic YES.
But enough about air conditioning. There are much more important and less frivolous things to discuss.
We left New Orleans this morning, a tribe of women moving, building a movement as we move through the world. It was one of the most powerful moments I’ve ever experienced, knowing that we were bringing a dream to life, knowing that no matter what, the ride would change our lives and the lives of those we touched.
I feel so deeply, deeply grateful to all the people who made this trip possible, especially the crew in New Orleans without whom I don’t know what we would have done. The story of New Orleans is amazing, fantastic and absurd all at once. I was fortunate to meet a woman named Amy Marlow last summer when I passed through Delaware, and she made me pancakes and we decided to be friends even though we lived very far away from each other. She ended up in New Orleans, and when she heard I was coming there to start Wanderlust 2, she invited me to stay with her. Of course, I turned into twelve, and we turned the house into a chaotic mess of women and energy bars and bike parts for three days. Amy not only didn’t complain, she cooked for us, drove us around, and was generally more wonderful than I thought humanly possible.
Amy, of course, doesn’t exist in a vacuum, which meant that we also spent the weekend being treated to various and sundry bike repairs from Ric, our official Wanderlust mechanic without whom many of us would probably not be here today, Noah, who works at city health clinic and talked to us about the state of health care in New Orleans (in a word, atrocious), and Alli, who took us on a historical bike tour of the city on Sunday exploring the politics of Katrina, the recovery, economic justice, and New Orleans.
I know some of the riders will be able to share more eloquently than me about the experience of being in the Lower Ninth Ward where the levee breached, but I will say that it felt important to be there, to start our trip bearing witness to the ways in which the catastrophic failure of social, economic, educational, and environmental systems turns a force of nature into a natural disaster.
In many ways, Katrina was just a day in America writ large, a massive example of the kinds of small scale disasters that happen every day. And make no mistake about it, Katrina was massively devastating, and impacted the lives of millions of people in sudden and irrevocable ways. But it reminds me why of all the reasons to write and to ride, this one seems most important.
I ride for reproductive justice because it connects issues in way that is resonant with the lived experiences of people I’ve met, and it holds bodily autonomy as the central, critical nexus of our activism. Without being able to become a parent, express your sexuality, not become a parent, and have control over your body, it can be incredibly difficult to make decisions in other areas of life. And just as the politics of Katrina fell along racial and socio-economic lines, the heirarchy of decision making power in our society often falls along those same lines.
I ride to find out if those lines are fixed or mutable, and if we can use this trip to begin building a movement that encompasses a broad vision of what reproductive justice means.
Do you have specific things you’re interested in knowing more about the trip? Leave a comment, let us know, and look forward to many more posts from the intrepid Wanderlust crews about our daring adventures and explorations.
