Cadillac Ranch at 8 AM

Alisa with a cadillac

We finally got to my friend Max Beck-Keller’s family’s house in Santa Fe in the early afternoon. Max’s family was nice enough to let us stay with them for three days. I lived in Santa Fe for a year when I was a freshman in high school, and it was pretty great to be back again in the land of green chile, adobe, and old ladies wearing tons of large turquoise jewelry. Besides doing a screen-printing demonstration at Warehouse 21, we managed to see a lot while we were in the area–including a visit to Site Santa Fe (currently showing the Eighth International Biennial–the highlights being a piece by Mary Reid Kelley that blew my mind and a piece by Martha Colburn, of whom I am a longtime fan), a tour of the Santa Fe Art Institute’s artist-in-residence program, a visit to Landfall Press, and our only thematically-relevant stop: the Tinkertown Museum.

Elena screen-printing at W21

Landfall Press

Tinker Town

I’ve taken pages of notes at every stop we’ve been to, but these are the only two sentences in my journal from our visit to Tinkertown: “Bad font. Grated my nerves, made me sad.” I did not enjoy the place at all, which is interesting, especially given how much I loved John Preble’s Mystery House, which John created after visiting Tinkertown. Tinkertown had a lot of “Old West” paraphernalia, and a good half of the stuff on display was pertaining to carnivals, circus freaks, “oddities,” etc., all of which made me feel sort of depressed. There were signs everywhere (”bad font”) explaining what we were seeing, which made it feel like a tourist trap. There wasn’t anything that I found particularly clever or funny in there, and there was no climactic moment, no denoument…which there has to be if the experience is going to be so orchestrated. There was a specific entrance gate and a path that left no room for straying. The museum was also overcrowded, and I spent more than ten minutes standing in a tiny hallway with our friend Houston waiting for the line to move forward so we could escape. I think it’s worth trying to describe what I didn’t like about this place, because otherwise I’ve been pretty enamored with everything we’ve seen.

Luckily, Tinkertown is on the way to a beautiful summit called Sandia Peak…

View from the top

Alisa, Max, Elvia and Houston at Sandia

On August 1, we drove west to Tuba City, Arizona, to stay with my family. My aunt, Frances, moved to Arizona when she was young, married my uncle Glenmore, and raised her kids in Tuba, which is part of the Navajo Nation. My cousin B, the youngest of Francie’s three daughters, is my age, and we have always been close. B gave the three of us an amazing tour of Tuba and Coal Mine Canyon, where her family keeps livestock on the land.

My aunt and uncle took all of us to the Grand Canyon on our first night. We brought a picnic and watched the sun set. My aunt bought me a book I had been coveting: OVER THE EDGE: Death in Grand Canyon. We were absolutely not disappointed by the canyon, as one expects to be disappointed by national landmarks–it was incredible.

Uncle Glenmore and Elvia at the Grand Canyon

Sunset at the Grand Canyon

Sunset

On our second day, we herded some sheep…which was absurd. We are apparently incompetent when it comes to herding animals. Our only instruction was “don’t run towards them,” which is of course exactly what we did. In the afternoon, B took us on an amazing hike around Coal Mine Canyon. We slept in the family’s hogan on a buffalo rug for the three nights we stayed there, roasting s’mores in the stove on our last evening.

Elena herding sheep

Beautiful cousin B overlooking Coal Mine Canyon

The kitten, Napoleon, hiked with us the whole way

Though I think my cousin B should be the one to write it, I could write an entire book about visiting Arizona, and the project I’m working on about our trip has a big section about it. It’s just bizarre how little any of the three of us knew about the life in the Navajo Nation, and how much we learned in just three days from B.

We drove back west on the 4th, to see the feast day festival at Santo Domingo Pueblo, where my middle cousin, Jesse, lives with her family. The dance we saw was beautiful, especially the outfits. As always, Jesse had prepared an insane amount of food…we left with two entire loaves of bread and enough salads and beans to last us for days (Thank you!) No picture-taking allowed in Santo Domingo, so no evidence–sorry!

After visiting Santo Domingo, we were officially on our return east. Our last three stops have been Lucas, KS, Carthage, MO, and Chicago, IL. Lucas (despite its population of under 430 people), is a strange mecca of outsider/visionary art, home of the Grassroots Arts Center, the Garden of Eden, and The World’s Largest Collection of the World’s Smallest Versions of the World’s Largest Things.

Entrance to Dinsmoor's Garden of Eden

The traveling roadside attraction

The Garden of Eden’s creator, Samuel P. Dinsmoor, is in fact entombed in the backyard in a glass coffin, which was quite the sight (again, no pictures allowed). He’s grown a little moldy over the past few years. Another highlight of Lucas was the local family meat market, where we bought handmade bologna to eat for dinner. (A side agenda of the trip has been to sample as many different kinds of meats as possible on the road. Arizona probably wins as far as meat variations: in one meal we ate blood sausage, grilled mutton, and a delicacy called a’chee consisting of two kinds of intestines wrapped around each other to form a long worm-like chain.)

Bologna!

While stopping for a bologna picnic in Lawrence, KS, our car got a flat tire.

The grand finale site of the trip is kind of hard to explain. Alisa and I have been hoping to visit the Precious Moments Museum & Chapel in Carthage, MO, for four years now. The place has become practically mythical to us. Sam Butcher, the man who created the Precious Moments figurines (or at least, drew the pictures from which a Japanese sculptor makes the prototypes, and which Filipino factory workers copy and paint), invested the capital raised from sales in the production of a free religious…well, theme park. The main attraction, the chapel, was inspired by a trip Mr. Butcher took to the Sistine Chapel.

Welcome to Precious Moments!

A Precious Moment

The chapel

I guess I should try to say how our pilgrimage to Carthage fits in with the trip’s goals, since this may not be apparent. Basically, as with everything we’ve seen, it broadened our consciousnesses about what’s out there and what counts as art to whom. Our tour guide at Precious Moments certainly talked about Mr. Butcher as if he were our century’s Michelangelo. The popularity of the figurines (and the greeting cards, and the t-shirts, and the prints..) should tell us something about what much of America values as art, and about American Christianity’s particular aesthetic. So many people we’ve met this month have made our country’s religious fervor apparent to us in a way that I, for one, refused to acknowledge previously. Whether or not you enjoy the “Precious Moments style,” as our tour guide referred to the chapel’s aesthetic (though she said Mr. Butcher also knew how to paint in “Modern Style” and “Classic Style”), it’s probably time I at least looked at the stuff. Personally, I find the “style” unbelievably offensive, in all the big ways: sexist, racist, classist, and even weirdly perverted. It certainly has a creepy Neverland quality. I knew these things before visiting the chapel–but I had not actually taken the time to think further about why it appeals to so many Americans. I think that the Precious Moments chapel, despite looking egregiously ugly to me (divorced from my political revulsion, I don’t think that the tear-drop figures are beautiful…then again, it’s obviously impossible to divorce my politics from my aesthetics…), functions similarly to the way churches have always functioned–to provide a palatial house for God’s splendor on earth, to show us a glimpse of His glory. By aligning God with wealth, religion makes itself powerful. But in this case, the particular aesthetic that God’s glory is conveyed in is confusing to me; where did it come from?

The figurines display at the Precious Moments Museum

"The first factory that produced the Precious Moments dolls consisted mainly of Bible School students and Christian workers from three schools in IloIlo, Philippines."

Baptizing ourselves

We left Missouri feeling as if we had literally been hit over the heads with bibles and made the long drive to Chicago. In Chicago we stayed with our amazing friend Jack Kerns and his lovely family. Alisa’s mother is also here on a business trip, which means that we have now seen a member of each of our families this month. She took us out for dinner at Le Colonial and then drinks at the Ritz…

Dinner in Chicago--last night on the road

And then, of course, we ended the month with one final night of karaoke. On the 13-15, we’ll be at the Wassaic Festival in Wassaic, NY, doing a screen-printing demo and showing some of our work from the trip. We’ll let you know how that goes. Otherwise, get in touch if you would like a copy of one (or all) of our projects: book, cd, or printed shirt. insidersout2010@gmail.com

We signed Jack up to sing Third Eye Blind...continuing in the Austin tradition.

The best bloody Mary in the world.

Tyler and Grace

Austin was awesome. We were graciously hosted by the West Coast operation of Drive-By Press, whose East Coast counterparts had been the ones to make us want to get on the road in the first place. Joseph Velasquez runs the Austin branch of Drive-By, supported by the wonderful Tyler Krasowski and Grace Lawrie. They have a great crew of friends (printmakers and otherwise) in the city, who showed us around for two days. We saw an outdoor movie screening, drank giant, veggie-filled bloody Marys at Rio Rita’s, visited Yard Dog Gallery, sang an amazing night of karaoke at Ego’s bar…and then went to shoot guns near Waco, TX, with Joseph’s teacher/mentor/artist/friend John Hancock.

The man: John Hancock in his studio.

The Gun Show

DPA

Glamour Shot

Glamour Shot

Glamour Shot

Favorite guns included the Lugar, the .357, the 9mm Barreta, and the .45 (Smith & Weston). Not saying that the three of us are in the market to buy a gun now, but…we might be. What’s the connection between printmaking and gunshooting…metal machinery? Precision? Who knows. It makes sense to us.

Group photo of gun team

Other than the gun-fest, the best part about being Austin was talking to the guys and their friends about printmaking, living as an artist, traveling for extended periods of time (they’ve done plenty of that), academia, the art world…you get the idea. I wrote down some things that Joseph said over a few beers at their studio space: “Selling out is when you let repetition become formula,” “You don’t need to choose sides between the gallery world and the non-gallery world,” and “The reason that normal people don’t like art is because they don’t like being made to feel ignorant.” Drive-By Press’s purpose, in many ways, is to democratize art–if people can see how a print is being made right in front of them, they don’t feel so excluded from the product. We’ve been thinking about democratization a lot in terms of outsider art sites. Most of the outsider work we see is made by people who do feel entirely excluded to the art world and its language, and they are often making things that they would never think about as art unless someone told them. The Drive-By guys’ business model is pretty new; they are people who, in fact, did not choose between the gallery and the do-it-yourself approach. Nice.

It seems like an important coincidence that both of the families we’ve stayed with so far, and who we visited mainly because of their proximity to our route, have had a dad who works with his hands and happens to be an avid collector of something. In Arlington, Virginia, our friend Alison’s dad, gave us a tour of his amazing vintage motorcycle collection. Michael Mutter has an entire garage behind his house devoted to his passion for restoring vintage motorcycles and putting them together from scratch. It was obvious that he really loved the machinery—and I could imagine how satisfying it would be to make a machine out of old parts that could take you thousands of miles on it when it was finished.

Michael Mutter amidst his collection

He told us that his dream was to one day do this race across America that people do on old motorcycles, and that the motorcycle he had chosen to rebuild for the event was the oldest possible model that could actually make the trip at a fast enough speed. I thought this was really interesting; the goal was to get the earliest, simplest machine designed that could function to today’s standards. The pleasure and satisfaction, then, were derived from one’s ability to construct an antiquated machine well enough to perform today. I imagine that there is also something of a historical fiction/nostalgia aspect to the feat…you can pretend that you are cruising across America 40 or 50 years ago. The pilgrimage is similar in some ways to the trip that we are making insofar as it attempts to connect us to our cultural heritage and to other trips that have been made across our country for the last 100 years. (Regarding re-imagining history: the show of original photographs by Walker Evans, Eudora Welty, and Baldwin Lee that we saw at the Knoxville Museum of Art in Knoxville, Tennessee made us think about the history of journalistic journeys through the American South and the ways in which our trip can be thought of in terms of witness and documentation. We’ve been talking about the visible ways that the South has changed since Evans’ and Welty’s photographs were taken, and a generation later, Lee’s photographs. This led me to thinking about poverty and of course food, which I’ll get to later.)

The second collecting and crafting dad we met was Steve Corn, Elena’s brother-in-law, whose family we had the pleasure of staying with in McMinnville, Tennessee (a few hours west of Knoxville). Steve makes miniature figures, mostly from old Western films, for collectors around the world. He was trained as a blacksmith at the Appalachia Center for Craft—an beautiful place that we visited on our way South—so he already had the basic skills necessary for casting and sautering miniature weaponry, etc., before he began. A few years ago, his daughter Hana (now almost 13) asked for an expensive dollhouse, and Steve decided to build her one himself…the rest is history. I don’t know if he started collecting figures before or after he started making them, but in addition to the one’s he’s made he has tons of vintage ones lined up on a shelf in his bedroom.

Steve Corn hard at work

These “hobbies” seemed right in line with something Mark Cline had told us at his workshop last week in Natural Bridge, VA: “No matter how high-tech the world gets, or how high-tech they think they get, it’s still basically, humans like to work with their hands, they like to use their minds—you know, they like to go out in the garden, they like to do something.” This is similar to what Roger Manley told us about the need for satisfaction that comes from manual labor with a visible result (see previous entry). And apparently, people love to make stuff, but they also love to amass tons of it. Most of the art environments we’ve visited feature not only incredible amounts of creation, but sprawling collections of stuff. Part of this is probably due to the need to accrue a mass of raw materials in the hopes of one day making something out of them (you never know if you might be able to make something out of 60 empty whiskey bottles or doll heads), but there also seems to be a relationship between a love of making and a love of objects themselves. The feeling of excess and total indulgence in the pleasure of worldly things reminds me that Rebecca Hoffberger at AVAM told us that the primary impulse that drives the creation of visionary art environments is the desire to create an earthly paradise, a heaven on earth. Especially in some of the poorer areas we’ve visited, like Bynum, it’s easy to imagine how non-utilitarian excess could seem heavenly.

A stash of Howard Finster's collected bottles

In a turn of thought, the idea of excess brings me back to a thought about food. We have seen an unbelievable number of fast food restaurants while driving through America. I’m not sure I have thought critically about this fact in a while, as these chains have been such a fixture on the landscape for most of my lifetime. But while traveling, it has often been impossible for us to find a place to eat that is not a fast food chain, and this seems a remarkable difference from the landscape Walker Evans was documenting not too long ago in some of the same areas we are passing through. We heard a story on NPR on the way out of Charleston about the insanely high number of Americans barely subsisting on food stamps these days. I’m not sure what I want to say about this except that the presence of excess in the form of fast food makes sense to me when I think about the unbelievable poverty many Americans are living in. As anecdotal evidence–the teenagers we met in Crossville, Tennessee, had been living at the Minister’s Treehouse for two weeks at the time, because they had fallen out with their families and are now homeless. The only meals that either of them eat these days are from Wendy’s or Taco Bell.

Thinking about this great disparity in Americans’  lives makes me want to reiterate that we are not combing the South for characters to make fun of or people to gawk at. It is true that we are culturally out of our element in our own country, but I think that the relationships we are forming with the people we meet nullify the interpretation that we are joke tourists.

Back to collecting. John Preble at the Abita Mystery House in Abita Springs, Louisiana told us his theory that the New York art world can’t understand “collections of junk” (he was referring to his own work) because there is just not enough space in city apartments for people to keep so much stuff. He said that New Yorkers “can’t emotionally acknowledge” an aesthetic not confined by limited square-footage. This makes sense to me–I did protest that rich New Yorkers find enough space to keep their crap…so I’m not sure that the size of homes is the ultimate determinant. But I agree that a minimal aesthetic only makes sense in the context of comparative affluence. The combined possibilities for privacy and expansion in rural areas allows for the kind of sprawl that an imagined worldly paradise would imply.

Part of John Preble's collection of paint-by-numbers

Though this seems like a million years ago now, I’ll start in Spartanburg, South Carolina, where we taught a successful all-day bookmaking workshop at the Hub-Bub organization’s showroom on the 17^th. We learned a lot from the teaching experience, and the people at Hub-Bub were wonderful and generous with us. (Photostream from the workshop here !)

We drove down towards Charleston on the 18^th, with a stop at Pearl Fryar’s topiary gardens. The gardens were lovely. When we arrived, it was raining, and the sound of the water dripping in the garden, along with the smell of the wet pines, made his garden seem lush, exotic and strange.

View of some of the trees in the topiary garden

In Charleston, we ate dinner at Sermet’s Corner, a restaurant owned by visionary artist Sermet Aslan. Rebecca Hoffberger at AVAM had recommended we eat there. We camped at a great campsite on Sullivan’s Island, and in the morning we made a quick trip to the Halsey Institute, where Mark Sloan’s assistant (Mark Sloan co-wrote the visionary art “bible” with Roger Manley), Rebecca Silberman, was nice enough to show us around and talk about the place. We managed to get an hour on the beach before we hit the road again—I’m still sunburned.

On July 20, we arrived in Knoxville, TN, where Elena’s family friend, Krishna Adams, gave us a great tour of the Knoxville Museum of Art. Here we saw a fantastic photography show with work by Walker Evans, Eudora Welty, and Baldwin Lee. We spent the afternoon checking out Knoxville—we went to the old general store and bought buckets of candy, then crossed the street to the well-known Yee-Haw industries old-fashioned letter press company. One of Yee-Haw’s employees showed us around the back of the shop, an amazing conglomeration of prints they have done over the past several years, many old presses, and thousands and thousands of pieces of moveable type and images cut into wood and etched into metal. We all sort of had an epiphany about the possibility of setting up a similar shop, especially in a city like Knoxville where the rent/overhead would be so low.

Yee-Haw Press

Yee-Haw's thousands of moveable type

From Knoxville we drove two hours to McMinnville, Tennessee, where we stayed at Elena’s sister’s house with her wonderful family: husband Steve Corn, and kids Hana, Elijah, and Levi. We had a great time with them despite the fact that we were trying to catch up on work in their living room, and Steve showed his work–he makes miniature figures for collectors around the world. I’ll talk about him in my next entry.

Elena working in the living room with nephew Levi

After a night in McMinnville, we drove South. We stopped at the Appalachian Center for Craft, where Steve had gone to school for blacksmithing. The college has about 85 students total in the fields of ceramics, metal, glass, woodworking, and textiles. The three of us were incredibly jealous of the facilities there—especially since Bard, the school where we just graduated, has very few facilities for art practices that could be deemed utilitarian (like ceramics).

Beautiful ceramics studios at the Appalachian Center for craft

Our next stop was the Minister’s Horace Burgess’ treehouse in Crossville , Tennessee. The treehouse itself is incredible, defying description. According to Horace, it’s the largest treehouse in the world. Personally, I found the experience of exploring the treehouse quite psychologically harrowing—the seven-story structure is a maze of rooms built according to no visible logic. There are pieces of old furniture and strange structures in several of the eighteen enclosed rooms, and though the building is actually quite stable, it feels pretty rickety. While wandering around, you loop back on yourself and get lost again and again—ending up a full three stories above where you started, or at a total dead-end hallway.

View from the treehouse (complete with swing!)

The treehouse

After spending an hour or so in the treehouse and another half hour speaking to Horace himself, who was very sweet and non-evangelically spiritual, we were invited by Horace’s best friend/accomplice Jerry to camp on the lake behind the tree house. In addition to being a visionary and artist, Horace is a landscape architect by profession, and he has spent his free time over the last two years landscaping the lake behind his treehouse. The setting sun reflecting on the water was blinding, and across the lake there were six horses grazing on the far shore. We pitched our tent on a floating dock that Horace built (along with a platform and diving board), and spent the evening hanging out with Jerry and two teenage guys who Horace lets sleep at the lake or in the tree house in exchange for keeping watch over the place.

Horace Burgess, the treehouse's creator

The wonderful Jerry by the lake

The lake in the morning. Our tent on the floating dock.

In the morning, we woke up at seven to the smell of urine—one of the Minister’s dogs had apparently peed on the tent. This got us up and out pretty fast. We drove straight to Summerville, right on the Northwestern tip of Georgia, where Howard Finster’s Paradise Gardens has been languishing since his death in 2004. We had heard rumors that the place has become pretty defunct, since much of Finster’s work has been removed from its original site and the place has become overgrown, but we decided to check it out anyway since it was on our route and since we are fans of Finster. We did not regret the choice. Finster’s masterwork, the environment he built on the property behind his house, is in an amazing state of decay and disrepair at this point, but we found it all the more beautiful and profound because of this. The intervention of time on Finster’s Paradise made the experience there feel archaeological, like we were discovering a bygone utopia. The objects themselves have taken on the quality of relics, and the overgrowth of plants and trees—which in some cases have completely taken over Finster’s structures—forces one to think about the futility of human creation and the smallness of human activity, no matter how ambitious. The decay made me imagine what the place looked like through Finster’s eyes, which I assume is what Finster wanted to make every visitor do: to imagine paradise. My favorite part of the sprawling gardens was a mirrored treehouse on the back of the property that the trees have begun to grow through. Beautiful.

Howard Finster's mirrored house in the trees

We drove Southwest to Alabama that night, and visited the Ave Maria Grotto site in Cullman. We were pretty unimpressed by the site, mostly because of the creepy gift shop full of Jesus figurines and anti-abortion literature at the entrance and the $5.00 entrance fee. The work of the artist, Brother Joseph Zoettl has been relocated and arranged in the side of a hill. He made miniatures of buildings around the world, including the Basilica in Mexico City, landmarks from his hometown in Bavaria, and his vision of Hansel and Gretel’s fairy castle. Brother Joseph never seemed to have settled on a scale to use, so the overall effect is pretty random and bizarre.

View from the grotto

We camped just outside of Prattville, the home of the Reverend W.C. Rice’s Cross Garden. In the morning we got to the cross garden early. The sun was beating down so heavily that I could almost feel my back blistering. The heat felt that much hotter as we walked around looking at Rice’s paintings of the words HELL IS HOT HOT HOT on old dryers, washing machines, and stoves in the various vacant lots around his house.

Hell (and Alabama) is Hot Hot Hot

In the driveway to the house, we ran into Rice’s grandson-in-law, who was getting married that afternoon. After a few minutes of intensely religious small-talk, he beckoned his father-in-law to come speak to us. The hour that followed, in the driveway, in the boiling Alabama heat, was one of the more disturbing hours I’ve had. We got proselytized like I have never been proselytized before. I have written at length about the experience; perhaps an anecdote or two would explain best and most quickly. After about an hour of angel/devil role play, denouncing our President/gays/Jews/infidels-in-general, Rice’s son-in-law took it upon himself to prophesize Elena and my futures. Elena is going to have a big family. And if I start singing in my church choir, he promised, I would have a record deal within the year. He did not seem to want us to leave…but we said thank you profusely, and made our escape.

In Montgomery, AL, we spent the early afternoon at Marcia Weber’s Art Objects. Marcia has been a folk art collector for many years and has personal relationships with most of the artists she represents. We talked about a lot of interesting and relevant things with Marcia—the term “contemporary folk,” as opposed to “traditional folk,” the relationship of visionary art to evangelism (especially relevant given where we had just come from), and the situation of women folk artists. Fascinatingly, she told us, W.C. Rice’s wife had actually painted all of the words (SEX PIT! NO ICE WATER IN HELL) on the objects for him! Reverend Rice had only a third-grade education, and was illiterate. He would “hear” the Lord’s word, and relay them to his wife, who did all the actual painting for him. Marcia told us of other folk artists she knew whose wives did similar work for them. This adds greatly to our theory about the lack of female visionaries—there are actually plenty of women artists working who are just not getting any credit for it. This of course seems to undermine the idea of “visionary” art to me—Rice may have had the vision, but his wife’s hand produced all the material work, work which I happen to think is quite beautiful–despite, or in addition to, its message. One would think that in outsider art, as opposed to contemporary art where the question has become somewhat irrelevant, the presence of the artist’s hand should be the ultimate criteria. However, many successful folk artists (I am using many of these terms interchangeably at this point—not technically correct, but I am happy to disambiguate if anyone wants to know), who are responding to demand for their work, do indeed have other people working for them.

Marcia Weber holding Fish Train!

I was touched by Marcia’s concern for the artists she worked with and her desire to help them support themselves. This appears to be in stark contrast to many other folk art dealers she mentioned. She told us horror stories about dealers who have outright stolen work from unsuspecting artists living in dire conditions and sold it at extremely deflated prices, thus robbing the artist of income and, worse, destroying the market for the artist’s work in the future.

We stayed in a Super 8 Motel in Covington, Louisiana, that night, which felt like an extreme luxury. In the morning, we went to the Abita Mystery House, also known as the UCM (you-see-em) Museum, also known as the life work of the amazing John Preble. John was inspired to create the museum after a visit to Tinker Town (in Albuquerque, New Mexico, which we plan to visit tomorrow). The place features a huge collection of old pinball machines, videogames–even a wind-up organ. There are thousands of John’s hand-painted signs (”YOU CAN HAVE A PARTY HERE”), jokes, taxidermied animals attached to each other (a bird with an alligator head), and motorized dioramas that move at the push of a button.

Alisa & Elena in front of the Mystery House entrance

Playing the wind-up organ in the Mystery House

We spent a long time chatting with John, who has wonderful energy, and who was excited to hear about our trip and swap stories with us. One anecdote we thought particularly interesting was a story he told us about the time that Raw Vision Magazine (leading publication about outsider/visionary art) paid him a visit and spent hours photographing his place in the hopes of doing a feature on him. After the whole shoot was done, the journalist asked John if he had perhaps had any education, and upon hearing that John indeed had gone to graduate school for art, said, “oh, sorry, we can’t use you at all.” John was interested in knowing how we would categorize him and his environment—I have no idea. But this reminded us once again that as much as we would like to deconstruct the categories that have been distinguish the genre we are focusing on, this categorization is necessary. In John’s case, for example, he needs a word to describe his creation in order to draw people to it.

John Preble

We were sad to have to leave John and the museum, but left in the early afternoon and zoomed to Hammond, Louisiana, only about a half hour away. We visited the house of Charles Smith, whose work we had seen on display at AVAM in Baltimore and greatly enjoyed. We didn’t get to meet Charles, but we left a note for him—and he’s since gotten in touch with us.

Some of Charles Smith's figures in his front yard

We got back in the car and drove down to the Chauvin site in southern Louisiana, to see the work of Kenny Hill. This was the sweetest, most touching work I had seen and I was profoundly moved by several of his sculptures. His was some of the first auto-biographical or even narrative work we had seen, and this, combined with the fact that the materials used were consistent, made it seem accessible to me, despite the fact that there was no one there for us to talk to.

Kenny Hill's self-portrait

We spent the night in New Orleans with our friend Zach Maddox (thanks!!), who took us to an amazing puppet/music show by Quintron and Miss Pussycat in the French Quarter and made sure we got to eat crawfish, oysters, and alligator sausages before we left. We arrived in Austin on the afternoon of July 25, where we lucked out and met the most wonderful crew of people. Our adventures in Austin were fantastic and will have to wait until a later entry to get into…I’ll just put this picture in as a teaser:

A little bit of Texas...

As always, check out our Flickr photostream to see tons and tons more pictures from each of these places. There are many, many amazing things we haven’t been able to write about.

Next entry, with some deeper thoughts about the last week, forthcoming…

An obvious result of the laptop loss is that I am able to write a lot less than I had thought I would. But in a certain sense, and as Bob Snead pointed out to me on the phone today, I’ve also been somewhat freed from the responsibility of constant reflection. The truth is that we have had barely a free moment to do the recording and synthesizing work we had planned on, besides of course, from the sweaty back seat, and often I feel frustrated by the inability to get something down right after it happens. But when traveling, there is always a balance between doing stuff and telling the story of doing stuff before it’s done—the danger of the tourist who sees the entire city through a camera lens.

But trips like this can’t help but create their own mythologies. Especially as we encounter such mythic, larger-than-life personalities on our way, the whole thing begins to seem like an epic of some sort. The weirdness of our agenda, which only we seem to understand (and even sometimes we are just pretending we understand it), allows us to go only exactly where we want to go, and I’ve realized that we are going places that we think are going to make good stories.

As for the “new mode of production and distribution” that I have been constantly referring to and talking about – Clyde Jones and Vollis Simpson led me to some ideas on the topic. For instance, Clyde gave us his critter (Alisa tells the story in the previous entry), and he wouldn’t accept a penny for it. In fact, he won’t sell any of his critters; he makes a living by doing odd jobs around town. If he needs to go any farther than the general store around the corner (which he can get to on his lawnmower), he hitches a ride with a neighbor. The whole town supports him, and rightly so, as he seems to have single-handedly kept Bynum alive. The woman in the General Store told us that after the mill shut down, pretty much all the businesses in town closed, and that Clyde is pretty much the only attraction it’s got left. In this sense, both Clyde and Vollis operate outside of formal economic systems and function as community builders. By creating regional attractions and refusing to sell, catalog, or even protect much of the work, they reveal an idea about creating stuff that seems practically ancient and unbelievably sweet. And no wonder people like Roger Manley, who we spoke to in Raleigh the next day, are hooked on “discovering” them—they are lovely people who find joy in creating art objects and connecting with people. Not to say that contemporary artists who are part of the “conversation” (as I recently heard it called), do not make things out of genuine impulse—and come on, who’s to say what’s genuine, what’s conscious, what’s intrinsic and what’s influenced…however, it is easy to prove, if one wants to, that Clyde Jones, for example, is producing from this supposed authentic place. Positive reaction to the work only perpetuates its production, as opposed to being its original impetus. In a time in America when there is so much skepticism about the art and academia, people (me) like to be reassured that art-making is a “natural” activity, and that, as Rebecca Hoffberger told us while we were at AVAM, living a beautiful life is, and can still be thought of as, a work of art.

View of Clyde's Critter Crossing

Some beautiful critters

This brings me to something we talked about at length with Roger, who was kind enough to welcome us into his office at the Gregg Museum and take us to a lovely Vietnamese restaurant in Raleigh. Roger has had many years to formulate theories about why people like Clyde and Vollis began and continued making work. As Alisa talked about, many of these people’s histories of art-making are linked to a traumatic life event. Normally, I am skeptical of the (post-Freudian) impulse to designate a psychological root from which every life action stems, and this impulse’s connection to the tendency in art history to directly link an artist’s biographical information to work produced at the time.  This has always seemed a reductive and uninteresting way of deriving meaning from art to me. However, the fact of a physical trauma causing a possibility or necessity for expression in this way makes a lot of sense to me—particularly in the way that Roger explained it to us, which makes a connection between art-making and physical activity. As he said, if you’re someone who is used to seeing the results of your manual labor at the end of the day (as in, you picked 1000 tomatoes today, or you fixed three lawnmowers today that work now), a physical trauma often renders you unable to do this kind of work and thus deprives you of a visible affirmation of success or self-satisfaction. This creates a real need to create a physical response in the world around you, which seems like a real basic fact about human existence to me. (This need is reflected so poetically is the impulse for many self-taught artists to make whirligigs at first…simple but entirely futile machines that do nothing but spin in the wind. Roger told us that in the Middle Ages, the sign for craziness was a little whirligig.) It is true that the only way I have ever successfully worked myself out of my own small-scale personal traumas has been through physically building things.

Which brings me to another question Roger helped us with—why are there so few women making outsider environments? Of course, the first artist Roger encountered was a woman—an old lady named Annie Hooper who lived in a house on North Carolina’s outer banks. The house was stuffed with cement and driftwood sculptures she had been making for years, and Roger met her spontaneously while hitchhiking around as a seventeen-year old college student. But besides that amazing story, which was fantastic to hear from his mouth, there aren’t a huge amount of other self-taught women artists that he’s come upon, or that we’ve heard of. He said that the prevalent theory used to explain this fact is that women have enough of a creative outlet in their traditional work of child-rearing. It’s true that quilting, cooking, gardening, and teaching are creative activities…but doesn’t quite explain the lack of another outlet. Roger suggested that the real deterrent for women is the fact that men’s work-life ends at retirement age, and that they aren’t expected to keep producing after this time, but that women whose work is at home never get to retire, and so they never get those years of free time in the second half of their lives. This sounds plausible to me, combined with the fact that women’s realm of manual labor is indeed much less permanent than men’s. Fabric doesn’t last as long as metal.

Roger, Alisa, and Elena in the Gregg Museum offices

Roger in the car with Fish Train

Actually, is anyone still making “outsider” art? As we talked about with Roger, the guys we’ve met so far are not just old but ooooold. Vollis is definitely pushing 100. Maybe the new generation just hasn’t been discovered yet…but the truth is, folk festivals today showcase a surprising amount of crap, crap that has more to do with the crafting industry or even the art world than with Clyde’s back yard. Not to say that all of this nouveau folk art is bad, or “fake,” but that it doesn’t hold the same power as work like Clyde’s, and, more importantly to me, does not propose an alternate function for art in life as do these visionaries we’ve met so far. Folk art is art that sells itself as such, rather than work made to confirm one’s identity, one’s place in the world, or to create beauty and forge human connections in an otherwise dying little mill town in North Carolina.

She’s just under 10 pounds, covered in sparkles, and has eyes made of synthetic peonies. Sure, she might accidentally stab us at any sudden sharp turn, or cover everything she touches in dirt and sparkles, but we love her beyond words and are so glad she’s in our lives!

So now let me explain the adventure that led us to her. We were heading to Bynum, North Carolina in pursuit of an alleged man named Clyde Jones who creates “critters” with a chainsaw and recycled materials. So after camping at Jordan Lake, we asked a park ranger if she had heard of Mr. Jones, and of course she had. By telling us to take a right at the Lowe’s and McDonald’s and then another right at the BBQ place, we decided he couldn’t be far. At the mercy of an iPhone going in and out of service, we stopped at a decrepit old general store where we thought Bynum was.  Only to find that the general store was now a dimly lit community center offering a few bags of chips, the one lady in there told us that Clyde Jones not only lived just a few blocks away, but that he was heading right for us on his lawn mower! Gallantly riding his yellow and blue machine and wearing a baseball cap that read, “Clyde Jones: the Critter Man” he entered his daily hang out to find three girls gawking and smiling at him like tweens at a twilight premier. His country swagger and unintelligible southern drawl whisked us away in a blissful stupor as he told us to go have fun and check out his yard. So we headed out, unsuccessfully following directions that went something like this, “ga up, dawn, and ten rhight – ya cant miss it”, we were noticing that just about every yard in town was sporting a marvelous critter. But finally, we saw a kaleidoscopic vision of color and shapes in the distance, and we knew that had to be it. The site was overwhelmingly amazing. It was impossible to notice every detail amidst the smorgasbord of glitter, random objects, elks, alligators, elephants, a santa clause in a canoe, and faded photographs of Clyde’s critters all around the world. My personal favorite was a porcupine that had bathtub faucets for quills. All of the love and energy that Clyde put into those critters with his nine fingers and chainsaw put me in a frenzy.

After returning to the community center to talk with Clyde, we attempted to ask him questions about his process, material choice, and artistic intention, and tried even harder to understand his replies. Our academic background (or shall I say brainwashing?) certainly deterred our connection to Clyde and understanding of how to approach such a reality. But with Clyde’s amazing heart and sweet demeanor alongside our enthusiasm and desire to become friends, we had a grand ol’ time in the backwoods of North Carolina. Clyde decided we needed us a critter, so we followed him back to his house behind his lawnmower, making us even more thrilled than before. He thoughtfully picked out a beautiful white bird that could fit in our already packed car and had eyes like mine (Clyde’s words, not mine). After trying to guess what kind of bird it was, he finally told us that it was a “fish train”. “Fish train?” we asked, to which he replied, “ya”. So, the name stuck and we couldn’t help but give our beautiful critter a name that would honor its creator and our new friend. After many a hug and group hug, we carried Fish Train to its new home and waved goodbye to the man that surprised us with love and creativity never known to us before.

Clyde wasn’t the only awesome old man we hung out with that day. We headed east to Lucama in pursuit of Vollis Simpson’s monumental Whirligigs. Arriving with some cold Pepsis in hand, we approached Vollis’ mountainous clutter of machinery to find him dozing in front of his studio. Well over 90 years of age, Vollis greeted us with true southern hospitality and offered us places to sit amongst the rubble. Even harder to understand than Clyde amidst the blaring radio and fans, we were able to gather that he started building the whirligigs when he bought himself a welder after fighting in WWII. Although I couldn’t gather any real rhyme or reason as to why exactly he started building 40-foot tall contraptions that spin, it seems that he does it for his inherent desire to make something with his own hands and of his own imagination. His natural knack for constructing extremely tall structures and unyielding energy to keep creating is completely personal, yet extremely selfless and welcoming to visitors and the local community. After walking under the enormous wind-powered contraptions that spun in all directions and made chime-like noises, we left feeling overwhelmed with the amazing amount of human potential displayed through the feats of man-made imagination.

Some of Vollis' whirligigs

The next morning, we woke up early, packed up the tent, and headed into Raleigh to speak with Roger Manley, the man(ley) on outsider art. His insight into the field and understanding of the nature of such art was reassuring to our concerns, curiosities, and conflicts with outsider art as a practice, category, and reality. His advice on approaching “outsider” artists let us know that we weren’t doing anything wrong when we weren’t able to get a straight answer out of these extremely talented individuals.  He suggested that we ask individuals like Clyde and Vollis to talk a little bit about what they did before they began to create art, not why or how they started. From this method of questioning, Roger has deduced that what you can discover from this line of questioning is that you will almost always find a history of trauma, and the time after is when the need to create begins. From my knowledge of outsider/visionary/many a great artist, this theory holds true. Clyde and Vollis are both living testaments to this theory: Clyde suffered a terrible fire accident, losing a finger, while Vollis fought in Saipan during WWII and was later severely injured by a cable that snapped and hit him in the chest. Without these traumatic events, these men would have probably never completed these lifelong accomplishments, nor would we have been so inspired by the capacity for creation and imagination.

Never before have I thought of trauma as such a positive thing; in fact, I’ve never wanted to be traumatized more. I suppose our Baltimore debacle might be as traumatic as I wish to get during this trip, and I’m afraid it has made me paranoid to leave my new laptop out of sight and mistrusting of the unknown. As for the benefits of getting our laptops stolen and window smashed in, I suppose we’ve learned our lesson to never leave our laptops in the car, but I’m still waiting to reap the benefits. Sure, almost anything after an extremely traumatic event can seem better that it would have before, but what I’m perplexed by is the necessity of disaster, the inevitable occurrences that make us feel like shit in order to evolve, accept, and be grateful. Can trauma be a good thing? Is it the only way to really have a clear picture of what you want and desire most? Indeed, what we have been trained to think is a bad thing can ultimately be the best thing that ever happened to us.  And without the struggles that Clyde and Vollis both had to overcome, there would be no “Critter Man”, no ingenious invention of the whirligig, and most importantly no Fish Train.

So without further ado, I can now appreciate the traumatic experiences in my life and look forward to the ones in the future, knowing that true trauma can sometimes be the best way to change for the better and begin to live like you could have only imagined.

Tucked away in the North East of England, far from the chaos of our bus, we are settling in well to a routine of effortless, breezy days, fresh linens and soft green lawns. The newness of this environment has been invigorating and Mateo is bubbling over with excitement and enthusiasm. We have been keeping busy with projects and many, many field trips. Yesterday we where out in the countryside (Scarcliff in Derbyshire) having a dinner at the house of some family friend. After an early alfresco dinner I spotted a field of wheat and all at once with complete abandonment Mateo and I ran!

We ran far and were overcome with a powerful sense of freedom.

We found magical horses…

Made grass angels…

Played music…

and walked back very hot and very happy! We were like the two bright-red poppies wild in the wheat field. I will cherish this day with my little boy always.

More to come…

So, our trip started out with a streak of unbelievably bad luck. We had some minor hitches over the last week, but nothing compared to our big catastrophe in Baltimore on Monday.

But let me start at the beginning. We spent Saturday night in New York City with three of my good friends who were visiting from Brazil and who I hadn’t seen in a year since my semester abroad in Sao Paulo last year. The six of us spent the night out together, I got to refresh my forgotten Portuguese, and we talked over our plans with them. Two of them are artists I’ve worked with, and explaining our plans and goals to them was exceedingly helpful. In all of our cases, the day helped us transition away from the lives we were putting on hold. We bought the Brazilians bagels in the morning (“Isn’t it just a round bread?”) and, albeit hungover, Alisa, Elena and I headed down to Baltimore in the afternoon. Our Couchsurfing contact completely abandoned us and we ended up in an Econolodge on Sunday night. But, Monday morning we had a private tour of the American Visionary Art Museum scheduled at 11 AM, which was definitely the best place in America for a trip like ours to begin. Right off the bat, we got to speak with the founder, Rebecca Hoffberger, and took a lengthy tour with the director, Pete Hilsee. But more about that in a bit.

At 1pm, we were told by some museum employees that two cars had been broken into in the employee lane directly in front of the museum, where we were parked. We ran outside to find our rear righthand window smashed and, of course, our three laptops gone from where they had been buried in a pile of stuff in the back seat. The next hour was spent with a very kind policeman and the museum staff, desperately filing reports, changing passwords, calling AAA, waiting on hold with the insurance company….Pete and Rebecca were unendingly helpful and kind during this time–many thanks to them.

Our tour of AVAM suddenly cut short, we immediately called our friend Alison who lives an hour away in Arlington, VA, and zoomed as quickly as possible to her family’s house with a trash bag taped over the car window in a thunderstorm. That must have been one of the most miserable drives I’ve made. Alison and her boyfriend, our friend Brooks Ward (link), were waiting for us with stiff drinks, chocolate chip cookies, and a place for us to collect ourselves and figure out the feasibility of the rest of our plans. Brooks happens to work in the conservation department of the Hirschorn Museum in Washington, D.C., and offered us a tour the next day. We were glad to re-direct our course and happily took him up on the offer. We also decided to follow through on our plan to conduct a screenprinting workshop in Baltimore the next afternoon, to give the city another shot, and more importantly, not to let down the community organization that was counting on us. But more on that in a bit as well.

Back to the laptops. Clearly, so much of our trip is based on our ability to record it: in words, in pictures, in sound. The journey is self-reflexive in that sense. Without our computers this is all very hard. Our lives were on those computers (isn’t yours?) and not all of our stuff was backed up. In fact, tons of it wasn’t. So why were we so irresponsible? Suffice it say that the area of Baltimore AVAM is in is decent, that we were parked about ten feet from the main museum entrance, that two different sets of security cameras caught the whole thing on tape, that our computers were hidden in the car…but in the end, we were utterly naïve. It simply did not occur to us that our out-of-state license plates would make our car an obvious target for theft and that you should just never leave your damn laptop in the car. Especially given the fact that everything we need is in the car right now, we had not distinguished between the more replaceable things and the one thing each of us owned both very worth stealing and also extremely vital to our lives and our trip. So we’ve agreed to call it a combination of stupidity and extreme bad luck and leave it at that.

The Catastrophe

The ever-wonderful Alison is lending us her old MacBook, which works pretty well despite being vomited on last year, and Alisa’s mom lent us the money to buy a new MacBook Pro on Tuesday. The two computers should get us through the next month, so we can stay in touch with you and keep working on our projects, which are already underway.

With all of that explained, I’ll talk about our trip to AVAM in brief. There are pages and pages I could include here, but I’ll try to keep it succinct. (Recordings of our interviews and much more writing will be available on our adjunct blog, http://insidersout.wordpress.com, as well as in the final books and CDs we produce.) The American Visionary Art Museum is a completely unique place that is hard to place in the context of the art world. Before arriving, we had read some polarized reviews of the institution and its founder, Rebecca Hoffberger, and we were excited to see the place for ourselves. My main questions were about the simultaneous commodification of “visionary” artwork as such and the insistence upon its non-commodifiability; about the demand for authenticity and problem of “proving” that a visionary artist or artwork is authentic; and about the resulting opposition created between education and authenticity.

Rebecca herself is a well-informed, well-spoken, non-evangelically spiritual woman. The whole museum is imbued with her personality. (She happened to be wearing a giant mirrored brooch that exactly matched the exterior of the main building.) She has a point of view reinforced by many years of categorical placement outside the art world and hostility and judgement on the part of “inside” curators. However, it appears that much of this opposition is self-defined. My second-favorite thing that she said to us was that “visionary art is created when life experience is too big for words, by people who don’t wait for an outside power to grant them opportunity.” My favorite thing she said was: “The difference between a visionary artist and an insider artist is the difference between a lover who knows all the moves and a lover who listens.” I was glad that Rebecca vocalized her position as “not anti-academic at all, but that there are aspects of existence that the system doesn’t allow for,” and liked the way she grappled with the terminology of words like “outsider” or “art brut.” In other times and places, she said, cultural production was not limited to those with the job title “artist.”

AVAM's large sculpture gallery. Beautiful pink poodles and Leonard Knight's original hot air balloon.

I decided that AVAM was faced with the problem inherent in any type of representation of marginalized/underrepresented communities, which is that they must be labeled as marginal in order to be brought to light. It’s always a compromise to have to reinforce one’s position outside the mainstream so that the mainstream can become aware of one’s existence. In this case, the careful positioning of the museum’s collection as “visionary” work allows it a certain authority, and asks that it be considered on its own terms.

The museum did indeed have detailed biographies of every artist next to the work, and we talked at length with our lovely tour guide Pete about this fact. Again, I wanted to know if the stories were there to prove authenticity (e.g. this guy really overcame some tough stuff to make this spit-covered canvas, so we know he’s the real deal). Were the stories meant to hook you into looking at the art, or vice versa? Why couldn’t the objects stand on their own? After feeling frustrated about this question, I began to think about the fact that so many of the art pieces we saw actually contained words in them. I have believed for a long time that the distinction between word and image is an invented one, as contrived as the distinction between art and non-art. If the artists could include words in their work, words were not somehow antithetical to the integrity of the objects. The biographies alongside the work simply served to complete the stories that the work was telling. AVAM wants to tell the stories of the work and of the artists however possible–in words, pictures, sound, whatever.  I came up with the conclusion that AVAM is a museum of stories, of lived experience, and of the capacity for human expression, none of which is limited to the display of objects. I am impressed with AVAM’s institutional transparency–as Pete said, “we’re not trying to pretend that this stuff is being presented in a vacuum”– and the presence of affection and enthusiasm in their display of the work.

Here I can draw a comparison with the Yves Klein show we saw on Tuesday at the Hirschorn in D.C. In my opinion, Yves Klein made just about some of the sexiest art on the planet. The show has all of his most amazing works, and I almost felt embarrassed in front of the bigger blue-pigment coated canvases because of how sexy it all is. Then of course there are the actual imprints of naked women’s bodies on half of the pieces, and videos of women rolling themselves around in blue paint… Anyway, the weird part is that you couldn’t get closer than two feet to anything in the exhibit without an alarm going off and a guard yelling at you. Compared with how Rebecca had lovingly caressed the frame of a work by Sermet Aslan the day before at AVAM, I felt like intimacy was sorely lacking from my experience at the Hirschorn.

Interestingly, we did find affection for the art object–in the museum’s basement. Brooks took us down into the conservation department, where we got to talk to the Hirschorn’s head sculpture conservator. No room to write much about it here, but it was fascinating to hear her talk about restoring a work as a mystery to be solved, and to see the conservators fondling and sniffing priceless artworks while only upstairs we couldn’t get even a foot away from anything.

Paul Thek's Fish Man in the Hirschorn Conservation Dept. (& Alison!)

We ended the day in Baltimore again, at a woman named Beth Barbush’s house. She runs a weekly event called Porch Art from the porch of her house in the neighborhood of Remington. Kids and their families come by to learn a new skill or do an art project. The whole thing is powered by donations and Beth’s hard work. We were lucky to get in touch with her and arrange to teach some basic screen-printing to members of her community. Elena took an image that some of the kids had drawn last week and made it into a beautiful screen. We set up a table on the sidewalk in front of Beth’s porch and printed about 35 bags, pillowcases, and T-shirts. We explained the process to everyone and let the older people pull their own prints. It was fun, super engaging, and immediately rewarding, which was exactly what we needed to get our minds off of our own logistical crap and make us feel like our project was still worthwhile. Afterwards, Beth and her friends took us to the corner bar for a pitcher of beer, where we had a great conversation with one of her friends who is running a kids’ science camp at the end of the summer. We talked about how artists and scientists are both essentially problem-solvers and about how there should be more conversation between the two. The rain began to beat down heavily, and it was time for us to drive back to Arlington for the night. Baltimore, it seemed, was not the worst place on earth.

The porch!

All ages at porch art

The design

On Wednesday, we got up at the crack of dawn and headed South. So much has happened in the last three days that has justified and redeemed the trip a million times over, and we’ll post about it this weekend. But one more note about the robbery. Seeing the smashed window of my car was one of the most strangely painful and ashamed moments in my recent memory. The violence in the gesture and the violation of an assumed private space, as well as the theft of an object that contained so much of my private life on it, felt like a real tragedy at the time. Afterwards, I am able to feel thankful that the loss of data is still not equivalent to the loss of life, that I had friends and kind people around to cushion the blow, and that things are just things and that money is just money. We are still young enough that nothing we have created is precious, and in some ways this occurrence reinforces something I have been thinking about a lot lately: letting go, leaving things behind when it is time to move on (no matter how unfinished they may seem), and changing and growing constantly by dropping dead weights. These are the weights of extra possessions, extra guilt, extra resentment, and above all, extra fear. A cheeseball Australian motivational speaker, who the three of us met at a bar in Miami this spring on the day after my 21^st birthday, told me that I needed to learn to love myself just as I am. I asked him, “what about change? Can’t I be constantly changing?” His response was the question, “Yes, but, are you changing out of fear?” I had already sucked down several margaritas and had trouble processing this, but I wrote it down in my journal, and the question has been troubling me for quite some time. Perhaps ironically, I wrote a long piece of writing last week about the notion of an unchanging self or “constant” identity, which is now lost on the stolen laptop. I think it would behoove us greatly on this trip to face no experience as a loss or a gain, but as simply a change—change which is always occurring in our lives, whether we see it reflected in our belongings and surroundings or not. As for the question about whether we have a constant, unchanging self in there somewhere, or whether this is constantly changing also…more thoughts to come.

Our chariot! not exactly the Transit Antenna bus, but...

Let us introduce ourselves. The three of us graduated in May from Bard College, which is in the lovely non-town of Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, about two hours north of NYC. Elena and I (Elvia) were both Studio Art majors at Bard and had our thesis shows in the spring. Elena’s thesis work was in the nether-region between sculpture and painting, but she also happens to be a skilled printmaker. My thesis was a large sculptural installation…turns out I have a knack for building walls and then tearing them down. Alisa was an Art History major who wrote her senior thesis about sound art in Chile, where she spent a semester abroad in 2009. She plays bass guitar and baritone tuba, belongs to several bands, and you’ll never see her without her field recorder.

The three of us have been wanting to get on the road for a while. Alisa and I have been throwing around the idea of a serious road trip for years. Last year, Alisa took a class about outsider art with our professor Susan Aberth, and the idea of seeing some of the places in the books she was reading for the class became totally stuck in our heads. (The authors of the book Self-Made Worlds: Visionary Folk Art Environments, pretty much the folk art bible, have been some of our primary resources and contacts while planning this trip. It’s amazing and wonderful to experience how responsive so many people are to enthusiasm.) Elena and I had been talking about what to do after graduation for a long time also. We were both frustrated by the options presented to us, which seemed to be either moving to New York City or to…New York City. Then, this past spring, the guys from Drive-By Press came to give a talk and do a demo at Bard, and five minutes into their visit Elena and I had arrived at the same conclusion: a post-grad adventure was not only possible but necessary. It was as if we had just needed to know that someone else had done it. That there were ways of existing outside of the art infrastructures we knew about, and that alternate modes of production were a viable option.

Any art student on the east coast, or maybe in America, could probably understand why the Drive-By Press guys were such a breath of fresh air for us. To contrast: about two months before their visit, Andrea Scott from the New Yorker came to speak to the art students at Bard. After her talk, a student in our class raised her hand and asked if there was anywhere for a young, ambitious artist move after college but to New York, to which Ms. Scott laughed and said, “No. Just, no. I mean, you could go to Berlin…I’ve never been…but it’s not New York. Nothing is.” A professor of ours protested from the back of the room: “Actually, Austin’s got a really great scene!” Someone else mumbled that Savannah, Georgia was pretty cool. Ms. Scott then said something along the lines of, “If you take yourselves seriously, there is only one real art market, and it’s in New York.” Another student asked about selling work as a young person—was selling your work at a cafe a bad idea? To this, Ms. Scott’s response was much the same, insisting that the only way to present serious art work was in a gallery space, and preferably one in Chelsea. In other words, there was no other way for us to enter the art market than through one very small portal, which could only be found somewhere on the island of Manhattan, and the key to which she was holding. All other markets were irrelevant, and more importantly, if they existed they were simply small offshoots dependent on The Art World.

After this lecture, most of us felt pretty disheartened. We figured that not many of us were going to be able to find this portal. Were we going to be able to keep producing? What if we hated New York?

The idea of outsider art is a gateway for us to think about lots of things. It brings up notions of authenticity, of the nature/culture divide, and of identity, that are in fact central to Western art history and to the way that the art world functions. These academic questions are important to us—but more than anything, we want to see what’s out there! We are truly fascinated by all of the sites we plan to visit (a list can be seen at http://insidersout.wordpress.com), which range from full-on folk art environments to artists working in their backyards. We want to know more about why people create and how they do it with little means. And, on the other hand, we want to learn about how we too can be actors in the world, how we can share our own knowledge and desire to make work, and how art can be a community-builder in lots of different situations. For that reason, we’ll be conducting workshops in several places across the way, sharing our skills and opening avenues for productive dialogue about our ideas.

We’ve spent the whole day packing and are starting to get touchy because we want to get going. We’ll be posting regularly over the next month (alternating, so you get to hear from each of us), and we would love to hear your thoughts. Let the adventure begin!

Packing all day...

Further to Bob’s entry the other day and before the Insiders/Out girls introduce themselves we thought we’d make a quick post chronicling the move from our beloved home onto the bus and our departure from the searing heat of the Miami summer to the temperate bliss of our European tour.

The last week in the house was different for us all. While Sam reminisced over our time whilst packing I was making the final touches to the bus, trying desperately to get all the toxic stuff out of the way at least a few days before our little lungs crawled aboard – actually, in the last week, during an impromptu trip to Home Depot, Harper began walking! Aside from this massive development, Harper, unable to fully comprehend what was happening and why her world – that prior to our packing was expanding daily – was beginning to shrink, started to feed off our stresses and became increasingly agitated. Mateo on the other hand became increasingly excited. In the end we had two kids who couldn’t sleep for different reasons, and as Sam and I rushed around trying to get things in order our family and our house kind of imploded simultaneously as each of us added tangentially to the others situation.

When we started packing we decided to limit ourselves only to what we could fit on our bookshelves (not including sheets and clothes), but despite sticking to this almost until the last day and taking the triumphant photograph above, we buckled under the strain, convinced ourselves it would be better to actually SEE the clutter on the bus before we really stripped down, and so ferried and loaded truck load after truck load of crap into an already tight and rapidly diminishing space.

On our last night in the house after delivering the final pieces of furniture to our friend’s place on the beach and selling a bunch of art that we couldn’t take with us we sat in the dark in front of our fire place and ceremoniously burned all of our old bills, check books, letters, invoices, pay slips, contacts – everything that symbolized an organized, steady existence.

The next morning saw us drenched in sweat and cleaning products. When we woke up, we stripped our foam king sized bed and cut it down to queen size with a dangerously sharp kitchen knife that Richard sharpened for us. With the left over foam we made cushions for the couch and a mini mattress for Mateo. The weather had turned overnight and was now raining, forcing us to dash our final few truck loads when the rain abated, a circumstance which accentuated our fleeting status. On the final run, after saying goodbye to the one cat we could find (a neighbor is watching them while we are away), we drove from the house, Sam fighting back the tears. It was surreal. Happily the moment we set foot on the bus, a welcoming, steady aura enveloped us. The rain stopped and Harper, who hadn’t been sleeping miraculously passed right out on the bed despite a lack of curtains and me installing a clothes rail with a power drill less than six feet away.

It was hot. During the day, during the night, there seemed no escape. Even laying ontop of the sheets with fans blasting right on us and the window open we found it hard to sleep the first night. The next morning I made a fire and cooked our chicken’s eggs. I spend the day tying up loose ends at work, organizing the disastrous interior of the bus and making plans to trade in the car.

We arrived at the airport in good time. Our morning trip to Car Max wasn’t a success. They didn’t offer us enough so we will continue payments until we get back and try to find a buyer. This was Harper’s first flight. Mateo, a seasoned traveler took it all in his stride, vegetated to in-flight movies and even hung together well in the face of jet lag. I managed to cajole 3 extra meals out of the flight attendant and spent the flight crouched at Sam’s feet – we didn’t get to sit together.

For the next 2 months we will be in and around the UK. After a a short trip to London and Paris at the end of this month we will hire cars and travel to the Outer Hebrides to spend a few weeks in a cottage surrounded by nothing but moss, low lying grass and the dramatic swells of the North Atlantic sea. Sitting here now in my parents house after 4 formative years in Miami it feels like forever since I was here, almost long enough to forget much about life in the UK. By comparison 2 months does not feel long enough to reacquaint myself with the life I once had, but that’s really not the point. If anything this is a chance for my family to meet Harper and for Harper to get a taste of her roots. But by the looks of it, she is already well connected.

Harper aping her contientious guardians by sucking the condensation from an ice cold can of Stella courtesy of Virgin Atlantic (the can was not open)

Mateo, Harper, Sam, and Tom in their almost finished TA bus.

With their Bus nearly complete, the new Transit Antenna crew is now on sabbatical in the UK until September to escape the Florida heat, and while they will certainly be providing us with a few updates from Tom’s home country, we thought it would be the perfect opportunity to host some guests on Transit Antenna dot com. So for this month, we are featuring the project Insiders/Out, a group of three young artists (Elvia, Elana, and Alisa) hitting the road on a three week whirlwind tour of the United States via folk art meccas.

Though their trip will only give them a quick taste of road life, their divergent interests in outsider art, field recording, printmaking, and self-publishing should make for an exciting experience (for both you and them) as they produce various ephemera while moving through places like Pasaquan, The Ave Maria Grotto, and The Unclaimed Baggage Center. We have invited the group to utilize the Transit Antenna website as a place to synthesize all of their ideas, stories, and projects because at its core Insiders/Out embodies the artistic spirit of Transit Antenna. You will be able to track their progress on our map as well as in our new guest section where their posts will be archived. I hope you are as excited as I am to see where Insiders/Out will take us.

an image from our future move.

Man it’s been awhile. I started writing this post with the same amount of anxiety and guilt I have when I pick up the phone to call my mom for the first time in a month, except that it’s been almost 8 months! During that time I’ve been insanely busy. In fact while Tom, Sam, Mateo, and Harper have been preparing to take Transit Antenna in their own direction, the former crew has done everything but sit on their hands, dispersing across the globe with all finding some semblance of normalcy (or at least something other than life on a bus).

Steven-O at his best during a recent wedding (not his own).

The person I think I’m most jealous of is our former hitchhiker Steven-O. Since we dropped him off in Portland, OR in August of 2008, he says that he got “a little chunkier” (haven’t we all!) when he spent some time with his Italian mother who “loves to feed you,” landed steady work and a girlfriend for a while (from our last correspondence I couldn’t discern if he still had either), and eventually ended up in Australia, of all places. I’m not simply envious of the fact that he got to spend New Years Eve in Tasmania, (though I’ve always wanted to live with marsupials), but I’m more green eyed over his ability to glide through life like a rock skipping across a crystal lake. Eventually he will stop skipping and sink into daily life, but for the moment I really enjoy watching and postulating how far across the lake he will get.

Wheat's new floating love

The other Transit Antenna hitchhiker, Wheat, found love in his home town of Orlando. When we deposited him in Jacksonville early last year, the plan was for him to spend a few weeks in Orlando and then head back to Brooklyn, NY.

wheat und kim

Now it’s been more than a year and half since we dropped him off, and he has remained, for the most part, in Orlando doing a lot of gardening, fleamarketing, and photography with his girlfriend Kim. The lure of the road is starting to get under his skin once again and they are contemplating an extended road adventure of their own. Maybe Transit Antenna 3.0?

Seth workin' on the Clover Mural, finally

As of late, Seth and Jamie have spent the majority of their time living and working in Seth’s hometown of Clover, SC – population 4916. Jamie started freelance writing for the local county paper and just this month landed a full time gig as staff writer for the Rockhill Herald. (see some of her stuff here)

what Seth's mural will look like in the end, sort of.

All the while, Seth has been navigating the Bureaucracy of his home town in an effort to paint a mural. Finally after many months of wrangling, a wall and funding was secured, and he was able to break ground earlier this month.

the Kristofoletti fam in Geneva

There’s several big news items when it comes to Joe and Amy. First they had a baby. Crazy right? We were really unsure why they got off the road early last summer, and then they broke the news over the phone a couple months later.  On February 9th, 2010 Daniel Falcon Kristofoletti was born.

I told Joe that the baby's name sounded like a super hero secret identity. He responded with this photo.

The next big thing for them came after Joe painted a mural at Redux Art Center based on the Cern Particle Collider. Soon after he was invited to Geneva to paint murals on the buildings surrounding the Collider itself! As I write, the whole fam is living it up in Switzerland.

The first section of the Cern mural project. It attempts to depict the small blackholes created by the collider.

When they’re not Europeans, they spend their time in the great city of Austin, TX. They’ve tried many times to talk the rest of us into moving to the City of the Violet Crown. The only catch is its surrounded by the rest of Texas.

Taylor assisting with our movin' film.

Dawn , Taylor, Kentridge, and I have wrestled with where we want to set up permanent camp. For the moment we are held up in Charleston, SC by default simply because it’s where we have family we can lean on. But it’s not our dream city, and after much deliberation we have set our sights on New Orleans. While many would find the crescent city to be less than ideal, not only because of the glacial pace of rebuilding after Katrina but also because of the impending damage that the gulf oil spill will bring, it still remains close to our hearts and our top choice for a relocation. Dawn’s been working hard as manager of a local bakery, Taylor enrolled in public school, Kentridge has fallen in love again with the marshy backyard of home, and I’ve been busy with several projects including The Is Not Broke Recession Proof Wallet Co. And despite my internet silence, I’ve been heavily involved behind the scenes with Transit Antenna helping Tom and Sam get their still-unnamed bus rolling and running on Waste Vegetable Oil (both in person for several extended trips to Miami and virtually with drawings like the one below). I’ve also been behind the scenes of the website here working on some exciting new features. Next month we will have some special guests reporting live from the road. Stay tuned for more!

Despite living with my inlaws and not paying rent, it’s been hard to save any money mainly because of my lack of steady work. Dawn’s been really humping it for the both of us, but something always comes up that sucks the money out of our bank account. However come hell or high water (which are both very likely in our soon-to-be-adopted hometown), we are hitting the road in August to make our way to the Big Easy.

at a friends wedding where I officiated and dawn made the cake. POWER COUPLE

Oh geez, I almost forgot to give a much needed update on Walter, the bus. He has become a mainstay at East Jesus, where Container Charlie says visitors fight to stay in his comfy beds and enjoy his amenities.

The tire mammoth erected earlier this month on the grounds of East Jesus

Since our exodus in November, East Jesus has seen a fury of activity with many new art projects making their way to the Slabs.   Walter has received a battery and solar panel upgrade, a new water tank and inverter waiting to be installed, and drought-tolerant cactus’ which utilize a gray water recycling system we installed before we left. The pedal power generator / co-pilot seat will soon find a new home powering the East Jesus Tower lighting system. The interior has remained largely unchanged besides the addition of some cutlery and corkscrew in the kitchen.

A recent image of Walter taken from the East Jesus Tower

Charlie is in search of an ambitious artist that is willing to stay for an extended time in the belly of Walter and do some of the “round tuits” he hasn’t had time for, though with triple digit temperatures day and night at the moment, that seems unlikely in the coming months. With that said, there is an open invite for friends and fans of Transit Antenna to stay in the bus, with the stipulation that you bring Charlie a case of Natie Light and that you follow all of the rules of East Jesus. If a stay in the low desert sparks your interested you can email us at info@transitantenna.com for more info.

A very cool recent addition to East Jesus by Hollywood styrofoam and fiberglass sculptor Michael Rabbitt.

We’re almost there guys. The interior is in down to the moldings, we begin staining and varnishing tomorrow and it might have been the heat, but I swear I saw Tom staring blankly at some plumbing earlier. The progress has come on quick these last few weeks, despite the intense heat, and Mateo is relishing his new loft bedroom. Tired of having to ask our help everytime he wants to get up there he insisted on making a ladder. Here’s how it went.

After opting for a rope ladder as opposed to cutting holes in a plank as we had first intended we set about locating some rope. The stuff holding up our long-since-redundant hammock in Tom’s shambolic wood yard seemed ideal.

Next, after deciding that we didn’t want to spend any money we went for bamboo. Luckily these choice specimen have been littering our yard for months so we grabbed them and headed for the shop.

Thankfully no carpenter ants living inside the bamboo came out as we were setting up. With the sun beating down we lazily prepared the essentials. For anyone wanting to recreate this project they were: rope, sticks of some description, drill with drill bit same diameter as rope, saw.

Bamboo can be tricky to work with. It grows in sections, each of which is sealed from the other by a kind of a knuckle. When making the ladder we had to make a choice about whether we wanted the ends of the rungs to be open or sealed. After cutting it we were able to see how it was inside, and realizing that there would be a lot of waste if we went with the sealed option, we decided to cut either side of the knuckles leaving the rungs open-ended. Just how we like things! (That blue on Mateo’s face is chalk. I enjoyed a lie in this morning and when I woke up everyone, including the baby, looked like postmortem clowns).

With the pieces generally cut to size we then had to clean them up. There are probably many ways to go about this, but the easiest Tom found was to nip the rough bits off with the chop saw. This however is not advisable as when the material is not properly secured the saw blade can stick causing the material to kick back, which if you’re unlucky can pull your hand into the path of the sharp and rapidly rotating blade.

To my amazement no one was hurt. Just as well, we haven’t had health insurance for years!

The next stage is to drill holes in either side of each rung. At this juncture it is important to envisage which side of the rung will be your top and which will be your bottom. We chose the most concave side to be our top. Holes must then be drilled vertically through each end of the rung. We went with the gold Dewalt bit, its for metal really, but the other one was just too big.

Et voila!

Next up, carpenter ants or not, you probably need to finish the rungs. If using nice bamboo you might want to keep its natural waxy luster, but as ours had been alternately sodden and baked out by our trash cans since the winter we didn’t have much to lose. Back at the house we gathered some scraps of sand paper and got to work.

Also, with bamboo, it has this furry stuff that grows on the inside that could get gross so we dragged a pair of Tom’s old boxers through the holes to rid them of their funk.

Mateo liked this part.

Bad bug time then descended upon us, forcing us to flee inside from swarms of hungry mosquitoes. Once safe within we set about threading the rope through the rungs.

Mateo seemed to get the order this needed to be done in quite well. Start from the bottom, knot first then rung. Check the spacing, another knot, followed by another rung and so on. At this stage it is important to know exactly how long your ladder needs to be. Maybe placing the rungs out will help decide the order and always leave yourself more rope than you think you need as the knots use up quite a bit. Also, depending on the type of rope you use, it might be helpful to put some tape at the ends to stop it fraying.

With the ladder lashed together it was time to test it.

Impatient to see results we headed back to the bus.

Installing the ladder was simple, if not sweaty. All we did was drill four holes, two top and two bottom, and thread the rope through, knotting it at the back. Of course, everyone wanted to help!

And there you have it. One awesome rope ladder…

and one happy camper/jungle boy…

In contradiction to the many stories we have read about nomads and their poultry, quite a few people have told us that our plan to take chickens with us on the bus simply won’t work. Their warnings range in severity from stressed chickens, to dead chickens to the more sinister “your chickens might be fine, but what if the eggs are poisoned and you don’t find out until its too late?” All of this nay saying is beginning to make us have second thoughts about taking our three beloved birds with us when we hit the road. One thing we are sure about, however, and something we often use to reassure the many chicken worriers in our lives, is that our three cats, Little Fuz, Leviathan and No Name, definitely won’t be coming with us.

Yesterday we passed the one month mark for moving out of our house and onto the bus. As we begin to pack up our things, deciding what few personal effects we will be able to take from the mountains of junk we have accumulated from four years in Miami, an uplifting sense of freedom is far out weighing any sentimentality. The only things we are really having a hard time leaving behind are our cats.

Their mother, Baboon, a stray we took in as a kitten, moved out soon after giving birth to them in 2007. They’ve been together all their lives and we are all they know. We thought about taking them to my Mum’s in the UK, but the quarantine laws are crazy and we can’t afford electronic tags. We also considered donating them to a farm, but as they are used to domestic life we felt they would be much happier with a foster family. They’re really awesome pets – super chill, tons of personality, and mostly outdoor. We love them and would hate to separate them, so while a few friends have offered to take one or even two of them, we wanted to see if any of our readers, preferably based in South Florida, would be able to offer a home to all three.

In case any of you have space in your lives for the unfortunate casualties of the Transit Antenna lifestyle, here’s a little introduction.

Little Fuz:

The alpha male of the group, Little Fuz or Fuz for short, was the second born – the first born, his brother Gary, sadly disappeared one day. I’ve had cats all my life, but I’ve never met one quite like Fuz. Maybe it has something to do with his crazy mother or the fact we had him neutered before puberty, but Fuz is nuts, ironically. Bursting with personality, Fuz is more like a puppy than a cat; an eternal cherub.

At any given moment you can guarantee that you can find him doing something funny. Whether its crawling under rugs, chewing on things or simply charging around like a horse with a wild gleam in his eyes this cat is sure to brighten even the dullest of days. Pros: Handsome, head strong, easily personified. Cons (which are actually just Pros that require an acquired taste or a big heart): Randomly swipes at you when you walk by, eats shoes, cries occasionally if lonely.

Leviathan:

Third born Leviathan, or Prince Leviathan as we often call him, was the largest and smartest of all the kittens.

While the Little Fuz was busy swimming in the water bowl, Leviathan was sleeping. He was the first to walk and always last to finish eating. Sam hoped he would fulfill her dreams of having a fat cat – a role that Fuz seems to be working hard towards. Like most cats Leviathan conserves his energy well, but unlike most cats does little else. As an adult he is the epitome of a cat, lethargic to a fault. At any given time of day or night, Leviathan can be found sprawled full length on a bed, couch, under a bush, anywhere he feels undisturbed. And even when you disturb him, he rarely moves. Blessed with a long fur dissimilar from the rest of the cats and softer than a bunny, Leviathan is the perfect Ying to Fuz’s Yang. Two brothers could not be more different, and still equally awesome. Pros: Extremely placid, graceful, silky smooth. Cons: Tinny meow, collects burrs, occasional hairballs.

No Name:

The runt of the litter, No Name is the only girl. Initially a bit of a bitch No Name’s tom-boy days came to an end when she hurt her wrist as a kitten.

After comforting her she became inseparable from people and will now sacrifice any activity, luxury or comfort just to be near you.

Sometimes a little creepy and/or annoying (creepy when she gets the sense you think she is being annoying) she is the sweetest of all cats. Everyone who comes over can’t believe how small and needy and still she is. Oddly, even if you kick her out, she always appears back inside, often at your side. Having corroborated this after thoroughly checking the house for secret entrances we have come to believe she might be some kind of witch cat and as neither Sam or I have experience in the dark arts regard her with appropriate caution. Pros: Extremely cuddly, pint sized, quiet. Cons: Periodically sheds hair on back of neck perhaps as a result of flea medication, rich nutty aroma, evil?

At the end of the day, despite how much we love them, we simply can’t entertain the idea of bringing them along. Not only do they shed fur, harbor parasites and require a festering tray of grit in order to shit, they also have little sense of trust; fleeing from you the moment they are taken beyond the boundaries of their territories and over reacting by bearing their claws at the slightest hint that you might be coercing them into anything other than sheer self indulgence, even if it’s for their sole benefit. Actually, when you think about it, despite the many things we accept cats can’t or rather won’t do such as protect property, engage actively in mutual play, swim hypnotically through a salt water tank of corals or fetch anything, ever, all they are really any good for is companionship of an evening, however, even this if often limited to the moments just before or after they eat and even then you have to not mind a fishy sphincter in your face too much and/or being play clawed, which lets be honest, is often is just the same as being real clawed!

Nevertheless, despite all their intrinsic faults, cats deserve to enjoy the run of a stable (not on wheels) home, a garden to call their own (despite lacking the equipment to technically claim it) and some semblance of routine. As such, our decision is not so much based on how the cats are no longer good for us, but rather about how we are no longer good for the cats, and how it wouldn’t be fair to include them in our plans. Somewhat starved of attention of late owing to kids and pressing bus schedules they would already be thankful of a loving family. Their personalities, each special in their own way, are purrfectly balanced both individually and as part of the whole. Interested parties please contact us via info at transit antenna dot com. Serious applications only please.

Please note that all of our cats are super kid and chicken friendly and amazingly none of them meow for food or bring dead things into the house!

or ‘God’s eye‘ is a craft that I remember making as a child and always enjoyed for its beauty and simplicity. Originating in Mexico the Huichol people call their God’s eyes ‘Sikuli.’ which means “the power to see and understand things unknown.” When a child is born the central eye is woven by the father, then one eye is added for every year of the child’s life until the child reaches the age of five. The result is a mysterious and magical object.

To make one you will need two sticks or branches and yarn or similar material that can be used for weaving.

Secure the two branches together with a knot from the end of your yarn.

Begin weaving the yarn around your sticks, looping round each branch.

The God’s Eyes will grow and take form.

Here is the one I worked on – I weaved the yarn so that both sides are the same and there is neither a front or a back.

Mateo really enjoyed making these and was confident doing it without my assistance. He was very proud of his creation and instantly felt the magical pull of his God’s eye and displayed it over his bed to protect him.

Check out this guys very impressive God’s Eye here.

We’d like to give a big warm thanks to everyone who has helped us with donations so far. Without your kindness and generosity we would be struggling far behind.

In addition to continuing product endorsement these preliminary thanks will be given in chronological order not by size of gift. We value all donations no matter how small and have been genuinely touched by the willingness of all those listed below to assist us in our endeavors.

Firstly we’d like to extend a massive thanks to Sam Caylor at Caylor Supplies (www.caylorsupply.com). Without him, his son Archie and their college Lee we would never have made it back to Miami. After arriving early one cold January morning to their impressive hangar filled with machine tools and greyhound memorabilia these boys worked tirelessly all day, pulled no less than two transmissions from various coaches parked on their property, fixed our shifting problem, switched out all our tires, bequeathed us with a bunch of spare parts and only charged us for labor. Anyone in need of MCI advice, services or parts should definitely give these guys a call. They ship to anywhere in the US and specialize in used and some new parts at knock down prices.

Secondly we’d like to thank, promote and pay homage to Leon Griffin at WVO Designs (www.wvodesigns.com). After finding Leon’s revolutionary business online we called him up for a donation. Not content with simply providing us with what we had asked for his generosity extended beyond all reasonable expectations and at the last count had gifted us with over $2,000 worth of equipment including but not limited to a Basic Raw Power Centrifuge with a 1000W Bolt-on Heater (pictured above), 3 way Solenoid Valves (pictured above), a Raptor fuel pump (pictured above), a Monster Transfer Pump and a Heated Pickup. An industrial engineer, Leon has applied all his know how to the use of waste vegetable oil as a fuel. His products are amazing. He is amazing. Short of building him his own shrine on the bus we wanted to again give thanks for his rampant charitableness. Without Leon we would surely be running a Flintstone-esq operation, circulating coolant around the bus by sucking on hose until blue in the face and filtering raw waste vegetable oil by swinging quarts of the stuff above our heads in a pair of Sam’s unwanted stockings.

A big thanks goes out to John Gaither from Atlantic Control Products, inc (www.atlanticcontrol.com) who with very little coercion sent us three aab solid state timer relays (1 x trailing edge single shot adjustable part # HRPSD22TS and 2 x timer delay on release adjustable part # HRDB121). Thanks John and ACP. Every little helps!

Next up we bow to the ITT Corporation (www.itt.com), a high-technology engineering and manufacturing company operating on all seven continents in three vital markets: water and fluids management, global defense and security, and motion and flow control. Having contacted them through their website about a donation of a water pump, namely the Flojet Triplex Automatic water system pump model # R3626-344, we received a phone call over breakfast one morning to say that the pump was on its way. Not a bad start to the day! A few weeks later, however, the pump had not arrived, but we were again very happy when Customer Service Representative Sharon Mannarelli, despite finding no record of the promised donation in the companies files, took us on our word and shipped not only without question, but with the very best of wishes. Sharon is currently working on getting us a Flojet Inlet Strainer for our plumbing system. With any luck we are near the end of the three week lead time. Any news Sharon?

Of course its fabulous when companies are doing well enough to be able to make charitable donations, we couldn’t do what we do without them, and the smaller and more independent the company the more impressive the gesture, but what is really remarkable is when individuals who ostensibly stand to gain nothing forfeit hard cash for the mere satisfaction of giving to a worthy cause. Here follows a couple of personal heartfelt thanks to a few such individuals.

First up on the hallowed podium of Transit Antenna catalyzed altruism is Nestor Alfaras, a kindly gent who after going out of his way to arrange for us to collect a 40 gal aluminum fuel tank that we agreed to purchase for $75 from his craigslist.org advertisement ended up giving it to us for free! Nestor had been heading out of town the week we called him and told us we could collect the tank from his wife in his absence. Thankfully, he arrived home early from his trip and on the day we decided to head down to his home near FIU was busy rearranging trailers in his front yard with his son. After a brief chat about our project and some recent news concerning emissions of pollutants in Asia he gifted us the tank with pleasure and wouldn’t even accept $5 for his son. What a guy!

Joining Nestor in that special place in our hearts we have Mike Simmons, a name sake of my uncle, the photographer Mike Simmons, who sold us 4 deep cycle batteries. Mike is the wholesale business. His company, Bilateral Sales (www.bilateralsales.com) buys and sells unwanted excess inventory and unused equipment globally at competitive prices. After meeting us in the car park of a charming adobe tobacco store in Fort Lauderdale, apparently the first of its kind in the area, we caravaned to his storage facility where he charged us a knock price ($520) for four Trojan batteries (which for the record we have not adequately tested yet) and then proceeded to give us a tour of his facility, offering us a variety of electronic goods. We mentioned to Mike that we were in the market for a 24V charger/inverter and a battery isolator to which he replied “what about a seat?” and pointed to a beautiful yacht helmsman’s chair:

After politely protesting that we couldn’t possibly Mike insisted that he would never get what he paid for it and helped us bundle it into our car. In the confusion, Mateo managed to remove the cap off one of the batteries and thrust an unwitting index finger inside. Thankfully he was not horribly scarred and we drove away happy. The chair is amazing and with suspension, adjustable firmness and lumbar support is very comfortable. Also after researching the chair, which is a Mariner, online we found it to be valued at around $800. Thanks, Mike!

In addition to those who have kindly volunteered their time, experience or equipment we’d like to save this spot for all those who have donated materials. Ranging in quality from brand new or once used to detritus found at the bottom of a dumpster, and in volume from scraps to whole truck loads, the many hand-me-downs and windfalls that these individuals have sanctioned have enabled us to move ahead far quicker than our own meager wallets or resources would allow. Worthy of such accolades are Locust Projects (www.locustprojects.org) and Leyden Rodriguez-Casanova (www.fulanoinc.net) for allowing us to salvage materials from their exhibition “An Uneven Floor”. Win McCarthy and Addison Waltz for breaking down their loft bed so we could take the wood. David Rohn (www.davidrohn.net) for various doors, plywoods and insulation materials. New World School of The Arts (www.nwsa.mdc.edu) for MDF, plywood and shims. Dorsch Gallery for insulation and plywood. Praxis International Art (www.praxis-art.com) for half a crate from their dumpster. And our neighbor Diego for a desk he no longer wanted.

And now a special thanks to three people who we could not have attempted this without.

Firstly thanks to Lori Kelly for allowing us to park our bus on her property. Without her patience and hospitality we would be truly screwed. Secondly, thanks to Lori’s partner Richard Haden (www.richardhaden.com) for his applied expertise regarding all things wood and for the loan of his equipment and transportation. Without his openness, understanding, and lack of sentimentality toward tools we would be far behind schedule. Without his experience and advice, however, we would probably be finished by now, but the bus would likely look like crap and fall apart after the first hundred miles!

And last but by no means least, a very special thanks to our friend and Transit Antenna Founder, Bob Snead, who not only flew with me to Arkansas to collect our bus, but has worked extremely hard both initially in Arkansas and again on a second trip to Miami in an attempt to set us up with a system that will hopefully ensure that the second phase of his project, our lives for the next few years, are not as beset by mechanical issues as his were.

Finally we wanted to give credit to some folks who although seem unable to help began speaking to us with the very best intentions. As we see it, even though in the end these guys couldn’t give us anything due to either financial constraints or product availability, their willingness to communicate and interest in our project not only separates them from the countless others who outright refused to engage us, but elevates them, regardless of whether they graciously declined or simply stopped writing back to a level to which many would do well to aspire to.

Thanks then to Sheila Kerr from Windstream (www.windstreampower.com), a company of just 14 who are unable to donate a pedal generator to us due to their commitment to other worthy causes such as the humanitarian crisis in Haiti and doctors in Kenya that need to keep mobile blood units cool. Thanks to Xantrex (www.xantrex.com), manufacturers of RV, marine and commercial vehicle products whose tech Don Wilson was looking into a Prosine 3.0 24V inverter/charger for us. Thanks to Tony Williams from North Star Energy Services, inc (www.northstarenergyservices.com) manufacturers of portable solar generators who wasn’t able to donate a full system, but offered various necessary components for a photovoltaic trailer set up. And thanks somewhat preemptively (as she still might pull something out of the bag for us) to Dagmar Gatell from Granite Environmental (www.erosionpollution.com), specialists in Erosion Pollution Control Products and Site Specific solutions for Industrial Spill Clean Up Applications and emergency use who although have not said no definitely will likely not be donating a hot water bladder tank due to their enduring efforts in the face of the continuing ecological tragedy in the Gulf of Mexico.

And what the hell, thanks to everyone who hung up our calls or moved our emails to their trash cans without a seconds thought as without you we wouldn’t have the basis for comparison by which all these other stellar organizations and individuals shine so brightly in our weary world.

Its getting hot down here in Miami and the hotter it gets, the slower our progress becomes. Early morning starts are now almost impossible without cloud cover and even with all the windows open, the breeze from across the railway tracks amounts to little more than a fart in hell. On the flip side, with all the sweating I’ve been doing, my skin has become very soft and being so wet all the time means its hard for the mosquitoes to find a foot hold! Ironically when we picked up the bus in Arkansas we were impeded by rain and cold. At the very least I suppose we’re getting a valuable bonus introduction to the polarity of weather waiting for us out there in the states.

For the meantime however, while the searing heat of South Floridian summer forces me closer and closer to a nocturnal kind of existence, I wanted to pause for a moment to keep you all updated with progress so far. As I am still drawing up plans that will describe the intricacies of the veggie conversion and partially completed on board acquisition and filtration system this post will mainly serve to divulge the living quarters with only scant pictorial reference to engine parts.

So without further ado:

Following the final design shown in the post entitled Foundations I began gutting the interior in preparation for the build out.

The first step was to remove the luggage racks. This proved harder than expected, but once down they yielded a trove of salvageable parts such as speakers, Plexiglas, lights, brackets and wire. After dragging them out of the bus and dissecting them I decided to remove the walls.

Before removing the walls I needed to remove the chases than ran the length of the bus on either side. Behind these were dusty cavities used for the heating and possibly the A/C system. We won’t be using the A/C system on the bus, but heat would be nice, so after removing all the chases and flutes that directed the air along various tunnels into the walls I decided to keep the vents open. Eventually a number of them will vent hot air directly into the living quarters through the floor. The walls weren’t easy to remove. In of themselves they were flimsy, conveniently sectioned things, but they were attached to a girder that in turn was fastened to the wall with hardened steel bolts. In the end only the sawsall would do.

With the walls and luggage bays gone it was time to make a decision about the floor. To lay a new one, or not to lay a new one? After tearing up the linoleum we found that the floor was 1/2″ plywood – almost too thin to build on – and rotten in parts. Along both sides of most of the bus this was all that separated the interior from the luggage bays. Various friends had various ideas ranging from “tear out everything and start from scratch” to “to hell with the floor, just set up some tents.” We didn’t fancy ‘tenting it’ for the next few years, novel though it would be, so in the end we settled on a happy medium: replace the rotten parts, epoxy the suspect parts and lay a new 3/4″ plywood floor on top. This would save us having to tear up the whole floor (which was screwed into steel beams running the length of the bus) and would also give us a little more depth to screw into. The picture above was taken just before we laid the new floor.

Below the existing floor were a variety of moisture barriers, insulation materials, cavities. Running the length of the bus were tracks used to hold the chairs in place. As the tracks were raised they presented a bit of a problem, but in the end instead of shimming the whole floor up around the tracks with door skin we decided to simply router grooves in the underside of the new floor and glue the whole thing down. We used Liquid Nails FRP Panel Adhesive for the glue and rocks from the garden as weights. It took eight sheets of plywood plus a few jigsawed details bits to cover the floor and around four hours to complete – despite ventilating the area well, by the end of it I was as high as a kite!

With the floor in place construction could finally begin. After mapping out where the bed and bathroom would be situated I cut holes in the floor for the vents and started building stud walls. The first stud wall to go up was the one separating the bedroom and the bathroom.

Our bus came with four broken windows. Thankfully the windows are made from two layers of glass, and so although one layer was cracked their general integrity seemed sufficient. This saved me the having to source new material to replace the window. My final quick-fix solution was to move the windows around so that the broken ones would be covered by the buildout, fix them in place with self tapping screws, remove all the opening mechanisms, adhere enameled plywood to the glass with silicone, fill any gaps with insulating foam and hide the whole thing behind a wall. So far only three of the four windows have been blocked out and only two of the three that have been blocked out have been hidden behind a wall. I primed and painted the plywood with oil based enamel then braced it against the window so that it would make good contact until the silicone cured.

I really should have done the windows before I started building walls, but in the end it was fine. After the windows that I immediately needed to be blocked in were finished I set about making the bed.

Our bed/bedroom consists of a queen bed for Sam and I at floor level, a raised cot for Harper and a loft for Mateo. I had come by a few sheets of specialty maple plywood that I decided to use for this purpose. The framing was done with a mixture of 2×4 and 2×6.

When we converted the engine we saved considerable time and effort by running new fuel lines inside of the bus for the veggie and diesel versus tapping into existing diesel lines and running new veggie lines through the center of the bus via the differential. In order to do this we had to cut a hole in the floor above the tank and run the lines down the length of the bus, through the bathroom floor, to the engine.

A heated pick up will soon be installed here on top of the tank.

After running through the bus, the lines go through a hole in the bathroom floor.

Here you can see from below where the veggie lines run after going through the bathroom floor.

This is a shot through the right access door of the engine.

In this close up you can see the esoteric configuration of solenoids, hose, bushings , T’s and a pump that govern which tank the engine draws from. This is the suction side. You can see in the top left of the photo where we tapped into the coolant line (you can maybe see it more clearly on the previous picture).

Around the other side of the engine we tapped into the coolant again for the return. The veggie oil runs in aluminum fuels lines inside fuel hose filled with coolant. As the engine heats up, the coolant in the hose surrounding the fuel lines heats the veggie oil. The oil and the coolant circulate around the bus continually providing the pump is working correctly. All of the selections between the tanks happen back here and most is controlled electronically by switches I installed at the dash and by a relay, however, there is a small manual component in the form of a ball valve that in conjunction with the pump can be used to prime the engine if we happen to run out of diesel. If the electronics eventually fail we will likely switch to a manual system, but for now, thanks to WVO designs, seeing as we have the technology we may as well enjoy the convenience of it!

Eventually the lines inside the bus, together with all our water and some electrics will be encased in a chase. As these lines are effectively the spinal chord of our bus, we need to keep them safe. So far I have only built the chase in the bedroom so that I could move ahead with the bedroom build out, but soon there will be a small (9×5″) chase that runs the length of the bus. You cant see the chase in the bedroom now as I have built over it with a larger chase that runs at the same height as Harper’s cot and functions as a kind of extended bedside table.

When finished, the ground level of mine and Sam’s bed will be lined with Masonite, Mateo’s loft floor will be made from panels of plywood and underneath Harper’s cot will be a small storage area accessible through a hinged hatch.

As we’re moving onto the bus in just over a month my priority has been to get the bed setup finished. Now that that is almost done I will start work on the bathroom and the plumbing. The kitchen and living quarters will be a temporary fix until we can find sponsors for appliances. On July 3rd we fly to the UK to spend the summer with family. During the time it takes us to finalize things after returning to Miami in September and out departure we will likely eat a lot of raw food and shower whenever it rains!

Maybe we will get the bus finished before mango season, but it doesn’t seem likely!

For Mateo’s recent birthday this past March, Tom and I decided to make him something special- a beautiful woodland Treehouse. In trying to avoid getting sucked into buying expensive wood toys we took a leap and created something ourselves. We stayed up late nights working on our little project in secret and found ourselves delving deep into a magical woodland world. It is so satisfying to see your children play with toys that you made for them with your own hands.

To make a treehouse yourself you will need some  basic wood working skills under your belt and more importantly, access to tools. We found that making the treehouse was an organic process and will vary depending on the wood that you find.

In total, the whole project took us 15hours to complete, including all the little details like the hammock, ladder, swing etc.

Tools and Supplies you’ll need:

Miter saw , jig saw, drill with bits, router, sander, wood screws, wood glue, dowel rod, string and yarn (for the hammock, ladder and swing), some 1/2 inch (approximately) planks and a selection of beautiful hard wood branches.

We gathered all the branches we could find that might make the right fit for our Treehouse. Make sure any wood you find is fully dry and not still green. Wood should not have any mold or decay.

Use the jig saw to cut out the shape you want for your base floor and back wall (optional). As we need to attach the treehouse somewhere in the bus we went with a back wall and added a window as a little architectural element. The window can be cut with the jig saw if you first make a large hole with your drill – large enough to put the jig saw blade in.

After cutting the planks to shape we used the router on the edges. A variety of ‘bits’ are with the router to make different edges, but we went with a simple rounding tool. The result is a really nice (and more importantly safe for little hands) finish. Finish this phase of the process by sanding your pieces.

Once our base floor and back wall was finished we started to think structurally. We cut a gnarled piece of wood to sit flat top and bottom on our base and then figured out its placing.

We screwed in our back wall to the back edge of our floor. Note: Make sure to pre-drill your holes to avoid splitting wood – especially in to your branches.

To avoid unsightly screws the branches on the first level should be screwed in from the bottom. The second level is little trickier. Here your branches need to be set in place with a combination of screws and glued dowels. We screwed through the second level into the first branch to secure it from the top, then pre-drilled holes in the second level and the second branch. Into both sets of holes we put glue and into the holes on the second level we inserted dowel pieces. Our second branch went on top of this and the dowels from the second level went up into its holes. Everything is set with wood glue for extra strength. The third level is set in the same way as the second level.

In the end we made a total of four floors, each suspended and supported by various cool bits of wood. The process is itself one of play, deciding where to add or remove branches until settling on a final design.

When the structure is complete then you can focus on the trimmings. We cut a staircase out with a jig saw then sanded it. It is set in place with a screw from the bottom and wood glue at the top. You could also use a stack of wood rounds, but this worked best for us.

This little woodland Mama hangs from the wood and rope ladder made with string and left over wood dowel. We bought the woodland family and baskets from Magic Cabin.

We added a branch that extends out for our swing.

The ropes are made from thin hemp which I braided together. I wrapped them around a wooden dowel  and then fed the rope through holes that we drilled into our branch.

The swing itself is a small cut off from a wood round. The swing is set in place with a knot at the bottom of the rope.

We even cut  a “mouse leather hide” for the floor. Also note the blue in the window. The chairs were purchased from Fairy Furnishings.

Mateo was pretty impressed. I was too! I hope this woodland home stays in our family for generations!

Our internet got cut off recently due to unpaid bills, but despite an inordinate amount of Home Depot trips we are back in business!

The bus-to-RV conversion is moving about as fast as one man (Tom) can manage to build an new home from scratch on a budget provided for by his infrequent writing gigs and my random art workshops and placenta pill making. Ordinarily this wouldn’t be so bad, but we have committed to move out of our house in 2 months so unfortunately pressure is on.

Thankfully Transit Antenna alumni, founder, and our personal hero, Bob came down to Miami to oversee the installation of the veggie system. He and Tom have been coming back exhausted and covered in engine grease for the last couple weeks and although Bob is now safe at home, Tom has continued to tinker and apart from a few connections I think its safe to say that its almost done.

Following them on their way to work on the bus one day, Mateo, Harper and I set about yet another homeschool project. With springtime and the promise of burning veggie oil in the air we decided to remake our makeshift butterfly house – it was looking particularly sad that morning.

The basic design consists of two wooden circles, a top and a bottom, held apart by sticks – the more tree/branch like the better for the butterflies – and wrapped in mesh.

Our first lesson was the use of a compass. Mateo was impressed that we could make a perfect circle with this little device.

We then jigsawed the circles we drew. We used wood scraps that the boys cast aside from the bus build-out.

With the baby strapped on this was no was no easy task!

Next we used a router to round out the edges – thanks Richard for the loan of the tools. Then Mateo sanded the wood rounds with a jitterbug sander – he was happy to get his hands on some tools without adults intervening.

We found some fallen branches from a nearby mango tree and then we, or rather, Richard, screwed the branches into place.

Finally we took the old mesh (with chrysalis still attached) and wrapped it over the new frame, leaving a little gap for access that we pinched with a small bulldog clip. I would like to add a string to the top of it so that once we are on the bus we can hang it.

And hey presto! A home fit for a metamorphosing king or queen. Maybe I can make a bunch of these and sell them on Etsy.com for a bit of pocket money while we’re on the road. In the meantime, leave your orders in the comments section!

Yesterday – about a week after we finished the project – Mateo’s first butterfly emerged. Unfortunately it did it at night so we didn’t get to see it, but Mateo had fun releasing it into the wild all the same. Its a Cloudless Sulpher butterfly that we pulled of off Ariella’s tree (Childhoodmagic).

Now we have 3 more caterpillars in pupa form that have made it their home. Quite the getaway!

Happy May Day!

For Mateo’s fifth Birthday, a friend of ours (Cassidy) brought him an ice cream tub of worms, Eisenia fetida (red wigglers) to be precise.

OK, so it was not the typical Birthday gift. They aren’t a new kite, ball or lovingly crafted accessory, but in truth they killed! The kids went nuts over them. Granted some, and admittedly some adults too, were a little taken aback (especially as they arrived during cake), but on the whole they went down (gulp) like a house on fire!

So why are my friends sabotaging my son’s birthday party with containers of worms? Well, for one, my son is a boy and likes all things creepy and crawly (especially if they are sanctioned as interior pets), but mainly because they are used for vermicomposting, a process of composting where in the bodily functions and general day-to-day activities of various species of worms – usually red wigglers, white worms, and earthworms – are used to create a heterogeneous mixture of decomposing vegetable or food waste, bedding materials, and vermicast. Vermicast, similarly known as worm castings, worm humus or worm manure, is the end-product of the breakdown of organic matter by a species of earthworm, in short, its poop.

Currently we produce a lot of compostable kitchen scraps as we host an organic produce club and eat almost exclusively home cooked food and our compost bin, amorphous fly blown mass that it is, currently servers a number of purposes in our lives, not least of which is its intended function of producing rich yummy soil (which in Miami is a rarity). Tom also delights in banging on the bin to dislodge bugs which he then feeds to the chickens, but we’ll go into his failed attempt as Buddhism later.

One worry of mine about becoming nomadic, living on a bus, or simply not having a trusted source of produce has been that despite burning veggie oil and running solar power we would be forced to be less green. The idea of buying non-organic food in bulk from Wal-Mart, sleeping in their parking lots, and producing tons of dead weight trash is frightening to me. So what we are working towards is something close to sustainability where by even without a garden much of our water and waste can somehow be reused. For example when we install the water tanks on our bus we will dedicate the gray water tank as a plant water tank and use only natural based toiletries like Dr. Bronner’s. The worms are a significant step in this direction because they make the act of composting more adaptable to life on the road. We can use the vermicompost the worms produce from our waste in our micro farm as a water-soluble nutrient rich organic fertilizer and soil conditioner and should find we have extra (like earthworms, red wigglers are hermaphroditic) we can use the worms as live bait for fishing or as treats for the chickens who, cooped up in the luggage bays, will no doubt be in need of a little TLC.

Sadly the worms are native to Europe, and not the US, but prior to our adoption of them (risking their dissemination in just about every state of North America and, if we make it that far, Central America too) they have been introduced (both intentionally and unintentionally) to every other continent except Antarctica, occasionally threatening native species. They also don’t like citrus fruits, but since I’ve found that eating citrus while breastfeeding gives Harper a diaper rash fresh squeezed orange juice has been off the menu anyway.

We don’t quite yet know how boarder control officers will feel about a bus teeming with its own ecosystem, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it… or not.

Today in preparation for Easter on Sunday we weaved our very own baskets! I think this was a little over my 5 year old’s head. Although he would check in on the basket’s progress now and again to snip some paper and give a nod of approval it is probably more a project for children 8 years old and older.

We were inspired by this tutorial, however we made some modifications. For the project you will need: newspaper, scotch tape, duct tape, stapler, school glue and scissors.

The night before we weaved our baskets I prepared the newspaper into folded rolls. The folded rolls should be about 3/4in thick and you will need roughly 9 short folded rolls (approx 2ft. long), which will make up the ribs of the basket and a couple  longer  folded rolls (approx 4ft. long).  I doubled up a couple of the shorter ones to make the longer strips. I then glued these strips and let them dry over night.

Start with your shorter newspaper rolls. Begin by weaving 4 strips together.

Keep on weaving till you have used all of the short strips. This woven surface will make the floor of your basket.

Start to shape the basket by folding the lose ends of the strips upward. Once you have folded each side you can then then weave the long strips through the ‘ribs’. To keep my forming basket from unraveling I stapled one end of my horizontal strips on to one of the vertical strips (see above far left).

Keep on weaving and with a little patience a basket will begin to materialize. When the strip you are weaving runs out simply lengthen it by stapling another strip to the end.

When you are finished weaving, fold the ends over and staple or tape them.

Trim off any extra paper.

We added a strip of neon orange duct tape along the rim of our basket for extra durability and to keep the staples from poking out.  We also added a handle made of duct tape for more efficient Easter egg gathering. Ribbon would also be beautiful, but we thought duct tape is just a more bit bad-ass.

Happy Merry Easter!

Here are some spring projects we have been working on.

Nest building through collage. Like birds we scavenged for twigs, paper leaves, and other bits and bobs to build a nest.

We glued our materials on to watercolor paper (any heavy weight paper will do), and built up as many layers as we could, bearing in mind we didn’t want our eggs to fall through! And here are the results:

Mateo's nest

my nest

We had built our nests and so we needed to make some eggs.

We painted a few wooden eggs (bought from the craft store for $1 each) with metallic acrylic paint.

Painted eggs and a nest we found

Mateo is excited about his eggs! They’re going on the nature table.

Our daily ritual: Collecting eggs from our chickens

Experimenting is the greatest opportunity to learn the ‘what if’s’ and ‘why’s’. Recently, Mateo and I have been learning about matter: solids, liquids and gases. Freezing water, evaporating water, and working out how the clouds collect all that rain water. Mateo has since become obsessed with putting things in the freezer to see if their states will transform the way water turns to ice. We have frozen all sort of things – paper airplane’s, clay balls in water – but the pinnacle of our freezing escapades has been our colored ice sculptures.

We added food coloring to water and froze it over night in random shaped containers. Mateo was so excited to find these blocks of colored ice in the morning. Voilà! – pure magic in his eyes.

We adhered the ice chunks together with salt. Mateo was amazed to find that salt melts ice.

We watched in fascination as salty little rivulets cut grooves into the ice’s surface. The melted, tinted water then pooled at the bottom of each sculpture and blended together into new, more beautiful colors.

Continuing with color… While out trash picking one day, Tom and Mateo found part of an old school pencil sharpener attached to a desk dumped in a neighbor’s yard. So they snagged it and spent the afternoon together sharpening colored pencils to create mounds of shavings dusted with layer upon layer of color.

Mmmmm!

Thought it might be time that I contributed… Here we are a little over a month with our bus and still ripping shit out – a bottomless pit for the moment and an endless source for debate.  As we inch our way towards the light at the end of a tunnel I’d like to contribute some of our homeschooling ventures. Since the majority of my time is spent making projects, experimenting and gallivanting around town with my children it seems an obvious place to start.

I have been homeschooling since the birth of my second child, Harper a little under year ago. To date it has been the most fulfilling (and sometime frustrating) choice I have ever made – much like getting the bus! Basically ditching school came down to a decision to either do or not do what I actually believe in.

What I have come to realize is this:

Conventional education despite having its place in our heavily fundamentalist country is, like so many systems within our culture, a lie. Not only does it fail for the most part to do what it purports to do, but it actually renders children incapable of doing what they naturally love – to learn.  School has jipped us out of the joy of learning as well as our ability to self-educate.

From a 1910 school book predicting technology in the Year 2000. Via appletechnician.com

So many parents are reliant on school to “complete” their children and give them the “education” that will set them soaring through life, but for the most part this is not the reality. I hated going to school as a child and I never learned anything I was actually interested in. I was always preparing for the real (adult) world by going to school, but ironically nothing they taught me in school had anything to do with the real world. Instead of pretending to prepare for some non-existent reality I want to give my children the opportunity to learn by experienceing the real world first hand. To that end the bus will be a great tool.

So the choice was clear for me. Since I have made the leap from unfulfilled arts professional to full-time parent and teacher extraordinaire, I am inspired again. My everyday no longer drags on with things I aught to and would rather not do, but instead is driven by the momentum of mine and my children’s curiosities. Ultimately we are FREE…and it feels very, very right.

I have started a branch of Transit Antenna in www.transitantennahome.blogspot.com, which will be solely dedicated to our homeschooling projects and ideas. Blogger has a great network of homeschoolers, but don’t worry about keeping up there as everything will be duplicated here in addition to our other, non-homeschooling related posts. Till next time.

The Transit Antenna kombuchas, like the bus, as yet unnamed.

Nothing, but in a similar vein to Rrejii from Regent and some other friends from the north we’d like to introduce you to the latest addition, or rather additions of Transit Antenna, the kombucha family, or at least one very far flung branch of it.

Enriching our lives with their slimy vinegaryness these not quite mushroom, not quite jellyfish, smell like a baby poop, kind of vomitus, kind of phlegmy organisms will be joining us on our travels and according to what we’ve been told, helping us alleviate that which ails us, even dirty pots and rust!

According to www.kombucha.org, kombucha has the potential to: eliminate or reduce heat rash, cut through grease thus making an excellent household cleaner, reduce or stabilize blood pressure, improve the condition of people with liver problems, clear finger fungus (whatever that is), flatten and fade old age and liver spots, help with eczema and psoriasis, ease carpal tunnel symptoms, eliminate or reduce heat rash, help older people look and feel younger, improve circulation, stop severe menstrual cramps, prevent and heal canker sores and oral irritations, prevent and help heal bladder conditions, help arthritis sufferers, remove rust (!), improve eyesight, cleanse toxins from the system, eliminate the desire for alcohol (yeah right!), return gray hair to original color, soothe burns including sunburn, prevent underarm swampyness when applied as a topical deodorant, repel insects including mosquitoes and fleas, take the sting and swelling from a bee sting, smash cold and flu symptoms, and even smooth out cellulite.

If that wasn’t unbelievable enough, a kombucha colony is also reputed by those in the know to make a great poultice. Now I don’t know much about our readers yet, but if someone strapped one of these to me in the middle of the night I think I would scream blue murder and cry all the water out of my body. Thank goodness they don’t move much save for rhythmic sloshing when you agitate their jars as the thought of a cluster of wriggling, leech-like creatures of an indefinable genus, all silently malevolent and pissing jism into my drink is enough to keep me awake for weeks!

Like Ming's hot hail fury, Sunday School can't prepare kids for this!

Of course kombucha is neither malicious nor predatory; nor he nor she. It is not even an ‘it’. Kombucha is a basically a tea, albeit a sour, unpleasant tea, made from the fermentations of an ever thickening visible mass of microorganisms that vaguely resemble a mushroom or an American pancake. Though the reality of its being alive makes we self-centered humans (particularly myself) ascribe a persona to it, it is in fact a benign jelly, much like snot or some other micro-community-based bodily secretion, with the only major difference being that while its appearance of an ill making, stagnating, ne’er-do-well is obvious, the kombucha colony and its product, kombucha tea, or simply kombucha, is supposedly actually very invigorating and good for you. That said, it seems I’m not really doing the phenomena justice, and as I hate the thought of replicating some hackneyed claptrap about kombucha do’s and don’ts almost as much as I am confused by the plausibility of its reproduction, for fear of discouraging kombucha virgins or boring those who are already in the know (shudder) I am going to refer now to notes bequeathed to me by Phaedra Robinson, a lodger at Lori’s and Richard’s house (the house where our bus is parked) and the kindly provider of the beginnings of our kombucha obsession.

The mothership, Phaedra’s current kombucha.

Kombucha Mushroom: SCOBY by Phaedra Robinson

Kombucha tea is the product of a fermentation process with a SCOBY (Symbiotic Colony of Bacteria and Yeast), some starter tea (or a little apple cider vinegar can be substituted to help with acidity level) and a fresh batch of tea and sugar. This naturally effervescent drink is often considered to be a health elixir, reputed to fight cancer, alkalize, recharge, and detoxify the body, assisting with digestion, metabolism, weight control, the immune system, aging and liver function. However, these properties have not been proven and there is info out there which claims that kombucha is potentially harmful to the liver or can have adverse allergic affects. It is a good idea to start drinking kombucha in small amounts; about one ounce of tea a day, accompanied by lots of water throughout the day. It should only be imbibed by those with healthy metabolisms, and probably not by anyone with yeast issues. It also contains a minuscule percentage of alcohol.

To make and transform one gallon:

Be careful not to contaminate it by always using very clean hands or non-latex gloves when handling it, and using food-grade glass containers for storage, and definitely no contact with metal.

o Use a stainless steel pot to boil one gallon of filtered water.

o Remove from heat and add one cup of sugar and about 5 (preferably organic) tea bags or similar bulk amount (the stronger the caffeine the better the kombucha will ferment, though I have read of some people using herbal tea, which undoubtedly takes much longer.)

o Steep for 20 minutes and dissolve sugar with stirring (do not caramelize over heat.) I use raw turbinado sugar and yerba mate because they are vegan and more affordable.

NOTE: Using agave will probably take longer for the kombucha, and may not truly be healthier for the end result since the kombucha organism eats the sugar as food and therefore does not leave its harmful affects. Also there has been debate over agave anyway regarding if it is truly a scam or not. But go ahead and experiment if you like.

o Let the tea cool to room temperature (or make a dense tea and dilute to one gallon with cool filtered water.)

o In a clean, wide-mouthed, glass jar, pour in the tea, at least ¼ cup of reserved starter tea or vinegar, and add the SCOBY.

Making a fresh batch - kombucha on the move.

NOTE: This SCOBY looks like a slimy pancake and can be white or yellowish, or even slightly pink or purple. It will grow to the size and shape of the container it is living within and produce “babies” which are layers of the colony growing. These layers can be separated and given to others to start more batches of tea. After using the original “Mother” for about 5 batches, it should be replaced with one of the babies. I compost my retired “mothers” with the speculation that the microorganisms will be good for the soil.

o The “mushroom” should float to the top but do not be alarmed if it floats at an angle or a little low at first.

o Cover the jar with a breathable cloth such as muslin and secure it with a rubber band to ensure that no flies or ants can enter and plant eggs.

o Store at 70-86 degrees Fahrenheit in a dark place or wrap the jar so that no sunlight can enter.

o Be careful of spores entering as well. If mold begins to grow then start over with a new SCOBY.

o The tea should be ready in 7-10 days and should be tart and slightly carbonated in taste.

NOTE: When Kombucha is left to ferment beyond the 7-10 day cycle I have used it as cooking or cleaning vinegar. Others use it for their pets (though my cat doesn’t like it) or for skin and hair rinses.

o Transfer the tea to glass or plastic containers with corks or plastic caps and store the “mushroom” culture in the fridge until you are ready to create a new batch. You may also add a bit of ginger or juice or something similar after its been made for variety. Yumm!

Mateo thinks kombucha is "good" because "it looks nice". Ahem.

Thanks Phaedra! So kombucha is a fermented tea that is imbibed for medicinal purposes (I learned that from Wikipedia!), but what about the history? the context? Well, despite looking like, sounding like and nowadays actually being something you might come across in a Chinese horror herb hawker’s hideaway, kombucha in fact originated in Russia in the late nineteenth Century.

Flying in the face of various tall tales of pre-Russian usage in Asia it would seem, from the trifling research I have done on the subject, that kombucha came to be not because of a investigative effort by a health conscious people, but rather because Russian peasants were tired of their staple of water and stale rye bread aka Kvas or English bread drink, a fermented beverage that despite containing 1.2% alcohol is hilariously considered by Russia’s gregarious standards to be non-alcoholic.

We often think of human evolution as being concluded, but for me human evolution as we understand it doesn’t really exist at all. Its not that I am a fundamentalist Christian, far from it, I dig Darwin as much as the next lost soul, but I question how a creature that began as a bacteria and will likely end up a computer can be naive enough to ascribe the label ‘human’ to its present, fleeting form. Nevertheless, in this 250,000 year heartbeat since our species began eating prepared foods (some evidence points to 1.6 million years but 250,000 is the accepted minimum that our bodies took to adapt to their present state – don’t believe me? go here) there has been an evolution parallel to our own – that of food. Much like the dodo, many foods (and methods of food preparation) have ceased to be, not because the plant or animal they were derived from became extinct or the methods of their production became impossible, but because we (largely meaning westerners) moved on, usually from the barren clutches of necessity to greener pastures. Some food stuffs of course such as plain rice, unleavened bread and unfortunately suet will probably always be a part of our diet, not strictly because they are great, but for reasons pertaining to cultural preference. We can call these foods insect foods, not because insects eat them, but because like the insect they have been around forever and will likely remain around forever. Some foods however, our dodo foods, foods like sheep’s brains, ‘only potatoes’ and hopefully soon so called ‘fast foods’ have been or will be proved to have, well, limited shelf lives. Being then that we naturally substitute poorly nutritious and/or foul tasting foods for healthier/more nutritious yummy foods as time goes by it seems odd to me, idiot that I am, that a repugnant water logged scab and its sour effluent would not only slip through the cracks of our fastidious selections (natural or not), but gain popularity.

Organic Kombucha Tea Beverages.

Ironically it seems that the key to kombucha’s success, much like tiger penis, relies not on a ratified understanding that it actually ‘works’, but simply that it might. In spite of Russia’s wealth of natural resources, the majority of its people have been and many remain unfortunately very poor. Presumably this extended period of economic strife endured by the former soviet union and its various prior incarnations made kombucha, in of itself a vile looking, smelling and tasting thing, a delicacy by default. This assumption combined with the fact that there is limited evidence supporting any purported benefits and a lack of studies being conducted, probably means that kombucha’s popularity is purely anecdotal. As such, despite our faith in it, kombucha appears to fall into the category of unsubstantiated health foods – it is certainly repulsive enough to conceivably be good for me (most good stuff tends to suck).

In conclusion the perpetuation of its very existence, even its inauguration to Transit Antenna, seems sadly, but fascinatingly to be the result of Russia’s prior inability to dig itself out of an economic hole owing to a number of contributing factors including, but not limited to Yeltsin’s corruption and mismanagement of the first eight post USSR years; poor infrastructure; poor agriculture; expansive boarders that cost a lot to patrol; constant road works necessitated by invasive climates; an aging population due to a low birth rate that is in turn aggravated by a high death and migration rate; and a short sighted investment on the part of the USSR in a now outdated vocational curriculum (sewing or something).

Its seems fitting then, as we embark on a life whose only certainty is comparative destitution – treading paths well worn by other similarly ideological, although no doubt less cynical individuals by road-testing (in our case literally) a speculative doctrine – that we should not only bring with us, but ingest on a daily basis, a potent reminder of the repercussions of gullibility and time’s privilege – evidenced by history’s penchant for turning a blind eye to failure and celebrating mediocrity – to bestow otherwise hateful things with a rosy, awe-making glow.

Bottoms up!

Detail of side elevation of bus made using Google SketchUp

We’ve had a busy month of prep work getting everything ready for the interior, but happily we’re just about to begin laying the floor.

Some amazing donations of equipment for the plumbing system and veggie conversion have come our way (especially from WVO Designs), but finding sponsors for materials and appliances for the living space has proven somewhat difficult. Regardless, thanks to a great windfall of plywood courtesy of Locust Projects that I salvaged from the installation An Uneven Floor by Leyden Rodriguez-Casanova and a few far less officiated dumpster dives we now have enough to start.

The opening of Leyden’s exhibition at Locust Projects – Bob and I attended before traveling to Arkansas.

Leyden’s exhibition after I broked it.

Truck full of wood. Laden you might say.

My wood so far (that table in the foreground is for sale if anyone is interested)

Harking the wisdom that less is more and design is everything we have leaned towards a no frills floor plan with the built components exhibiting a regrettable lack of diagonals and much to my disappointment absolutely no complicated hinge systems. The decision to go this route was arrived at when Sam pitted my expansive imagination against my tragic budget and restrained practical abilities. Sure I would have liked to live in a cross between a walnut dresser and Barbarella’s spaceship, but I can neither afford the time deemed necessary to master carpentry nor the buck to commission help – I have much more important things like working out if removing fresh air intake valves could be detrimental and what color tile to use in the bathroom to worry about!

Amidst my procrastination, sporadic actual work, and random, unsolicited acquisitions during unsocial hours the guys at Cabin Fever – who have offices just down the road from where we are parked – have been helping us fine-tune the interior design. Their insight and experience with small spaces has provided a much-needed dose of reality and although I am still tweaking like a madman I thought it was about time to go public…

Our initial design saw us relocating the bathroom from the rear of the bus to the center. Here we took into account the kids needing their own space and treated ourselves to a king size bed. At this point we were adamant that the bathroom should be moved, mainly because we wanted a king bed.

Still adamant that the bathroom should be moved we began to think about compacting the sleeping area, our insatiable greed for space robbing the kids of their privacy in favor of a palatial lounge. However, after working in the bus one day sensing time speeding by with no sympathy for our foibles we conceded to leave the bathroom where it is, instead extending the wall out slightly to allow standing room for a shower. Our plans of a luxurious boudoir thwarted, we began to consider alternatives for a smaller bed and compacted kitchen.

Our eureka moment came (or at least we thought it did) when we devised a free standing, port to starboard oriented kitchen as opposed to the typical bow to stern or vise versa on either side configuration. We felt that the side mounted kitchens you typically see in bus conversions and RV’s made the space feel too long and train-like and enjoyed the designy, playful nature of this open-plan style modular solution. Happyiness was also ours upon realizing that a queen bed was possible!

We thought that the obstruction this design would obviously cause to one’s movement about the bus was actually a good thing as it defined the living and sleeping areas well. Moving forward we strove to incorporate a drop down table/bed, and other functional ideas from common-or-garden RV’s that we deemed useful and coolifyable.

Set on the design for the table we prematurely congratulated ourselves by refining the bed design, giving Mateo some privacy in the form of a bunk level that at a later date can be modified to accommodate Harper who for now would nestle next to us in a cot-like configuration.

When we came to thinking about the design for the living space, we realized we could maximize storage and alley girth if we made the table benches into a kind of L shape, with the end bench doubling as a cupboard. The table would then drop into place forming a queen bed. The couch too, would make a queen when the cushions, one of which will have a face hole cut out of it for massage purposes, are unfolded.

Alas, after drawing chalk on the floor of the bus and meditatively pacing around trying to convince ourselves that our designs were solid, there just didnt seem to be enough space to realistically entertain the idea of a modular Kitchen and a massive semi permanent ‘projects table’. We are now at an impasse. A very exciting time.

Having gone from this…

to this…

and after finding this…

to this…

…I now have only to remove the heat ducts, fresh air intake valves and confirm to myself that the plan I have to remove the existing walls will work and we can finally lay the floor.

Yesterday, as we were on the verge of buying a double stainless steel kitchen sink for a knock down price from craigslist we came across a guy selling one of these mini kitchenettes…

The thing is way smaller than we wanted, but considering it only has a footprint of 30 x 25 inches and packs in a sink, a mini fridge, a beverage/toxins cupboard, a stove top, is made by Avanti (a reputable brand) and is available to us brand new for a quarter of its asking price our space greed has returned and we are now entertaining something like this…

Here the meeting of the bed area and the kitchen has been simplified from an overly complex pantry wall to a single sheet wall with ample storage underneath Harper’s bed. We don’t even know if the mini kitchenette will be able to run on the solar power system that we haven’t even got yet, but optimistically I have steamed ahead with the design regardless, setting the unit into a counter top with shelves on the right, a mushroom closet on top and a cupboard whose door hinges from the top to form extra counter space to the left. We had wanted a full oven, a full fridge, hell, even a freezer, but with such a small kitchen we can go crazy with home-made bean bags and twister, which lets be honest is really what Transit Antenna is all about!

So that’s where we are at. A pain in the ass midget kitchen and no ice cream (we are actually thinking of getting a dedicated chest freezer for game meat). Over the next few days, perhaps even hours, the design will change. Having discovered SketchUp just over two weeks ago my neck has developed a chronic ache and I am seeing everything in terms of 3D renderings. We’ve come along way without actually doing anything, but are still pining the loss of our modular kitchen so if anyone thinks they have a solution we’d love to hear it. In fact, why don’t we make it a competition: Send your entries on a postcard with your name, school year and home address to info at transit antenna. There’s no fee and the winning design, or parts of designs we like, will be built, badly. When working for free for us please consider that we require space for at least two queen beds, something to sit on and that everything be inherently, effortlessly, uncompromisingly cool.

Photograph courtesy of Kai Prol and Childhood Magic.

Please take the time to check out this awesome cyber exhibit – documentation of our new bus by budding young photographer and Mateo’s best friend, 4 and a half year old Kai Prol.

We are honored that this charming feature on Childhood Magic, a Miami based homeschooling blog, is not only Prol’s first official assignment, but also the first independent coverage of our recent inauguration to Transit Antenna. Its official folks!

http://childhoodmagic.blogspot.com/2010/02/camera-ready.html

Note the attention to detail, the zany color corrections, the crops, the pain staking annotations. In short, far more astute, matter of fact and generally useful than I could muster!

Remember kids: don’t touch fan, it could cut your finger!

Thanks Kai!

First sight of the bus, January 18th, 2010

Here follows an account of the retrieval and transportation of *as yet unnamed bus* indirectly from Springdale, Arkansas to Miami, Florida. Due to the regrettable length of this ultimately successful and rewarding experience and the many expound worthy moments therein I will break down the entire excursion from pre-departure to warming party into three subsections, punctuating each throughout with illustrative photographs taken both on route and arrival.

First acquaintances

Having researched various buses for a number of months, Sam and I finally settled on an MCI 9 in Springdale Arkansas. Of course we had not intended to go so far from Miami to acquire a bus – prior to finding this rig, the furthest we had previously entertained traveling to was Virgina – but a number of unfortunate forces, specifically miscommunication in one form or another, conspired against us.

The first hitch arguably occurred when the guy selling the bus listed it in the wrong state, the consequence of which was that Googling “MCI for sale in Florida” unearthed his bus listed as being in Springdale. The second occurred when we allowed ourselves to fall in love with the bus over its supposed relative proximity. Multiple hitches then occurred when the owner failed to catch on that I thought he was in Pensacola until our forth or fifth conversation, by which time we were emotionally, if not financially invested. “Pensicola?” he said “I’m in Arkansas. I thought you was in Pensicola!”

Preceding these events (which I trust with hindsight will grow funnier by the day) Bob Snead and I had been emailing following an article about Transit Antenna on Artlurker. Having written about the project, Sam and I decided we wanted to participate, perhaps join it, however when Walter croaked, Bob asked if we wanted to run with it solo. When our purchase of a bus became a tangible reality, Bob and I made plans to travel together to collect it.

Bob's first time in a Snuggie, January 16th, 2010.

After arriving in Miami on the morning of Saturday 16^th with a couple who I embraced as his family only to learn they were relative strangers, Bob spent two days with us playing with Christmas stuff (see Bob’s first time in a Snuggie) and crashing various BBQ’s and openings before Sam and the kids dropped us off at Miami air port on Monday morning.

Sam and the kids dropping us off at MIA, January 18th, 2010.

In the air, DFW to XNA, January 18th, 2010.

Our arrival to Arkansas via Dallas was nearly delayed when we kicked back a little too much in a fast food joint in Dallas airport and nearly missed our flight, but we arrived on schedule and met with Bill Watson, the previous owner/seller, a one legged, twelve cigar a day smoking Vietnam veteran…

Bill Watson's belt buckle.

…come country guitarist…

One of Bill's old 'get ups'.

…with a staggering vocabulary of colloquial non sequiturs and bag of tricks up his sleeve as long as the arm it covered.

Liars Club

The bus had been advertised as ‘not road ready’, a kind of ‘as is’ deal, but Bill, who had been in the bus business for thirty years or so reduced the price significantly when I offered to pay his son David, a forty eight year old diesel mechanic, plumber, hunting fanatic, and by his own father’s admission, a deadbeat dad, who lived among his weapons and trophy kills in a den under his parents house called ‘the dead zone’, to work on getting it in shape. Oddly, David bore a striking resemblance to Animal, the sketchy repo man who sold Bob, Seth, Dawn and Jamie their first two buses, Walter and Big Walter.

David Watson.

Bill had previously rebuilt the engine, but when his health failed resulting in the loss of his right leg he understandably quit the project. The bus then sat for five years – typically not a good thing – but when we arrived, despite Bill warning us that it ‘slobbered a bit’ and that I would be ‘disgusted’ we were pleased to find the engine purring sweetly.

Seeing the bus for the first time.

The engine.

We set up camp in an RV on site, an unexpected luxury considering we were prepared to freeze on the bus.

The interior when we arrived - where we had expected to be sleeping.

Bill’s house was cozy too, but with a TV on in every room, and every room filled with smoke and kitschy tourist tat we were initially glad to be mostly outside.

Kitschy tourist tat.

Over the next two days we worked on the bus’s electrical system, rewiring the lights, and fixing faulty sensors in preparation for the first test drive.

Bob.

Foolishly, the evening before said test drive, in the euphoric glow a home cooked meal (courtesy of Shirley, Bill’s wife, a living dichotomy between a sweet old Bible belter and an Arkansas Razor Backs fanatic) I settled up with Bill.

The next day, Bill was oddly no where to be seen and after driving the bus and realizing it wouldn’t shift out of second gear, giving us a top speed of around 20 – 25 mph, we found we could really use his help. After countless unsuccessful test drives in Bill’s absence, between which we made every plausible effort to fix the unknown problem by process of elimination from changing filters to adjusting the modulator, we learned, to our dismay, that Bill had slipped out in the early hours of the morning, crossed the state line into Oklahoma and was gambling away all the money I had given him the night before. Disheartened at our sudden apparent lack of leverage, the reality of a 25mph clunker loomed insurmountably as we slumped in response back to our RV and made the most of heat.

Bob, dejected after yet another unsuccessful testdrive.

Bill returned as we were turning in and with his prosthetic leg took the bus out on what Bob described as one of the scariest experiences of his life. Bill was clearly not able to control the vehicle and with the combination of darkness, tight and steep country lanes and being rusty the whole exercise amounted to little more than an extremely dangerous waste of time.

Bill Watson, Arkansas (not Pensacola).

By this point Bob and I were coming to the tail end of what Bob described as our ‘honey moon period’. For the next four or so days we stagnated, gave in to the temptation of the RV’s DVD player and out of frustration ragged the bus, hazards blazing and all, down to Fiesta Liquor on the outskirts of town to procure a variety of poisons ranging from Saki and red wine to bourbon which with the aid of pineapple juice we made into delectable ‘hot toddies’. In our languid mornings, Bill, before parading us around various mechanics trying to find someone who knew what the f they were talking about, got into the habit of treating us, often hung-over, to breakfast at Hardy’s, a second rate fast food burger joint in Springdale where every morning aged men (and one woman no-one spoke to) convene to form what Bill referred to as his ‘Liars Club’.

Sitting there with Bill and the likes of Darrel Mason who in his twilight years would sit motionless savefor  wobbling eyes and a waddle, waiting impatiently for free food which would propel his increasingly translucent body one day further toward its death, Bob and I made a pact never to become this.

Me, David, Bob - posing because we had nothing better to do.

Since arriving around eleven days previous we had gotten used to Shirley’s meals, taking liberties with the household amenities and generally sitting around with our thumbs up our asses. The mounting stresses of our poor wives struggling at home and sleeping alone had eaten us away from the inside out to the point where our thoughts, addled by countless flagons of sweet tea, had begun to digest themselves out of mercy.

I can’t recall what hit first, the realization that we had developed somewhat of a Southern drawl in our voices or the crippling reality that no-one in Arkansas could fix the bus for less that five grand, but after nearly choking on Bill’s second hand cigar smoke on the way back from the Liars Club one day it was clear that breaking point had been reached.

There’s no place like home

We were going nowhere fast…literally. Every day we would kid ourselves that today was the day we would get on the road, but with every turn of every wrench our hopes would rise only to be crushed. Bill’s repetitive mantras about his naivety regarding the bus’s knackered transmission and his condolences despite his refusal to refund us more than 2,500 became like Chinese water torture.

Eventually, perhaps far later than it should have, eating and shitting in Arkansas, waiting for different results from our increasingly futile samey endeavors became too much to bare. Enough was enough and so one evening, when the family were out at the funeral of Bill’s sons brother-in-law we resolved to execute a plan which in happier times we had disregarded as lunacy. With little time to spare before an old testament style blizzard descended and grounded us for another unbearable week we packed, jumped in the bus, and set out on an uncertain journey to the residence of a guy named Sam Caylor who lived 200 miles away in a little town called Rantoul, Kansas.

Parked in a Wal-Mart, Paola, Kansas.

We drove for hours. Ten to be precise. With no working heater on the bus, halfway through the night our feet froze and by the time we pulled into a Wal-Mart in Paola, Kansas, at around 5am we, or at least I, was in serious pain. Exhausted, numb to the core, but glad to be far, far away from Arkansas we bedded down for a few uncomfortable hours in the bus warmed by the glimmer of hope given to us by a phone conversation with Sam Caylor the day before and the heat packs we had surreptitiously stuffed into our socks in the Wal-Mart bathroom.

Rantoul, Kansas.

Rantoul turned out to be kind of a big things graveyard. Driving through the iconographic Kansas landscape we happened upon field after field full of chopped up machinery. One was full of bits of planes, and when we arrived to Caylor Supply, LLC we were both shocked and comforted to find it was situated in a field full of burned out, salvaged and butchered MCI’s.

Exceptional service at Caylor Supply, LLC, Rantoul, Kansas.

Within seconds of arriving, actually before I had chance to alight, Sam and his team had the bus up on two massive hydraulic jacks and were busy rummaging around inside the engine compartment with strip lights and wrenches. It seemed the problem we were having was of great interest to Sam as Allison 740 transmissions are in his words “typically bullet proof” and the fact that we could shift into some gears, including reverse, but not the higher gears, was intriguing his mechanical brain.

Caylor Supply, LLC, Rantoul, Kansas.

Sam’s workshop was amazing. Stuffed full of memorabilia including a section of a 1950’s diner it seemed to me, in my sleep deprived and frozen state, to be an aircraft hanger of the most wonderful warmth. Contrary to our experiences in Arkansas with ‘professionals’ who did little other than to discourage us at best, rip us off at worst, I was inclined, having recovered from being jilted by Bill’s misrepresentations to throw myself and what little trust I had left intact at Sam’s feet.

Sam and Archie comparing valve bodies.

After a test drive they pulled the valve body off the transmission, but could find no fault. After pulling two other transmissions from buses sitting out in the field and swapping valve bodies around as I dozed and ate canned tuna the bus was fixed.

The two transmissions, sans valve bodies, which Sam pulled to find a match.

In a frantic rush to close up by 5pm we gathered what parts we could use, traded what we didn’t need in exchange for them, switched up our tires to the best configuration we could muster and grinned from ear to ear when Sam told us he would only charge us for labor. In less than six hours, Sam Caylor and his team (son Archie and colleague Lee) had achieved for a fraction of the cost what a weeks worth of busting our guts in Arkansas could not. With a song in our hearts we hit the road.

Heros. From left to right: Sam Caylor, Lee and Archie.

The drive back to Miami was certainly faster than the drive to Kansas, but not without tedium. That evening we were pulled by cops for swerving and interrogated. A coolant leak before sunrise the next morning somewhere in South Missouri was a rude awakening. Later that same day somewhere on the outskirts of Memphis we hit the tail end of the blizzard and crawled through snow drifts with frozen wipers and two inches of ice built up on the front of the bus.

Bob driving through the blizzard.

Just outside Montgomery Alabama we had a potentially dangerous blow out because Bill, in his infinite wisdom had put different sizes together in a pair on the right back end (also referred to as dualies). Just before entering Florida the cops pulled us (me) again, this time searched the bus for drugs. Shortly after that Bob threatened to shove a page from the manual detailing the air system up my ass. Half way down Florida Sam and I got into an argument about money via text messages that Bob could scarcely afford. For the last four hours of the journey I drove convinced we were about to die.

Me freaking out in my underwear.

Around 12 hours after we had woken up to a coolant leak in the freezing cold I pulled up outside Lori Kelly and Richard Haden’s place, some friends just across the river from where Sam and I live who have a drive big enough to accommodate the bus and a wood workshop (Richard is a sculptor) that will no doubt be crucially convenient when we begin the conversion.

Parked in Miami.

Taking what little we could carry, including half a bottle of Old Crow that I had bought Bob after losing a bet about whether a meal we had in Arkansas was rice or pasta, we climbed down from the bus and into the back of a friends truck, who drove us home only to see me turn a pale green color and pass out on my lounge floor.

Bus warming.

Bus warming.

Two nights ago we held a bus warming party. Having spent every living penny we owned getting the bus to Miami, Sam and I were happy to have friends who plied us with beer, champagne, almond biscuits and pork loin. We moved a stereo onto the bus so that people could dance, and when the kids got sleepy, we sat chugging beers around a campfire with the perfumes of nature sighing on our skins.

Fire.

Over a week has now passed since we brought our precious cargo, the ship itself, home. Home, that word is going to take on a new meaning hopefully real soon! Here in Miami, busy working on floor plans, the misery, slop, and flagrant racism of Arkansas seems a million miles away. No more drives into town, no more cigars, no more David and his questionable machismo anecdotes and rants about Mexicans. No more longing.

I’ll end this now. Apologies for the length, but I kind of needed to get this out of my system. I’d like to dedicate this post to Sam Caylor, without whom we would have almost certainly returned to Miami empty handed and in the debt of Bill Watson. Before Bob returns in March to assist us with the conversion to WVO we’ll be working on floor plans, stripping and insulating the interior and waiting patiently for the right name to come along. Suggestions welcome, we’ll keep you posted.

Bus family.

Mateo.

Video of the Walter crew crossing the Salton Sea in December of 2008.

Mateo, Tom, Sam.

Hello. My name is Tom, and together with my wife Sam, and our kids Mateo (4) and Harper (0) we will be traveling around the country for an indefinite period of time proudly under the guise of TRANSIT ANTENNA.

This being our first post, we don’t want to wax lyrical on everything we intend to do because a) we don’t like making promises we can’t keep and b) (perhaps most importantly) we don’t really have a plan.

Home base, El Portal, Miami.

From our base in Miami where we work on art stuff we’ve been following the group now for over a year, living vicariously through their many trials and triumphs and so while it’s a real honor to be taking the reigns, we fully understand that the life is by no means glamorous. Actually, about half the people we talk to about the project think we are crazy. Thankfully the other half are really inspired, and it’s these individuals that are giving us the strength of character necessary to venture out on this particular limb. Both a carrot and stick and a shadow, the mindset of being TRANSIT ANTENNA will likely sometimes be our incentive and other times simply underpin our activities; a means by which others can identify us and we ourselves can justify our existence, purposeful or not.

Harper, Tom.

For the next few months we’ll be keeping you up to date with the conversions (both WVO and interior living space) and sharing our various avenues of research with you. Rather than wait until we have polished, considered contributions you’ll be treated (with any luck regularly) to ideas in progress, barely crystallizing thoughts and snapshots of our formative nomadism. While the TRANSIT ANTENNA alumni will continue to contribute as ever you will probably notice some changes to the website as new sponsors are added and our pictures, trickling down through wordpress plugins via Flikr, expand the gene pool of the TRANSIT ANTENNA image library, perhaps changing it beyond recognition.

Mateo.

This is something we are mentally, if not practically, prepared for, and although its going to be at least five months before we get rolling we wanted to walk you through the process of change, get you used to our voices and hopefully inspire you to journey with us from the comfort of your personal computers as we journeyed with Bob, Dawn, Taylor, Jamie, Seth, Amy, Joe, and Kentridge.

Sam, Harper.

We imagine that living nomadically is going to be a huge learning curve. No doubt it will be hard to come to terms with living in a tight space and spending every waking minute together. Kind of surreal, kind of scary, but ultimately the most simultaneously all consuming and exciting thing we have ever done.

For the kids, especially Mateo we imagine it will be both adventurous and painful to be away from friends and family, but beyond all of this, irrespective of whether this is a good idea or not, whether we will last or not, it’s a really good exercise in having a completely over ambitious idea and following through with it.

See you around!

Mateo.

1. Charlie made some tasty sangria.
2. Sonia asked us to say a prayer for Walter. Then she laid down traction racks for her tires and tried to push the bus with her truck. She got a few feet before sinking, so next the guys tried to push the bus using man power.

3. Dawn’s camera bag somehow transported itself from her car to the bushes.
4. Builder Bill became worried that the folks seated behind the truck would get decapitated by flying traction racks. Sonia tried again, this time facing the other way.

5. All the pie was eaten.
6. Some guy said he was going “to wait 45 days and see how much [he could] get for the bus.”
7. Sonia and a few boys tried to lift another boy using only their index fingers. It didn’t really work. Then Sonia walked them through this ritualistic (arbitrary) positioning of their hands over the boy’s head. Then they tried to lift the boy again and he flew up into the air.

8. Charlie ran out of sangria.
9. Eddie showed up with his Ford F-350 and, with a little man help, successfully pushed the bus into the hole before sunset.

10. Charlie kicked almost everyone out and started playing music. It was dark but nice under the canopy that covers Charlie’s outdoor living room. Bob mistook a dog named Spider Monkey for Kentridge. They look almost exactly alike, and Spider Monkey is a really good dog, too.

On the morning after Walter’s death, when we called Good Sam for a tow, we didn’t really know whether Walter would end up in the desert, someone’s backyard, or a junkyard. We preferred the desert over the other choices, for in the desert, the bus wouldn’t be crushed and become part of some enormous inert heap of metal waste. Instead, it would become a memory with a physical correlative, a monument to the stories we’ve created on the bus. The desert seemed a fitting place. In the desert memories are left to deteriorate against only time, (when they’re made of steel and fiberglass) the elements, and (when they’re as inhabitable as Walter is) the occasional human resident.

Good Sam needed a destination, so we gave them an address in Niland where the squatter’s haven Slab City is located. One of few free campgrounds in the US that tolerates permanent boondocking, Slab City is located on a retired military training base called Camp Dunlap in the desert between the Chocolate Mountains, a military bombing range, and the Salton Sea.

(Last year around this time, our first goal was to visit the slabs, but we missed the turn and ended up in Bombay and stayed for a couple of months. When we finally left Bombay we stopped by the slabs for a few hours. I had a conversation with a man named Victor who got his news from talk radio. He told me Obama thought there were 57 states [somehow this meant Obama’s presidency would ensure an Arab world takeover] and that I was the first liberal he’d ever met. So it goes.)

With the tow truck drawing nearer to the bus, Seth, Taylor, Kentridge and I jumped in the Sneads’ new Mercedes and drove toward the Salton Sea and Slab City where we would attempt to find a suitable place for Walter to spend the end of days, not knowing exactly what to expect. We drove around following leads from the library to the church to the Oasis Club where many of the oldtimers hang out. By some twist of fortune, we found our way to Container Charlie, Slab City’s preeminent art enthusiast and aspiring curator.

That was two weeks ago. Tomorrow we will push Walter into the desert grave we dug with our bare hands (with help from shovels and pick axes) in the back of Charlie’s camp. Charlie has graciously accepted our gifts of various second-hand belongings including our forty-foot mobile home (which will only be slightly inconvenient once we bury it at a slant). We’ve invited some folks from Slab City and our dear friends from Bombay Beach to a wake followed by a final collaborative effort to lay Walter to rest.

DIGGING WALTER’S GRAVE: DAY 1

DIGGING WALTER’S GRAVE: DAY 5

When the wind blows in the desert it whips up dust like plumes of smoke, reducing visibility to a few hundred yards and sometimes feet, and though you can’t always see the thousands of tiny particles flying at your face, you can feel them collecting on your skin and know you’re breathing them in: the dust of plant matter, minerals, human waste, trash, the detritus of the bombs the military has dropped every night for decades now in the mountains to the east. Out here the dust blows everything past and present into great swirls that will blow on into the future against one another until they become infinitesimally small.

I imagine Walter a decade from now. As long as Charlie’s here, he’ll be taken care of. But Charlie too may feel life pulling him away. In that case, I hope Walter doesn’t become a meth lab, or get towed and crushed by whoever oversees this land. I hope he’s right where tomorrow we’ll leave him. At any rate, I’m sure he’ll have a few stories to tell.

Walter’s Burial from Seth Gadsden on Vimeo.

I know I have delayed in announcing this to EVERYONE, but, yes, I have received my new computer! I got it about a month or so ago. It is the first computer that I have ever owned, because, of course, I’m 11 years old! It runs fantastically and it all I hoped for. I did indeed get a very malicious virus from going to a certain site, but that was easily resolved with Windows Vista’s Time Machine feature, which allows you to restore your windows files to a certain date. My parent’s call it my ‘Peacock Laptop’ because of it’s cool design.

The battery lasts about 6 to 7 hours just idly surfing the internet, listening to music, and uninstalling stuff. Playing a game, however, results in it lasting 3 hours at maximum. I hope this laptop lasts a good few years! Thank you everyone for supporting my fundraiser! I hope you all enjoy the paintings you bought!

Be good,

Andrew.

Despite our speed of only 65 mph (and much slower going uphill), things have recently been changing very rapidly on the bus. 21 days ago we quit being Alaskan Butchers and went back to life on the road. 19 days ago a veggie fuel line cracked and we witnessed the bus come almost to a complete stop going uphill on the Alaskan highway. 18 days ago Jamie had her “almost thirty” birthday with little fanfare. 17 days ago we re-entered the contiguous United States. 16 days ago Dawn finally made a delicious cake for Jamie’s birthday. 15 days ago we visited a new friend in Bellingham, Washington and I made the mistake of eating some questionable Carnitas at a pretty upscale Mexican restaurant. At 4 in the morning (I guess technically 14 days ago) I watched the new Lindsay Lohan movie “Labor Pains”, after puking in a Walmart Super Center toilet. 14 days ago we fixed an air line leak and made our way into Olympia, Washington to visit Stephen Eggleston (I met him online after he stumbled upon my website in search of the actor Bob Snead made famous by his role of operator in the medical alert commercial “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up”). 13 days ago I randomly had a beer mid-afternoon in downtown Olympia with the dude who started punkrockpermaculture.com and fought with Dawn about where we wanted to live after we park the bus (still unresolved). 12 days ago we found ourselves in Portland, Oregon visiting my childhood best friend dalas verdugo (I knew him before he officially dropped the second L in Dallas). 11 days ago I ate pork again at another Mexican restaurant, and didn’t get food poisoning. 10 days ago we left Portland and I felt guilty that I didn’t visit any of the new friends I made during our last stint in Portland. 9 days ago we arrived in Reno so that Seth and Jamie could fly to a childhood friend’s wedding in Washington, DC. 8 days ago Dawn and I spent the early morning hours gambling in a Casino for the first time in our lives and won $1500 at the craps table of the Grand Sierra. 7 days ago we lost $150 in the Grand Sierra and I side swiped a street sign in downtown Reno. 6 days ago Dawn, Taylor, and I took the bus to Elko, Nevada so that Taylor could try Basque food (he read about Elko in a book titled “Zack’s Lie”, and it was the only place he requested we visit). 5 days ago we finally arrived in Elko and ate Basque food at the Nevada House restaurant (most memorable dish was the Croquettes which seemed to be deep fried balls of mashed potatoes mixed with sausage). We told our story to the waitress and she got us 30 gallons of veggie oil without us asking! 5 days ago we left a generous tip for the waitress at the Nevada House restaurant. 4 days ago we hiked in the Ruby Mountains and afterwards I realized the bus was hemorrhaging engine oil, about a gallon or more every hundred miles. 3 days ago we made it back to Reno, picked up Seth and Jamie at the airport, lost another $150 at three different casinos, and decided our best options where to park, bury, or destroy the bus somewhere near the Salton Sea, 583 miles away. 2 days ago I sideswiped yet another sign, just before Dawn and I bought a 1981 stick shift diesel Mercedes-Benz 240d for the exact amount we had left from our winnings. The car is named “Reno.” It will soon have dice on the mirror. Yesterday Dawn spent her second day ever at the wheel of a manual transmission vehicle and cut her hair very short. Taylor took a shower. The bus leaked about 6 gallons of oil on a 500 mile trek. Seth drove the bus while Jamie did research for our next stop to add engine oil- Palm Desert, CA. And then – about 10 miles from the exit on I-10 at 10:12pm Walter took his final breath and blew a head gasket. Today we are waiting for the tow truck so that we can take Walter to his eternal resting spot 60 miles away – Slab City.

We crossed the border a few days ago at Sumas in Washington. The notorious efficacy of the US border patrol spared us no excitement as we tried to reenter our country:

So, we roll in at about 10:00 pm, and after seeing the plants growing in our dash board, the BP officers ask us to park the bus for an agricultural inspection. We enter the office where we are told to wait for the verdict. We feel confident of our innocence. We’ve crossed to and fro America a few times now and have never been in trouble except when an agricultural inspector at a California check point took from us a cotton plant that we liberated from a field somewhere in Texas.

With the door still swinging at our rears, an officer behind the counter engages us with a string of typical questions regarding the who what when where why of our travels. He’s an imposing figure, but void of physical aggression. He places his palms face down on the counter, and as he speaks he tilts his head ever so slightly to the left then the right and holds his chin upturned just enough that his gaze follows the spine of his nose like an arrow aimed our way. Below, his lips barely move, and no syllable falters. Below his neck his body stands columnar. We answer his questions to the very best of our ability. Our responses elicit only subtle responses from him whether he delineates the law regarding our suspect items or, satisfied with our answers, nods and moves on to the next question.

First, he asks about our plants. We have a few cacti, some herbs, a tomato plant and green beans growing (or heaving) on the dash. Where did we get the cacti? he asks. Seth says, South Carolina. His fingers rap the counter once. He warns us of the destruction to fragile ecosystems caused by harvesting flora from nature. Then he asks us about produce. We launch into a litany of all the fruits vegetables we possess, detailing the stores where we purchased them and accounting for every head of broccoli and clove of garlic, checking our recollections against each other’s like penitents before the day of judgment. Next he asked us about meat, particularly wild game. Uhhh…we have a whole cooler full of wild game products we got in Alaska. (We’re not really sure what all we have.) Again, the officer responded with such tactical calm–the kind to make you fearful of the punitive energy that must be welling up inside him. He explains that next he would ask us to see our hunting licenses because without them being in possession of wild game raises the suspicion that we are poachers.

You see, he says, We have many laws to uphold here.

We don’t have licenses, only a story about working at a meat factory. Does he believe us?

Then he calmly pulls on a pair of gloves and asks, Is there anything else, anything at all, you would like to tell me before I search your vehicle? We shake our heads, retreat to the bench and watch as the officer and two others head out to the bus. The officers not one second out the door and we remember two things: our massive stock of vegetable oil and our little, dirt slaked pet, Rreji. We wonder the fate of our pet and our sausages.

We sit there for probably a half hour, looking out the window, waiting for the officers to emerge and play their card. Other travelers come in, answer questions, sit and wait while their vehicles are searched, and are then granted freedom, both to use the BP bathroom (which we may not until the completion of the search) and to enter the US. Then Taylor notices some commotion around the outside of the bus, an officer signaling with his flashlight for additional officers to come. A line of men in black jog over and climb aboard. What on earth could they be doing? I wonder.

A few minutes later, one officer returns to the office, a look of exasperation on his face, and says,

Do you guys run that bus on vegetable oil?

Yes.

Scratching his head: Did you do all that yourselves?

Yes.

Man, that is awesome!

(laughter and sighs of relief fill the room) Thanks! we say.

Then our interrogator returns gently smiling and equally interested in learning about our story.

We see a lot of vehicles through here, but we’ve never seen anything like that, and that’s a compliment, he says.

We give them cards with our website on it, and ask if they want any reindeer sausage which their stringent protocol prohibits them from accepting. (Their protocol also prevents them from getting their pictures taken while on duty. I know this already: When we crossed into Canada from the US the first time, an agent confiscated my stun gun, which my parents have asked me to keep close since college and I have subsequently forgotten about in drawers and other dark places. My stun gun, alike a number of other self-defense tools [weapons, whatever you call them], happens to be illegal in Canada, and has now been “abandoned to the Crown to be destroyed.” I begged the officer who wrote me the citation to wrinkle his brow and give me a finger wag for a picture, but he said he could not even if he wanted to.)

So all ends well. We say goodbye to our friends at the Border Patrol and head to Bellingham, WA, perhaps one of the sweetest little towns in the Pacific Northwest, whose climate, I’m convinced, grows the most beautiful, luscious flowers.

Hello all. Just checking in to let you know that right now we’re pit-stopping at the Toad River Lodge, only 117 miles from Fort Nelson, BC, making good time on our trip back to the lower 48.

We had some trouble getting out of the driveway at Indian Valley Meats back in Alaska. The crew there told us to hang out so we could attend their annual hoorah at the Brown Bear Pub. Walter took about five hours and four potfulls of motor oil boiled on the stove to get himself cranked. But since we hit the road, he’s been cranking fine. Until next time…

We also work with an excellent meat cutter named Steve Mendive.

This is a picture of him getting bucked by a wood bison and this is a link to a special about him on MSNBC. You can watch the video there.

And why, you ask? Believe it or not…(drum roll, please…)

WE HAVE JOBS! (Temporarily, of course, so no one should worry that we’re taking up permanent residence here (though it’s tempting).

After arriving in Anchorage about a month ago, we made a new friend in the Alaskan salmon business who sent us to the Alaskan meat people, more specifically to Doug Drum, a.k.a. Mr. Alaska, and his daughters who run Indian Valley Meats. Mr. Alaska has been great to us. We’ve been busy turning salmon mush to tasty jerky and breaking down all kinds of wild game brought in for processing. Blood guts vats of meat and sausage slime equal good times. We’re gathering skills here. Alaskans know, when shit hits the fan, they’re still gonna eat. We certainly have been.

And in between boxing dog treats and slicing tenderloins, we’ve been celebrating, too. First, with Taylor’s birthday, topped off with a flaming igloo ice-cream cake, courtesy of Dawn, and then with Dawn’s “Almost 30″ birthday (what’s the point of saying 29 anyway?), which we toasted with Long Island iced teas down at the Indian House bar.

As a Welcome-to-Alaska gift, Doug treated us to a special trip to the Kenai Wildlife Refuge. The Kenai’s rocky mountains lie across the inlet from where we sleep in Walter. Every morning when we step out of the bus, we take in the view before heading up to work, just a driveway’s climb to the processing plant. They swell up to jagged peaks that now gather powdery snow. So for Memorial Day weekend, Doug offered to fly us over the inlet to drop us off in the middle of the mountains for some total isolation from non-Trantennas. So two-by-two we climbed into Doug’s little biplane for a twenty minute flight out to Trapper Joe Lake. Before taking off, Doug’s daughter called and begged him not to overload the plane. “Oh, I would never overload,” Doug said, later admitting, “We’ve got three pounds of shit in a two-pound bag!”

Dawn and I took the second trip over. During the flight, Doug demonstrated his snazzy GPS device which practically flies the plane for him, and then banked the plane down and over our shoulder in search for bears along the tree line where they hang out to catch delicious little frogs. During our sweep of the tree tops, Doug asked us if we were the types to get sick and when we said no he bounded into funny stories about people puking in nose dive. One guy puked in his stocking hat. Doug opened the door and told him to “Throw it out! I’ll buy you a new one!” to which the guy chucked it out over the inlet, shedding himself of the humiliation. Then he realized he lost his dentures in the mix. “There’s no way we’d get those back!” Doug chortled.

A few minutes later we were approaching Trapper Joe Lake on which sat a little aluminum john boat occupied by Seth and Taylor, who arrived first at the cabin. Doug wanted to “scare the crap out of ‘em” and pointed the props right at the boat pulling up only whipping up enough of a torrent to blow the hair piece off a bald spot. He landed in the lake and taxied over to Trapper Joe’s cabin where he dropped us before speeding off to pick up Bob and Kentridge and the remainder of our supplies.

The little domicile housed us all (with one on the floor) and Kentridge for the three nights we stayed. We spent most of our time resting, reading, and fishing for rainbow trout on the lake. Rainbow trout are sneaky fish, slowly stalking the shiny metal lures before chomping down. Then when they realize they’re hooked, they’ll fight until they’re bloody, flying into the air and stressing the line. But despite losing many lures to their razor teeth, the fish did not prevail. Bob and Dawn managed to bring in enough to feed us and then some for our time there.

And I’ve never heard such a silence as I did sitting on the lake, only the sound of ourselves, the occasional plane or the howling of wolves echoing through the valley to interrupt it. Oh, I can’t forget the squeaky oars.

.

When Doug picked us up, the lake was calm, but the wind was building on the other side of the inlet, so we had to hurry. Bob and Kentridge, round one, Dawn and Taylor, round two, and Seth and I hung back just in case the weather didn’t permit a third return. With the kid and the dog gone, Seth and I decided to fire the gun Doug gave us as a precaution against the bears we didn’t see: a 357 magnum.

Taking turns, we sent slugs across the lake and into the wild. After all, it’s Alaska. Grab y’er hand cannon and go get lost.

A performance celebrating the 40th Anniversary of Apollo 11 in Regent, ND. The moon-lander was left behind as a road-side addition to the Enchanted Highway. Special Thanks to Gary Greff and all 250 residents of Regent.

The night before Seth and I disappear into the Denali Wilderness for three days of adventure, I can’t sleep. My restlessness comes not from fear about living in grizzly country where the rangers warn, “You will be the only people you see. You must be ready to save yourself if you get in trouble,” or from fear of the hike’s difficulty. In fact, the difficulty is precisely the attraction—extremity has a way of cleansing the body and the mind. The objective of such an adventure is of course to spend time in nature, but also to exhaust oneself to a point beyond worry and fear, beyond thought.  

After packing on Sunday night, I stand outside the bus and stare at the cool glow of the sun setting just beneath the horizon. It’s 12:30 am. That the sun never really disappears is a strange feeling. It simply tucks itself in for a few hours before embarking on its slanted course through the sky, feeling forever like early morning, then early evening forever again, inviting insomnia. I know I need to get some sleep, but I’m ready to go get lost (with a map and compass, of course).

I try to sleep. Still wide-eyed at 5:59 am, I ask Seth if he’s ready to go. A second later my alarm buzzes, my hand already poised to silence it. Within a couple of hours we’ve packed, eaten breakfast, and are being let off the camper bus at the border of Unit 29, our very own eighty square miles of uninterrupted wilderness to explore.

From the road we follow Tattler Creek for a couple of miles, climbing about 1,000 feet up the rock bed to where several streams draw lines between the mountains all around us before merging into the creek. A curious ermine inspects our bag, running almost up to my boot. An eagle flies overhead and perches on a rock ledge above our path.

Our goal for the day? To summit Sable Mountain at nearly 6,000 feet. We drop our packs and hoof it up a stream leading to the top. Although climbing the water slick rock steps of the stream makes for easier travel, we’re eager to ascend, so we move to the steep tundra which provides no natural steps but rises from the drainage quickly. Hiking without trails is a different animal than what I’m used to. With each step we climb a foot or so vertically while taking care to sink the sides of our boots into the moss to prevent our ankle from turning sideways. A flat spot is hard to find, but when we find one we greedily steal it as we would a seat on the train after an exhausting day. I’ve never appreciated flat ground more.

Eventually the tundra breaks into even steeper scree slopes. Now with each vertical step, I slide down several inches before my footing takes hold, sending rocks tumbling down below us. I swear I’ve never worked so hard in my life to push through the dizziness and fatigue, but the reward is immense: each step reveals more of the Alaska Range, whose glaciers and snowy caps motivate us to surmount one rock cluster after another until we’ve reached the summit from where all things descend. This view comes with a price, but it’s well worth it. Seeing as how 80% of Denali’s visitors never leave the road, I feel privileged to be on top of Sable.

The other creatures high on the mountain are Dall sheep. They graze at high altitudes so they can spot their chief predator the wolf as he approaches. Because he cannot employ stealth in such openness, he seldom follows the sheep so high. Their tracks under our feet trace paths toward even steeper slopes than we dare to traverse. I’m impressed by the tenacious woolly creatures. While we never catch up with them, we spy them off in the distance, sprinkling the ridges like lint, always on a different ridge of the mountain than we’re on, either ahead or behind us, as though they always know where we are. 

When we finally reach the top, we have climbed almost 2,000 vertical feet in less than two miles. Our ascent path is so steep we can’t see it from the top. Instead the slopes appear to fold underneath themselves creating vertiginous bulges that skew distance and space and scale and make me feel like I’m falling backwards, not up, the mountain. A quick glance at the horizon, and I’m upside up again.

With legs like overcooked noodles, we regain our packs, located about twenty feet from a giant bear hole, and eat a lunch of beef jerky, tuna fish and crackers, and M&Ms, while contemplating our next feat: a 4,500 foot mountain we must overcome to get to where we think we’ll make camp. We decide to take off before the food coma sets in. Going up is par for the course, but once at the summit, we see the valley on the other side roll out below us like a giant, undulating carpet. We see the stream leading to the Big Creek where we plan to make camp:  a nice, flat, green hill next to the river.

Getting there’s a little tricky. It’s not that bad, really, just an hour or so spent descending, or rather sliding down an interminably steep slope of loose scree. Then another hour or so crossing hills covered in squishy tundra and sprawling berry bushes. At this point we’re fatigued and my ankles twist and I stumble at almost every step because there’s no way to know the depth my foot will sink in the mossy pillows or where it will find an even deeper crack hidden between them. I learn quickly that walking directly on the bushes provides for more stable passage, even though I imagine myself as a giant breaking the limbs of the poor creatures underneath my feet.

When we arrive at “the Thumb,” our prospective camping spot which we named for its shape, my feelings of remorse change. Instead of standing on a smooth, flat, hospitable hill we thought we saw from the mountaintop, we’re instead neck deep in thick trees atop tundra. One minute of walking through this terrain and the cheap rain pants we bought at Wal-mart for $4 are trailing behind our ankles.

We descend to the river to make camp in the rocks and forest, both of which are cause for discomfort. Scat and prints of almost every animal we can think of cover the ground. Shed moose antlers shine white through the low brush. Furry appendages and fur balls hawked up out of giant carnivorous throats lie moist and matted on the ground. While we eat dinner in the middle of what we surmise is a major moose crossing, I project into the hills Public Service Announcements thanking the animals for their cooperation and apologizing for any inconvenience our intrusion has caused.

But despite signs of imminent carnage all around us, we sleep undisturbed and rise on our second day to another challenge, an endless rain that compels us to hang around camp, leaving only to collect blueberries on the hill. Animals in the wilderness are almost always on the move, scouring the hillside for food, avoiding the paths of predators.

However, when cold and wet, we humans tend to be shivery and quiet and unwilling to make our location known to animals. During our time on blueberry hill, we encounter a moose coming over the ridge—we think it crosses through our camp during our absence—and a grizzly bear who’s doing what we’re doing, grazing on berries, just on another hill altogether.

We’re comforted by the knowledge of our superiority to beasts, including the not insignificant ability to collect things in one of our species most ingenious inventions, the zip lock baggy. As we hoard berries for future desserts, we lick the sweet juice from our discriminating fingertips and opposable thumbs, feeling sorry for the quadrupeds that must take the whole branch, leaves and all, to consume just a tiny morsel of fruit and certainly cannot take any with them.

We spend our final night unmolested in the tent (which to an animal must appear the oddest object in the wilderness, especially when a terrifying rendition of the Star Spangled Banner erupts from it each morning). As though the weather hasn’t been wet enough, it starts snowing as we don our parkas, pack our gear, and get ready to hike out along Big Creek.

We’re learning to adapt to the Alaska climate and to the mountains, which make their own weather. We walk for miles through rock bed and dense forest, following moose trails through the thick tree stands. The river goes on for a few miles, passing from the south to the north of the western edge of Igloo Mountain. Just north of Igloo we turn southeast toward the road and enter miles of soggy bog heading to the edge of the wilderness. I keep my spirits up with song, “We’re TRUDG-ing THROUGH the TUN-draaa, TRUDG-ing THROUGH the TUN-draaaa, TRUDG-ing THROUGH the TUN-draaa To DAAAYY!”

I have to admit that the last few miles walking through the tundra’s dense, waist-high brush kind of freak me out. But then I realize that my boots—just another thing that separates man from beast—are impervious to the bog’s murky waters. During the walk I step in muddy water above my laces so many times, but I feel hardly any dampness. Impervious.

I brag to Seth about my boots which I bought for $8 used at an army surplus store. His feet have been wet since day one.  For the remainder of the walk, the landscape rotates between open, berry-bushed tundra, slimy bog, thick forest, and spruce mazes. Seth and I fight our way through dense tree stands that seem to be blocking our access to the road, forcing us north when we need to be going east. We come upon a lake we must circumnavigate. Seth says, “It seems like it’s going on forever and ever, huh?” We keep moving.

By the time I’ve convinced myself that I’m really not a wimpy, hairless creature stuck in the wilderness, but a survivor of extremity, the road suddenly appears before and then beneath our feet, eliminating the need for self-confidence, a point that despite our fatigue feels a little disappointing. As we celebrate with embraces, the wilderness immediately recedes in our imaginations even though it’s still only a few steps away. We remember for the first time during our adventure that it is our two-year wedding anniversary.

I told Seth on the mountain that I thought the experience would be like childbirth, almost too painful to bear but a pain easily forgotten and replaced with an overwhelming desire to do it again. I wondered how long it would be before I felt again like hauling myself up and down and through the thick of it, in search of whatever it is we’re after: clarity in exhaustion, accomplishment in extremity.

I do know this: I miss my boots already.

On our second day in Alaska, we found ourselves in North Pole which is a small town about 10 miles outside of Fairbanks. This town acquired its curious name in the hopes of attracting and convincing toy companies to come here and find a home. All we found here was 10 gallons of vegetable oil, a giant statue of Santa Claus, and these four-legged creatures.
*The music on this video is a yiddish version of Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

Now its time to meet RRRRRrejii, the newest member of our crew. We found Rrejii while in Regent, North Dakota, and Taylor gave him his name. Enough description, check out the video.

This is a painting animated by a weird bird painted on metal. I saw it while me, my parents, Dalas and Anja Verdugo(friends of ours) were hiking in Portland, Oregon. It was crafted while moving at 55mph, Walter speed. The making of it required very tiny paint brushes, acrylic paints, a pallet, water, and hardboard wood. Polly Wanna Pulse was painted by none other me, Taylor Snead, the kid of the bus. I am raising money for my first computer!

Dimensions:

Height – 6 1/2 inches

Width – 7 1/2 inches

$50 including shipping. More will be listed soon! Thanks for the help!

SOLD!
Sorry there are no paintings for sale at the very moment, there should be 2 more in the next week or two!

Bracing myself on the edge of the passenger seat with my left hand, I tightly grip the door bar with my right. “Let’s take it slow”, I say to Bob as his foot quickly jerks from the gas pedal to the brake. The past hundred miles or so that we have been approaching the imaginary line separating the Yukon Territory from the noncontiguous state of Alaska, the road has been a myriad of dips, bumps, holes, and gravel that send the bus airborne, rendering all passengers weightless for a mere second. There are no visible lines restraining your vehicle between the boundaries of the road or steering one clear of any oncoming traffic. Of course the oncoming traffic is few and far between aside from the countless dogged souls on a personal mission to pedal their way across the last great frontier. Coming to a stop behind two other vehicles a friendly woman informs us “it’ll be about a 5 minute wait”. The stretch of road ahead appears to be a sea of holes paved with dirt and rocks. “Hey, do you need a ride through this shit?” Bob hollers out the open bus door. Maneuvering his bike through Walter’s cluttered vestibule, our wayfarer gives his thanks. The young, lean man having no more than a pack on his bike and a homemade flag pronouncing “Jesus Christ is our God”, spoke with a twang in his voice that, for a moment, took me back home to the south. The conversation was your normal getting to know your hitchhiker conversation, talk of the Carolinas and his recent misfortune of being a victim of a hit and run. Walking away with only scrapes and bruises, he was more worried about being set back on his journey a few days. He hopes to make it to the far point of Prudhoe Bay, Alaska and back before winter sets in. As our jaunt across the rubble came to an end he carried his bike off the bus, and politely handing Bob a pamphlet asked if he could pray for our safety throughout our travels.

Driving through the Yukon Territory is like slipping through a portal to an imaginary land. The sky is endless and filled with cotton white clouds casting gray shadows on the mountainside. Each massive, majestic peak is unique, ranging in color from greens to browns to snow tipped white, and terrains from thick forests to rocky mounds to sharp glacier carved crevices. The road flows up and down and forms snakelike curves as we tip toe, not over, but around the sleeping giants. The waters of the rivers and lakes are sparkling crystal with hues of blue and green. Only on postcards and in books have I laid eyes on places of such beauty.

Approaching the border crossing we run through all the possible incidences, such as the commandeering of our tomato plant and how we will explain the 40 cubies of 200 gallons of veggie oil stacked under every table, on each step, and hidden around every corner of the bus. Bob slowly pulls the bus up next to the little guard house with the little window, and a little, but round man steps out. We hand over our passports and he begins to go through the routine questions that we have come to expect at our border crossings: “where are you from” , “what is your reason for traveling to Alaska”, “how many people are on board”, “how do you know each other” and “can you please step outside of your vehicle and stand over there”. We single filed out of the bus and realizing that the temperature had dropped well below, well cold, some of us quickly reboard the bus to put on proper attire. Appearing to be senseless tourists shivering in the cold meaning no harm to Alaska, and carrying no illegal drugs or weapons, the guard promptly steps off the bus and tells us “you may board your vehicle again and have a nice evening”. Our celebration is not flashy, simple sighs of relief at the ease of our crossing, jubilant grins at the satisfaction of making it this far, and butterflies of excitement at not knowing what to expect next.

One thing that I think we did know to expect, but were unaware of its impact, is the sheer beauty. There are copious amounts of words that can and have been used to describe Alaska; however, I will simply say that it is awe-inspiring in all its glory and everyone should visit atleast once. After only a handful of miles past the border, Seth pulls the bus over at a scenic overlook. Sitting in the driveway with a look of curiosity on his face, a scraggy wild fox invites us to come out and play. Cautiously keeping us at a certain distance, the fox loiters about entertaining us with his mere existence and accepting our offerings of bread. Snapping hundreds of pictures, we could possibly remain for hours, us staring at him, and him staring at us. Unfortunately, Kentridge has other plans in mind. Pouncing out of the door and darting across the highway, he chases the fox into the woods. After a few minutes of worried whistles and calls the incorrigible hound returns, and we all hope the sly little fox got away unharmed. Spotting clean outhouses stocked with toilet paper, we decide this is the perfect place to spend our first night in Alaska. The hours pass, but daylight seems to linger forever. It is well into the night before darkness finally sets in. And as we climb under the covers, bellies full with satisfaction, we begin dreaming of the adventures that tomorrow will bring.

I have been making paintings over the past few weeks and will be working on more for the next few weeks. Buy them for $50 on the bottom of the store section of the website.

This is a painting motivated by this random castle in the middle of Kentucky. It was spotted while we were on our way to take a tour of a Bourbon distillery. I first painted the castle, then thought it needed something, so I added a Good Year blimp for fun! It was crafted while moving at 55mph, Walter speed. The making of it required very tiny paint brushes, acrylic paints, a pallet, water, and hardboard wood. Kentuckian Castle was painted by none other me, Taylor Snead, the kid of the bus. I am raising money for my first computer!

Dimensions:
Height – 8 inches
Width – 8 inches

$50 including shipping. More will be listed soon! Thanks for the help!

SOLD!

This is a painting caused by being in snake country and not seeing any snakes! I like snakes, so I looked at pictures of snakes and saw this awesome picture of a Burmese Python , so I happily painted. It was crafted while moving at 55mph, Walter speed. The making of it required very tiny paint brushes, acrylic paints, a pallet, water, and hardboard wood. Constricting Burmese was painted by none other me, Taylor Snead, the kid of the bus. I am raising money for my first computer!

Dimensions:
Height – 7 inches
Width – 6 inches

$50 including shipping. More will be listed soon! Thanks for the help!

SOLD!

This is a painting influenced by a weird sighting of a tree living on a little stretch of beach in the middle of a lake. I was looking at my mom’s flickr pictures and I saw an image of this, and because we thought it was very funny, I painted it. It was crafted while moving at 55mph, Walter speed. The making of it required very tiny paint brushes, acrylic paints, a pallet, water, and hardboard wood. Sole Survivor was painted by none other me, Taylor Snead, the kid of the bus. I am raising money for my first computer!

Dimensions:
Height – 8 inches
Width – 12 inches

$50 including shipping. More will be listed soon! Thanks for the help!

SOLD!

This is a painting spurred by the interest of the 40th anniversary of the first walk on the moon while working on the Regent project . I saw a picture of it and thought it looked pretty cool, plus, it would be a nice challenge. It was NOT crafted while moving at 55mph because, of course, we were stopped! The making of it required very tiny paint brushes, acrylic paints, a pallet, water, and hardboard wood. The Eagle Has Landed was painted by none other me, Taylor Snead, the kid of the bus. I am raising money for my first computer!

Dimensions:
Height – 6 inches
Width – 8 inches

$50 including shipping. More will be listed soon! Thanks for the help!

SOLD!

This is a painting encouraged by being in big cities, and always seeing something Coca-Cola oriented! I could not stand it, and I thought, “Man, the Coca-Cola logo is practically unavoidable!”, so I found a picture of a Coke can and vigorously painted it. It was crafted while moving at 55mph. The making of it required very tiny paint brushes, acrylic paints, a pallet, water, and hardboard wood. Who’s Coke? was painted by none other me, Taylor Snead, the kid of the bus. I am raising money for his first computer!

Dimensions:
Height – 6 inches
Width – 8 inches

$50 including shipping. More will be listed soon! Thanks for the help!

SOLD!

This is a painting inspired by a stretch of stacked pallets in the middle-of-no-where Hicksville, Ohio. It seemed like something you wouldn’t see every day. It was crafted while moving at 55mph, Walter speed. The making of it required very tiny paint brushes, acrylic paints, a pallet, water, and hardboard wood. Tower Of Pallets was painted by none other me, Taylor Snead, the kid of the bus. I am raising money for my first computer!

Dimensions:
Height – 6 1/2 inches
Width – 7 1/2 inches

Price: $50 including shipping. More will be listed soon! Thanks for the help!

SOLD!

I’m Don Perdue, the newspaper guy who took pics of the bus, and talked to you in the Walmart parking lot in Whitecourt, Alberta, on Friday morning, Aug. 7. I did a story on Transit Antenna & the bus, & story and pic will appear in the Aug. 12 edition of the Whitecourt Star and the Mayerthorpe Freelancer. To view them, go online to www.whitecourtstar.com or www.mayerthorpefreelancer.com

Cheers,

Don

Our first stint on the Alaskan Highway went well. Seth drove about 280 miles from Dawson Creek to Fort Nelson, sometimes down grades as severe as 10%. At the tops of those hills, the roadway dipped so low it disappeared like rollercoaster tracks, and the rivers, lakes and massive rock faces spread out over the valleys.

The Alcan draws the extreme to it, whether they prefer traveling by force of a 17-ton careening bus, or by more trying means: their own legs. We shook our fists in triumph at a biker as he humped up a large hill we were coasting down. He saw us and shook back. Later we saw another guy doing not so well as the rain had started, and I asked Seth if we should stop. Seth said, “If he’s out here alone on his bike, he’s doing it for real.” I guess those guys know how to throw out a thumb if need be.

The road wasn’t always so treacherous. We’d travel for stretches down long, nearly straight highways lined with thick forest. At one point a rain cloud looming on our right finally overtook us, but the sun was still cutting underneath the stormfront from the left, casting the roadway in severe shadows flickering in the rain and trees.  Taylor said the whole scene, when paired with the most brilliant double rainbow we’ve ever seen, was “Awesome!” The trees flew behind the rainbow which I could trace almost all the way to the ground.

This morning we woke up in Fort Nelson, British Columbia. This little town’s primary economy seems to come from travelers stopping here on route to the Yukon Territory and Alaska or the lower provinces. Last night, our first stop in town was Boston Pizza to look for oil. For a minute there, we thought this trip down the remote Alaskan Highway was going to be too easy. But last night we discovered that our favorite Canada oil source doesn’t have a grease receptacle here in the nether regions. Furthermore, there’s nowhere else to get grease around here. Our trip still may be easy, but now we know we stocked up on oil for a reason, carting over 220 gallons reserve to add to our 100 gallon tank capacity. Whitehorse, in the Yukon Territory, has a handful of restaurants we know and trust, so hopefully we’ll have some luck there.

When we came into town, we did find a few things: RVs and semis parked wherever along the roadside, rollicking drunk young people, some reeling down the street clasping their beer bottles and cups of vodka spiked Kool-Ade or whatever, and an unlocked wi-fi signal streaming from a hotel with an adjacent bar. All night, we parked out front of the hotel and borrowed the internet while the boisterous exhortations of boozers carried into our windows as they were bounced out of the bar and into the streets. And these drunkards were clearly Canadian: “Eh Bouncer?! You a *%@$er aren’tcha’ eh!”

“So much for a sleepy little town,” Seth said as we searched for an unlocked door into the hotel, so we could borrow a bathroom.

It’s nice when people change your view of a place.  (The change in weather really helped too.)  We love Canada.

On the upside we’ve had no problems finding vegetable oil because the Canadian Suburbs have all the same American Restaurant. Arby’s, KFC, Olive Garden, and Pizza Hut are all plentiful in every city so far. Things seem to be a bit more expensive here and with the currency exchange being about equal, it just feels like we’re in a rich Connecticut suburb than in another country. But I have to admit that we haven’t done much else besides fiddling with the fuel system. Basically we keep seeing air bubbles coming off the return side of the engine when we’re running on Vegetable oil. Typically when we see this, it means it’s time to change the fuel filters. But we have new filters in, so we thought it was sucking air into the fuel system somewhere down the line. We’ve tightened and changed fittings, changed filters, and even put air pressure on the lines to try and locate a leak. Every repair we make does not fix the problem. The insane part is we aren’t having any loss of power, which typically happens when we suck air or need to change a filter. The bus is actually running very smoothly. I just hope this isn’t the calm before the shit storm.

Anyhow, we hope to talk to you soon. Probably when we make it to the other part of our country.

Transit Antenna would like to thank Gary Greff and The Enchanted Highway for the use of his workshop, tools, scrap metal, vehicle and installation location! We would also like to thank Steve for helping organize the event and coordinating the burgers and brats! All proceeds from dinner go towards Dickinson Tornado Relief and The Enchanted Highway. And thank you to the town of Regent for welcoming us and coming out and having a good time!

The Eagle will Land Soon!

The friendly town of Regent, North Dakota is where we are calling home for the next few days as we have begun bringing to fruition an out of this world installation project . We arrived here late Tuesday night eager to start sketching out plans for our sculpture. This small town of a little over 200 is home to The Enchanted Highway, and the perfect destination to build a life size lunar lander in celebration of the 40th anniversary of man’s first walk on the moon. Gary Greff, the creator of the large scale scrap metal sculptures that line the 28 mile stretch of blacktop that is The Enchanted Highway, has been captivating passersby for the past fifteen years with his works of art, and is generous enough to let us use his tools, shop, scrap metal, and fork lift to put together our lander.

Geese in Flight, The Enchanted Highway

A design originally thought to be constructed out of trash and cardboard has morphed into a creation of permanent proportions. Bob and Seth have been testing their welding chops on the 16 foot square base, while Jamie and I have begun putting together astronaut costumes for a live reenactment of the moon walk, Transit Antenna style, to be performed at the unveiling of the moon lander on Sunday in Regent. We contacted the local papers in hopes of spreading the word about the event, and ended up as the cover story on the front page of the Saturday edition of the Dickinson Press.

Veggie oil bus stops in Regent and construction of ‘moon lander’ underway

We have a tremendous amount of hard work and heavy lifting to do in the next five days, but are extremely excited to be celebrating this momentous anniversary with the people of Regent and the surrounding communitites.

Base of Lunar Lander built by Bob and Seth

We’re in Regent getting prepared for a moon expedition.

On the end of one row were a few interesting ones, like a lawn-mower-bike and a ski-bike.

In the middle of the room was the NASA and space stuff. Many of the things were about Deke Slayton, the man who stayed awake for 100 hours in the NASA control room to help safely land Apollo 13 back on Earth. He had wanted to go into space, but couldn’t go because of heart problems. Later on in his life, he did get to go with the Russians to help setup the space station. There was an old astronaut suit that looked like a dead person laying down.

There was also a small model of the lunar lander in a glass case.

There were other things, such as small articles about Deke, and artifacts from the spaceshuttle launches of that time. On the ceiling was a life-size model of one of the early planes, and a bigger than life model of a hand-glider.

In the back was a model of a “pod” and a flat cardboard space man with the head cut-out.

There was also a little, kiddie toy-room. We walked around a bit, and on our way out, we saw a mural.

Part II

Later that night, we had been driving for a while, but we stopped in a little town called Blue Earth, in Minnesota. It just happend to be Jolly Green Giant Day(the icon for Seneca Foods).

We watched an awesome fireworks show with a really cool finale.

Everyone there honked their car horns- and bus horn! Then we vanished, driving off into the night.

We’ve put a few miles under our tires and a few states behind our bumper in the past couple of weeks. Our last pit stop story came from Lexington, KY and the next will take you across the highways and biways of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconson.

After getting a little tipsy at the Woodford Bourbon distillary in Lexington, we got our ducks in a row and headed for Cincinnati, OH. We were on a mission to acquire some veggie oil and hoped to stay for the night before moving on to Hicksville, OH for Independence Day festivities.  We checked out the Manifest Gallery and Drawing Center near downtown Cincinnati and secured a place to park overnight at their Essex St. Studios.  The studios were housed in a large warehouse that was also home to The American Sign Museum, a gallery of old lighted signs.

Before settling in for the night five people packed five laptops into five seperate bags and walked to the nearest cafe/bar to get their fix of electricity and free wi-fi. The next morning those same five people were on their way again. Destination, Hicksville, OH to celebrate the Fourth of July with the Kristofolettis.

The warm welcome and gracious hospitality never diminished for the 4 1/2 days that we spent in Hicksville with Joe and Anna. We were fed three full, delicious meals a day with snacks in between and entertained with stories of times past and given lessons for future success. The house that Joe built from the ground up sits in a peaceful field of lush green grass with tall evergreens planted sporatically around it. One could easily spend an entire day (which Taylor and I did) on a blanket in the grass playing games, watching the clouds go by, and taking silly pictures.

We celebrated the fourth with an impressive display of fireworks in all colors and shapes. Sunday morning, Bob and Joe rose with the sun and went out to the lake to go fishing. Coming in day after day empty handed in Mexico, Bob finally had some luck and caught his fish. On Monday morning we all went down the street to the new high school to take a look at Joseph’s murals up close. They were quite impressive, as was the new school itself. After many hugs and kisses and good luck wishes we hit the two lane blacktop once more heading west.

We were on the search for oil again and our GPS brought us to Fort Wayne, IN. Aside from refueling we didn’t make any other stops in Indiana and drove on to Chicago, IL.

Sitting in the Windy City Cafe we laughed and made jokes as Annako stepped out of the train stop in a sweater and scarf and we sat comfortably eating lunch in our shorts and tank tops. A few hours spent walking the city we learned that Chicago is not called the Windy City just because and you never leave home without a sweater. Our first stop on this Tuesday afternoon was Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art. The museum featured art by seven self-taught artists hailing from the great state of Ohio, as well as an exhibit of landscape drawings from the artists travels across the country and around the world. However, the most exciting exhibit found at Intuit was a permanent installation of the contents of artist Henry Darger’s living and working space which was located in Chicago. The Henry Darger Room Collection includes tracings, clippings from newspapers, magazines, comic books, cartoons, children’s books, coloring books, personal documents, and architectural elements, fixtures, and furnishings from Darger’s original room.

We also checked out the artwork on display at the Contemporary Art Museum.

Actually, it was an engaging exhibit for Taylor, making it a successful family outing.

We strolled through Millinium Park and took multiple dorky photographs with all of the other tourists in front of a gigantic silver bean. After pounding our puppies on the pavement all afternoon, we took a train ride to Annako’s house to visit with our friend and enjoy a nightcap of espressos and hot chocolate.

Madison, Wisconsin is nestled on a strip of land between two lakes. There are three times more bikes found in Madison than there are cars. It is now Thursday. We parked the bus in a lot by the boat landing and walked the path along the lake into the city. After spotting quite a few fish floating belly up, we learned that the lake, and the fish in it are polluted with chemicals. According to a posted sign, the state fish the Muskie, can be caught in the lake, but is only safe to eat once a month. While some of the other species are safe to eat as often as once a week. I decided better safe than sorry and ordered the pork burrito at lunch instead of the fish tacos. We strolled the cirular path around the state capitol building and Bob, Taylor, and I visited an Odd Wisconsin Exhibit at the History Museum while Seth and Jamie took Kentridge for a walk around the block. Getting back on the road before nightfall we drove slightly north to Sparta to get an early start on Friday at the Space and Bicycle Museum.

Finishing off High Five! is this print by Bob, which is pretty self explanatory.

Purchase a limited edition of High Five! here.

This print by me can be used as a guide for giving effective criticism.

Purchase a limited edition of High Five! here.

When we started on the road, I installed a pretty sweet heat exchanger that we used as a water heater. It was something I got from my Father-in-law’s boat salvage yard (aka backyard) and was originally used in a boat to take in salt water to cool down the engine. We used it in the opposite direction to take hot coolant from the engine to heat water (almost to 200 degrees!).
The major downside was we only had hot water when the bus was running. Week long stints, however, meant no warm showers. It sucked but we were willing to live with it. Then while in Texas (everything bad seems to happen in Texas!) the heat exchanger sprung a leak. Luckily we were not driving (meaning no hot water all over the place) and caught it almost immediately. So we bypassed the thing and lived without hot water for several weeks until we got tired of cold showers. We needed something cheap that also didn’t drain on resources like propane or electricity, so in walks a black garden hose on our roof. Twenty bucks got us hot water and it worked pretty well during the summer. The major downside was we only had hot water during sunny days which meant only mid afternoon showers. Plus for the first several weeks, our hot showers had a distinct smell of garden hose rubber. However when winter came even the most sunny of days would get the water only mildly warm. Our garden hose really needed direct overhead sunlight to give us hot water, so again I went back to the drawing board.

I have to confess that nothing has motivated me more than a cold shower on a winter day. So parked in a Walmart parking lot in Southern California, I went inside to the camping section. The only option was a black shower bag which you sit out in the sun all day to get a hot shower in the evening. The downside is these bags leak (Jamie bought one and tried it during the heat exchanger crisis) and more importantly we would have to remember to put the damn thing out everyday. We’re not that prepared or organized. So I bought a $7 five gallon drinking water bag. When I got back to the bus, I put some hooks in the shower and proceeded to warm up water on the stove. Three pots boiling water and several gallons of cold sink water filled the bag with a perfect shower. I hung it upside down in the shower stall and christened our “bag shower” era with the first of many cleanings under the bag. The size meant plenty for two showers (military style- wash, turn off, soap, rinse) and so we naturally formed a lingo around showers. “Did you do a whole or a half bag?” “Hey, there’s a half bag in there if you want it.” “Could you make a bag for me, please?”

Nearly four months of showers finally took its toll on the bag, and it sprung a leak on our way back across the country. So it got me to thinking about tankless propane hot water heaters. I had heard about them when we were doing the original bus build out but cost and the propane usage made me hesitant. The heat exchanger was free and all the tankless systems I could find were around $600. But now with the bag showers we were already using the propane, so I decided to revisit the idea. With little effort, I stumbled upon a ridiculously cheap $120 tankless hot water heater by the company Eccotemp. I’d never really heard of the company but found on their site that they were based in our hometown of Charleston. So during our last stint there we found ourselves in the Eccotemp warehouse getting a tour and getting hooked up with a L5 water heater.

Since the installation in April, we’ve been rigorously testing (aka using) the water heater and I have to say the Eccotemp L5 is well worth the price. It gets water very hot. The propane usage is not bad. We have yet to change our first set of D batteries for the ignition switch and it only took a couple hours to hook it into our system.

It was not a plug and play installation because the L5 is designed for outdoor use with a gas grill propane tank (images of people washing their cars and horses were on the box), but it only took a couple of fittings, sheet metal, high temperature duct tape, and a dryer vent to get the thing up and running in the spacious area behind our propane fridge. We put it in this compartment because it already had good ventilation and it was relatively easy to add more venting for the water heater. If I had to do it again, I would make the vent take up the entire width of the unit with sheet metal rather than using the dryer vent.  But as it’s currently set up, it works great. However, I should say again that this unit is designed for outdoor use and Eccotemp does not condone indoor use of the L5. If you’re going to install one like us, make sure to vent the hell out of it. In addition to the vent attached to the unit, we also have large vents at the top and bottom of the compartment. In case of a propane leak, the gas will flow out of the bottom vent instead of inside the bus. During really hot days we have a 12v fan we can turn on at the top vent to circulate air in the compartment. Anyways ventilation is very important. You could die. I’m serious.

If you use it as designed, you could seriously use it out of the box. It comes with a regulator for a propane grill tank and even a shower head. There are limitations to the L5, as to be expected with a $120 bargain. You can only use one fixture at a time. No big deal for us. We don’t typically do the dishes and shower at the same time. For us the big bummer was we have to have the water on full blast. We were used to doing low flow showers to conserve water, but now in order to keep the flame lit (and water hot) our water pump has to be wide open. As a result, our water usage has gone up, not a ton but enough to feel like we’re filling up our 200 gallon water tank more frequently. Bottom line, if you need a cheap propane water heater, the L5 is worth every penny. After four months with no problems (knock on wood) I hope this saves me some headaches as well as anyone else considering mobile hotwater.

This print by me (Jamie) is about minor spills that could happen and really haven’t ever happened but seldom do.

Purchase a limited edition of High Five! here.

This print by Seth depicts a simple truth of operating motor vehicles that may or may not pertain to events that took place over the past year.

Purchase a limited edition of High Five! here.

By Bob, this print is about the mechanical importance of knowing the difference between right and wrong.

Purchase a limited edition of High Five! here.

Another print by Seth, inspired by our trip to Los Angeles, where around every corner, things like this seem to have just happened.

Purchase a limited edition of High Five! here.

This one’s from Bob. People always marvel at how well we get along. Here’s how a typical conversation between Seth and Bob goes.

Purchase a limited edition of High Five! here.

The silk-screened print by Seth depicts Seth and Bob’s successful attempt at lifting Jeffrey Deitch off the ground with balloons. Check out the “success” here

Purchase a limited edition of High Five! here.

Seth’s mural is on the left and Bob is pimpin on the right.

Asheville packed a lot of fun into a few days. Right down the tracks from where we were parked, the Wedge gallery and micro-brewery served up $10 pitchers of a beer that Seth will actually drink (that means it’s really good). We also made some new friends and revived some old friendships: thanks to Stacey and Lee for taking us to the falls, and thanks to Justin for the great dinner and company!

So we left Asheville yesterday afternoon where the day before Seth and Bob painted murals in the mural garden, a local wall dedicated to harrassment free expression, we were told by the folks at Flood. From the looks of it, few mural painters grace the mural garden. The walls were completely covered with tags, though, and several by a tagger called Doink.

The only rule at the mural garden is to completely cover another person’s work, taking care not to leave anything half-covered. The garden was close by, so the guys schlepped some paint cans down the railroad tracks to the wall. A tagger called Doink had a few things up. Seth painted this over his tag:

Behind this wall are some shorter silos on which Bob painted a tractor emiting a cloud of nasty smoke whose nastiness comes from several tags showing through a light coat of gesso and white paint, but I don’t have any pictures of his, so he’ll have to add a picture HERE:

Flood had a great library where I found an illustrated version of the Bible by world-class painter, Thomas Kinkade. I just wanted to share this.

Here’s a little sampling from the inside. I’m not sure how his imagery relates to the content.

We got the bus cranked and probably spent thirty minutes tuning our CB radio: thumping it, testing channels, figuring out (or not really figuring out) what SWR, USB, LSB, SSB, talkback, af gain, rf gain, roger beeps, dimmer, squelch, and 10 codes are all about. Finally we hit the road and got a little CB action. There was some work on I-40 and a trucker was telling another trucker that he better “geeit on over when they says merge, don’t be scaird now!”

It wasn’t but a couple of hours and we found ourselves in the rapidly dwindling mountains of Knoxville, Tennessee. We made a quick stop to see the folks at Yeehaw Industries who run one of few letter press shops in the country. They use mostly post-consumer papers and cardstocks, which is just one reason why you should buy stuff from them. Another reason is that they make really cool stuff, so check them out.

After leaving Yeehaw, we found ourselves at a crossroads: head to Nashville or head north to Kentucky. While we all want to go to Nashville, Dawn and Seth did some research on temperatures around the country, and we were figuring the westerly route might bring us into hotter climates, so we’re heading north for the Great Lakes, Canada and…oh yes…Alaska.

But first a stop off in Lexington, Kentucky and then Cincinnati, Ohio. Today we met up with friends Brian and Blakely who treated us to an afternoon in the Raven’s Run nature preserve. We hiked out to an overlook of the Kentucky River.

Tomorrow might bring a visit to the Wild Turkey distillery, which offers free tours. What would a visit to Kentucky be without taste-testing some whiskey? Until next time…Jamie

This is a 2 layer silkscreen print, image size is 16″ x 16″, paper size is 20″ x 20″. The print was designed by Seth specifically for this project as it depicts our experiences on the Salton Sea in southern California. Edition of 10 on BFK Pearl Grey archival paper. Edition of 20 on wheat colored archival Strathmore paper. Edition of 20 on archival newsprint paper. All prints are $100. This includes shipping. Thanks for your support.

This silk-screened print by Dawn was inspired by our visit to Titusville, FL, where we watched a midnight rocket launch at Cape Canaveral. When we were about to leave, we got our bus into a little pickle of a ditch and had to push it out…or did we?

Purchase a limited edition of High Five! here.

Inspired by a fight over something pretty stupid, we thought it would be interesting to take a different perspective on all the things that have gone wrong over the past year. High Five (something we never do) was born. Neon colors don’t show up very well on digital cameras, so imagine all of these a bit brighter than they are depicted here.

buy the whole series here

A limited edition Hand Silkscreened portfolio by Transit Antenna Crew Members : Seth Gadsden, Jamie Self, Bob Snead, and Dawn Snead is now available. Entitled “High Five!” the series details a new perspective on all the problems Transit Antenna has had during the past year. This edition was printed during our stint at Hub Bub in Spartanburg, SC. Throughout the next ten days we will be posting a detail of each print. The portfolio includes a cover page and 10 signed/numbered prints in an edition of only 20! All prints are on 8.5 inch by 9 inch paper. You can buy a whole portfolio now for only $250 (that’s only 25 Bucks a print!) Lower numbers in the edition will be sold on a first come first serve basis, so order now!

But whenever we find ourselves actually tolerating the weather (sweating bullets, making ourselves nearly sick), I think how far we’ve come in adapting to our ever changing environs. Being from South Carolina, none of us would have ever said before the trip that it’s okay to live not even outside, but inside a heat-trapping vehicle sitting in a parking lot! I could go on and on, but I’ll spare you.

Before we left Spartanburg, we gave Alex, Betsy, Jonas and all the residents gifts of the assorted prints we made, including this lovely garment that Bob made. It was inspired by a (perhaps intentional?) design error in the promo material the resident artists made for an upcoming event called the “Make-a-thon.” The flier pictures a crab scrawling something with a red pen that looks an awful lot like “Make-a-thong.” Seth was a trooper and modeled it for the camera.

So we packed up the bus and left the graffiti wall that our bus looks really cool against, and took a cue from our Governor and headed to the mountains of Asheville through the Saluda grade. Man, the air is so much cooler here! We had some difficulty scoring oil as we rolled through town, but when we changed our oil filters, they didn’t leak when we put them back on, which was AWESOME—never happens! I told everyone to thank Tootsie, who is our oil goddess, just so you know. (You might say a word or two each night to help us out.) Yes, we’d already been turned down by several restaurants with “contracts” whose oil containers were chocked full, but marked by the ubiquitous Blue Ridge Biofuels sticker, but our luck was changing. I wasn’t worried.

Finally, we scored a full tank, not marked by Blue Ridge Biofuels, and headed to the Wal-Mart for easy access facilities and sleep. In the morning, we all bought ourselves some new digs: shorts, tees, nicer shirts for me since all mine look terrible. Next, laundry. Next, heading to the Flood Gallery and Art Center where we were greeted with serious Southern Hospitality.

Flood is a collective gallery, studio, and residency space that also houses (what do you know!?) the Blue Ridge Biofuels operation! What a coincidence. Nice folks at Flood. They’ve got so much going on, biodiesel making, glass blowing, sculpture, blacksmithing, artist residencies, exhibition spaces, a library, writing workshops and readings, and a haircutting salon where I will tomorrow chop all my hair off. There. I said it. Now I have to do it! I was thinking something like this:

That way my ears won’t sweat.

Anyway, we’ll be in Asheville for a couple of days parked at Flood, another place where our bus looks cool, and will report soon with information about our whereabouts and all the new stuff you will soon see in our Transit Antenna shop.

Until next time…Jamie

We arrived at Hub Bub, in Spartanburg, S.C., last Saturday evening. Before parking for the night we stopped at a local popular greasy spoon, the Beacon, for a bite to eat. The rain was pouring down as thunder pounded in the atmosphere and bright flashes of lightning cracked all around. As we turned into the parking lot a giant explosion of light and sparks “beaconed” from the lighthouse sign of the restaurant. Amazed by the visual effects of the road marker, we knew we were in for a treat. Our excitement faded slightly as we found our place in the winding line forming a snake in the doorway, and came to learn that a transformer had blown causing the power to go out in the kitchen. We placed our oders with the blind man at the end of the counter who shouted secret Beacon kitchen code back to the cooks and informed us that due to the power outage we would have to eat our chili cheeseburgers and fish sandwiches sans “a plenty”. The fare was decent and we decided we should make another visit to the eatery before we leave town to get the full Beacon experience. By this time the rain had slowed and we moved on down the road to Hub Bub to settle in for the week.

Hub Bub is an arts and events “showroom” (gallery and performance space) that hosts an artist in residency program. The  Program provides three pre-professional and emerging young visual artists and one creative writer the opportunity to “live free and create” for 11-months in downtown Spartanburg, SC. Alix Refshauge, the development director of Hub Bub had contacted us about visiting the center on our way out of Charleston, and we decided to take up the offer and utilize their silk screen facilities… .So we have been busy little bees, working in the warehouse, designing and screen printing posters, bags, a zine, and whatever else we become inspired to create. The facilities include a dark room to hold emulsioned screens before exposure, a light box for exposing, a pressure washer for washing out our screens, and space to spread out, where we usually have to find the darkest cubby in the bus to store screens, expose during sunlight hours only, try and fit our screens in the sink or shower for washing, and bump elbows working at our one work/dining table/guest bed. However we cannot seem to escape the upcountry S.C. heat, as the warehouse, like Walter, has no A/C! (Stay tuned for Bob’s do-it-yourself air conditioning currently being developed and installed in our humble home!) Seth has been working on a really nice large 2 color limited edition poster, soon to be debuted on the website, as well as smaller works for our zine. Jamie tried her hand at a run of a 3 color small print inspired by an abundance of locusts we ran across in Arizona…New Mexico…somewhere out in the desert. The fine details and colors really turned out great. Bob has been working on the cover and some pages to “High Five”, a collaborative effort zine detailing a handful of exciting moments from our travels. And  I have been printing and sewing a couple of fun new bag designs to put in our etsy shop. We are looking forward to having new work to share on the website with all of Transit Antenna’s friends.

The third Thursday of every month, Spartanburg hosts an art walk throughout the downtown galleries. We decided to see what it was all about and get in on the action. We drove the bus approximately 3 blocks to the corner of Main St. and Wall St. to set up our tables and show off our new digs. The tables were meticulously arranged with Transit Antenna t-shirts, posters, cards, bags and purses, photos, paintings, collages, and all the art we could scrounge up from the bus when the sky grew dark and the temperature dropped a good 15 degrees. Although it was nice to cool down a bit, the gray clouds loomed over our heads and the wind began to pick up; a powerful gust blew across the tables sending our art tumbling down the street and under the bus. Chasing with outstretched arms Seth and Jamie collected our goods from the sidewalk, middle of the road, and under the bus, and we packed up just before the rains came. Thinking the evening was a complete bust we hung out in the bus on the corner and waited for the rain to cease. We slowly began to draw attention to ourselves, an occurrence that happens often in small towns (and even big cities), and visitors started asking the usual “who are you?” “what is this bus about?” questions. We set our tables back up on the corner of Main and Wall and visited with the locals. We gave tours of the bus educating our guests on the veggie oil system, pedal power system, and the ins and outs of living on a bus. We even sold some art! Seth’s parents drove all the way from Clover to take us out to dinner, ending the night with pizza and calzones.

But wait, the night wasn’t over yet. We drove out to Camping World to dump our smelly sewage only to find that the dump-site was locked behind a gate, and made a stop at Wal-mart for more art supplies.

Here is a separate series of screenprints that Jamie completed while at Hub Bub. They are inspired by a horde of locusts we encountered in New Mexico.

Here is a screenprint that I made while in Spartanburg. It is inspired by Taylor and our experiences at the Salton Sea.

Along with the prints, Dawn is also attempting to include some of the images above in various forms on her hand-made bags and purses.
All of the images are apart of a fundraiser and can be found in our online store.