We woke up this morning to find two comparatively fresh bus tires sitting on the sidewalk just outside the compound. No one knew where they had come from. The mystery deepened when we looked at our tires and thought that maybe two, at least one had been switched out during the night. The mystery grew gradually shallower as we realized that our tires could not have possibly been replaced without our realizing, and shallower still when we checked our email and found a message from Bob Boyce, saying that he was driving down from NC with two tires for us. The photo above is of Bob and his buddy Sal who drove down to Miami last night in a Prius to rendezvous with some solar power equipment, in particular a single panel that will supply him with as much power as the seven or eight he will be donating us.

OK, back up. Here’s a little history: Bob contacted the original Transit Antenna crew last year offering to resurrect Walter with a new transmission, but he was already stripped, embalmed and buried by that point. When we initiated the second leg of the project Bob contacted us offering to help out on the renewable energy front and we snapped his hand off. Bob has been researching solar and other alternative energy systems since the 80’s – you can find him all over YouTube – and more recently has been developing batteries and hydrogen fuels. Luckily for us he is also a bus nut. With a payment from a life insurance policy he decided to replace all the solar panels on one of his RTS buses and offered us his cast offs (in addition to a stove, a fridge, some family sized portions of meat and of course tires!).

Bob travels a lot, but resides permanently in a sweet spot at the foothills of the Smokey Mountains in a property that runs on off the grid power and gets its water from a local, gold-rich spring – its nice, I tasted some this morning! After we get our acquisition and filtration system connected we will be taking the bus on a dry run up to his place to install all of our house power.

As we embarked on this project, with no savings or secured income, we held fast to the belief that if we committed ourselves to a greater good the universe would arrange itself around our dreams. Six months in and we not only have people donating valuable photovoltaic systems, but personally delivering tires so that we can collect them! Thank you, Bob. We love surprises and people like you!

I am feeling guilty for not having written anything in a while so I am sitting down somewhat mindlessly with no real agenda in an effort to alleviate my awesome burden. We returned to Miami on Sunday evening. Since then, in spite of jet lag and unshakable headaches, we have managed to build out a good portion of the kitchen, charge our batteries and organize the bus into something which more closely resembles a home than the building site we left after two days of effective squatting.

As I don’t particularly have anything I want to say I guess I’ll try to summarize my impressions after 5 days living on a bus.

Firstly, everything gets gritty. Even though we are parked on grass the amount of soil, sand and other grime that gets tracked through the bus is staggering. We have a series of mats and rugs and a formative (as yet fully enforced) no shoes rule but more debugging is needed for sure.

Secondly, the weather is a pain in the ass. Its raining and its hot. The rain comes every hour or so without warning and although the hot is HOT its not not raining for long enough for anything to dry. While its nice to be out in it more than we were when we had a house, and while its definitely invigorating I have to say that I only enjoy it to the point that I take pride in no longer worrying about it and would certainly not seek out dampness independently. I am (and I imagine most are) somewhat feline in this respect.

Thirdly, this would be much easier without kids. This thought is surprisingly not as regularly occurring as you might think. Yes, every waking moment is permeated by the inconvenience of their inabilities and instances do constantly come to mind where in decisions or actions that we now labor over would not even be an issue if it were just Sam and I, but we have definitely gotten used to the pace. After you rationalize that they’re going to take time to adjust, not to mention time to grow up, you naturally take them and their needs into account, only noticing (or fantasizing) how smooth things would be if they weren’t a consideration. But you’ve got to love them. If it weren’t for them Sam and I might not have gotten to this point and truthfully most of my excitement for this project comes from imagining the foundations of experience that we are laying for them by living this way.

Did I mention the weather sucks? What else? Oh yeah. After seeing my cats yesterday, getting rained on on my way into the supermarket, and then finding myself wet, cold and faced with the prospect of eating raw due to our lack of appliances I felt very sad and very in need of hot food. This feeling only lasted a minute, however, as after I quickly weighed up my options and realized I would have to BBQ in the rain I snapped faster than a hungry puppy and bought a ready baked lemon and pepper chicken. For the record I felt terrible about it and will no doubt feel even worse when I have at the leftovers later today.

Essentially we are camping out. With no water, electricity or propane (not to mention a working toilet – Sam is researching composting, but more about that later) things can get really tedious. Showers at night and in the early hours of the morning are fun, but for how long? Our priority at the moment is to further reduce our possessions so that even in the absence of adequate storage, the bus seems uncluttered. This should serve to strip us back to basics proper, after which (after I feel I have room to work) I can epoxy the bathroom.

Regarding our power situation, for the moment we are running cords in through a window to a midget refrigerator and two shop fans. Last night I began a trickle charge regime for our house batteries, but I imagine it will be at least a few weeks before I begin working on the electrics. Maybe longer if we prioritize the completion of the filtration and acquisition systems in preparation for a possible dry run to NC to collect and install solar panels.

In general things are pretty good. We’re kind of dirty but we have about a grand in the bank and our layered foam bed – since we chopped it down to queen size and robbed one of layers to make the coach and Mateo’s bed – is happily much more comfortable. The early mornings – cold showers and sunrise ocean swims – the rough and ready hygiene routines – brushing teeth outside and performing hourly dog poop patrols – and the complete lack of privacy or luxury are actually quite fortifying, in a spiritual sense, though often quite humiliating.

I imagine that the way we are doing it – moving our entire lives onto the bus leaving nothing in storage – is very different to the way the Transit Antenna alumni rolled. Obviously there are parallels, and I am sure that at times they saw no light at the end of the tunnel, but their Transit Antenna experience was primarily about projects and temporary subsistence rather than a radical, atemporal shift in lifestyle from workers/consumers to gypsy documentarians. Ironically, having gone through this anti-society-post-punk-anarchic-quasi-re-wilding process, the last thing one wants to do is sit down at a computer and write about it. The air seems too precious to waste on breath spent in reflection, the sky too vivid to miss by staring at the glassy surface of a screen, and interest too immediate to endure focus on anything not covered in soil or engine grease or sawdust and unavoidably in your face.

Later I’ll write about some other things that are happening in our temporary neighborhood, but for now I think its enough to let you know where we are at. There is still a lot to do, but having met our deadline of June 30th to move in and having spent the summer recouping in Europe’s temperate climes we feel more measured, less urgent, and sure that things will only get easier with familiarity. Mr. Apocalypse, I am ready for my close up! That said… its only been 5 days!

After we left Texas with a bang (ha), we drove all night to Santa Fe. We slept in the car for a few hours in the middle of the night a few miles down the interstate from Cadillac Ranch in Amarillo, TX, and woke up to the blinding sun and the sight of the row of cars stuck upright in the ground in the middle of a field. We were deliriously exhausted. It was weird.

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.