Notes on trailers...

I really wanted to leave by 1 today, but I also wanted to make sure I got a shower before a long afternoon of driving and greeting new friends. I've covered the floor of the trailer with boxes and STUFF, and all the seats with clothes, so hopefully new friends have a guest room and don't mind a spontaneous guest. I've slept through worse though, if I have to stay in the trailer.

Lowe, it's 1 o'clock, and I've yet to have a shower. OK, a quick one then.

So, I strip down to take my shower.  And I think, I better put those Sun King jugs out for S or I might forget and so i walk, naked, to the laundry room when someone KNOCKS on the BACK DOOR.

In case the said knocker has X-RAY VISION, I run from the door to the bedroom and I look for a bathrobe. None. I put my clothes back on, and peek out the window and the knocker is gone, but no sooner do I know this, than a knock on the front door.

So I decide to risk it, because there is no car up front and usually only neighbors are so nosy.

I open the door, to see the man who is always walking down the street drunk (he usually has a 40 in a paper bag, like on tv!).

‎"Hi, I see your hubby has that neat trailer out back..."

(sexist)

"... and i haven't seen one of those in YEARS and those are SO SWEET, and I'd really like to take a look inside."

I think of all the boxes and STUFF in the trailer. Normally, I do like to show it off, but I'm late, and it's messy, and this is the neighborhood drunk, we're talking about. "No, I can't show it to your right now." (God, I hope my nipples aren't showing, stupid no-bra.) I concentrate on how to get him to go away.

And he said, "oh, that's really neat, I just wanted to see it. That would be so sweet with a tv in it and a stereo and ac..."

And despite my desire for him to leave, I said, "with all that, what's the point of camping?"

"Well, it would be sweet. A home away from home. I'll come by some other time. I live just down the street. Anyway, it's really neat."

"Thank you," I said.

Day 14: Leaving Las Vegas

Images so far.

Vote for your favorites.

Curtains for Alice

I couldn't resist these curtains when I found them at an expensive antique shop in Indianapolis. I had planned on making pleated drapes with them for Alice. Wouldn't that be cute? And they are heavy enough to add some temperature shielding to the drafty windows. Alas, I was intimidated by making drapes and never did set up my sewing machine (it's still in the box from the move here). I have two or three full curtains, and extra fabric. Enough, actually, that I wonder if I shouldn't make curtains for a house instead, so I can enjoy them more often. Or I could make a matching table cloth and matching pillows.

I bought colorful vintage sheets and covered all of Alice's cushions with them. They are very busy and loud for the space, but added a much welcomed pop of color. They will also protect the upholstery from car sick kitties. I bought several sheet sets so I can rotate them, as needed, over the next month. Pictures will come later. Meanwhile, the fabulous bark-cloth curtains go back into a box.

Summer Road Trip

View Summer 2012 in a larger map

The moving company I hired pulled up in front of my house this morning. I went into a panic, double-checked my email confirmation, and then wondered why they were a week early. Eventually, the guy unloaded something to the house across the street, got back in the truck, and drove away, but the coincidence was not lost on me.

One week from today, movers are showing up at my house.

I have lots of stuff packed... but not really ready for movers. I don't know why. It's almost like all the boxes make it so you can't see the stuff you need to pack. They give you a false sense of accomplishment that you are farther along than you are. What about all the boxes in the basement that need to be repacked? What about all that crap in the garage? What about the stuff I decide to sell at the garage sale? It's an extra problem I'm having the sale after... what if I change my mind about something?

Ugh.

Above is the route I'm planning. You'll notice I will be going to Western Montana first, to finish 2 more prison photos. Then Idaho and Wyoming. Then a whole string of states Alice has never been to: Utah, Nevada, Colorado, Kansas. Then the states I never take pictures in (I don't know why): Missouri, Illinois. Then into the destination state.

"Wish You Were Here"

Alice in North Dakota

I'm finally wading through the tens of thousands of images made with Alice exploring the American landscape. I'm working on putting them into a book (though I was just looking through the blog and I see I left some of my images on the other hard drive), complete with about 100 images and some text. Here is an excerpt of what I am working on.

When the economy crashed and it became apparent I might not have a job, I had to come up with a different set of expectations for my life. To me, if I could figure out how to change my outlook, everyone else could too. Immediately, I wanted to live more in the present and to see beauty in the local. I especially wanted to start living dreams that deep down, I knew I wouldn't pursue otherwise. One long-time fantasy was to buy a vintage camper and hit the open road, discover the corners and crevices of the country, and be lost in the wilderness, yet find so much more. I would be a twenty-first century pioneer, merging my love of technology with a simpler, happier life. I wanted to create a new volume on America, after Robert Frank, and channel the freedom of the highway with the intensity of Jack Kerouac.

In 2009, I bought a 1964 aluminum travel trailer named Alice, and set out on a three-month road trip. I brought two cameras, a digital SLR and a Polaroid; my grandpa's typewriter; my laptop and a scanner; and my two cats. Intensely documenting my progress on Twitter, a blog, and Google maps, I considered this journey a performance. Viewers could take a vicarious road trip in the middle of their workday, tracking my progress across the country on two-lane highways. I went to the places that were built in the Century of the Car, many of which are deserted or visited only by foreigners and locals now that airfare is cheap and fast.

I photograph Alice as the surrogate for the nuclear family of a bygone era, posed in front of the monuments, the scenic overlooks, and the kitschy roadside attractions, though the ever-present road stands with her, beckoning us to the next nostalgic turn-off. Occasionally, Alice upstages these landmarks, herself an ambassador from an idealized (if not realized) past, and the manifestation of many people’s dream to be on the road. You can’t own a trailer like Alice if you want to go unnoticed or stick to yourself. In Alice, you are an exhibitionist, though you know full well anywhere the road takes you, no matter how scarce the cellular network, you have your own private bathroom.

It is a daunting task. I realize I make a lot of different connections when I think about this work, from nostalgia to the economy, gypsies to the nuclear family, environmentalism to urban decay, kitsch versus culture, etc. Creating a cohesive text that doesn't become too ponderous or self-referential will be a challenge. Editing the pictures down has also been difficult. I had the list down to 800 before my trip out here (except again those images I forgot to bring), then down to 240 yesterday. Finally, I just pulled my favorites out of that pile, rather than dealing with rejecting images. As with all photographs, it is difficult for the subject to be separated from the image, and sometimes bad photos contain awesome subjects and vice versa. There is also a question of whether I will include archived blogs in the book, as they went together. In this case, the traditional photobook is influencing my decision away from all that content. What about those 600 tweets from the first summer of Alice? This is what I have been working on this week.

On the Road

My Smart Phone has been incredibly uncooperative this trip, from dropping calls, to overheating, to lagging ten minutes behind each letter I type. It is FAILING me at mobile blogging (not to mention, mobile teaching). So, I have a lot of catching up to do when I get to Indiana. In the mean time, here is a sunset picture.



I was at the Walker today with my camera. A man walked right up to me and asked, "What do you do with your pictures?"

How do you answer that? So many directions... I upload them to a computer? I edit them in Photoshop? I put them in PowerPoints and teach them in class?

I asked "What do you mean?"

He asked if I showed them. I said yes.

"Good," he said.

Alice rises again!

I had planned to stay in MT another week or two, but circumstances have been such that I decided yesterday to move my departure date forward to tomorrow. TOMORROW!

I have had HUGE lists of things to do, like "fill a change-of-grade for this student who couldn't figure out how to turn in her paper" or "write a letter of recommendation for this student I hardly know" and "find Torah's harness" (which I still haven't found) and "test new lighting equipment". You see, I am going to Indiana for the summer. It is absolutely anti-intuitive to leave comfortable, dry-ish heat (70s-90s) for humid, hot, buggy Indiana. (Although after the TICK incident, everywhere might have bugs.) BUT, I am engaged to S and refuse to be one of those weird people that doesn't co-habitat before marriage. Besides, I'm a teacher, so I don't "WORK" in the summers, and I should go there, where he IS "working". Hmm, those last quote marks might be wrong; he really is working.

I have a whole list of projects I want to work on this summer, including a video installation, a "Made in China" boycott, a series of animated GIFs, etc. I am also preparing many video tutorials to help with my classes next year and try to make my Year 2 run more smoothly than my Year 1. Lots to do. And in S's house, I can do these things almost as well as in mine. And I can see all my friends from Wabash, who I miss terribly. I haven't found good replacements for them in Montana and this has been difficult.

ANYWAY. Keep your eyes open for the next 4-5 days for Alice updates and Twitters. It may not be much of a blog this week, as flooding is affecting so much of the Midwest. My college is currently housing over 200 evacuees from the Crow Reservation, as the creek has flooded out even the freeway (I was going to take). Most of the State Parks I am looking to camp at appear to be closed from flooding. It may be a Walmart week, which means, I will probably drive more miles a day than I usually do.

Yellowstone in May

With S in town, it seemed only right to head over to the SUPER VOLCANO to see the sights. Last summer, we had a brief day and a half there, and there is nothing like tourists in a National Park in August to make you hate humanity. So, May seemed perfect for us. Fewer tourists, not too hot, new baby animals, etc. etc.

You can agree with that logic, right?

We set aside 3 nights and 4 days to make the trip out, hike, and relax in the trailer, sans kitties. It was such a weird experience, I kept going to the back of the car to let them out for a potty break. No cats in here.

What I didn't really think about, was despite the beautiful weather Billings, MT is getting, a piddly 3000 feet closer to the sea than Yellowstone, was that much of the park is still under snow. After we had already made our non-refundable deposit on our camp site, the operator casually mentions that the entrance we were planning on taking had been closed for a week, due to an avalanche. The other nearest entrance was still closed for the season, as the plows don't finish clearing the roads till June (that pass is a beautiful, but white-knuckled pass up to 12000 feet). No problem, right?

Did I mention my trailer service guy told me my water heater had a crack? And I told him, "I never use it anyway. Just reroute the pipes around it."

There was more snow in the south end of the park (where our campsite was) than in the north end. Most of it was very reasonable in temperature, like California snow. Chilly, but still in the high 40s so who cares? This image (above with Alice's new license plate!) was the coldest I've been taking a photograph. The wind was howlingly aggressive and unpleasant.

So you can appreciate how much snow there was in many places, and imagine how much snow there was a few months ago, here is a drift we took pictures next to. Apparently, it collapsed and closed the road a few hours later.

Another unexpected bonus... BABY ANIMALS!! They were all over the place. Baby BEARS and baby BUFFALOS, and baby BIRDS. The negative of BABY ANIMALS is that there are MAMA ANIMALS out too. Most of the trails we marked in our new "Easy Day Hikes of Yellowstone" book were closed due to hungry BEARS.

Yes, I photoshopped this. I'm not dumb.

The first morning, we awoke to a 40 degree trailer. The water came out of the faucet at a loving 32 degrees. It was inspiring to get dressed and on the road quickly. The next morning, it was 37 degrees in the trailer. I jumped out of bed, lit the stove under two kettles, and got back in bed until the heat from the stove warmed the trailer into the 50s. It happens faster than you would think. Which is why summer cooking is unpleasant!

The third night, I decided we should splurge and I asked S to figure out my only-used-once furnace. Try as we might, it never would start. No heat at all. Luckily, the next morning was 43 degrees inside, and by then, we had a rhythm going with the stove and it practically felt comfortable to get up and start the coffee. Creepy how fast you could turn into an Eskimo (in climate, not culture).

I made millions of pictures and am in the process of sorting through them. More soon.

Bunny and Alice

Soon we will be going Alice. Should we bring the bunny?

The First Alice

I think I will need to get one of these for next summer's road trip.

Camera Play

Me with Gunfighter, Oakman, AZ

Me with Grand Canyon, AZ

We were in Flagstaff, as I said, and continued east on Highway 40, taking the frequent exits through tiny towns to see the last remnants of Route 66.

Remnants of Old Route 66, Two Arrows, AZ

Our destination was Meteor Crater, but we delighted in stopping at each tiny town, the sun setting, the moon rising, and a fire glowing on the mountain, filling the sky with smoke.

Full Moon with falling star at Two Guns, AZ

We started making long exposures, capturing the peeling murals as the moon rose. It made us giddy to see the results, childish perhaps. It reminded me of learning photography and pushing the limits of the media. That, and the strange echos across the desert, like the sounds of ghost children giggling in the Ghost Town inspired us to make more pictures.

Ghosts, Full Moon, Two Guns, AZ

Alice, J and I, viewing fire, Two Guns, AZ

Tomorrow, we are going to try to see the Crater at dawn, then find some caves at Two Guns, then off to the east once more.

Long, lonely road

Alice Avion on Route 66, desert in either California or Arizona, August 3, 2009

I'm in Flagstaff, Arizona, at the old-faithful, WiFi-fallback: Barnes and Noble. It seems a little ironic how much I have been craving the remote, the out-of-the-way, the unique, yet have to return to the mainstream chain to participate in the world. That is how these things that are isolated, stay that way, I guess.

For those who don't communicate with me directly, Alice Avion, J, two cats and I left California via Route 66 on Saturday, August 1. We spent the night at my grandparents in Beaumont, CA, then headed up through Joshua Tree and Amboy to continue on 66 into the desert.

Joshua Tree, California

Joshua Tree, California

Because of how long it has been since my posting, I fear any attempt at remembering everything will mean we won't make it to camp tonight, so I will be slightly brief. Time has also made it difficult to remember all the poetic ways I wanted to talk about how isolated 66 is, so much more so than other roads, with tiny towns along it somehow still trapped in the 1950s. Alice fit right in.

Alice Avion on Route 66, Amboy, California, August 2, 2009; link

Some of the stops, such as Roy's Motel, are famous on 66. In this case, Roy's is all that is left of the town of Amboy in the Mohave Desert. We spent that night in an RV park in Needles, were the evening air sat stubbornly at 105 degrees. The trailer quickly turned into an oven, and each foray for a photograph turned into a life-or-death situation for the cats. Soon, I just left the car running, as I jogged around the desert capturing my images. Something about the 1950s feel of everything made this seem like a safe thing to do.

The park in Needles had a beautiful pool, which was warm as bath water, but seemed cooler with the blue light-covers under the water. The sky grew dark as we swam, and the pale silhouettes of owls swooped above us.

Route 66, tires in the desert in either California or Arizona, August 3, 2009

Route 66 becomes a topsy-turny roller-coaster in several places in the desert, the road barely wide enough for the car before succumbing to the surrounding dust. Don't be fooled though: it was beautiful, exciting, peaceful, and a car would pass once a half hour. This was what I had set out for.

Route 66 tourist stop, Ashfork, Arizona, August 4, 2009; possibly a replica of the famous art piece

Most of the tiny towns seem to subsist on the few tourists that come along this famous road and stop to buy trinkets. Oh course, there are only so many "Route 66" magnets made in China any one person can buy... I did appreciate the "Outsider Art" aesthetic of the places.

Route 66 tourist stop, Hackberry, Arizona, August 4, 2009, another famous art piece

Gun fight with town donkeys and Alice, Route 66, Oatman, Arizona, August 4, 2009

A delightful town, Oatman, shows what the road was originally for--running through the main streets of towns in order to trap travelers. At high noon in Oatman, the Sheriff blocks traffic on the road for about twenty minutes for a gun fight/comedy routine. Even the poor UPS driver parked his car in the street and had to wait in the 103 degrees for the show to finish. Even without the show, drivers must be careful of the numerous donkeys moseying about the street.

My favorite fun-fact about this mining town (whose motto is "the Ghost Town that refuses to die") is its namesake, Olive Oatman.

"Have Gun Will Travel", Grand Canyon Caverns, Arizona, August 4, 2009 (be sure to look at the larger version of this one)

We camped the next night in the Grand Canyon Caverns, the 3rd largest dry cave in the world. We also had the chance to finally open up Alice's awning and photograph it in front of the rising full moon.

Alice Avion with full moon and awning, Route 66, Grand Canyon Caverns, Arizona, August 4, 2009

The caves have been a tourist attraction from the beginning. You take an elevator down a 250 foot shaft into a large, cool cave. Concrete sidewalks mark a predetermined path a guide leads you along, much like the Jungle Boat Cruise at Disneyland, including corny jokes. My favorite story was sad and haunted me for a few hours of my drive. There used to be other surface openings, and animals have fallen into the cave to be fossilized or mummified. One such was a now extinct Four-Toed Sloth named Girdy (don't name it! That makes it worse!). She fell in and broke her back. She lived a while after though, long enough to use her Four-Towed hands to claw at the walls to try to climb out. The scratches are still there, a toe found caught in the rock. A replica stands where she fell, and her fossilized bones are in a museum in Phoenix.

Girdy the Four-Toed Sloth, Grand Canyon Caverns, Arizona, August 4, 2009

Grand Canyon, Arizona, August 5, 2009

Then there is the Grand Canyon. We arrived on the evening of the 4th and paid for two nights. We saw the moonlit canyon that night, then a poor view of the canyon most of the day, obscured by a cloudy sky, and smokey atmosphere (there was a fire at the north rim). The shuttle system seemed efficient enough, but somehow it took us two hours to get back to our car. We called it a day. This morning, we drove through the park on the 64, exiting out the east side, but catching amazing views of the canyon, newly cleaned from a late-night thunderstorm, which left no trace other than fluffy clouds.

Alice Avion and one of the Seven Wonders of the World, Grand Canyon, Arizona, August 6, 2009