New York - Violators will be prosecuted

Winter in the northeast. Dawn again, tho the usual progression of colors has not come with the light. Midnight blue to velvet to cream to orange are not there today. The sky is a dirty grey, the sun slowly crawling the far side. And me in a break of old apple trees, pack on my back, frog-marched ahead of three deer hunters. It is not yet gun season.

- Did you take a shit in them spruces?

- Sure, I say.

I let him be right. I camped, built a fire, and slept within them spruces (which, anyway, are firs) but they have not been shat in. Not by me, anyway.

- Didn't you see that?

He points to a sign. A very familiar looking one. One that says 'Posted: Trespassing Prohibited.' I notice that there is no name written underneath to tell who issued this. I dislike that intensely. Anyone prepared to give his word ought to give his name as well, particularly when that word is followed by a threat like 'violators will be prosecuted.' Whenever I've had a marker and come across one of these unsigned postings, I have supplied the missing name. Carlos Salazar. Domingo Sousa. Constantine Zuchanos. Or, my personal favorite, Barnabas Hipplethwaite.

- Yes, I saw that.

- So why'd you go back there?

- All the land here is posted. Wasn't any other kind around.

The man lifts up his hands.

- Not my problem.

He is right, of course. This is not his problem. I did not mean this as an excuse, but only to state a fact. As I might have said 'these fence posts are made of juniper, and those of cedar.' I was not bothered by my trespassing

The US is not a single nation. It is not even a collection of 50 states. It is, rather, a quilted bed of several hundred-thousand petty monarchies. As a resident, it is not possible to walk wherever without crossing the boundary of one of these fiefdoms. In this way, the US is not like the old nations - the Seneca, for example - where citizenship meant the right to go where one wanted over a commonwealth of land. Instead, it is the narrow negotiation borders.

Once, I met a German traveling around the US with his English friend. He had been living here for seven years. I asked him what he thought about his time in the country, what he liked and disliked.

- For a country that calls itself 'the land of the free,' you have an awful lot of regulations.

- Oh? said his companion, And Germany doesn't?

- Ya, we do. But Germany never claimed to be 'the land of the free.'

It is a good point. Land ownership - never an easy concept for one who considers his own only what he can carry away - has reduced the free country. There is so little to move about as the ancestors did. No loitering. No standing. No pack stock. No bicycles. No hunting. No fishing. No trespassing of any kind. Violators will be prosecuted. The road is the only free country left.

- Didn't you see that four pointer? one hunter demands

- No.

But I now know exactly who is going to be blamed if no one among these three gets a deer this year.

- Where you from, boy?

- Washington, I say, tho I am not sure what variant of 'from' this answers. Anyway, I feel like saying it since he feels like calling me 'boy.'

- Jesus, he says, his eyes rolling up to the deity. By the disdain he shows, he probably thinks DC.

I dislike being asked where I am from. I have never liked being asked that. It is a question meant to identify another into one of two groups: one-of-us and not-one-of-us. But there are too many variants in the understanding of 'from.'

A person could be from where he was born, or where he was a child, or where he finished his growing, or where he feels his home to be. In central and western New York, those places are expected to more or less conform to the same brief stretch of geography. This confinement carries the idea of a local factionalism, a centralized patriotism, and an expected loyalty that confuses me.

For a person to be from a place, he should be able to do a few things:

- Know how deep the soil is, and what grows best in it, and how it smells before it is ready to receive rain

- Describe the shapes of clouds that drift over

- Spell the most repeated name on the town graves

- Navigate the streets in the dark.

- Tell of a stream, and into which river it runs, and what are the fish therein, and are they introduced or indigenous

- Trace with a finger where the rail lines go, and whether or not the trains still run, and what they carry if they do, what they carried if they don't

- Name who or where serves the best bread and drink

- Give the length of a summer day

- Have the knowledge of what the place looked like fifty, a hundred, a thousand years ago

In short, he should be able to say what there is to love in this place. To claim a place is to love a place, and to acknowledge that you are as you are because of it. If he cannot do this, then he did not love it, and he is from somewhere else.

And of all those I have met on this trip, I can name with certainty two who were from where I found them - a postmaster in Idaho and a farmer in Iowa. I suspect a third as well - a professor in western New York.

For myself I can name all the many places I could be 'from,' but no one place could stand alone as an answer. So I expand the borders of all till they connect and form a whole. Peculiarly, this one most accurate answer - America - is never sufficient.

Somewhere around the sunrise, to the east and the south, was where I had been a boy. According to some, this is where I am from. My driver's license indicates as much. But that is only because that is where I had been a boy. Entering this world and growing accustomed to it - and likely exiting it too - were all affairs of an elsewhere. Like a spiderling, like the character of a bildungsroman - Beowulf or Siddhartha - I wound up born one place, grew up in another, and then finished it all up somewhere else. Now it is many years since I was a boy and hardly anyone around the sunrise would think of me as anything but. Doesn't seem much reason to go back. And still, somewhere around there is the old home, and inside it my folks, growing old.

- This can't be the first time you ticked someone off coming this far, says one hunter.

- Actually, yes.

My voice is flat, showing neither anger, nor fear, nor shame, nor righteousness, as tho I had been caught in the act of nothing more sinister than answering a ringing telephone.

One hunter glares and re-enters the woods. The second pulls out his mobile and curses furiously. The third - the interrogator - points down the road.

- Get the fuck out of here.


Welcome home, boy.

noun, verb, & adjective

What is the word? 'Vagrant'? 'Vagabond'? 'Traveler' would do it didn't bring to mind Phileas Fogg with his steamer trunk, or those new 'travelers' and their trademarks of dogs, dreds, and drugs.

'Transient' perhaps? That's a good one since it seems a near cousin to 'transcendant,' but the connection makes it seem like I have aspirations of Emerson, or rather, like those who emulate him.

I've always liked 'hobo.' I wander, I camp, I forage for food, I work when I find it. Tho I suspect there has to be some sort of locomotive component to that title. Altho I followed rail lines for much of the West Coast and the Midwest, I have never hopped freights and have no intention to. And, having visited the Hobo Museum in Britt, Iowa, I think there might be some sort of national brotherhood or creed to which one must subscribe in order to be a hobo. I've already got memberships to co-ops, coffee shops, and libraries all over the place. I'm not sure I can adopt any additional manifestos.

'Swagman' is good. As in 'once camped a swagman down beside a billabong..." I only just thought of that one when I realized that I do boil water in a billy, and I only think of a billy as one because that was how it was introduced to me. However, usually I just call it what it is - a rusted coffee can. I do like the word. It puts me in league with all those other -men. Snowman. Sandman. Batman. But it does place me in the uncomfortable position of having to articulate what my 'swag' is, and how I use it, and whether or not I waltz it around. I'm not even sure I know these things.

How about 'tramp?' It is a versatile word, being noun, verb, and adjective; as in "The tramp tramped aboard the tramp steamer." (let's see, translation: "The wanderer walked aboard the steam ship that allows wanderers.") And it seems to be a word that, oddly, has different associations depending on the sex to which it is applied. Charlie Chaplin's "The Tramp" compared to Tony Bennet's "The Lady is a Tramp." Also known as 'Gentlemen of the road' in England. A homeless Romantic?

Yep, that seems about right. I have been tramping about the countryside and I do have some oddly polished manners: I shave at least once a week, drink tea from a porcelaine cup, read Alan Watts. Tramp it shall be.

Photographs: Folks and Lakes

Some previously unpublished photographs of people by lakes. In this case, Lake Michigan from Chicago, Illinois and Lake McDonald from Glacier National Park, Montana.

Steelcup travel, looking for beds, breaking and entering

Just as I had been told, I found the house with the blue VW bus in the backyard where I could sleep for the night. No one had bothered to lock the bus, or even roll up the windows, so I threw my pack in the back and then tried the backdoor of the house. Nobody home, which had been mentioned to me, but always best to check. Then I went for the front door, but on the way noticed the screen on a first story window was loose. It came off without any damage, so I opened up my knife and slid the blade under the sill and lifted. Unlocked. Soon my feet were kicking aside blinds and stuffed animals in the evening's early glow and I was on the bed of a little girl, to judge by the furnishings. Standing up, I shut the window, then went out thru the backdoor to replace the screen.

Sure, I could sleep in the bus, like I had slept in the culvert, or the abandoned truck, or under the bridge, or any number of other places that had come up just as the day had gotten too dark to keep walking. But on the other side of the wall there would be a bed, or a couch, or at least some carpeted space and blankets, and - preciously - hot water. I would rather have a cup of hot water each day than to have a bed each night. I value my steel cup more than my down bag and use it far more frequently and for many more things. Drinking, eating, cooking, shaving, bathing, collecting - both food and money. Clanging as it hangs from the outside of my pack it has been my bear-bell in the Rockies and proclaimed me as a vagabond in the towns. Tonight, I would drink wine out of it.

I am forgetting to mention something.

Yes, I was breaking into this man's house. But this was breaking and entering of a legally permissible kind. He had messaged me from Louisville with the OK and I had kept his phone number in case anyone should show up. But the neighbors didn't know that. And in such situations, I've generally found it best to proceed without hesitation, to look as tho I belong in the place - a renter who has forgotten his keys, or been locked out. Looking for the ends of yard work to do, I pulled a few weeds out from around the firepit and sorted recyclables, not out of any sense of wrong done to property but to complete the illusion. It seemed the sort of nonchalant, suburban banality that no observer would report. Perhaps, to lay on the sauce, I could act even more residential. Pull out the shopvac. Where some white-white shoes. Mount a ride-on mower. But no one was watching.

Back inside, I made myself dinner, drank the man's wine, watched his Buster Keaton collection from the couch that I would sleep on. Someday, I thought, I'm going to travel with my own bed.

Chicago

The rails, tho busy, were easier to deal with than roads. The paths go straight, are kept quite clear, and I prefer to dodge trains than automobiles. They are much more predictable. Even after dark, so long as they headed east, towards the moonrise, it was a far better to take the railroad than the highway. This is Illinois. They can’t go but one way.

Getting into Chicago – and then, getting out – was much harder than being there. Like any major city, the length of suburbs were the more difficult part. Once I got into the heart itself, I was just another vagrant. I have tried, whenever I have relocated, to blend with the locals, to do as they do, go where they go, eat what they eat. In a grey hoodie, off-color grey pants, grey hat, I fit in with the grey city. Wherever I am is where I’m from.

A well-meaning girl had warned me in Iowa to watch out for police officers in Chicago, since they might think I was homeless.

- I am homeless.

- -Well, I meant like those that sleep on park benches.

If that is the sole distinction, then I did not sleep on any benches, and so don’t qualify by her measure. But there are few traits to otherwise distinguish me, at least from those I met on the Loop and the South Side. They are these:

1. I am younger than 40.

2. I carry a tent

3. I am reasonably clean-shaven

4. I am not black.

They were all good folks, the ones I met, and like folks anywhere like you better when you act and talk like them. I never withheld money - if that is what was asked of me - and never took a photograph without offering something.

By the third day, the anonymity and neural stress of the city were more than I wanted, but I stuck around while some prints got developed. It was like being in a bus station or an airport when everything necessary has been done and all that remains is for something, some one thing – some great thing? – to happen. Two more days and they were done, and I headed out, towards Indiana, thru the South Side.

I had long known that the city I had seen was not for me, but the notion was fixed when I went into a gas station to ask directions from the clerk and found him completely surrounded by glass, a knot of cracks, a bird’s eye, in front of his neck where a bullet had stopped.

Fifteen blocks further south was a forest preserve. Dan Ryan Woods. I had chosen it since a satellite map showed a park within city limits where the crowns of the trees touched. Figuring I would have better cover there, I headed for it.

Inside the woods there was very little undergrowth, suggesting either wood gathering or the tramping of feet. There were bottles, cans, cigarette butts, the usual urban detritus, and a few worn footpaths casually growing over in creeper . I wandered to find both a place to spread my bedroll and to find those who camped here and gain their permission. But tho I found food wrappers, clothing, and marks of a toilet, there was no sign of fire or even of a cleared area for sleeping. Even the shirts and socks I found were half-rotted and had likely sat sinking into the earth since before the last winter. Whatever indigenes there were had gone elsewhere.

Under a broken locust, I set out my bedding. Dogs and traffic whined thru the night, but I slept well, having come back to a place where I could respect the rules of conduct. In the hour before dawn, from the north side of the woods, an owl cried.

Some folks wanted to interview me for a podcast. You can listen to it by clicking here.

photo trade: David Lee

I met David Lee in DeKalb, Illinois as a guest of his roommate. He also enjoys taking film photographs and the following were some prints that I traded for.




You can see more of his photos here

Clutter: Illinois