From the Road

crossing the columbia river

The moon is rising halflit and yellow from the horizon. I am sitting in the cab of a box truck right now, on highway 84 somewhere in Idaho.  Bill, the director of the Backbone Campaign is driving next to me.  We are on our way to Salt lake city.  “Nick!” he shouts, “you have to look at the moon… Oh my god it looks amazing!”
Nick sits up and twists around in his nest behind the two front seats where he has just laid down to nap.  I am writing this realtime.  When we find an internet location in the morning I can post this.   We have been driving since 7 am today. Tomorrow we press on to Denver.  The first goal of our trip is to march outside of the Democratic National Convention.

Behind us in the box of the truck are 500 gallons of biodiesel in steel drums.  Behind the biodiesel, and on top of and around it, are the giant puppets.  They are meticulously organized on shelves, or lashed to the walls — among them a 1000 square foot Preamble to the Constitution.  There are over twenty of them, in various levels of assembly.  Each prop in its unique way displays a particular issue that threatens to remain unsolved regardless of who is elected president this year. Each of them also proposes a solution, in a simple and visual way. We plan to carry them outside the Democratic and Republican conventions, and then eight more cities and campuses, where the “procession” will transform itself into a venue for education and citizen-action training. The tour is scheduled to last a total of ten weeks.

We have been on the road since 8am this morning, when we left a ranch in eastern washington where I live off-and-on these days.  Nick and Bill arrived there last night after packing the truck on Vashon and driving across the state.  Others this week pressure-washed and repainted the truck, put donated supplies in the cab, and put finishing touches on the puppets. At the ranch I have spent the last two days processing and rearranging biodiesel donated by the land trust the owns the ranch.  We were able to add two hundred gallons to the three hundred that Nick and Bill had picked up along the way.

 

I was impressed by how well everything was packed in — the solid shelves, and an old Pfaff 238 sewing machine mounted in the back with crates of tools beneath it.  It is beautiful, all of it, like a ship of some kind — all of the most important things that we will need along the way, we hope.  Many people have worked hard to make this tour happen.  Bill and Amy, the backbones of the  Backbone, chief among them.  Nick and I were lucky to come on board at the last moment in a frenzy of activity.  The pieces came together around us as the community prepared to send some of their own into the world to represent their place and the ideals that still hold us together despite the yuppie invasion of our post-rural leftist home, or the despair of our times and everything else that makes us kick the dirt or grumble in the mornings when we turn on the radio.

But here we are bolstered by the sense that we are going to do something really worth doing.  Meaning goes a long way on the highway when one would otherwise be tired of driving.   And I have my own hopes and desires that tug me along through life.   I don’t necessarily want this to be a political blog, I just about how I live my life.  It is a way to hold forth the things I think are important lest they be forgotten in my own mind or simply be one more set of human desires not voiced in this nation of strip malls, strip mines, and stripped out media.

Similarly, I view these huge images loaded in the truck behind as the desires of our community.  I feel honored to be delivering them to Denver.  If i had to choose I might have made them differently, or they may have been different icons — in some ways my ideals or theories diverge from others whom have helped to create this procession.  But then again I have not yet created a home, or raised children, or run a farm. I am on board.

It has been easy this past year to feel sorry for myself and the world. There are some things that as a still-young person I cannot reconcile by thinking through. Like how our country became the way it did, or how many times the ninth ward still jumps back into my head. Or why we are still in Iraq? I get angry sometimes and storm around. Other times I sit down and cry. I want this world to last, I decided. I want it to at least last long enough for us to have a shot at something better for all of us. When I wake up and notice how beautifully life shines around me, I have a strong desire for peace.

Nick calls this truck an “an ambulance of icons,” and he refers to people building their dreams out of hope and sending them across the country with us.  It is not often that Nick waxes poetic.

Oh, and an excuse to travel with Nick?! You bet. He has been working a lot lately, but he also wants to hit the road. He may have to return home after the conventions to finish the house he is building with his father, but he will be with us in spirit from then on.

The road treats us well… We have outfitted the truck so that we can refuel anywhere, transfering biodiesel from the storage barrels to fuel tanks by way of a twelve volt pump.  We are getting better than 10mpg.  Which is good news.

from the road,

Logan