From the hot swamp to the cold city

Our red canoe cut through the still waters of the swamp. The sky above us was mirrored by the water underneath our boat. The trees had surrounded us in a way that made me feel like the rest of the world didn't exist. A few yards away I could see a large brown turtle sitting on a branch jutting out from the water's surface. As we got closer, it spotted us, diving into the water and swimming away. The three of us looked all around us, watching in silence, afraid to break the perfect peace that surrounded us.

It was October, and as far as I could tell we were somewhere near Elizabeth City, North Carolina. It was the Croatan Earth First Rondevous that had brought us down here to the swamp, where we had been camping for the past few days and attending workshops about everything from blowing fire to edible fungi identification. The workshops were a lot of fun during the day, and at night our camp of about 30 people or so became a wild party filled with songs, stories, drinking and large groups of non-monogamous "hooking up". The sun was starting to set on what would be the last night of the rondy though, and we paddled our boat back to camp.

The next day everyone that hadn't left already followed the organizers of the rondy back to their home, the Feral House, a squatted house tucked between the swamp and a motor home park. It was a beautiful place, with all the amenities of home... except a bathroom. It even had electricity brought to them through a broken meter which only ran at a hundredth of the speed of a normal electricity meter. This meant that they were getting all their electricity at 1/100th the cost. I glanced at their last month's bill that had been posted on the wall. The total was seventy-five cents.

It also housed a small infoshop, which i perused for about an hour before going into town on a dumpster diving mission. Dumpster diving in Elizabeth City was extremely good, and we brought back tons of produce for the hungry mass of kids hanging out on the porch. After eating, a large group of us stood around in the front yard, debating green vs red anarchy over a few pints of moonshine. It was distilled in the woods near the house, and one sip made me take a step back. You could clean car engines with the stuff. We continued talking as the moonshine went to our heads... and as the sun went down and the lights turned on, so did the stereo. An eighties dance party broke out, and rocked into the night.

The next morning I sipped hot coffee from a mug as I sat next to a campfire in the backyard. The coffee was nursing my hangover as I rubbed my aching temples. My ride came around the side of the house and announced our departure. Gulping down the last of the hot liquid, I followed her back to her car, throwing my pack in the trunk. I gave a final goodbye to everyone at Feral House, quickly jotting down emails and thanking the residents of the house for putting on the rondy. I climbed into the car and as we drove away, I looked back at the house to see my friend Tick standing at the fence giving me a farewell fist in the air.

Days later I found myself back in Baltimore crashing at the Tree house, the upstairs level of an upper class victorian home near Towson University. We had named it after the balcony on the front side of the house, which had trees towering over it from the front yard giving the feeling of sitting in a life-sized tree house. It would become home to many kids in the Towson area, and at first, everything was good.

But the cold winter had begun to settle into Towson, and the mode quickly changed from drinking and playing outside, to staying indoors smoking pot and playing video games. It wasn't exactly the living environment I was shooting for. I wanted to put on puppet shows, go dumpster diving, and wheatpaste posters at night. I wanted every day to be new and amazing and something to make everyone else want the same. While I tried to invoke some kind of productive change in everyone around me, nothing seemed to work. Everyone was too comfortably set into their new mode: work, commute, blaze, sleep.

I soon found myself sinking into the same rut. Day after day I would find myself coming home from the health food store I worked at, too tired to do anything but crack open a beer and collapse into the sofa. I couldn't muster the energy to do anything but watch the game of super mario brothers being played in front of me.

Working at a health food store should have been ideal. I felt like it was a work environment I could live with ethically, but after being there for two months it was becoming more and more clear to me that this store's 'ma and pa' exterior was a sham. It was no different than a corporate chain like Trader Joe's, with it's greedy management and disregard for the 'lower' employee underlings (sales clerks). Working there made it painfully clear that this was no co-op grocery like I had imagined, but just another 'health food store' run by people that didn't give a damn about their employees.

My hatred of customers and management grew with each interaction I had with them. Senior appreciation day was the worst. A twenty-five percent discount was given to anyone over the age of 65, and it was always the busiest day of the week. The elderly would flood the store, hoping to purchase something that would cure their ailments, in what I could only see as a sick desperation to stave off the inevitable. The different types of vitamins we sold numbered in the thousands, and I considered ourselves not that much better than a voodoo curio shop.

"Hey, you forgot my discount on this apple!" one customer would whine.

"I need glinkoba-E, not glinkoba-E alpha!" would complain another, and with each complaint I would pray for their deaths.

"Please, please just die." I thought to myself. "Do yourself and everyone else a favor..."

It may have seemed cruel, but with managers constantly breathing down my necks, and cheap old people bitching about everything possible, I was a little low on sympathy. I made mental note to never turn out like any of these people.

In a frustrated impotence of writing I sat for days in front of my computer, trying to put the words together of another story for Squat the Planet. I couldn't even write anymore. Suddenly it dawned on me that my job and my environment were killing me. I was falling into the same trap I had escaped from all those years ago in Los Angeles.

Work, commute, drink, sleep.

Alarms went off in my head, and the next morning I took immediate action. I slept in. The phone rang over and over, and I happily ignored the frustrated messages left by my boss. It felt good to be able to fuck them over and make the boss do some of my work for a change.

It was near the end of November, and by this time things in the house had deteriorated dramatically. The landlord wanted us all out, and everyone was trying to find new places to go. Things had gone so badly over the past two months that I wasn't sure if Towson was worth saving. My mind wandered back to a warm, clear night late that previous summer.

I was lying on the roof of an abandoned auto garage near downtown with my friend Jenn. We sat cuddled together looking up at the stars, debating the things we thought possible in this place. Jenn was pretty pessimistic.

"This town is dying," she said, turning from the sky to look at me. "It would be better to just escape,"

But I still had faith in the potential that lay here. "This is the first place I've ever been where I feel wanted. For the first time in ages, I feel like I have a family. I can't accept that it's all just going to wither away," so I stayed, and she left.

Yet it seemed like the ways things were that summer were indeed withering away into nothing. Everyone moved out of tree house, moving back in with their parents, and I was left by myself, sitting on the street, wondering what I should do next. The worst part was that no one even asked where I was going or if I was going to be okay. Suddenly it felt like no one cared, and I spent the next few days sleeping in the abandoned hoagie shop in downtown. Even inside that building the temperature dropped so low every night that I couldn't sleep because i was shaking so violently from the cold.

Finally, I woke up one morning to the cold biting through every layer of clothing I had. I was becoming used to being woken up in this fashion, and I packed up my backpack and climbed downstairs. I leaned against the back door that was my way in and out of this building only to be stopped by something blocking the door outside. Confused, I pushed harder against it until it eventually gave way as I slammed my shoulder against it, forcing the door open. I stepped outside and looked around me in horror as I saw what had been blocking the door. Falling from the sky, surrounding me on all sides, and covering everything in the city, was three feet of snow. It had all fallen overnight.

At this point I knew there was nothing else I could do. I went into the city, and caught a greyhound bus out of town. I passed out from a lack of sleep and dreamed of the warmth awaiting me at my parent's house back on the west coast.