September 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

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21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

September 21

Another hurricane is swirling, barely squeezing between the peninsula of Florida and the Cuban island. It is a spooky moving symbol on the weather map, it is a vision out of religion, a curling face of cloud with a clear blue eye at its center. It is looking right out of the weather maps at us.

It has wound into the super-warmed waters of the Gulf of Mexico. These waters are like fuel for it, will stoke its twisting power. These waters are its fury, are its reason and its meaning. They will concentrate it like a set of mirrors. They will speed up its winds to blow down an industry, to blow down a people, to spiral its unnatural terror.

The storm now is Rita, as the hurricanes spin their way down the alphabet. They are egged on by that vehicle that just drove down below my window. They are warmed up by our selfishness, by our need to go back and forth in big tanks of metal that need to burn up the insides of the earth and cast their refuse in a tail up to change the nature of the planet, of its lungs, of its breath.

The whole big atmosphere is looking down, is acting back. It has an eye of hurricane to stare at us and our wastefulness. You would think that all that staring would make us nervous by now.

These waters are superheated because of us. The storm will lash itself hard, this storm of storms, just weeks after another storm of storms breathed down on us, on our Gulf coast, and is anybody listening? I can still hear all the cars of the morning, the cars that are heating up the oceans, the wasteful cars of global climate change. I already hear so many and it is barely seven in the morning. There is a car and there is a truck. There is their sound, occupying the morning sky. There is their sound, far louder than the soft birds. They wake up before the sun can rise to make them see themselves, make them see the terror that they cause with their sound and moving and selfish.

We are doing this to ourselves. We are doing this to everyone. Even the Americans, the most oil wasteful of all, are getting slapped in the face, twice in the same month. You would think we should do something. You should think we would stop with this car insanity. You would think that we would all get ready to walk or ride our bikes, but it does not sound like it, not yet, not this morning, not from what I can hear.

September 22

Last night, a storm wound over our heads. I was at work. I was in a bunker of a big brick building, so I did not feel it. I did not know it. There were no windows in that building for me to see the storm blow. There were no windows for me to see and feel the first rain. But that storm blew in and over, and the lightning lit the sky.

I rode my bicycle back home last night, and it was only slightly dripping when I stepped out of the back door of that building into the glowing night. Behind the high rise apartment tower I could see the sky still in shock. Strong lightning cracked up here, strong lighting flashed up there, so I could see the clouds, so I could take a picture of the ferocious, the sky. I started off into the drips, not going so fast, not wanting to with the streets so wet. I was hoping that the worst of the storm was over, but I was wrong, but I was wrong wrong wrong.

Halfway home, the sky opened up on me. Halfway home, the storm resumed its fury. There were no winds this time, those came at the beginning, there was just washing washing rain, and the rain fell down hard, and instantly. I was soaked with water. I was a sponge that could hold no more.

The streets filled with water as I pedaled, as I raced my wheels. The rain was too much, too quick, too fast for the storm sewers, and it puddled in the street, and I rode thru it like water. The sky was still in convulsions, shivering and shaking with its lightning, but I could only barrel forward into the rain and I was just so glad that there were few cars on the residential streets. I even crossed Broadway between two facing cars moving not so quite headlight fast in the puddling rain. I did not want to wait too long for them, I did not want to say hello to the rain for too long on the washing sidewalk.

I rode up clumsy to my home. I rode up clumsy to my shed and stowed my bike and leaned my hair into home. I changed to dry pants, and then we sat down to watch the news. We saw that a tornado may have touched down just north of here at the front of the storm. Tornadoes do not happen in September here. Tornadoes are June and July. The hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico, Rita, now has winds of 175 miles per hour. It is roaring its way across warm water straight to George Bush's Texas.

We have made the world angry. We have polluted it to fighting back. We have coaxed and teased it and now its global climate change is lashing back at us. It is making the weather unpredictable, it is making the sky more of a horror show, it is making the storms stronger to bother us. And we need to change our ways, or it will wipe us all away.

September 23

The three million residents of Houston are evacuating their city as the winds of storm Rita bear down on the gulf coast. On the highway between Houston and Dallas, on that superhighway of many lanes, there is gridlock. Usually a four-hour car trip, it is taking people thirteen hours or more to make it. At times the speed of the cars is one mile per hour, far slower than walking speed. Some people are actually pushing their cars, for that moves them the speed of traffic, and saves on gas. Others, who are not so much into pushing, are running out of gas and having to leave their cars on the side of the road.

A city is evacuating in the waste of private cars. Each car takes up a waste of room on the highway, so much more room than just the people inside it would take up with their bodies alone. The evacuation would likely have gone much faster if everyone left their cars behind in the city for the storm and just walked from Houston to Dallas.

Even more efficient would have been an evacuation by mass transit, or by bicycle. Cars are what we rely upon, but they are the worst way, they take up so much room that they end up slowing down the whole system, they turn an evacuation highway into a linear parking lot from city to city. An evacuation by car means that people run out of gas and are completely helpless before they even get anywhere.

Buses or train could have been filled up, and would not have clogged the arterial routes like cars do. A bus full of people barely takes up more room than the people themselves would standing on the road. An evacuation by bicycle might take up more room, might make the highway more packed and slow down the traffic, but at least the riders would not run out of gas. They could just take along lunch in their backpack and that would be the only gas they need to make the trip.

But instead the highway is slogged with one mile per hour massive metal pods because of our car blindness, because of the height of our collective car addiction. That addiction itself, that overuse, has brought us two storms of a generation within one month of summer. That car addiction is blowing up entire cities by storm. That car blindness is wiping our civilization off the face of our polluted angry planet.

September 24

Yesterday was a perfect early fall day here in Minneapolis. Hurricane Rita may have set foot to the coast of Texas, but here the weather was fine. After work, we took a long walk to a pizza place to sit outside and have pizza for dinner surrounded by lots of other outside happy people. On our way to the Psycho Suzie's, the pizza place, we stopped at an art gallery, the same one I have already stopped at twice the last two weeks, to look around at the comics arts. Because of the nice night, there were even a few other pedestrians on the sidewalks as we walked up north and then over a few blocks.

After dinner, we felt like a late movie. We started walking down Marshall Street, which is much nicer to walk down since they changed the striping from four lanes to two lanes with two big parking lanes. The new stripes were painted earlier this year, and it made it easier to enjoy the dark mansions and the wild railroad tracks beside the street while walking while walking for pleasure, while walking for transportation. It was dark night by now and the only other walkers we saw were a couple people walking from their car to a restaurant.

It was dark and chilly and time was moving on, so after walking more than a mile I checked the time and the bus schedule and noticed that the bus four blocks away would be coming in just a few minutes. So we walked over there and did not have to wait long to get inside to its buswarmth and buslight and catch a glance at our fellow travelers. After a short ride, we walked a few more blocks to the movie theatre, taking a peak into Nye's bar to see the polka band. Then we walked down Main Street, where a lone violinist was serenading and asked us if the college football team was playing at home or away this weekend. We did not know to set the violinist straight.

We walked into the movie theatre, which is actually in the same building where I work, to check the showtimes. We had half an hour so we walked down the hall to the coffee shop to get a couple drinks and read the Onion newspaper. We sipped and read for a short while, and then walked back the short walk to the theatre, past the outdoor diners still sitting for the night view along the river.

We got our seats and watched "The Corpse Bride," an animated film set in a world that had no cars. The world of the living was in black and white, and the world of the dead was in color, but neither world had cars. Cars are not needed in our fantasy worlds. They are out of place and clumsy and brutal. Our real world is pretty close to those fantasy worlds. At least we do not need a car, tho many other cars pass by us, and may be dangerous, but do not hit us.

Before the movie started, I checked the bus schedules, so I knew when the buses would be coming once the movie ended. So when it did end, we went to the correct bus stop and caught the correct bus within five minutes. Another five minutes later we walked the three blocks walk home. As we walked, still under the influence of the movie, we saw the trees as something like living things and hoped the stars would come out brighter to play.

September 25

It has been raining for so long, you wonder how the world packs it in. Whatever does it do with all that wet, does it ever get its fill and have to vomit it back. Does it ever just say, "Enough is enough," and that is that for the weather, for the people like gnats on its surface, for something else, or other.

On the bus, yesterday, reading like sinking into my seat. Looking around now and then at the everybody else, checking the road and the street for subtle differences of time.

The hurricane has stepped up on the land. This one was not as fierce as the last big gulf one. It lost some force as it rode up to the shore. It did make one dandy traffic jam, tho, one long parking lot from Dallas to Houston. So many people evacuated voluntarily, and took a ride in their family car. They lined up on the asphalt strip to wait behind the car in front. You could turn the whole world to highway and it would still not have been a whole lot more efficient at moving a city out of itself.

In the bookstore, I was trying to find maps of the country that showed the railroad tracks. All the maps were highway maps. That is all they had to know. I could not find one that showed the line with the hatch marks, that simple sign for the railroad lines.

I saw "Broken Flowers," the Jim Jarmusch movie, yesterday in the afternoon. People getting into cars and out of cars. Cars in the driveway, cars filling up all the space between mind and horizon. Cars and jet planes scraping up the sky and the ground. People living shiny outside lives like the skin of their cars. People sitting in one place but not moving anything, and ruining the world, just blowing it to trash. Plastic houses and plastic cars, and the plastic people who cannot shake themselves into any kind of sentience. I was so happy to have to ride the bus back home and sink into a novel by Balzac where the emotions were as tall as trees. It was a pleasure to speck into the lives of Balzac, even tho my own life's world is closer to Jamusch.

Two more days at home and then I will be all about movement. I will feel the sway from side to side all day on the train. I will move across the country at a strong and stately speed. The rails will be so smooth, I will sit but then I will stand.

September 26

Tomorrow morning I set off on my long train journey. I get on the train early Tuesday and will be in Philadelphia Wednesday afternoon. That will be the first of many trips as I take a month to wind my bowtie way around the U.S. and Canada.

I will not be able to update these pages while I am away, so I created a Carfree 2005 Annex where I can make entries from remote locations.

Yesterday I packed my backpack. I am traveling light but it is still a little heavy. I packed as it rained, off and on, almost all day. I am taking a few things, but not so very many things. At this time tomorrow morning I will be at the train station. There I will be waiting for the train to pull in. I will be waiting for my ride, my trip, to begin.

I am taking along my small video camera, a notebook, a couple books to read, and clothes. There are probably more things I could take. I could also travel with less than I am taking. I plan to do laundry several times along the trip, so I packed with that in mind. I will have to do laundry at least once a week if I am not going to be too smelly. That means that I will spend some time of my trip in Laundromats, at the laundry facilities of the hostels I will be at, or at the laundry rooms of some of the houses where I will be staying.

I have e-mailed ahead to a network of friends that I plan to visit, and from some I have asked for a place to stay. I have friends in some of the cities and in other places I will visit, I know nobody. At those places I will settle into a hostel. I already have all my reservations made. Almost all my reservations. I will make the last couple of reservations this morning.

The trip is all planned. I am even packed. I have one more day to go and I will bicycle to work for this day. When I get home I will put my bike in the shed and leave it there for more than a month. I will be riding transit and when I get to my destination. I will be checking out the transit and walking facilities at the many places I will be visiting. I will see the nation one train, bus walk at a time, one field at a time, one junkyard at a time. The world will slowly spin around me, and I will take it in from a cushion of rail. Tomorrow morning I set off. Philadelphia New York City Montreal Toronto Chicago Denver San Francisco Portland Seattle Vancouver Winnipeg and back home to Minneapolis by bus. Here is where you will be able to read all about it.

September 27

The infinity transit odyssey began this morning at a quarter to six. I was only three blocks from home. The city bus was pulling up just as I dropped an envelope into the mailbox. I ran across the street with my big backpack on my back and got on the bus.

I transferred to the University Avenue bus in downtown and rode with thoughts of trains down to the midway Amtrak station. I walked a block with my pack to the station, which is midway between the downtowns of Minneapolis and St. Paul and with nothing really around it. The train station here is a bus station in the middle of a railroad industrial area. But there were many people inside it. I found a seat and sat and looked at them, and looked down, and drew a little.

The Superliner train cars pulled up, only a couple minutes behind schedule. I got my place in the boarding line and was able to get a window seat, but there were other people coming on, and an older man asked if the seat next to me was free and I said it was and he sat down next to me.

He sat next to me from St. Paul to Chicago. He was on his way to Kalamazoo, Michigan for the funeral of his 92-year old father. He had a model railroad, and we talked about that, and we talked about Montana, where we both had lived in previous years. He had worked in commodity trading, and talked of his ranches and his houses way far away from settled towns. He chewed tobacco and had a black stain on the lower half of all his bottom teeth from the habit. At first I thought his teeth were rotten, but then I saw him pull out a pinch and stick it in his gum, and then I knew why his teeth were so discolored.

My long journey was just beginning, and every tree that went past seemed to say so to me. We settled down on the shores of the Mississippi, but I had foolishly chosen the other side of the train to sit on. My seatmate was so compelling that I did not get up for quite a while, I did not get up to go to the lounge car for the great views from there but I stuck in my seat, I stayed there and drew some animations.

We passed towns thru trees, we passed trees and water. We crossed the country inch by inch and had the freedom to look to left and right. We could not even see the straight ahead, we were spared the driver's worry of the next ridge ahead, so we could enjoy the present moment, we could enjoy the now world out the window, the ninety degrees, the here and now and the specific moment passing.

Downtown St. Paul was beautiful. Red Wing was beautiful. Winona was beautiful. Even Tomah, Wisconsin was beautiful. The train rode into Milwaukee and we stayed in the shade of the old train station there. When we curved around the old warehouses of old Milwaukee I watched the grafitti for clues, I looked for the big clock that still sometimes spooks me at night.

I had an hour and a half wait in Chicago between trains. The Empire Builder stopped its run there and everybody got off the train with their bags and walked down the long concrete platform just to the side of the Chicago River. I had some time to wait for the train I would catch that would take me to Pittsburgh but I sat in the basement station underneath beautiful Union Station Chicago. Instead of sitting on the marble benches under the ceiling like huge sky above you, you wait for your train in a low ceiling basement with plastic chairs and crowded in with the so many other people and their pillows and their looks of long train rides up ahead this evening, of sleeping on the train, of destination midnight.

The Union Station basement was packed with folks, but the train to Pittsburgh did not seem so full. I did not have a seatmate, so I could spread out when night grew thick.

I watched the south side of Chicago pass me by. We went by a yard for Amtrak trains. We looked at our doubles, the double decker Superliner trains like we were on. We rounded U.S. Cellular Field, which I had a feeling would be hosting the first two games of the world series in just a couple weeks. We went by the frame houses of the southside, and all the spaces between them where other frame houses used to be. We went by the factories of Gary, and then it was getting dark, and then the trees covered even more of the world.

I have made several post-it note animations today. At first I tried to draw the movement from the train window. I drew small symbols based on random objects I saw out the window. The first one was with fine point ink and was totally invisible when I animated it on the train window, so I moved to darker thicker ink for the rest of the animations. Both drawing small pictures, and then animating them on the window of the train, is a little difficult, because the train is moving, and altho it is moving smooth it is jostling from side to side now and again and again and just now.

I made a couple short ones in the last hour as the sun set. The light was perfect for shooting them on the window. In both cases I made metamorphoses based on things I saw on the trip, out the window. A house that turns into a building into a bridge into a power line and back to a house, and an arrangement of pipes that turns into a face. By the time I animated these, the original inspirations had long passed the train.

Writing on a moving train is also a little trying. I am writing this long hand into a notebook.

September 28

The train slides thru the fog, thru the valleys of Western Pennsylvania. One heartbreaking old mining town after another. Nearly one continuous settlement in between these hills, in this narrow river valley that holds onto the fog so hard, along these railroad tracks so smooth at 7 a.m. Churches with steeples balanced on the head of a pin, thin tall wood frame houses that climb the hillsides. Thick trees and brush turning red and yellow in little artist spots.

I had trouble falling asleep in the train last night. We slid past Toledo and I looked up in the dark and saw an iron truss bridge encased in lights making a double of itself in the black river it crossed. I woke up in Cleveland to see the overhead wires of a light rail line and its station platform, made modern by the night and light.

Today the boulders of the hillside almost heave their way into the window of my coach. The train is so precise that they can carve the hillside out so close. Below, in the tiny creek, the rocks are red for fall, or from the rust of all the empty brick and steel factories that line this valley, that command each quiet town.

The sun is starting to burn its way thru the clouds, the fog. The villages do not seem so lost anymore, now that they no longer have the fog like a blanket to tuck them in this morning.

Last night I had dinner on the train in the dining car. Eggplant ravioli. Not bad. I sat with and talked with a paramedic named Lee who was on his way to Harrisburgh, Pennsylvania to pick up a car he had bought on-line. We talked about living simply, how that is mentally, physically and spiritually important, necessary.

A whole hour before dawn the train got into Pittsburgh, crossing the river onto the triangle of land that marks the city center. I scanned the hillsides for the funicular railroads along them, but did not see one. Perhaps on another trip I will ride them.

The train was late coming into Pittsburgh, so instead of a three hour layover, we had barely an hour. I stepped outside the train station to sketch a few buildings as the sun began to rise above them.

Now I am on the train from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia. I have been riding the train straight thru for over 24 hours, minus the two hours spent on layovers in Chicago and Pittsburgh. I think my body is adjusting to the rhythms of the rail. It will most likely be a bit jarring when I get off in Philadelphia and have to walk the ground in place for three days.

September 29

After a day and a half on the train, I walked my backpack back to earth, across the gap between the train and platform, and I was in Philadelphia. I took the escalator up, and soon above me I could see the grand ceiling of Philadelphia's massive 30th Street Station. After ditching my sweatshirt and jacket into my backpack, I walked out the doors and saw the subway entrance across the street.

When I walked into the 30th Street Station subway stop, I first looked around for the bank of ticket machines that you usually find at a subway station, but there were none that I could see. There was a change machine and two booths with attendants. One of the attendants motioned to me. I must have been easy to figure out with my backpack and eyes looking all around. He told me the fare was $2 and gave me a system map. I went down the stairs and almost immediately a train was there.

The subway train took me down to 2nd Street. Along the way I spied some of the old PCC cars sitting at one station. I got off the train at 2nd Street. It was a short ride so I did not even unstrap my big backpack.

After registering for my conference at the hotel I went two blocks over to the hostel where I would spend the night and where I am writing this. It opened at 4:30 each day so there was a line of people waiting to get in and register. It is a fairly dreary place with no windows in the common room and large barracks dormitories. There were probably thirty beds in the room where I was, and I think they all were full. My earplugs rolled out of my ears at one point in the night and I could not find them to hold back the snoring going on around me.

Before I went to bed I sat in the common room as they showed a movie. As the drama went on in the TV set, another drama was going on in the corner of the room. Philadelphia police officers were there dealing with some issue between a young man and a young woman, but I could not hear anything, I could only watch their faces.

Last night there was an opening reception for the conference at the Institute for Contemporary Arts, which is near the U Penn campus. I took a shuttle bus provided by the conference to get there, but coming back, I figured I would take the subway. Two folks from Portland, Oregon came along with me, and I took my camera out to get some shots. We did not even have to look hard for the subway entrance, it was right outside of the museum doors.

At first we caught a streetcar which runs in the underground tunnel near downtown but out on the street a little further away. We paid as we got on the car. Then at 15th Street, under City Hall, we transferred to the blue line train, the same train line I had taken earlier to get me from the train station. We most likely got back more quickly than the others taking the shuttle bus, tho it did cost us $2.

Before I went to bed, I sat in the toilet stall in the men's room of the hostel and was amazed at all the graffiti I saw scratched in there. There were messages from all around the world to that toilet stall in Philadelphia.

September 30

I got up at six this morning and left my motel room by 6:30 a.m. I caught the subway, the blue line, the market street line, and then transferred to the orange line, the Broad Street line. The Broad Street line looks older than the Market Line. It may not precede the blue line but the blue line may have been remodeled some time in the last fifty years. The Broad Street line has an early twentieth century look.

On the orange line, station names are spelled out in tile on the walls of each tunnel. It has Victorian hand rails, and also has four tracks, for local and express trains. Some subway stations had some signs of water damage, and some had walls so dark, you would think they had not been cleaned since the days that steam trains pulled thru the tunnels.

I took the orange line train up to Girard, along which runs a streetcar line that re-opened earlier this month. The line runs PCC streetcars from the 40's that have been updated inside to include seat belts for passengers in wheelchairs.

When I got out of the subway, I was a little disoriented, and slightly intimidated. There was a platform for the streetcar in the street just next to the subway exit, and I walked up to that one. My intention was to go east as far as where the streetcar met up with the blue line train, and hook up with that several blocks down.

I did not even think to check the sun. I knew I was waiting for the eastbound train because there were only a few people waiting on this side of the street and a big crowd on the other side.

The streetcar pulled up, beautiful and green and streamlined, and I was so excited to get on it I lifted up my camera to get some shots of the ride. I was hoping that another streetcar would come from the other direction, so I could get video of it going by.

Then I noticed that the street numbers were going up rather than down as we passed them in the streetcar. Street numbers going up meant that we were going west. Last night I talked to a Philadelphia resident about my plan to ride this streetcar, and he said I would be fine and safe as long as I went east. Now I was going west. I saw some buildings looking a little boarded up on the street and got off at the next stop.

Here was a college, and for some reason, I immediately felt safe again. I waited for the next car going in the opposite direction and took it back to Broad Street, where a few streetcars had bunched up. I got a chance to get some video of a few of them, and I watched all those people standing at the platform across the street from the subway get into the car that I had just gotten out of. I took the Broad Street line subway back and was in my hotel room by 8 to write this down, and get ready to go back down to my conference.

October 1

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