by Carrot Quinn
“These are good guys,” our rides say.
Again, we are not harassed. We arrive in Portland a few days later, in the rain.
* * *
—
It’s at an anarchist conference in Eugene, Oregon, called Against Patriarchy that I meet Sami. She’s taller than me, cheeks rosy from the sun, wearing stained overalls and a shirt that looks like it was dug up from a riverbed. Her hair is wild, like she got in a fight with a pair of scissors. I am too awkward to talk to most people—I don’t know how to be cool—and it seems like everyone at the conference was born cool, with their screen-printed band shirts and their knowledge of obscure radical theory and their sardonic senses of humor. I only just learned what anarchism is. At the conference my heart shakes and I talk too quickly or forget what I’m saying in the middle of a sentence. I look people in the eye for too long or don’t make eye contact at all. I smile too readily, and know nothing about hardcore punk, Paul Zerzan, or bicycle touring. I can’t skin roadkill, tune a banjo, or make acorn flour. Mostly I am ignored. Sami talks to me, though. She corners me outside after lunch, lights a cigarette, and tells me about her estranged father in Burbank, California, who works for Disney, her chaotic mother who loves vintage dresses, is a palm reader, and has married seven times.
“I don’t really have parents,” I say. “My mom is homeless in Alaska, and I don’t know my father. I lived with my grandparents for three years in high school, but we don’t speak anymore.”
“I’m sorry,” says Sami. She stubs out her cigarette and takes my hand. “Here, let me read your palm. My mom taught me how when I was a kid.” She carefully studies the lines etched in my skin. “This says you’re going to be all right.” She squeezes my hand. “Let’s be friends.”
And so I have a friend. Together, Sami and I attend workshops on female ejaculation and zine making and eat expired tofu sandwiches provided by Food Not Bombs.
“There’s a room open in the house I live at, in Portland,” says Sami, at the end of the second day. “The front yard has this giant elm tree. You should totally move in!”
The Wych Elm house is on a narrow street of moldering craftsmans, boarded-up storefronts, and warehouses. There are only two bedrooms in the house, so the nine people living there have made space for themselves in creative ways: Wej, who is studying to be an environmental lawyer, lives on a ledge he built under the stairs that’s just big enough for a futon mattress and a stereo but not tall enough to sit up in; Abe, who spends the days teaching himself Madeline Adams songs on the guitar, has used a curtain to section off a corner of the dirt-floored basement whose brick walls are always weeping moisture; Lisa shares the loft above the dilapidated wooden garage with a number of spiders. A camper van doesn’t run but, parked next to the garage, provides another living space, and Nico, one warm summer, builds a shack in the backyard from scrap wood. Rose and her four-year-old daughter, Yosha, live in the attic, in which they’ve installed a woodstove, and I take the office-turned-bedroom off the small living room. Sami has the other room, which opens onto the single bathroom in the house—the bathroom that, in my year of residence at the Wych Elm, is never once cleaned. Since I have an actual bedroom, twice the size of my stained futon, which I found in the street, I pay the highest rent—two hundred and fifty dollars a month. In the living room is a couch on which visitors often sleep, their train-dirtied packs propped against the wall. There is a record player in the living room, and Against Me!’s Acoustic EP often spins on repeat, or Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane over the Sea.
Exchanging labor for capital is not something that we, the residents of the Wych Elm, have much interest in; we jealously guard our labor, choosing to squander it on our own projects—zines on DIY abortions; elaborate shadow puppet plays on the history of the North American Free Trade Agreement; bicycles built from salvaged parts; gathering tea from the tea dumpster that smells of bergamot and rose, and hummus, fizzy with fermentation, from the hummus dumpster; wild travels south on freight trains to escape the winter rains. Because of this, of course, we have little money. When we need money, we work in manic spurts, going to North Dakota for the sugar beet harvest, or to southern Oregon in the fall to trim weed. You can offer up your body for drug trials, or pick old clothing by the pound from the Goodwill outlet, model it yourself, and resell it on eBay. You can hawk your dirty underwear online, let a strange man watch you get a pedicure, or wrestle with your friend in a baby pool of Jell-O while this same strange man jerks off. When you have a couple thousand dollars, you quit, because you can; you are young, healthy, and you need very little. You can subsist on day-old bread from the trash and boiled pinto beans. Life is breathtakingly short, and Western civilization is definitely going to collapse in the next five to eight years. Paid work is a sort of death.
* * *
—
“You can’t change the system,” says Sami. She’s standing at the stove in the Wych Elm house’s damp kitchen, stirring tofu in a cast-iron skillet with a wooden spoon. Condensation drips down the windowpanes. We haven’t turned on the heat yet this winter—we can’t afford it—and cooking lends a modicum of warmth to the drafty space. Sami lifts a jelly jar of curry powder, unscrews the lid, and pours a heaping amount into the skillet. “You can’t change the system. It has to be destroyed.”
I nod as I dip bagels into a bowl of water and arrange them on a cookie sheet to toast in the oven. This is how you revive stale bagels. A black trash bag of assorted bagels sits on the kitchen floor, in the corner, next to the four-gallon bucket of tahini from the nut butter dumpster in Ashland. At least we think it’s tahini. There’s no way to know for sure.
The idea of living outside of societal systems and corrupt institutions that serve no one but the rich intoxicates me; it’s as though we can imagine a parallel reality to exist alongside the everyday one, invisible to the naked eye. If I try hard enough, maybe I can slip inside this other reality, and live the rest of my life there.
It isn’t enough just to live outside of capitalism, though. We have to actively work to overthrow it—or rather help it along on its own inevitable decline. Empires Fall—I saw this phrase on a sticker in Eugene, Oregon, and I think of it often. A week ago I got the phrase tattooed on the inside of my forearm. All that’s busted will eventually end, and something new will be born. Right?
We aren’t entirely sure how to hurry along the fall of Western civilization, though. Shoplift more? Make banners? Ride our bikes? There aren’t any clear answers. But in the meantime we’re getting ready as best we can to survive in the world that will come after. Production of goods will end, so we’ll need to relearn earth-based skills. In the wooden garage a couple of deer hides salvaged from roadkill hang from the rafters. Next to this is a half-tanned raccoon skin, belonging to God knows who, that has begun to mold. On the bookshelf in the kitchen are yellowed paperbacks on beekeeping, DIY boatbuilding, fermentation. Zines on how to sew a western shirt on a treadle sewing machine, the legalities of squatting on public land, how to weave a pack basket from invasive ivy. No one who lives at the Wych Elm owns a vehicle, and there is only one computer in the house—Wej, who lives under the stairs and who is in law school, has a laptop. It’s 2002, and none of us own a cellphone. A white plastic landline sits in the kitchen next to a notebook made of scrap paper and bound with dental floss, in which whoever answers the phone writes down a message for the intended recipient. This plastic landline, smudged with dirty fingerprints, rings often—many people live at the Wych Elm, and even more pass through each week, carrying wax boxes of cabbages and saying they’re headed to Fargo on the train, does anyone want to come along? The notebook is scrawled with doodles, love notes, missives from moms, and when the last page is filled it joins the others, lined up on the bookshelf like well-thumbed school yearbooks, and a fresh notebook is made from paper found in the trash. There are always piles of scrap paper around, in the living room and
the basement, left over from zine-making projects, screen-printed band flyers, puppet shows. If you have a skill, you’re obliged to share it, via zine, hand drawn or pounded out on the typewriter, copied at Kinko’s with a stolen key card and then passed along hand to hand on your travels or through the mail.
“Do you think this needs more curry powder?” asks Sami, pausing with her wooden spoon in the air. I look at the bright yellow tofu in the skillet.
“Maybe a little more?” I say. Sami unscrews the glass jar and sprinkles more powder out. I peek in the oven—the bagels are steaming. Perfect. The back door bangs open and a small woman, Madeline, appears. She’s wearing a ratted fur coat over a leopard-print bodysuit and stonewashed jeans. Madeline is visiting from Olympia, where she’s been attending Evergreen State College. She carries a milk crate of bruised apples, which she hefts onto the kitchen counter with a sigh.
“Let’s make apple butter,” she says as she picks through the apples, which are wet from the rain. “And pie.”
Madeline has been staying in the camper van out back for a week, each day joining the bike posse of unemployed punks who scour the city for free goods, and she is considering staying forever. She brought her violin with her, and in the evenings she and a group of folks climb up onto the roof of the warehouse next door and play old-time music well into the night, sometimes sleeping, if it’s clear, under the stars, on a futon they hauled up. Madeline is from a small town in rural Idaho—she was raised by a single mother who worked as a housekeeper, and they lived in the homes of her mother’s employers. Her father, who is from Mexico, died when she was very young. Evergreen State College was her escape, but she’s bored with school. What is the point of it, when the world is ending?
* * *
—
A keg of root beer means we’re having a party. It’s Trish’s birthday. Trish plays the accordion, wears layers and layers of tattered petticoats, and paints murals. The keg of root beer was acquired, rolled in on a dolly, and left in the living room in anticipation of this night. Everyone in our house, and most people we know, are straight edge, meaning we don’t drink, smoke, or do any drugs, and so parties consist of sugar in great quantities, games that are similar to charades but with more emphasis on hating cops, and, sometimes, group sex.
This party will be a dance party. The furniture is cleared away and Christmas lights are strung on the walls. There are slices of stale baguettes, some grapes someone found in an alley, and tubs of fizzy hummus. A Cyndi Lauper cassette alternates with a Madonna tape throughout the evening, and the walls begin to trickle with moisture as people, packed tight in the small rooms, work themselves into a sugar-fueled frenzy. For some reason, about a dozen people are wearing roller skates. In the backyard is a bonfire of pallets, with a wax box thrown on now and then to make the flames shoot up, charring the lower boughs of the wych elm tree, which is so large that, although it’s in the front yard, its boughs shade most of the backyard as well. People in Carhartts and flannels stand in the flickering shadows of the fire with their mason jars of root beer, sharing train stories, or they run from the house, overheated, and tear their clothes off, releasing their wet skin to the misty night. The familiar refrain of “Black Jack Davey” floats down from the roof of the warehouse; everyone who can pick out a chord on a banjo is up there.
I sit on a milk crate next to the bonfire, listening to people talk about trains. I haven’t yet ridden a freight train and the idea fascinates me, makes my heart stir with a longing I can’t explain. One woman at the fire, Kirsten, just rode solo from Salt Lake City to Portland. There was snow, but she snuck into the rear engine, with its heat and captain’s chairs, to stay warm. When the train stopped to work or change crews, she hid in the unit’s tiny bathroom, and she was never caught.
Andrew and Gabriel just returned from an old-time music festival in Idaho, where they caught a boxcar “on the fly,” which means jumping onto the train while it’s moving. They did this carrying a banjo, a fiddle, and two bikes. And not only was the train moving, it was going over a trestle at the time. Trestles are train bridges, airy frameworks of metal and railroad ties that stretch above rivers and canyons. There isn’t usually any place to walk on a trestle, and if you’re on one when a train comes you might have to climb up the supports of the trestle to get out of the way.
I want to ride a train so badly, but all I know of freight trains is what I’ve heard from my new friends. I have no real experience of my own. I can’t ride solo without any previous experience—it won’t be safe. A few weeks ago I met a young woman who rode a train without knowing what she was doing and lost both her legs below the knee. She’d jumped from a moving boxcar, not understanding how dangerous that was or how to do it safely, and was pulled under the wheels. I try to imagine what it must’ve been like, in the moments after falling under the train. Was she in pain? Had she felt anything at all?
Maddy, who has face tattoos and whose hair is a mullet that ends in a single long, flat dreadlock, lifts a wax box from a pile and tosses it onto the fire. The flames rise ten feet, and everyone gasps. Maddy announces that he just rode through the longest railroad tunnel in the U.S., on the train heading east out of Seattle. He was in the tunnel for forty-five minutes, and the exhaust was so thick he could hardly see his hand in front of his face. If the train had stopped, he would’ve asphyxiated.
Am I tough enough to ride a train? I don’t know. Sitting around the fire hearing my friends talk, I feel like I don’t know anything at all, like I am an impostor, someone who stumbled into this world but doesn’t really belong. I want to see the country like my friends have. I want to sleep in the bushes and run from rail cops, and use my wits to puzzle out the mysteries of trainyards. I don’t have experience, but I have desire. Maybe that’s a good place to start.
A week ago I talked to Jordan on the phone—he told me that he didn’t want to go to war, and so he’d gone AWOL from the Marines. Now he was living in Grand Junction again, working as a trash collector for the city, using a fake name so that the military couldn’t find him. He was thinking of turning himself in, though. Six months in military prison and his debt would be paid—he wouldn’t have to hide anymore. On the phone, he apologized for the way he treated me when we were teenagers. He’d been an addict, he said, and it had changed his personality, but he was clean now. The military had gotten him clean. He said he respected me; he respected the choices I made, how I wasn’t afraid to follow my heart. He said he wanted to be as free as I was, one day.
I cried after that phone call, the catharsis of his words unclenching a part of my heart that I hadn’t known had been twisted up. I felt serene afterward, full of a calm, intoxicating certainty. Now, sitting on my milk crate next to the fire, I realize that I am free. I don’t have to be scared. Or rather, I can go after the things that I want, whether I’m afraid or not.
2007
In Greensboro, I live in a redbrick house on a tree-lined street, in a small room, likely meant to be a storage room, at one end of the attic. Willow lives in a room just like mine on the other end of the attic. Our rooms have sloping wooden ceilings and a single round window that looks out at the yard. In Willow’s room is a futon on the floor and a desk made from a wooden door on sawhorses. Willow’s desk is cluttered with stolen art supplies, fistfuls of drawing pens organized neatly in yogurt tubs. Willow sits on a stool in front of this desk late into the night, drawing forests, mushrooms, flowering plants. The drawings contain hundreds of fine lines, tiny, impossible, intricate detail. A headlamp is bundled around Willow’s wild black hair and she wears just a sports bra in the stuffy warmth that gathers in the attic. Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs plays on repeat until dawn. The walls in her room are painted bright primary colors, even the floor. She repaints them in new colors every three weeks.
In my room I’ve strung up Christmas lights and built a platform bed from scraps of plywood. I’ve painted the walls fuchsia
and pea-soup green. I have a clamshell Mac computer I bought off Craigslist for eighty dollars. I’m working on the great American novel.
Downstairs lives our friend Helena, the painter. Helena’s room is full of light. She has lace curtains that move in the air from the yard. Half-finished paintings are propped against the walls—giant, abstract insects, many of them on fire. The floor is obscured with piles of books and clothing.
Willow, Helena, and I dumpster dive much of our food, and we shoplift what we can’t dumpster. Mostly, what we eat is bread and foods that are very similar to bread. Rent is paid with our earnings from participating in medical studies in nearby Durham—the studies last days to weeks, and some of them are sketchier than others. During the studies you live in a windowless room with the other test subjects, and medications not yet FDA approved are pumped into your bloodstream in great quantities. No one knows, yet, what the safe limits for these drugs are. That’s what you, the guinea pig, are for. The medical studies are terrible, but they keep us from having to get actual jobs, which would get in the way of our art.
The dumpsters in Greensboro, besides being full of bread, often contain birthday cakes. Sheet cakes in all colors and sizes, with misspelled names, botched drawings, crooked edges. We gather these cakes by the dozen, strapping them to the rear racks on our bikes with spent inner tubes. We ride to the trainyard in the empty hours of the night, wait for the trains to come, then throw these cakes at the trains as they pass. The faster the train, the better. The cakes explode on impact. They are vaporized. Happy Borthday Charile. Willow has frosting in her hair for days.