MicahPaul

A couple of hours ago, I returned home from a little journey. I set out for one week on the road with minimal planning, looking to go new places, meet new people, all that usual stuff, and with a more deep-seated desire to gain profound new experience and perspective.
In all of these respects, I succeeded.

What follows is an very lengthy account. However, for the sane ones who do not have the interest to read this beast, it can be summed up thusly: I surfed collectives in Chicago, met my friend Max at a Chicago jail, took him and friends West to Omaha, crashed at an anarchist house there, then headed North up to Brookings to spend a few days with my friend Wes, cut across Minnesota to Chippewa Falls to see Mariah, and then home. And it was amazing. On with it, then. Actually, one note: In reading over this account, it seems to come across as a bit flat - I seem to have failed in getting across the true feel of this trip. I hope the events can at least speak for themselves.

In the days preceding my departure, I began to get a nasty skepticism about whether this trip would work. Travelling without a plan and expecting to run into great adventure is a pretty gutsy move. I had never done anything of this sort before, so I really didn’t know what to expect. My fear was that I would drive to Chicago and have nothing to do and no one to meet for a week, and come back home with little gained but a gas bill.

The moment I arrived at the place I would be staying in Chicago, however, these fears were alleviated.

The drive to Chicago was extremely foggy. I stopped in Madison to have dinner with my brother, Noah, and would later find out that the reason I had a dickens of a time getting back on to I-90 was a 100+ car pileup that happened there. Anyways, I got to Chicago fine and then found my home. This was a place I had found through The Couchsurfing Project, a site which I very highly recommend for any traveler. It was listed as a warehouse having 16 people living in it. And how!

This is Weiser House, an activist collective in the Lawndale neighborhood of Chicago. 16 people currently pay rent, with many guests in and out. It is the second floor of an old warehouse. On one side, it is bordered by freight train tracks, elevated to match the height of the floor. Trains regularly rumble by, reminiscent of the apartment of The Blues Brothers. I am pretty much in love with Weiser House, having had dreams of living in a warehouse for quite some time now. Here are some pictures:

Everything in the house is collectively run, with people cooking meals for the collective most nights, chores assigned, and so on. They had a car for collective use as well. After I got there, a couple people just got back from the Odwalla Factory dumpster, and procured a huge booty of Odwalla goodies:

I pretty much lived on this stuff in Chicago. Expiration dates are really more of a suggestion, anyways. But I’ve had enough Chocolate Peanut Butter Odwalla bars for a lifetime.

I slept on a random bed that first night. Woke up around 10:30 to an absolutely beautiful day-I believe it broke 60°F. It was also muggy as hell. I was sweating in a sweatshirt and jeans. I did the half hour ride downtown and rode around downtown Chicago for a couple hours, just getting a feel for the place. I almost got laid out twice, one of which involved somehow sliding diagonally across an intersection, ending in a pretty sweet recovery if I don’t say so myself. It was a lot of fun, anyways. Riding around gave me a feel for how absolutely huge Chicago is — it made Minneapolis seem tiny in comparison. I managed to snap a couple of pictures in between avoiding death. They aren’t the best, I just attached my camera to my bag strap and occasionally held it up for a picture.

I also made a pilgrimage to Intelligentsia Coffee, quite possibly the finest coffee establishment in the Midwest. They allegedly don’t let their baristas touch a drink being served to customers without six months of training. This is, incidentally, the only place I spent money for anything in Chicago.

And worth every penny. That is a double traditional cappuccino. Bellissimo. That’s a word, right?

I also had the misfortune of 3 flats in Chicago, all of which conveniently happened within a mile of me seeing a bike shop. The second time I came across a pretty sweet bike shop called Irv’s in the largely Chicano neighborhood of Pilsen. It had the most ridiculous bike bling. I wish I could build up a ridiculous scraper bike with this stuff.

Anyways. Eventually found my way back home to Weiser House. I was quite glad I got back when I did (around 4 pm), because not long afterwards a magnificent thunderstorm swept through. A giant thunderstorm on January 6th in Chicago. So, I observed the thunder storm and read for awhile, until around 8:00, when things began to get quite interesting. Some people were talking about how a couple of guys had gotten arrested earlier and were going to do jail support for them, waiting for them at the jail and being there when they get out. It turns out that Bush had been in town that day, and a couple of them had gone in front of his motorcade with a giant banner. The plan was to just stand there, until someone yelled “Push!” and they charged a bunch of mounted police, and one guy knocked the Chicago Chief of Police off his Segway. Whoops! Anyways, most of them got off with misdemeanors, and a bunch of people were biking over to the jail to meet up with them. I asked if I could tag along, thinking it would be a neat opportunity to see the city at night. It wasn’t until we got outside that we realized that it was still pouring. There was occasional thunder and lightning as well, which made it a rather invigorating ride through a January Chicago Thunderstorm to the First Precinct Jail. And wet. Very wet. This was a memorable experience.

It was at this jail that the most curious thing happened. Also waiting around doing jail support was Max, a friend I went to South with. Yes, just running into an old high school friend waiting around a Chicago jail in a January Thunderstorm. It turns out he was doing much the same thing I was, just getting away and traveling around the country for a bit. He was crashing at another activist collective in town called Lowercase Collective. There was allegedly a feast happening here, so it was decided that everyone would go there. One of the guys I had biked to the jail with has previously been a messenger, and he lead me on a very long, fast ride across town to Lowercase. I must have biked 30 or 40 miles this day. Alas, Lowercase was lacking the promised feast, but good conversation was had with the Lowercase residents, my friend, and others. I realized that it was 3 am, and no one was biking back to Weiser all the way across town, so I crashed at Lowercase that night and peeled the clothes off my body.

In the morning I headed back to Weiser, and spent the day getting dry and warm. It was still perfect temperatures, and a bit drizzly. Max called me, telling me he and some friends are headed West and wondering if I would want to drive them a ways, maybe St. Louis or Des Moines or Omaha. In the spirit of the adventure, I agreed. The next morning, I drove over to Lowercase and picked them up. They were Max, Emily, Pete and Vince. They were hitchhiking and trainhopping to the West Coast, most likely to San Francisco. It was a really fun group. It was decided I would take them to Omaha. They threw all their packs in the van and we were off. We ate food that we had, Odwalla bars and dried apples and pita bread. We didn’t know where we would be staying in Omaha.

We got there around 8 or 9, walked around the Riverfront a bit, and generally came to the consensus that downtown Omaha on a Thursday night isn’t particularly exciting. Emily and Pete decided they would start hitching then, so I drove them out to a truck stop outside of town. A common theme: I was sad to see them go, off on a much more grandiose Kerouac-ian adventure than I. Myself, Vince and Max drove back into Omaha to try to find some people or a place to stay. We got good and lost and found ourself in the hip neighborhood, and we were walking past a pizza shop when Vince caught the magic word: the Pizza Shop was a collective. It was closed, but he got the attention of an employee and started asking about the activist/collective scene in Omaha. Turns out there isn’t much of one (who knew?), but there was one house with couple anarchists living there. We asked if we could crash there, she gave them a call, and to our pleasant surprise, we had a place to crash in Omaha. We headed over and met Henry. He was a very interesting guy, had lived many places, hitchhiked and trainhopped around the country, and was spending some time in Omaha. We crashed for the night and in the morning I took Max and Vince out to the same truck stop for them to hitch from. I was very jealous of their continued adventuring, and I’m afraid my appetite for such an adventure has been whetted irreversibly. Hitchhiking this summer? I hope so.

After seeing them off, I headed North to Brookings, SD to spend some time with my friend Wes. Brookings is a town of about 18,000 on the East border of South Dakota. This life was such a stark contrast to the one I had been living in the collectives. The lifestyle there is a very minimalist one, antimaterialistic, a life one might expect of the ideological contrarians of capitalism. It was really refreshing, an aim I would like to take in my own life.

Brookings had homes very much full of stuff. I had a good ironic chuckle when at a friend of Wes’ house I found a decoration above the toilet reading in hip bold lowercase, “simplify.” I counted 18 bottles of stuff in the adjacent bathtub. Ah, but it is the thought that counts.

Another stark contrast was the things I was doing. Brookings largely ended the more adventurous part of this trip, which was a bit saddening. Time was constraining. In any case, I had a fun time with Wes and his friends for a couple days. On Saturday, I cut across Minnesota to Chippewa Falls, WI. My excellent friend Mariah is about to set off on her own adventure in France, and she and her friend Paul were having a little gathering for a proper send-off. It was a good last stop for the trip. From there it was a return to Minneapolis. I got home around 11 pm.

So that was what happened in this week, and I must say, I am really impressed by how well this worked. I only wish I could have continued on West, hitchhiking to San Francisco. Time will tell on that one. My life has undoubtedly been changed, and what this account is missing is all the profound experiences that are so much harder to put into words. Maybe I’ll try to do that with a bit more time.

To close, here are some more pictures:

That’s the exterior of Weiser House, the Weiser House cat (named Cat), and a typical view of the some of the Chalkboards at Weiser House.

Dream on!

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 13th, 2008 at 16:11 and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.