I will be running a workshop on individual and community preparedness in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, on April 7 from 2-5pm at the Rhizome House, 2174 Lee Rd.
I will also be presenting a history of May Day somewhere in the triangle area of North Carolina the weekend after May Day. I’ll give you more details about that when I get them.
This week’s Substack was originally written in 2018 for my old Patreon. It’s a piece of memoir about my adventures in my early twenties, hitchhiking alone across Sweden while love-sick. It’s also one of my favorite pieces of writing. I hope you enjoy it.
Why Did You Sink the Red October?
I think this story about Finland starts in Sweden.
It was 2005, and I was twenty-two.
At ten or eleven at night my bus crossed the bridge from Copenhagen to Malmö. The border police got on, singled me out, and pulled me off the bus. I was sort of used to that by then. You could play “one of these things is not like the other” in pretty much any non-squatted space in Europe and I would have been the odd one out. I had long hair and patched-up black clothes, sometimes both a beard and a skirt, and you can sort of imagine a haze of flies around me at any given point.
“Where are you headed?” a guard asked once I was in the freezing night air outside the bus.
“Helsinki,” I said.
“Where are you staying in Helsinki?”
I wanted to say “you’re Sweden, not Finland, so it’s none of your fucking business.” Or I could have been honest: “I’m staying with the girl I loved through all of high school, who I haven’t seen in five years.”
“With a friend.”
They searched my bags pretty carefully, but zine masters of anarchist literature aren’t drugs so they didn’t arrest me or nothing and I continued on my way.
I had about twenty euro to my name, which I was planning on spending on the ferry from Stockholm to Helsinki. The only problem was, I hadn’t had enough money to take the bus all the way to Stockholm. Malmö was as far as I could get. I was going to hitch.
The bus driver took pity on me and took me an hour further, to a truck stop he said would be a decent spot to get a ride from. I got there in the middle of the night. There was frost on the ground. I walked out into a field behind the place, laid out my sleeping bag, and tried and failed to sleep.
It’s strange to say I used to live for that kind of adventure. But already at twenty-two it was getting old. It’s just that I wanted to get to Finland. My fate, whatever it might be, was waiting for me in Finland.
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