Wild Roving
or: the song of the open road
Happy May Day everyone! I’ll be presenting twice this weekend in Cleveland in celebration. On Friday, May 1st, the Rhizome House (2174 Lee Road, Cleveland Heights) is hosting a full day of beginner-friendly workshops, and I’ll be presenting the history of May Day during dinner, around 6pm. (But come for the rest too! I think this event should be good for folks who’ve never been to anything like this before.)
On Saturday, May 2nd, I’ll be at the bookstore Mac’s Backs in conversation with debut author (and friend) Carter Keane about their queer folk horror book Morsel (which you can get in person at the event, or order from Firestorm Books 10% off with my referral code).
I swear I’ll do events in other cities at some point too.
And as a reminder, this week’s Cool Zone Media Bookclub is more interactive than usual. You’re invited to read two short stories by Ursula K Le Guin: “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” and “The Day Before the Revolution” (collected here in one zine you can read online) and then discuss them on the It Could Happen Here reddit. Tomorrow a few of us will discuss the stories, with your comments, and it will come out this Sunday.
Wild Roving
“Now I see the secret of the making of the best persons,
It is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.”
—Walt Whitman, Song of the Open Road 6
Last night I stayed up past my bedtime (yes, I have a bedtime. I am in my 40s. I wish I stuck to it more.) watching A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. I haven’t finished it yet, and I have no intention of spoiling it for you, but the protagonist of this show is a hedge knight. A homeless man with a sword and a horse and scarcely a copper to his name.
I feel like the whole thing was written as a present to me. All the swords and armor and production values of Game of Thrones with a bit less of the nobility and (so far) none of the rape. Maybe I’ll finish the series and change my mind, but I like it enough so far that, as I said, I stayed up past my bedtime.
There’s a scene, early on, where our hero Dunk huddles under a tree with his master Ser Arlan of Pennytree, the hedge knight who squired him. They share a bit of plain fare while the rain falls heavy, and trees make poor pavilions because they leak.
I’ve been there. I’m not there anymore, but part of me will always miss it.
When I was an ancient person at thirty or so years old, I went to a conference for Earth First! organizers in the mountains and we talked about what was involved in trying to save the only planet that we know supports life. A delegation of indigenous organizers came in solidarity with us (or to help us be in solidarity to them) and one woman gave a presentation one night during dinner about how those of us who were colonizers might better be in connection to this land we lived on and cared for.
I wish I remembered her name, but at the time it hadn’t occurred to me that I was having one of those moments that will stay with you forever.
She talked about how it’s difficult, but not impossible, for non-indigenous people to really be rooted and connected to the land they fought for, but how it was essential to the work. It was hard for me to hear. I’d been traveling full time for more than a decade at that point, and I figured I’d be at it my whole life. Inertia had me in its grasp and I didn’t know that I could break free even if I wanted.
After the lecture, I went shyly to the presenter to introduce myself and we talked for a little while. I told her that I was a wanderer. That I’d never made my home anywhere, not for long, so connecting with a specific piece of land was difficult to imagine.
She laughed, understanding my nervousness. “Oh that’s fine,” she told me. “Some people are just that way.” She told me stories about a man, a lover of hers, who never found a home, who wandered with his guitar.
Some people are just that way.
Most of my friends, especially the older anarchists I knew (my elders, I would say), spent their time trying to get me to stay in one place. My frenemy Aragorn! (the exclamation point was part of his name, and he’s the reason I know the word frenemy. He literally once wrote a piece called “against friendship.”) caught up with me at an anarchist bookfair in Canada and told me outright that I was wasting my time traveling when I should be writing. That I could get so much more done for anarchism. He and I always argued and fought about politics before he died, but he always supported my vision of writing trashy pulp anarchist fiction, and he once lent me a synthesizer to play a show when I couldn’t afford my own.
Aragorn! was one of the first major theorists of indigenous anarchist ideas, so I can’t exactly say “oh, an indigenous person told me I can travel so it’s fine” and leave it at that, because another indigenous person told me to stay the fuck still. But Aragorn! would never forgive me for making oversimplified appeals to identity in the first place.
Another friend, still among the living and thus going unnamed, told me “if you go to the beach, you won’t see the ghost crabs unless you stand still long enough for them to trust you and come out of the sand.”
A fourth elder, who cut his teeth street-fighting fascists in Bulgaria after the fall of the USSR, told me it was fine to wander, that it’s just what some people do.
So my advisors were split fifty-fifty on what I should do with my life, and I kept at wandering. For about fifteen years, I rarely spent more than a few weeks in one place. Occasionally I managed a few months. Once, in the middle of it all, I stayed in Portland, Oregon for two years for love, though I still managed to move from punkhouse to tent-in-yard to punkhouse every few months.
In the end, it was an injury that slowed me down.
