ELLIJAY
this morning, i stepped off the pavement of peachtree road, just north of my cruciform tenement tower, and onto a grass embankment that slipped beneath a concrete bridge that spanned the railroad line next to the old hospital. the tracks had long since been abandoned after the rise of the bartermobiles running north of I40 and tennessee and the subsistence communities of the high plains. i strode the rails with a feeling of safety, with a feeling in my chest that as the day wore on, and the towers turned to sad shivers on the horizon and then were replaced by trees, then by foothills, moved from a weighted pity to a detached optimism that could have only come from waiting so long to start living. today i fared rather well in my travels and after reaching my playing-weight by delivering some old journals to a friend's family in alpharetta, i was able to move along the ties with ease. as the day wore on i was able to split the angles of my travel against the arc of the sun on my back and would shift modes when a power transmission corridor crossed the tracks and its long uninterrupted vista to the horizon matched, to a certain extent, the bearing i required in order to finish the day in a somewhat northerly locale. as the sun began to drop this afternoon i made efforts to stick to the old state roads with the hope of securing a lift to make up ground in the dark that i could not properly do on foot without the sun. (note: learn to navigate at night!) i was finally picked up by an apple cropper headed north from a seed run in ball ground.
so it is that i spend my first night of this participation in a world that existed 18 hours ago only on paper, as a guest on a small apple collective in ellijay cracking black walnuts in a vise and filling my head and chest with new intentions.
i remained on the farm for as long as my fresh wandering feet would allow. it turned out to be no more than three days if i remember correctly. yet, those days, at the front end of my peregrinations served to set a tone of welcomeness, benevolence, education, and equality. there were three homes on the farm, one of which was solely given over to those on the move or in need; it apparently had a long history of serving this purpose. the spirit of man had sprouted long ago outside the cities. it was still some time, even with a reconfiguration of societal structure to rival the french revolution, before the cities shone again as centers of contemporary social and cultural thought; even then they were something completely unrecognizable.
in the home where i was set up, two other travellers and a farmhand were lodged. the two travellers had been en route from what sounded like a similarly small outpost in arkansas called marked tree to the former capital in eastern virginia to investigate an Enfantin shanty township that had begun to string together the old landmarks and monuments. as with other new communities of the time, this was centered around small scale agriculture. having little experience in farming of any sort, the travellers hoped to ply their respective trades of recombinative masonry (which must have been in demand after the destruction of the wwii memorial, the newer national gallery, and other functionally worthless constructions) and vegetarian cookery. what they did have however, and what they shared with me, was an explosive desire to travel and to sow change.
the night before last my enthusiasm to reach out got the better of my thrall for the first of the new communities i was fortunate enough to encounter. i moved on and tonight find myself just south of maryville, tennessee. i feel already, that throughout my travels I will hold my experiences in ellijay as a fond blueprint for my goals and desires out here.
my two fellow travellers (it looked like they might be hunkered down in ellijay for some time when i embarked) and i had a long chat as we collected walnuts the dusk before i left. it was fiery. not toward one another but in rousing our spirits and pride of being part of all of this.
«the only way this works is if everyone has as little as you... everyone!»
«yeh, and also everyone must want to consume a part of themselves! well, i mean direct fruits of their labour, immediate cultural artifacts. when i made these railbed shoes, from my own drive and my own collected materials, it not only gave me satisfaction but it inspired those around me. i know it was not a new idea, and these are not even particularly well made, but a possession such as this, made by me, does something very different than the acquisition of a 'product' used to do. it creates a different social climate in which things that people have inspire those around them to either make one of their own or to make an advancement on that thing. people feel like they can do this because the object, let us say this shoe, is within their reach. the means and methods are transparent and the resources are readily available. it used to be that the acquisition of a 'product', something whose origin was mysterious and whose fabrication was opaque and specialized, inspired an abstracted envy in the community. people felt that the envy was for each other, for the product, yet it was for the power to make that product, for the unreal 'producer'. the 'products' brought misplaced negativity into the social system of the city and the people did not know how to stop it because they did not know who the 'culprits' were. but they were the culprits, you know? we were, because we placed stock in a deferred fruit of labour and our lives in turn became abstracted. it took us losing that supply, that 'something from nothing', to understand what the nature of that distance we had been keeping from outselves was. that distance was also between us, and it was even more tense and abstract and opaque. it made us fear being a community and it made us regress when we could have advanced. amsterdam, that is why, for your journey, not only across the terrain but into your self, i want to give you my railbed shoes. your ankles are sure as shit going to need them. but, i trust that the fruits of your experience with them will come back to me someday in the form of a more advanced shoe and i will think of the situations you must have gotten into that brought about that evolution.»
sure, so what i have next to my fire tonight is the same pair of shoes two days older, but those words, whether they play out through me or not, have propelled me through the last two days.
