Drift

Photo montage from today's drift (dérive) through North Adams for our Winter Study course. Today's journey was quite interesting -- I was digging on the phases one experiences while undertaking the "task of walking". Taking cues from our readings -- a broad sweep including works from Thoreau and Rousseau, contemporaries like Guy Debord and Nick Papadimitriou -- and taking notes on the fly (incl. photos, sounds, what have you), there was something of a transformation that took place over the span of the allotted hour. At first, one is kind of grumbly, or at least, in a state (or the straights) of looking for cues. Anything should act as beacon, right? Or at least allude to a bright and shiny path. Pigeons, the darkening skyline and threat of snow squalls, the letter H from Holiday Inn, reading signs from storefronts… all pretty regular stuff; nothing heady or brimming with an atypical motif to motivate the ambulatory legs-to-head matrix that opens up the worm cans and difficult-to-reach mental shelves. It wasn't until we strode up the road a bit that our selves began to gel into the landscape and the stride. Holding a recorder is nothing new to me, and I'm always conscious of using these while in the public -- are they staring? giving a hairy eyeball? curious? -- it's all old stuff to a local, perhaps, and discussing this into a mic or wiggling a camera here and there probably makes little sense to anyone. This shit is all actually pretty mundane: that crumbling tarpaper shack over there, the scrappy yard dog / guard dog announcing our arrival; the rounded mean spits of snow, making an urban walk uncomfortable. Nevertheless, onward we went, shuffling through snowy sidewalks to an unknown place where the road rose high to form a funny U. From this sudden vantage point, we could make out the backs of derelict factories and the snaking Hoosic river, biting its way through its canal, now a cement chute with green ice teeth. I was familiar with the architecture but I'd always known it from the opposite direction, and with that, by car, not these skinny legs. With the view and all its loaded parables about urban decay and mistrust, and high-horse lamentations about rusting neighborhoods and leering stares, our hopes rose on that hilltop. Everything took a change: a path conquered by walking, not driving! Views? Again, banal, but in it we spied circle-windows, trees that had grown over chains, ancient graffiti that sent sad messages to past loves or troubled teens. Symbols maybe? Oracles? Probably just idiot shit, and like the walk, nothing extraordinary. Despite this and the weather's decision to upgrade to a white-out, our trusty recorders continued, maybe a little more frantic and not-necessaily-elated-but-this-was-a-kinda-cool-moment-to-take-in /make notes in streams of nouns, taking care to empty the dusty shelves of every passing accidental thought. Sure, coffee awaited us below, in a warm welcoming cafe, but that would not happen for a lifetime from now. In that moment, the snow, the bits, the detritus, the ill-suited map of London as our guide, the walk as a task transformed into a march into the mind. Well, maybe not that lofty. Definitely not. But it accessed permission to let everything flow a bit more freely. Sometimes, if you let it or are actually looking for it, the legs will let your mind loose for a bit.