Introduction

This is some of the scaffolding for the trip


1- Charles Bowden- from Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing:

How can a person live a moral life in a culture of death? And by death I do not mean something symbolic or metaphoric. I mean the actual death of other peoples and other living things. My life has been spent inside a culture of constant war and vast slaughter of the beasts of the field and the grasses and forests of the land and of the fish in the sea and of the blue sky I was born under at the tail end of one of those wars. I am of that culture and yet I am against that culture. I am of my time and yet out of my time. I drive fast down freeways, but I have no belief that these roads lead to a future. Nor do I fear the future. But I do fear for the culture and the human beings within it and the beasts and plants without it that suffer in silence.

2- Laurence Sterne- From A Sentimental Journey

According to Sterne these constitute the
Reasons for traveling
“Infirmity of body
Imbecility of mind, or
Inevitable necessity”

and then the travellers themselves:

“The whole circle of travelers may be reduced to the following heads:
Idle Travellers, Inquisitive Travellers, Lying Travellers, Proud Travellers, Vain Travellers, Splenetic Travellers.
Then follow The Travellers of Necessity, The delinquent and felonious Traveller, The unfortunate and innocent Traveller, The simple Traveller.
And last of all (if you please) The Sentimental Traveller (meaning thereby myself), who have travell’d, and of which I am now sitting down to give an account, as much out of Necessity, and in the besoin de Voyager, as any one in the class.”

3- David Holgrem- Principles of Permaculture
Principle #1: “Observe and Interact.”

4- Archie Dunn- 'Conversations at a ‘Filling Station’

“Just shut the fuck up and deal!”

This will be, by virtue of its context in time and space and the limitations of its author’s intellect and knowledge, a limited and parochial tour. After all, it focuses primarily on what is going in parts of the USofA. How much more parochial can you get? We are all statistics to the Vast Machine.