strike that

Gone Again

Last night I was talking to Matt on the phone and he pointed out that this summer I have made use of an alarming variety of transportation. I’ve flown four different airlines. I’ve taken Greyhound and Amtrak and an Alaska Marine Highway Ferry. I’ve driven my truck and Marc’s truck and La’s SUV and Frenchie’s mom’s car and a rental car, and taken a taxi, and hitched rides on Craigslist. I ran. I rode Jones’ bike. I was in an ambulance.

I have been doing a lot of Moving Around.

And the crazy thing is that when I first got to Quebec City over a month ago, I was completely exhausted by this. I was coming off of five weeks of rootlessness and I was eager for it to end. I was exceedingly unexcited to have to figure out Plan B.

But somewhere I got a second wind. I like traveling, after all, and I have a relatively vast capacity for not having an address and rotating through three tanktops. And though I wasn’t thrilled about the circumstances and timing, it was fun to have so much Possibility. One of the first things I did was write to Habitat for Humanity.

Habitat organizes groups of volunteers to build low-cost houses. After Hurricane Katrina hit the gulf coast last August, I wanted to head down and work on a project there. But they didn’t have many builds up and running by my winter vacation, and spring vacation I spent in Quebec. So finally here I was, on the east coast, with time to spare.

Long story short: I signed up for a build in rural Louisiana scheduled to start last Sunday. And at the last minute, it was cancelled. A story that, in other summers, might have merited a whole post of its own. But at the moment I’m sort of in the habit of sudden changes of circumstance.

So I spent another afternoon Dealing With Fucking Logistics and farmed myself out to a group called Hands On New Orleans. I think I’ll be gutting houses instead of building them, which isn’t as fun, but what counts is that I’ll be doing something, and I think that something will be rather useful, and also they feed me.

But because I once again had unanticipated schedule flexibility, and because I’m bad at geography, I booked in four days in Santa Fe first to visit my parents, who are out here for a classical music festival. So this week I have been living in an unbearably lovely little hotel room, and taking pictures of adobe buildings, and hanging out in churches.

And tomorrow I’m taking a rental car to a plane to a taxi to a Methodist church near the French Quarter of New Orleans. Because sometimes you travel a whole lot and pretty much end up where you started.

posted by tortaluga @ 11:45 AM