Sunday, July 20, 2008

Walk #3

Instructions: Go for a long walk. During your peregrination, make sure you take the time to trespass upon another person's or entity's "private" property. How does walking on claimed and exclusive land differ from walking on public land? Recall that in Chatwin's "The Songlines," the aboriginal notion of space (collectively experienced, providing cultural identity) comes into direct conflict with that of the railroad companies' (owned by an entity, providing income). What other ways of perceiving space are available to you when you disregard "no trespassing" signs?

8 comments:

N.S.U.o.S. said...

The No School University of School has drastically underestimated (again) the amount of time it takes to be alive in the world, and has failed to trespass this past week. Since the posting on the blog has all but ceased for the moment, I'm guessing the student body has been similarly, otherly engaged. Let us, then, take a mid-semester break. I will see you in Daytona. I'll be the lightly bearded man in the tankini doing body shots off chihuahuas.

N.S.U.o.S. said...

Back in session.

The No School University of School trespassed today, and decided to add some filigree to the transgression by also stealing. Trespassing and stealing is a classic pairing--the cambozola and chardonnay of unlawfulness. What I stole was dirt. Yeah, dirt. Having purchased three plants from my local farmer's market, I found myself in need of some potting soil, and since I firmly believe that no one should ever have to pay money for dirt, I decided to steal some. The location for this illicit enterprise was the old Northampton Hospital, a dilapidated mental hospital behind Smith College, and the filming location for 'Cider House Rules.' I had trespassed there a few years ago in the winter, but wanted to see it while it was green. Also, I'd heard condominiums were going in, and I wanted to check out the site before it lost its historical patina.

I was too late. When I peeked through the branches, after having gleefully passed a 'no trespassing sign,' I saw construction workers using nail guns to attach things to other things, one of the main buildings of the original hospital torn down and replaced by uneventful condominiums. This seemed like an opportunity to test the boundaries of permission, so I walked brazenly into the construction zone, snapping photographs. Three or four workers stopped their activity to stare at me and follow my movements. I regarded them with a bored and purposeful expression, and continued walking around and taking photographs. Despite the numerous signs mentioning no trespassing, and my proximity to heavy equipment, no one bothered me at all. The thing about boundaries is this: people who believe in boundaries find it easier to assume that other people believe in them, too. If you give people no reason to believe you are crossing a line, they are relieved not to have to think about how to handle the situation. Boundaries exist, I suspect, so people don't have to think about certain things, like: How should this space be used? How should I interact with others in this space? Though I have trespassed since my youth--in neighbors' backyards, on downtown roofs, in the upper floors of a high-rise construction site in San Francisco, sleeping in a Pacific Ocean beach cave at night, on golf courses, on the tarmac of an international airport before such an activity was considered a national threat--I have only recently learned the benefits of calmly going where I should not be.

As for the dirt, I stole it at the end of my excursion. Always steal on your way out, not on your way in.

Photos can be viewed here:
http://picasaweb.google.com/noschooluniversity/Trespassing

N.S.U.o.S. said...

I mean:
http://picasaweb.google.com/noschooluniversity/Trespassing

N.S.U.o.S. said...

Oops. Apparently the link is too long. Try this:

http://picasaweb.google.com/noschooluniversity

Unknown said...

As I've gotten older, I have become less adept at trespassing. But when I was young, oh boy, don't you get me started. I've been looking for excuses to trespass, but haven't stumbled upon a good one yet. The only exception is my nearly constant use of restrooms in business where I am not purchasing anything or buildings where I am conducting no real business (besides the business of urination).

I do have several favorite trespassing memories from my youth. They always involve Brian and our old friend Bill, and mostly occurred in our middle school years.

Memoria Una: Exploring the recently opened Marriott Hotel in San Francisco. Finding an open service stairway that led us to a 30th-story roof that was obviously unsafe and meant only for construction workers and such. Being captured by security and brought down into their subterranean hold where they tried to intimidate and bully us into admissions of wrong-doing. We stayed strong and were eventually released to cause more havoc amongst the unsuspecting general public.

Memoria Dos: Clambering up the fire escape of a six-story apartment building in Berkeley, looking in everyone's windows as we made our way up to the roof. Bill was the first one down and then started yelling that Brian and I were on the fire escape trying to rob people. He could be a real jerk like that.

Memoria Tres: We would regularly scale a series of pipes to get on the second-story rooftop of a store that overlooked Park Street, the main thoroughfare of Alameda, CA. We would wander around up there and look though the skylights, and try to figure out how to get to the other roofs. But mostly we would just hang out amidst the soft yellow light of the street lamps and feel like we had a spot completely of our own, where nobody could find us, where we could be who we wanted in complete autonomy. Sometimes I still want to haul myself up the pipes and spread myself out on that roof, looking at the stars.

B.L.S. said...

(1 of 3)

The third walk was actually the second walk, chronologically. I carried it out a couple of weeks ago, again on a Monday. We—my saintly sidekick and I—began at about 10:40 AM and got home about 12:20. We covered considerably less ground than the first walk, at a little over 3 miles. However, the physical difficulties of the walk supplied the vigor that was lost in distance.

For this assignment, I had in mind a very specific place. It is technically a public place, free for any person with ambulatory capacities to enjoy. But, to get there, you have to trespass on land that is not only private, but jealously guarded.

This walk was rife with possibilities: drama, embarrassment, exhilarating escapes, legal problems, and grand statements about the ironies and injustices of the social construct of private property. I did not, in the end, cover all of these bases, but I made a fair shot at them.

Akin to my long-gone classmate Pierre, I feel that when I was younger, trespassing was not only more possible but somehow necessary to discover the world, or my own life. But I too have found trespassing to be more difficult with age. I have a job and a domestic sphere and things like that to preserve. In small towns like mine, there is only so much trespassing you want to risk if you intend to remain in the good graces of people upon whose good graces you depend.

So I had to choose my route and my reasoning carefully. What I really wanted to do, as I think most everyone else in this town wants, was to trespass in the private resort that prohibits the entrance of a single strolling soul who is not invited by the exorbitantly wealthy owners of one of its historic vacation homes.

But knowing I couldn’t walk in there head-on without risking some of those graces, I decided to trespass without trespassing. I would walk along the shoreline that runs the length of the resort, which state law considers public land. An internet search confirmed that as long as your feet are touching water, you are free to walk any such shore you damn well please.

Of course, I had to commit a true act of trespassing at some point to make this count. So I decided that I would walk parallel to the resort on the main highway, then head down the first public road that leads toward the water and look for some ordinary person’s private property to serve as an access point. From there, I would walk the whole shoreline back to my town’s public beach.

We made our way about a mile and half south down the highway and turned on to a road that dead ends in trees. After some furtive glances at the nearest house, the puppy and I disappeared into the underbrush. There was no trail to speak of, and it was hard going through tangled branches and thorny bushes. Eventually, we broke out into a forest floor of more minimalist design, with a pleasant carpet of dead leaves beneath tall trees. There was a creek that was practically made for crossing, with generous stones to hop along. To cut towards the water, we had to head back into some denser foliage, and at one point I wondered if I was standing in a vast patch of poison ivy, before I shook my head and remembered my father’s identification techniques.

I had done my calculations well: we hit the water right at the end of the resort road. Here sits the house of a local doctor that is not part of the resort. I know this not because I know him, but because claims to friendship with him are the go-to alibi of local folks who wish to drive down the resort road and admire the forested haven of conspicuous consumption. On a visit to this town before I moved here, someone took me on just such a drive to the doctor’s house.

B.L.S. said...

(2 of 3)

I slinked along the edge of his yard amongst pine trees, thankful no one seemed to be looking out any windows. My relief quickly turned to discouragement when I discovered that he did not have a shoreline, per se, but a wall. His yard was shored up with cement blocks that drop about three feet down to the water, where large rocks piled up awkwardly. It was almost as if the bastard had planned against the loophole in private property rights.

But I was not going back through that thicket and returning home defeated. I took off my shoes and climbed down into the water, dragging the poor puppy along to stumble over wet boulders with me. About half my body was still visible to someone in the house, so I just looked ahead with grim determination as if I had been walking this shoreline for unknown miles.

After the doctor’s yard ended, I had to cross a couple of isthmi. Rocks and foliage made it too difficult to skirt around them in the water. I did this quickly, realizing every moment on dry land was risking my subversive legal defense.

Then it was just me, the puppy, and a long curving shore that people paid millions of dollars to keep to themselves. There was no sandy beach, but grassy embankments that dropped into the stony water. I realized that it was absurd to continue without shoes, because the rocks were not letting up, but getting smaller and more jagged as we went. I put my shoes back on without socks and continued slopping along.

Pretty soon after this, the puppy had had enough. Every saint has her limits. Understandably so—she did not have shoes to put back on. Her paws kept slipping and stumbling on the rocks. I would drag her back into the water every time she tried hopping up on land. So at one point she planted herself squarely on a boulder and yelped loudly in protest. I picked her up. At four and a half months, she was just small enough for my weak arms to handle and just big enough to be awkward to carry.

I was trudging along even more sloppily with the weight of the puppy throwing me off balance when I came across an older white gentleman with a pleasant, manicured face sitting on a chair on his lawn and reading a book at the water’s edge. “Hi,” I said casually, as if I were fulfilling an ordinary obligation to slosh through a stony shoreline with a heavy puppy dangling from my arms. “Hello,” he said, with a faint smile of bemusement. N.S.U.o.S. is right about the bored and brazen approach.

When we reached the resort’s sandy beach, I could make out some possible impasses in the shoreline up ahead. Perhaps emboldened by the success of the previous exchange, I walked up on the beach as if I belonged there. I set the dog down and let her fling sand around. We walked past the pool, and I heard a mother saying to toddler, “Yes, there’s a cute puppy.”

I walked straight down the forbidden resort road, looking at the elegantly rustic houses, the out-of-state license plates, the peaceful trees that don’t know they are owned by somebody. I think I may have even waved at a passing car.

When we passed the guardhouse and hit the public street, I was elated. Though it was fleeting, I had walked through the resort fearlessly, and had tasted the sweetness of something that’s not quite mine.

But I had not taken anything away in transgressing this boundary. Rather, I like to think I had added something of value: a cute puppy for the toddler, a poetic revelation for the man who was reading, or at least an interesting story to tell. If some unintended chaos resulted from my presence, I felt confident that the creative possibilities of chaos itself would make up for any damage.

(Here I should disclose the three brief forays I have since made into the resort’s golf course, which is immediately adjacent to the public tennis courts, where I have found a harvest of black raspberries that I cannot resist stealing. N.S.U.o.S. is also right about the satisfactions of combining trespassing and stealing.)

B.L.S. said...

(3 0f 3)

Of course, this lead me to consider why we—or I, at least—are so drawn to trespass into forbidden territory of any sort: social norms, relational boundaries, political positions, or the kind of spiritual truths that famnsync discussed in a previous post. I am not one to trespass just for the sake of trespassing, or just to grab at something I want. I try to trespass only when there does seem to be generative potential in the chaos, not only for myself but for others around me. I try to trespass where we will be challenged, awakened, delighted, humbled, redeemed, and turned toward love in some new way.

Which is not to say I haven’t also trespassed selfishly, or that I haven’t caused damage even when I did it with the noblest intentions. That’s the thing about trespassing—it’s risky, irresponsible, and best not repeated too many times.

Though I wrote before about my only regrets being the roads I haven’t followed through to the end, I also recognize that some regrets are meant to be carried. They create a hollow, sweetened place inside you where the creative possibilities of chaos can continue to swirl, without needing to feed off of outer transgressions that could bring pain or confusion to others.

I am thinking of a song that touched me deep in a hollow, sweet place recently when a friend sent it to me out of the blue. It is, I think, about trespassing, and also learning not to trespass—though you never completely let go of the ache for such a life force to surge through you like that again.

And so I end with this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FiVC79fdyQM