Tag Archives: psychogeography

Ohio River Valley Literature, psychogeography, travel

Knack or knacked?

Me, 2013. Louisville, KY. Still not a great picker. And I miss that shirt.

The best way to travel, after all, is to feel, to feel everything in every way, to feel everything excessively, because all things are, in truth, excessive and all reality is an excess, a violence, an extraordinarily vivid hallucination. -Fernando Pessoa

Planning a jaunt for me is a kind of distillation. This isn’t to say that I plan closely, especially when I’m going out alone. The variables are just different when I travel with Amanda, who travels for different reasons than I do and who loves me inspite of my peripatetic soul. I’ve never been able to talk the progeny into a trip with me, which is probably for the best since she, too, embraces travel in a way unique than my own. Traveling on my own, I want to leave space for the unexpected in a way that a lot of people (rightly) consider unsafe. A bit of the knack and more than a bit of serendipity tend to fill in the details of my trips out. The unplanned and unplannable played a role in my last trip out, my failed walk-about along the Mississippi in May of this year.

Originally I’d planned another westward trip, all the way out to the left coast to visit friends, see the Pacific again, and wander the great square states with big sky broken only by the Rockies. I was considering another run at my failed walk. But then it occured to me that I hadn’t spent much time in my own backyard — the Ohio River Valley Basin.

There was a time that I covered the lower part of the valley in my car. This was the mid-1990’s. I was loose in the world more or less, trying to figure out how to live in the world with such an itchy foot. It wasn’t my intention to wander the lower valley. It’s just what I did. From Huntington WV to Ironton and Portsmouth, Seamen, OH, Cincinnati, Maysville, Lexington, KY. I worked just enough and often stayed with friends. I also stayed at my Mom’s when I had my weekend visitations with Stella, which offered the Kid some consistency and helped cover for the fact that I had no clue how to be a practical parent. A few times I tried to stop moving work. Once I moved back out to my hometown and paid rent to sleep on a cot in someone’s laundry room. One of my oldest friends got me that job and the crash pad, actually. I don’t know that I ever really apologized for imploding … as I usually do when I try to go straight and hold job like a productive member of society. Sorry, Bret. I really am. I’m also sorry for being a shitty friend and not keeping in touch.

But this time is different in that I don’t have a car, can’t afford a car, and if I’m being honest, I’m only romantically attached to the idea of having one. This means I’ll be traveling by public transport… which is spotty in a large chunk of the area I’m going to be wandering… on the kindness of friends and strangers (not that I’ve had much luck historically, hitchhiking) and on foot (as little as possible but still a possibility.) I’m open to pretty much all modes of transport and feel like I’ll get around to traveling in pretty much every way there is to travel before I lay down my walking stick and turn into a tree… which I’m not planning on for quite a few years. Longevity and stubbornness are on my side and so is my faith the serenditpitous nature of the universe.

I want to soak into the dirt that made me, follow the river to Cairo, IL, and bounce along the old National Highway. If you’ve read me at all, you know I’m not one for touristy excursions, but there will be some excursions, I hope. Geography is powerful, but maps are man-made collectively accepted delusions. One could even argue that a map is a kind of violence… an “extraordinarily vivid hallucination.” As a matter of fact, that’s what I am arguing. And that’s why I’m going. And that’s why I always come back.

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psychogeography

the orange dinosaur

I don’t get to walk everyday, though I almost always want to. The urge is less peripatetic than the thing that pushes me out on the road but I’m certain they’re related. I think I started walking because my feet have always conspired against me. As a kid, I was a lousy athlete. Couldn’t run well between chronic asthma and bad feet. As I got older, all my feet did was hurt and so I think I was just heaping hurt upon them. I was walking through Bond Hill – a neighborhood in Cincinnati – on my way to my tutoring gig in 2005 when I felt my left Achilles tendon splinter. It didn’t snap, and I didn’t find out that was what it was until a few years later when I had insurance. I just kept walking.

Last summer injured my right hip by accidentally stepping into the sump pit on our basement. For those of your unfamiliar with sump pits, basements in formerly swampy areas tend to have them to take on water from the soil around the house and pump it into the rain water or septic system. In our house, we think it was actually built to be a water source… which is a pretty good gambit as long as you can boil it first. This happened early in the pandemic, which meant I didn’t go to the doctor. I did a telehealth call about my ankle, which had swollen to the size of two really large grapefruit, but I wasn’t worried about the hip. I figured it was just sore from the impact of going down into the 4 foot pit, touching bottom, and bouncing back up onto the basement floor. I was lucky I didn’t snap my leg, so I didn’t complain.

I didn’t walk much last summer because I was actually working a temporary COVID staff in a day shelter for homeless men. And when I tried to walk the 40 miles from Savanna, IL to Moline this past May, I hit weather and my Merrells blew out, which made me decide to not do the walk… a decision I have since been bothered by.

Lately, I walk around the neighborhood. Pre-pandemic I was able to cross the city, though at a much slower pace than most of the mapping/GPS programs. I’ve lost some of my distance and am still building back up; I like walking around my neighborhood, though. The South End. Beechmont. Beechmont is the most ethnically diverse neighborhood in the city; when I first moved here, we had three different ice cream trucks to entice the children from 3 different ethnic backgrounds. The pandemic shaved those down to one, creepy truck that plays a plinky tune and screams “HELLO” like a Pee Wee’s Playhouse reject. The neighborhood butts up against several industrial areas, the train yard, and is relatively close to the airport. And because it’s an older neighborhood — and because Louisville is a river city with streets that tentacle out and around and on top of one another in an organic mess — it’s not difficult to find out of the way turns and find previously unexplored alleys and back streets.

On my last walk — this would be Monday August 1st — I wasn’t out of my block when I found the orange dinosaur. Some toy dropped or lost or otherwise abandoned. It’s the sort of toy that comes in a box with a flavorless burger and weepy fries. It wasn’t sitting up when I found it, but it seemed important to put it on it’s feet.

I don’t know why.

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