In 1989, a boy born and raised in Montana, two months recently graduated from high school, packed a car and moved with a friend to Los Angeles, California.  Albeit a twenty-seven hour blur, the journey arguably made as great – and lasting - an impression as did the destination.  A two-dimensional map of the American west came to life beneath four wheels and a dream.  Beaver, Utah made a simple impact as it passed by in a quiet flash.  Bleary-eyed, 3AM Las Vegas lights dripped, melted, burned an entirely different sur-reality.  The world became larger, stranger, more tangible, less definable.  It was there and then, in Hollywood, that this boy began to both retreat within and take a stand upon the page – reactions to a world within a world that had exploded.  The fallout began to shape him.  And he began to note the feelings of being the clay that was he – the knife, life, the world.

It was the first of a few great road trips.  And it marked the beginning of a life with documenting its passage by means of journals, short stories, poetry, and non-fiction.

 Eight years, five states, two college degrees, a second language, many stage plays and open mic poetry nights, and hundreds of pages down the road, he found himself in the strange early days of a nine-month tour as a substitute teacher in the Chicago Public Schools.  An excerpt from his journal describes a bit of his third day in the inner-city schools

Creative Writing is my first class, beginning at 7:45am.  I spoke a bit today of how much writing meant to me, how powerful it is, that we invent, we create, we construct realities.  They looked tired, away, stunned.  I told them of the poetry and open mic readings rampant in this town.  I had them copy the names of newspapers that told of upcoming and weekly events.  They are to bring me a schedule, something picked out for Thursday.

I decided we needed to start with description.  The morning was interesting, hopefully a fleeting day of winter, filled with wet snow, slick streets, and wind.  The grate-jaded view from inside the classroom did not do the world justice.

“Let’s go outside.”

They looked at me as if I had spawned another head.  “Come on…you can borrow my coat if you’re cold.”

They never bring paper or pencils to class, but we got that straightened out and out the front door we went.  I remember a strange glance from the coordinator (the burned out “pit” one) on the way out.  We stood dry, but chilly, under the overhang on the front stoop of the school.

“Now…what do you see?” 

No response.

"Look at the sky…look at the trees…look at the grass…the streets…” I waited.  “What do you see?”

“Cars…buses…”

“How are they moving?”  Nothing.  “Slowly?”

“…rushing…”

“Look at the snow…how is it falling?”

“…down…”

“HOW is it falling?  Hard?”

“…no.  Sideways…”

“Good.  Go with that.”

Six minutes later, we were back inside.  I think that they had both just written down the word of the thing I was telling them to look at, a dash, and a descriptive word.  GOOD.  I told them to erase those dashes, and go from a list of phrases.  They looked less – but still – stunned.  It took the smaller one a while to get started.  Class ended as they were still writing.

It was the first time he would guide writing, offering a momentary voice, a way out for some of the first of many students found neglected within the walls of the Chicago Public Schools.  It was here that he was reinvested in the expression of the written word as an anchor to this strange universe, a way to rise above by looking more closely, breaking the (in this case, sometimes sad) big picture down into its more precious parts of which it is made.  Attention to and speaking on detail as a means to the end of…comfort…seeing…being heard…maybe.  It was another step closer to PROJECT 1:1000.

Seven months, two plays, several open mic nights, and an exhausted supply of patience, tolerance, understanding, and educational improvisation later, from a phone in Buffalo, New York, he called a friend in Vermont to tell him that he had left Chicago hours earlier and was on his way there.  It was late October 1997, and the mixture of winter’s first breaths of air, quiet Indiana, dark Ohio, the wind off the Great Lakes, the lights of the World Series in Cleveland, and Niagara Falls’ persistence and power, filling him with a new idea of vast.  The world exploded in a dream of frosted fields and hills of upstate New York and Vermont.  Half-naked trees clung to what remained of their dying summer attire – beneath and surrounding him, a ground and air filled with the inexpressible colors – and the moods and meditations thereby created - of the carpet and forever sky of northeastern America in the fall.  A deep darkness, a cosmos filled with stars, and a wolf’s call in the hills west of White River Junction, Vermont unsettled him.  The road had led him there, to hear this night calling.  The U.S. was becoming less and less of a mystery, but the world beyond its borders began to haunt him.

On the return trip to Chicago, he vowed to leave his home shortly.

An immaculately timed phone call, twenty months, four fires (in school; on one day), many late nights and early mornings, a schoolyear and a half teaching and battling for justice in a dysfunctional inner-city Chicago Public School later, he left America for the first time.  He was one of four adults that accompanied fourteen youth from the Montana/Northern Wyoming Conference of the United Church of Christ on a “mission” of sorts to Costa Rica.  The group stayed for two weeks.  He stayed for a year. (This had been planned beforehand.  He did not “abandon ship.”!)

Up to that point, his writings included mostly poems, short stories, monologues, artistic processing, theatre manifestos, and rambling brainstorms of scenarios, stories, and stage and screenplays screaming to get out of his head.  But as much as his normally raging mind had been blown by various scenes in America, it was “rocketed into a fourth dimension” in Central America.

From the introduction to Madness Upon Me: 343 Days in Central America (web-published collection), he writes

There is no way I could’ve imagined what I would see, hear, taste, smell, dream, and do in the next year.  The world exploded and became more tangible all at once, yet slowly, experience by experience.

I knew I wrote furiously when I first got down there.  Mostly poetry.  But, my great aim was to be more a resident than a tourist, so I got caught up in work, and other largely meaningless matters.  In the end, I was only writing “journal-type stuff, “ and cursed myself for “not writing much.”  I upped the ante in the last days, thinking along the lines of a “travel/journal sortuv thing.”

[…]

I don’t know why I’m doing this.  Why do we do anything?  I feel kinda weird, pompous, precocious.  These kinda things should be put together after I’m dead or something, surely at least not by me.  Whatever.  I went to a different place and saw and felt some different things.  I learned more about other people, the world, and myself than I wanted to know.  I was also surrounded by great beauty in many ways.  Maybe it’s just a literary slide show.

And thus, more out of an experiment – perhaps necessity – to process all that was being seen, heard, smelled, tasted, and felt,  PROJECT 1:1000 began to take shape.

Without a camera to speak of, he was relegated to paint pictures with words.  He sketched Martín - the blind, downtown jazzman, a simple church in Escazú, a ten-year old blind boy named Juan David, who stole a piece of his heart on a bicycle, late afternoon coffee with his girlfriend’s family, a funeral procession, and the screams of a pig in the hills of Guanacaste.  Early on, especially, he wished for a camera.  He soon fell in love with the practice, the task, the journey of getting it down on paper.  Comments on moments, scenes, and scenarios – internal and external – conjured questions, revelations, discoveries, epiphanies.  Details became everything.  Emotions swelled, spilling the green jungle blood of change onto the page.  In the process of capturing people and moments, he encountered himself and the world.  

When all poems, letters, journal entries, non-fiction accounts, were assembled and uploaded to the Internet, he sent out the links to the pages to various online travel companies/magazines.  The response was mostly positive in regard to the writing, but the simple literary voice and descriptive content was baffling, lacking in important content in the eyes of the online companies. “Why are you writing this?” was a question.  Their desire was more geared toward technical and logistical information – hotels, restaurants, companies, addresses, phone numbers, menus, rates, prices, deals, etc.  All this information seemed trivial and extraneous to the true meaning of travel.  Do we not travel to see, hear, smell, and taste new things?  Are people and moments not more important than menus and prices?  He resolved himself to find like-minded travelers and readers, ones more interested in adventure, culture, and life, than the perfect places to stay and eat.  To him, the experience was the thing – and at the heart of the experience was people, voices, energy, dances, colors, customs, history.  All else was secondary at best, means to an end – the end being a richer life made so by a soul to some degree altered.  His stance remained that blowing bubbles with children was infinitely better than a good deal on a few postcards.

The goal and focus of the writing – and PROJECT 1:1000 - is perhaps best found within one of its own examples, an excerpt from a “Journal” entry made 11 June 2000, in Caño Blanco, Costa Rica

Tree after tree, branch after branch, leaf after leaf, I tried to eat it all with my eyes.  Eat it, drink it in, so that it would forever be a part of me.  This place.  This water.  This beauty.  I wanted never to be so far from it.  I took many pictures.  Photos.  They will surely not capture all that there was – surely none of what I felt.  For that, I write, and come closer to…representing what happened.  But, in the end, words, pictures, etc., etc., etc. all say so little, and it comes down to attention, eating up, drinking in these things, places, river, trees, and trusting that they truly are a part of you.  Now me.  We and I hope always to be, one. 

In September 2000, two months after returning from Central America, he set out on a “U.S. re-enchantment tour” and took “the long way” in a move to New York City.  Forty-five days, eight thousand miles, and Bozeman (Montana), Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks (Montana and Wyoming), Riverton (Wyoming), Salt Lake City (Utah), Las Vegas (Nevada), Los Angeles (California), Tucson (Arizona), Santa Fe (New Mexico), Oklahoma City (Oklahoma), Little Rock (Arkansas), Memphis (Tennessee), New Orleans (Louisiana), Birmingham (Alabama), Atlanta (Georgia), Asheville (North Carolina), the Blue Ridge Highway, Lynchburg (Virginia), Indianapolis (Indiana), Chicago (Illinois), Cleveland (Ohio), Syracuse (New York), White River Junction (Vermont), Portland and Damariscotta (Maine), and Boston (Massachusetts) later, he landed in New York City for a fourteen-month mind-bender. 

Two years later, he moved to Barcelona, Spain, from where he writes these words, dreaming of new places, faces, tales to be told, heard, and recorded in some immortal way.  He is somewhere in another chapter in the book of his life, ecstatic, hungry for more, open for suggestions, searching for fellow travelers and the path, and the stories they both have to tell.

 

David Overturf
Barcelona, Spain
2002

 

 

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