So we as travel-logers have pretty much failed to give a coherent sequential account of what has happened on our trip.

Let´s see if it´s possible to give a brief over view with some highlights.

1) The first night of our trip we ran out of gas in le grande due to the minor but very inconvenient problem that since the stations were closed we could not pay with cash which was all we had. So we all happily fell asleep in the car surrounded by snow. Jen commented that traveling with us was great, how we were awesome because we didn´t freak out over a minor incident like sleeping in the car.

2) lots of driving and driving and joking and eventually stopping in denver for the night. Which was really awesome, tobigeyl crowed me (mari) princess, she even made me a tiarra which i will treasure forever. I am now a princess in search of my domain, I am taking suggestions, one was the highway from canada to mexico that might be built. During the course of the night I decided that jen was in fact a jester-paladin. She was quite pleased with this moniker being presented to her in front of tobigeyl but a little less pleased when i dlecared her alignment good as opposed to neutral. Which is totally true by the way, what´s with this obsession that everything be honest and fair and calling people on stuff. I was extremelly delighted, and still am to hear tobigeyl call some of her brothers friends and also him "the geek swinger club." Jen writhed a lot at that description and is still writhing, i take un-measurable amounts of delight in it, and also in using it around jen as much as possible (I even told jen i was going to make her a club card). Maybe i am just bitter, no actually there´s no question, i am so bitter.

I wrote more about denver, texas, and chicago, but it just got fucking lost so oh well that sucks.

today I asked the woman for 'pasteles para tos'

for those of you who don't speak spanish, as apparently I don't, that's "cough cakes"

jenn.

mari was right. from the hilltops and the tops of the houses, san miguel de allende looks like pictures of jerusalem.

her hometown is a walled city -- internally walled. most streets are just hallways when you arrive at dawn and the shops are all closed. a rough cobbled floor for cars and motos, narrow rock ledges for humans, two solid walls painted in clean vertical blocks to indicate ownership changes and stepped horizontal blocks to remind you which way is horizontal, information you won't get by looking at the street. no gutter to puke in. no windows. no plants. on the walls, wrought-metal lamps. the names of the streets in ornate scripts. age-stained wooden doors made for trucks or for children, depending whether they're on the uphill or downhill side. sometimes, a door is open, and you can see into a garden or a rich-tiled hallway, a bakery or pharmacy or mildewed living room.

boaz immediately declared this to be the single correct city layout.* me, I think he's out of his mind. all open space severely privatized except the parks? you want only rich people to have rights to a one-acre ground-level sightline? but yeah, but yeah. the place is beautiful in its secrecy and simplicity. and when you've made it in behind the walls, nothing on the street can get you.

it's hard not to want to climb everything. I asked our first momentary host whether there were always kids running up and down the walls, but he said no. the broken bottles embedded in the wall-tops, they must help breed resistance to the impulse. that and the roof dogs.

all day, church bells piling on top of each other like the houses. all night, fireworks.

*"it's the perfect city to let kids loose in," he adds. "like, really little kids. in US cities you look at things for a while and you know exactly what's going on. here, you could just run around and explore."

boaz and I are still in sweet austin, eating pecans off'n the lawns
mari has abandoned us for a week of dancing and strawberry picnics; she'll come find us in a few minutes here, it's cool

yesterday was skipping rocks across the road, phone calls from a little juniper cemetery with finger-scrawled inscriptions in old cement headstones

troll is a texas long-hair, stocky and loud, clearly of the race "dwarf" despite his name (reminds me of printerland forrest like nobody, so I trust him out of established habit); he told us to take the car out back and shoot it. how much to fix it anyway, I ask, and he yells I WON'T! you hear? I'm DONE with this car!

everyone we ask for a second opinion hears the make and the year and asks us "have you talked to troll?"

this is after days of perseverance on boaz's part, pulling plugs and tubing long after I'd given up. at least he has the satisfaction of having made the primary diagnosis himself. it only took 15 minutes and 20 dollars for troll to make his pronouncement; we'd told him right where to look.

both mari and boaz have pulled me aside, now, to make me tell them why I've been acting so irritable, and they've each kept on asking questions all calmly and kindly until I got a flood of it out. aha! they're looking out for me! that means I'm not the parent. now I am not so irritable anymore!

austin has bicycles
austin has queers
austin has problems
I could move here

SO i just so happened to read jenn's entry about the nuns just now, which also happens to be largely about me mari having internalized fear. I would like to comment.

I don't think very many of you have had the experience of going through the world as a tiny blonde girl who looks about 13. Now i in no way think this should stop me from doing anything. You see everyone else does, i get told by EVERYBODY ALL THE TIME about the horrible ways in which i am going to get maimed and raped. Last time i proposed a road trip to mexico it was a couple years ago, and my aunt betty, a native of mexico city whose entire family lives there, literally forced me to sit through a lecture of about 2 hours about how i was going to get raped and murdered and kidnapped by the police, let alone criminals. She pulled out statistics and stories from people she knew and terrified me out of my mind, she terrified my mother as well, who further terrified me. A couple days before we were set to leave for mexico my mother literally forced everybody to interrupt their lives so we could all talk about how much of a bad idea this is, since we were no longer traveling with a grown man. I have been told by countless people not to ride the bus by myself after dark, sometimes in portland this means at 4 pm! Now in terms of feeling safer traveling in mexico with a grown man, this has nothing to do with actually thinking it is in any way safer, in fact more people probably means it gets more complicated in a tense life-threatening situation. The thing is that mexico unfortunately is still a very sexist country, and honestly i think that many people who might be hungrily looking at us as targets would be more dissuaded if there was a grown man there.

When i was a little girl and going to school in mexico the boys in school would get in trouble with the principal for not letting the girls go first. Mexico has an air of masculine superiority and authority, not everywhere not everyone, but it's still pretty prevalent. I mean there's definitely still heavily sexist parts of the US.

So do i feel like a walking target? No. DO i feel like everyone else sees me as one, yeah kind of. Are those in fact the same thing, kind of yes. So what does that mean, that i in fact do feel like a walking target? I am of the opinion that people should try to push their comfort level when it comes to fear. I feel like if you know what the worst that could happen is, and how to handle fear then you are more likely to be ok when it happens and less likely to limit yourself in life over all.

In my portland life there have been a couple situations that have gotten me a little freaked out. When i was about 12 this crazy man got on the bus at the same stop as me and decided to tell all the people on the bus how he knew they were all going to kill me, he could see behind their sunglasses he said, he needed to escort me home so i would be safe. It went on like that until the bus driver kicked him off a while later. Another time at around the same age a creepy stranger who was an older man kept sitting next to me and staring at me even when i moved seats several times. This was around the time a classmate of mine actually was raped and murdered. My mom stopped thinking it was reasonable for me to ride the bus by myself after dark, which i had been doing from the time my age involved double digits. She still thinks it's not ok for me to do that, at 18, even though i did it without problem when i was a child. Lastly I have this neighbor he's about 90 or something along those lines. I thought he was a friendly nice harmless old man. He would always talk to me, be friendly. One day I stopped to talk to him and he asked me for a hug, i thought nothing of this so i stepped up to give him one. He said "not here people will see" I thought that was really weird but he's really old and he happens to be african american so since i saw him as a nice person i figured maybe he was confused and it had something to do with race relations? He said "meet me around the back, hop in the car i'll get the money." at which point i went swiftly home.

So what does this all add up to? Well i feel like it's unfair to see the one very specific feeling; that in a highly sexist country in a highly dangerous part of the world (the border towns) we would be perceived as less worth fucking with, if there was a grown man along, as something that relates to my entire self perception and way of going through life. Honestly i don't think i really go through life feeling like a target, especially considering how often i'm told that i am. Just today we were discussing hitch-hiking and safety and a person we were staying with mentioned something about me being pretty, and boaz translated it for me as meaning " yeah mari you are very highly rapeable." I mean Come on Fuck it was one instance and one very specific situation, and i have to wonder if i were some sort of tough looking butch leather wearing 6 foot tall amazon and i said that in a very sexist country in a very dangerous area of that country that we might be perceived as more easily targeted since we were no longer traveling with a 50 year old man, would everyone decide that i had internally labeled myself a target? I somehow think not, i somehow think perhaps people would say that made sense as a thought to consider for a moment, especially since neither in that hypothetical nor now am i allowing it to stop me.

-mari

P.S. i let jen read this before posting.
P.P.S. Fuck you

we left portland after dark buzzing in the overpacked and orderless car, food spilling, boaz driving, mexican music cutting from speaker to speaker until we turned it off to facilitate the transmission of minutely detailed driving directions -- painful to me at first, the shame of taking control, but necessary if we wanted to stay on course, boaz assured me, and after that mari and I competed sometimes to shout orders the loudest. last act in portland was to circle back to a previous stop and drop off some keys we almost took away in mari's forgetful pocket. my knees jammed up against a back seat pocket packed with papers, candy, a disembodied doorknob for lockpick practice.

drove through oregon rain with the windows fogging, laughing happy nerves and making lists in herbert the travel log: averted disasters. brilliant ideas. gas log (who paid). we filled our first tank with the car still running and had to update two lists at once.

somewhere out near pendleton we gave mari her first driving lesson. we ordered her around a parking lot again and again, square corners, gentle stops, imaginary cars stuck to the driver's side to keep us out of the oncoming lane not that lane stop MARI. STOP. we warned her against hitting puppies pulling baby carriages. we let her drive the late-night small-town desert of hills and dark signs. we encouraged her out onto the highway and played operation with the lane stripes until the fear got to be about enough for us all, started to level off. pulled off and into a coal plant parking lot full of tumbleweed. she was perfect of course, and happy and proud. we were all amazed by the perfect legality of it all.

the plan was to drive straight through to denver and our first reliable pool of unwarned hosts. my travel-time had started a day or two before, of course, and I was exhausted from the christmas logistics and all the visits and the two almost-sleepless nights, all the making everything exactly right with my various portland loves. I took the first shift to sleep and to daydream homewards, and boaz, sixteen but used to driving to bend, took us into the blue mountains. he woke me up once by wishing someone could see how beautiful the road was, the lines and sheets of blowing snow in the dark.

at the closed and snowpiled gas station in la grande he woke me up again to ask, how bad is this?

we slept in our seats in a street closed for sledding without an idea of complaint

This is Boaz writing:

Hi you. Whoever the heck you are. It seems highly improbable that anyone will just happen to be reading this, so I guess you are anyone who knows about this trip anyway and Mari told about the live journal.
So we are in Chicago and are all still alive and have all of our most important limbs. We got into town yesterday and went to the party that we came here for and then went to sleep at Molly's house and then slept most of the next day except to go to this weird party at Meg's house and then sleep at Mary Katherine's (spelling?). Now we think we're giving Meg a ride to Austin.
We plan to stay here today, maybe poison some pigeons in the park, find some all night tango, sleep at Tovia's (again, I don't know the spelling), and then leave for Texas in the morning.
Anyway we are having a great time and are recording our adventures in two logbooks named Herbert and Herbra and making everyone we stay with sign the host book. And we named the car Nucifer (those of you who don't know what it means, feel welcome to lose sleep over it).

Boaz

This is mari writing,

So we are in chicago now ( since the morning of 29), which is the first part of the journey. On the way here we stopped in denver and hung out with tobigail. I don't think that's how you spell it, gayl? anyways.

So part of what's awesome about going to mexico is that it's going to be gorgeous and warm and sunny, while you in portland are cold and grey and without light hahaha, although that is changing since ( i think) solstice has passed now. It's been colder though because we are traveling to colder places than portland first.
The thing thats been really cool though is that although it's cold there's snow! Although it's cold and snowy it's actually sunny and blue out, it's great.


In the car at night looking out the windows i was overcome by this feeling like we were surrounded by the choppy ocean. The land would go out endlessly, and i felt awestruck and peaceful and quiet. There are also the praying mantis looking powerline poles out there which are highly awesome, because they look like praying mantices, which jen pointed out to me.

I'm really tired and i don't think i'm gonna be very good at telling stories, so i'll just leave it at that, but it's good to finally get this thing started.

-mari