Boulder Trail

Sandy Point State Reservation

Purgatory Chasm

The week before I left on my roadtrip, my sister Cassandra and I went to Purgatory Chasm in Sutton, Mass., where we climbed on rocks barefoot.

We found a cool place near by--private property with some very cool things on it. Stone tables, pillars, arches and a rusty creature dangling from a tree...

The Barn Gathering

I stayed with the Blackstones again on my way home. They invited me to a birthday party, then a barn party, and I got to meet Jenicka's mom and most of their community. Jenicka's mom owns a costume shop filled with a multitude of time periods, both real and imagined.

Her house is filled with dolls--Jenicka said there might be close to 500 or 5000 dolls in her mother's house.

Before this, I'm not sure I'd ever seen a couple of elderly dolls.

At the birthday party we went on a long, cold wagon ride down dark roads. The picture is of the Blackstones. I met a woman who had moved from Colorado to this community to be with her husband. They now have an infant.

The barn party was fun. There was bobbing-for-apples, a big cut-out scarecrow with a hole for people to put their heads into, and my favorite--food!

The only part of the barn party that made me uncomfortable were the few people who saw me at a sensitive time in my life, and were bent on "saving" me. One elderly lady asked me a number of questions: "Have you ever stolen? Have you ever lied?" Toward the end I figured out that it was a game I was certain to lose, and there was something about being born with sin. It was a conversation I found myself trying to untangle from. I heard a great many stories that night, stories of why one woman chose the lord, a terrible thing she had gone through, and why a married couple had taken Jesus as their savior, with another awful story. I don't feel right telling their stories here, so I won't. But they were real and raw and unsettling, and I can understand why people reach for religion so often.

Dancing: Akron, OH

This is Mike from Akron, Ohio. Back in October, he was living with a couple of housemates in an apartment and it cost them something like only $400 a month. We went out dancing at a gay club, and it was pretty cool. Not a goth club of course, but any dancing is good dancing.

Lincoln, Nebraska

I stayed with JeanEileen in Lincoln, Nebraska. She's in her '80s and has taken on many surfers since joining in 2007. She's been living in the house since 1985. I had the whole attic to myself, with books of literature and some by Kurt Vonnegut and Orson Scott Card. She has three cats and makes excellent rice pudding. Her mother painted the dressing panel behind her in the picture.

Apatosaurus

I took a picture of this T-Rex standing outside the dinosaur museum at the University of Wyoming. It had pinecones in its mouth.

They also had the full skeleton of an apatosaurus. Brontosaurus doesn't exist. In 1903, a scientist made the discovery that the species named Brontosaurus was really an aparosaurus's body with a missing head.