End of the Road

Reaching the end of the road in San Francisco felt like tumbling through a towering mirror. Five thousand miles of momentum behind us, our reflection shattered into thousands of glowing pieces. As we wipe away the blood and sweat to get a clear view of it all, it’s hard to know how to proceed—we’re still bedazzled by the scattered shards shining up at us from the ground. The coming months and years will be spent carefully collecting each sliver and piecing them together, but for now we’ve made it. An endless ocean faces us from the west.

This road has shown us sides of ourselves, each other, and our country that will stick with us until we die. At times difficulties overwhelmed us, distance seemed too great, and costs too high. Alienation and frustration destroyed inspiration. But we found strength in each other, our family and friends, our lovers, and an incredibly supportive audience. You have shown us the value of this journey, giving us the energy and focus to push to the end. Our endless gratitude goes out to you, and we look forward to meeting more of you when we take this project on the road again, touring the United States (and perhaps other countries) with the completed work.

Disassembling our bikes and saying goodbye to each other hasn’t been easy. Even though we’re ready for a change, this project has completely possessed us for two years. It’s been a lifestyle, a 24/7 job, and the sometimes loose glue binding us together as friends, partners, and brothers. We’ll still be checking our email as we recover and regroup, and we’d love to hear from you all with ideas, comments, and criticism. We’ll be sharing more videos, photography, and writing when we get to the other side… see you there.

The Final Stretch…

Photo by William Touhey

We’re leaving Tucson today. Our old friends Will and Leah have given us a place to stay here for a few weeks, and after healing from the violent desert sun, we’re finally climbing onto our bikes again. This is the last time we’ll be able to say that.

San Francisco is under 1,000 miles away, and in about three weeks, a journey that has taken over two years and just under five thousand miles will be finished. Hard drives have been piling up, full of video, photography, audio, and words. The pace of the blogosphere has proven too fast for this journey, and while we try to give you a peek into what we’re doing once in awhile, the vast majority of our trip is still unpublished.

We still have a long ride through a rapidly changing desert, and while we’re finally giving our bodies and our bicycles a rest in less than a month, our work is far from over. Over the next year we’ll be carefully scouring over the journey and working with our friends at Studio Syndicate to develop this website into something worthy of the story. We want to do something special with America reCycled, something that hasn’t yet been done, that has only recently become possible with the technologies that are now available.

Hopefully once the content really starts rolling out, it will all be worth it and you’ll see what we’ve been so busy doing, however silently.

See you on the other side

Noah and Tim

Austin Enchanted Forest

Austin revived us more than we could have imagined-we rode into the city still burdened by the gravity of New Orleans. It’s a harsh town, a microcosm of grief and tragedy that radiates the most stunning bursts of light you’re likely to see anywhere. Outsiders can only awkwardly angle for a glimpse of a culture that will never belong to us, admiring from afar while New Orleanians project tortured and beautiful souls onto the city’s facade.

But rolling into Austin, our load lightened before we even unpacked. Throughout the trip, we’ve heard about The Enchanted Forest, a community here that recently shut its doors to the public following attacks from the city. People said we would fit right in, and we rode toward it in hopes of an invitation to set up camp.

Hills tossing us through the city, a car stopped in the median and a glowing face poked out the window. “Hey bicycle guys! You need any water?”

Her smile projected the levity and innocence that seemed to permeate the whole city as it embraced us. She sent us toward her friends at The Forest and invited us into her own world as well, taking us out night after night to the steady buzz of Austin’s live music.

The folks at The Enchanted Forest welcomed us warmly, offering a tranquil haven away from the city’s bustling concrete. Over the next month, our wounds healed and our spirits lightened as our new friends shared their lives, inspiring us with the conflicted past and confused future of their home. A newly welded BBQ bicycle box and care package in tow, we finally left after family photos and hugs, heading west toward the blank desert canvas where we would slowly paint our next story.

The voice of The Enchanted Forest is long, loud, and nuanced, one that we can’t do justice to in a blog post. We’ve begun documenting it, and this short edit will have to do while the rest stays neatly stored on hard drives, waiting for the time when we can give it the attention it deserves.

Across the River

Leaving New Orleans felt like treading swamp water. Across the Mississippi, a hundred miles of highway hovered over a bubbling expanse of muck—a soggy blanket stuffed deep into our heaving lungs. It was the kind of sizzling road that burns the sanctity out of life. Every climate-controlled truck slamming past was an excuse for profanity and each mile an obligation. Fresh roadkill began to resemble putrid rotting carcasses. And when we did find sanctuary for the night, blood-sucking swarms conquered our camp.

They sucked us dry, but suffering gives way to the sublime. Finally enveloped by the slow fizz of the Louisiana Gulf, our naked toes massaged its nurturing expanse. Salty air and sloppy spoonfuls of oatmeal circulated our sunburned bodies, waves washing and whispering toward a hazy horizon. Living in the city had torn us away from our source, but it still owns us. It is us, and diving face first into the windswept tide is a sure way to reconnect.

But it was short-lived—Texas greeted us with the punch in the gut that’s made it famous. As we crossed the border, a Texas-sized shoulderless bridge scooped us up and slammed us into 40 miles of human noise, sprawling out into the demonic whirr of an oil industry gone mad. Highways stretched on for an eternity, twisting us to the side of the road over and over again.

Tim was fuming, slamming profanities against his bike in a thin green strip separating highway from strip mall. “Why aren’t you helping me?!” His words shot out like jagged metal.

Read the rest of this entry »

Wickedly Beautiful

It’s been a long time since you all have heard or seen anything from us. New Orleans has lived up to its reputation—rough and kind, dangerous and liberating, equally crushing and uplifting. We’re beginning to understand so many songs about getting chewed up and spit out by this wickedly beautiful town, only to come back for more.

The story we’ve found here is the best one yet, we think, and the depth of it has proven to be too much to finish right now. We’re taking off on bicycles tomorrow. We will return next year to collect the remaining material and to film developments in what we’ve discovered here.

We plan to be on the west coast by February of 2012, almost two years since we started this project. It’s been a long, hard road we’ve embarked on, one we wouldn’t have traded for anything. So many personal developments have happened since we’ve begun America reCycled. Other than being totally rewired by what we’ve seen and lived, our grandfather has died and our father has moved to Panama. Our mom’s getting married next month. We’ve both fallen in love. And as we prepare to leave New Orleans and begin looking west once again, it’s with worn and weathered minds that we anticipate our arrival. As well as the beauty and hardship that awaits us.

It’s been incredibly empowering and inspiring to edit and release short films and writing as we’ve progressed. Every time we put something out there and receive such encouraging emails and generous donations, it fills us back up and gives us energy to keep pushing forward. We’ve released five episodes now, totaling about 75 minutes of video, 50 pages of writing, and hundreds of photos. It gives you all a great sense of what we’ve discovered before New Orleans. Unfortunately, we will not be able to do this with the New Orleans footage we have, and we’ll be approaching publishing differently for the remaining four months of the journey.

We’re going to shoot and write as we go, and edit later. We’re expecting there to be four more episodes (including New Orleans) and to edit them all on the road would add about 4 or 5 more months to the journey. We want to spend the rest of this trip caught up in the inspiration we feel when we’re riding through communities and meeting people, and the arduous process of spending half the time in front of a computer would only be demoralizing and debilitating at this point. When we’re done, we want to be able to step back, take a fresh look at the journey, and tell its story.

So we’ll be making more frequent, less substantive posts. Blogging. When we finally do reach the west coast next year, we’ll be able to sit down and commit ourselves fully to editing everything together into a full-length film and a book, which we will then release alongside the short films. We’re so excited to get back on the road again and share what we discover. Thank you so much for all the help and support. If it weren’t for you all, we never would have made it this far…

We’ve dug up this writing, scribbled on a lineless sheet of paper, now transcribed. It and these photographs will have to do before we can tell our whole New Orleans story. We think it’ll be worth the wait.

There’s a daunting permanence to pen and paper. With each letter committed, the real estate actually diminishes irreparably. Each sheet occupies a very real space in the world. From the forest to the mill to this chipped and painted desk, writing becomes a craft in the literal sense—the gradual manipulation of material to bend matter to the shape of the human spirit.

The city owns you. This time of year more than others, when the heat actually soaks deep down as you sludge through the crumbling streets, alcohol forcing the blood through your veins and your lungs gasping to find air in the swelter. Murder rates are up, people with shallow enough roots are gone, and it’s just the backbone that’s left, pulling the city through the swamp of the season, promising to support the droves of fair-weathered residents once again when they return for the four-month long foreplay to the thrashing orgasm of Mardi Gras.

“Help us make love in the streets?” The words echo down Royal Street from a 19 year old, twisted by a morning of malt liquor. A look of bemused discomfort overtakes her targets, two middle-aged women, neatly dressed and toting bags of souvenirs. Their eyes grow increasingly disturbed as they scan her crew, four shaggy youth, encrusted in years of voluntary, proud street life. As the targets come closer, their apprehension dissolves into laughter as they spot an arrangement of shiny spots in the street. Little silver circles stamped with the faces of dead presidents, neatly forming the letters L, O, V.

“We just need an E and we got it!” shouts the girl. One of the women gleefully reaches into her pocket and provides more fuel for the game. “This barely even feels like spangin’,” muses one of the kids. “Nobody yells at us to get a job, we’re makin’ people smile.” He takes the donation and adds it to the L, O, and V, enlarging the word but keeping it carefully incomplete. “I think we have enough for another round,” announces a third through chapped lips. As he gathers half the change, I notice a deep lesion on his forearm. “Is that staff?” I ask. “You should see the one on my thigh!” He proudly begins pulling up his shorts before I stop him. “How you get rid of that?” I ask. Chuckling, he pockets the change and stands up. “You leave New Orleans.”

Flashback: Alchemy, The Georgia Burn, 2010

While editing in New Orleans, we unearthed these photos from Alchemy last fall. For a few days each year, an old farm in Georgia gets flooded by freaks who build a temporary village where the exchange of money is prohibited. Everybody contributes what they wish. Behind the entrance fee lies food, drink, music and generally twisted debauchery, all culminating with the burning of a giant effigy. We drove down in an RV with the crew from The Montana House, bringing some roadkill black bear meat and building a jungle gym out of bamboo and old bicycle tubes.

Welcome to New Orleans

Our blisters, saddle sores, and cramps are finally healed up, and quiet nights in the wilderness have been replaced by the drunken swelter of New Orleans. The last thousand miles have been as rough as they have been enlightening. Rednecks and hippies, fishing and wild gathering, country food and city dumpsters. This leg has rooted the journey firmly into the soil of rural America, and we’re finding that the ideals and grievances of communes and collectives aren’t so different from those found in small towns and farming communities.

We’re hard at work editing it all together to give you all a glimpse of how we’ve moved and what we’ve learned, all while exploring the endless vibrations of New Orleans. The city is exhausting. Bouncing between the hustler’s paradise of The French Quarter and the crusty gentrification wave washing over the Bywater, listening to old black jazz musicians and young white train-hopping buskers. Art and smut, killers and lovers, thievery and philanthropy, the weight of the city is already pressing down hard on us. But we’re keeping our heads high and sorting through it all for the next story… it looks like it’s gonna be a wild one.

In the mean time, check out the route we took by clicking on these words…

The Farm :: Summertown, TN

Ellie was a colorful elephant at the edge of the jungle. As the only patch of color in a sea of gray, she was understandably quite self-conscious. Luckily, she had charisma and a wild sense of humor.

The other elephants loved Ellie’s jokes, but still she felt like an outcast. One day, she figured out how to disguise herself by rubbing her body around in elephant colored berries. After finally seeing through the ruse, the elephants erupted in celebration. They all decorated themselves in Ellie colors while Ellie was dressed in elephant color. The parade was beautiful, marching boldly forward to the music of The Beatles.

The kids were absolutely adorable, wearing those foam wacky noodles strapped on their noses for little trunks and constantly forgetting their lines. They were all dressed in drab gray, except for one little girl who wore tie-dye. Parents gave a standing ovation, aiming camcorders and flashing cameras at the stage. As the two-piece jam band began their set, parents slowly dispersed, disposing of several untouched burritos in the compost bucket. Meanwhile, the film crew from Animal Planet hovered in the back, aggressively trying to angle their way into The Farm’s more juicy pockets for a possible reality show.

Read the rest of this entry »

On the Blue Ridge Parkway

We’ve covered about 60 miles in the last three days. I know it seems meager, but we’ve climbed about 4000 feet with a ton of weight. It has been absolutely beautiful though. A long stretch of the Blue Ridge Parkway was closed to cars so we had the whole thing to ourselves for two days, besides a snow plow who smiled and wave (there was no snow on the roads so I’m sure he was having a great day) and a park ranger who didn’t seem to care that we were up there.

I haven’t heard silence like this in a long time…

We’ve gathered a ton of material that needs editing, so there will be more to come on this leg of the trip. But until then, some photos.

The Road is Waiting…

Photo by Mike Belleme

We’re finally climbing on our recycled bikes today, heading into the mountains with our sun-powered mobile production studio in tow. The bags of freshly dumpstered food and roadkill bear jerky should be enough to keep us fueled throughout the week. And then there’s that handle of Wild Turkey. It’s gonna be cold out there–snow flurries are in the forecast.

It’s been a long trip just to get to this point–there is a slew of ways we could have approached the journey. We began with a vague notion of ‘modern folk’, but the full compass of the concept is still becoming clear to us. With every day immersed in kitchen conversation and pondering ingredient labels it gains a little more form. Each musician sitting in the street behind a coin-speckled hat and every island of trees stranded in an endless sea of asphalt sheds a little more light on why we’re doing this in the first place.

Even in its nascent form, the idea was compelling enough to tear Noah across an ocean to a country he had ceased to regard as home. It brought Tim away from rubbing elbows with some of Journalism’s most elite and powerful figures. It reduced us to two brothers on bicycles. A romantic enough notion, but what to do with it? There’s a fine line between an enlightening road trip and an aimless Kerouacian binge.

Read the rest of this entry »