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.

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and while we try to give you a peek into what we’re doing once in awhile, the vast majority of our trip is still unpublished.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 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.

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.

Ducking behind a map and a mouthful of food, I struggled to trace a path of less resistance—but the map held no answers, only a moment’s distraction.

“Well, that looks like a one-person job…” I reasoned, eyes darting back and forth. “And I’m not gonna put myself in the cross-hairs of this.” I walked over and halfheartedly pulled the frame apart so the wheel could slide back in snugly without taking off a finger.

“What,” he retaliated. “So you just sit there and eat peanut butter cause you don’t wanna deal with my shit?”

A bicycle tour tears people apart in the most beautifully infuriating ways. Life becomes an intimate collaboration, and an intricate web of tension and countertension keeps the balance. When a single spoke snaps, a shock echoes throughout the system, throwing the wheel, its bicycle, its rider, and his companions into disarray. Ancient wounds burst wide open, oozing all over your face and blinding you to the gentle beauty of it all. But as Tim centered his wheel, he centered himself and his surroundings, and we crept back on the road toward that distant, barely visible light.

All this didn’t help our already skewed opinions of Texas. George Bush, Christian hypocrisy, oil drilling, gun hoarding… the entire place seemed painted bloody red to me, growing up in a country epitomized to the world by this state’s most reckless dysfunctions. But the ever-changing landscape of a road trip forces you to confront your most unseen and guarded prejudices.

Our backs to the screaming sprawl, we rode easy as ranches and forest rolled softly by. Dead in the middle of Sam Houston National Forest, our odometer crawled past 2000, and we celebrated appropriately—a pannier makes a fine icebox and even the cheapest sparkling wine dances and giggles after a day of riding. We left the forest the next day well-rested, dehydrated and officially past the halfway point. As the asphalt started heating up, a small sedan veered ahead of us into a gas station. The driver bounced in and out of the store, wound back to overtake us again, and screeched to the shoulder.

“Hey you guys want some gatorade?!” An eager body flailed out onto the street, clutching two bottles of red. No older than 22, he peered at us through thick-rimmed glasses tucked under a little bicycle hat.

“I couldn’t believe… are those guys touring? I thought… I took this same route last year on my bike!” His words trampled one another, a million thoughts congested into a few sounds. “You guys are going into College Station too? I’m visiting some friends that’d probably let you crash.” He jerked and grinned excitedly, fumbling with his pockets. “Let’s just load up your bikes and I’ll drive you in!”

“That would kinda be cheating…” I smiled, looking at the empty powerade bottle in my hand and wiping my lips.

We took Andrew’s number and he sped off, our aching legs slowly pedaling behind. Moments later, my phone vibrated to a slur of landmarks and directions. “Oh, and heads up…” warned the last text. “These guys are really Christian.”

An hour later, the sun cast long and fading shadows across George Bush Drive. It felt like any other college town—a vast campus sprawled out into apartment complexes and strip malls, enthusiastic twenty-somethings smiling through the streets. Turning down a side road, we scoured past rows of fraternity houses before finding our home for the evening.

As we leaned our bikes against a wall in the garage, smiling eyes cautiously scanned us from top to bottom. Our hosts pulled us into the living room with firm handshakes and barraged us with questions about our travels. Seeking hydration, Tim shuffled over to the refrigerator. “You guys have 4 gallons of milk,” he observed with an inquisitive smirk. “Yeah,” confirmed one of the residents. “People here don’t really like to share.”

They seemed nice enough. A bit awkward, rigidly crossing their arms over polo shirts and khakis, but we probably seemed like freaks, standing right in the middle of their home—probably stinking up the place too. Plopping my weathered body on a couch across from the plasma television, I quickly became fixated on a poster—a map of the Earth with the words “Pray for Asia” splayed across the top. A vast rectangle dimmed the area from North Africa to Japan—the 10/40 zone.

“What’s this zone thing all about?” I wondered aloud. “Oh,” replied one of the guys. “Those are the places that haven’t received the gospel yet. I think people there are mostly Muslim.”

I bit my tongue and tried to ignore the statement’s more serious problems. “Well… maybe from Pakistan west, but there isn’t too much Islam from India to Japan…”

“Except for Indonesia,” corrected Andrew. “But that’s not even in the box.”

“Looks like southern Spain made it in,” I remarked.

The irony went undetected. “Yeah,” the resident chuckled, looking right at me. “All of Europe should be in there, really.”

I’ll be blunt—I’m still bitter about my Christian upbringing. It’s one thing to be raised with life as an open question, quite another to have to arrive there yourself. To have a whole slew of answers to the most important problems thrust under you from birth, only to have them crumble to dust in adolescence.

The paradoxes bubbled and brewed in my young mind until it cracked wide open. A God so powerful and capable that he simply willed the world to be. And then he thought it might be nice to have some people running around on it—little imperfect versions of himself. And then he thought, “well, why not make things interesting.”

So he invented evil and programmed us to be tempted by it, cryptically scattering his rules to a select few and leaving the rest in the dark. A stern patriarch of a deity, diligently watching and waiting to mark us good or evil and treat us to an eternity of one of the other. It’s the perfect God for Texas, really. But unlike Texas, God gave up on catastrophic intervention by the end of The Old Testament.

We awoke to the steady sound of the heavens opening up and drenching the Earth—a brief reprise from the drought that nurtured wildfires across eastern Texas. One of the residents nonchalantly walked into the living room, where the three of us were sprawled out on couches. “We’re going to church in about 20 minutes,” he said, pouring a bowl of cereal and walking back into his room.

Sinking deep into complacency, we listened to the soothing rain, thankful for some temporary shelter. Andrew enthusiastically reached into his backpack. “I’m reading this Richard Dawkins book called The Ancestor’s Tale,” he said, smiling intently. “It’s about where people came from, all the way back to the beginning of evolution.”

I pointed at the wall behind him and snickered. “But what about that poster?” A sophisticated family tree stretched above the couch, branching from Adam and Eve all the way out to Exodus. Near the top was the bottleneck where God botched the job and sent a raging flood to exterminate his creation, save for my namesake, his family, and two of every animal.

Our fun was interrupted as one of the residents timidly walked in and buttoned down his church shirt. “Uh…” he muttered, “my roommate’s not comfortable with you guys being here while we’re out.” He quickly broke eye-contact and returned to the bathroom to continue grooming.

Andrew’s eyes focused sharply. “I can’t believe they’re making us leave!”

“Yeah…” I shrugged, “some people aren’t comfortable with strangers in their space…”

“Yeah fine,” he said impatiently. “But then what’s all this about?” His hands flailed up at the posters on the walls. “They’re literally kicking you out into the rain! And to go to church!”

The residents locked the doors and shuttled off to service as we consolidated our things in the garage. “I was into Christianity for a bit,” confessed Andrew, pacing in front of our bikes. “And what I didn’t like was that I was helping people out of obligation, not cause I wanted to.”

“And then you started reading Richard Dawkins,” said Tim.

“Well yeah,” he replied. “I realized none of it really makes any sense. I try a lot of different things to see what’s out there, and there really is a lot of great stuff in Christianity. Like ‘do unto others.’ I mean, that’s why I gave you that gatorade. I was thinkin’ how much I would have liked someone to give me gatorade when I was biking…” He patted his pockets with his hands. “Oh darn,” he cursed. “I left my keys and phone inside. I can’t call them, they’ll be pissed…” He paused to regroup before his face lit up with a mischievous grin. “Do you guys know anything about breaking into houses?”

We circled the perimeter, testing firmly sealed windows and barricaded doors before ending up back in the garage. On the verge of defeat, my gaze drifted up to the ceiling. “Wait… there’s an entrance to the attic right there.”

“Does that go into the house?” Andrew hesitantly pulled down the dusty ladder, disappearing into the darkness above as we waited in exile. Moments later, he triumphantly swung open the door, keys and wallet in hand. “That was so easy! Hold on, I gotta go up and put the panel back.”

He ascended again and before even a minute had passed, we heard anxious words swell up from inside. “Uh… there’s a situation in here, guys.”

We rushed into the dining room where Andrew was pacing back and forth on an injured leg, a jagged piece of drywall in his right hand. He picked up pieces and put them back in their place, only to watch them fall back to the carpet. “What if I just put a dead raccoon on the floor?” he pleaded through guilt-stricken eyes, looking at the crumbling halo in the ceiling above him. “It’ll look like it fell through! You guys know about roadkill, right?”

With no suitable dead animals in sight we quickly discounted the idea. “Oh man, they are going to be so pissed,” he murmured knowingly. “Especially Oli. And the worst thing is it’ll just linger and come out here and there. Wait… I could just say you guys did it!” His eyes momentarily lit up again, grasping for absolution. “Oh wait, then they’ll try to make you pay for it.”

“Wait a minute…” said Tim, furrowing his eyebrows and looking at the confused and frantic fallen angel. “Is this their fault for going to church, or ours for not going?”

The humor of the situation revealed itself, and Andrew accepted his fate. “Oh well,” he conceded. “I better get out of here and wait for the phone call.” As we walked toward the front door, a small vile on the kitchen counter caught Andrew’s eye. “Oh hey look at this!” he said, laughing. “They bought bible oil. Oil that leaked right out of a bible.” Cautiously taking a whiff of the cheap perfume, I took one last look around, smiled, and stepped into the rain.

All our frustrations with Christianity aside, we were given a warm place to stay for the night—many wouldn’t have been so kind. And we were even accessories to some seriously negligent structural havoc. Just the same, the hospitality seemed so…unnatural. As if people were following rules and not their hearts.

It felt a world away from Acadiana, the Cajun stronghold of Louisiana we rode through just a week before. Almost as soon as we rolled in, we were enthusiastically brought to visit grandparents and invited to gumbo parties and seafood boils. We spent a night on the bayou shooting guns, crabbing, eating sausage, and dancing. When we were on the side of the road picking prickly pears, a cop stopped just to let us know we could camp anywhere we like. And after we thanked a couple for feeding us shrimp they caught that morning, the man just shrugged and smiled. “Well that’s what we’re all here for!”

The French-redneck charm sucked us right in and quickly reminded us why we built these bicycles to begin with. The Cajuns, of French lineage, settled in present-day Nova Scotia. But when British Protestants claimed the land for their own, the devout Catholics refused to bow to their invaders and were forced into exile. Searching south for a new place to settle, they tightened their already fierce solidarity with one another. Even as the French language slips from their tongues into their history, they remain deeply rooted in their culture, thrilled to share their world with curious strangers.

Sitting in a cafe in College Park, we continued to watch the rain pour as our hosts worshiped in a nearby building, ignorant to the new skylight in their house. Andrew Bird, Bon Iver, Radical Face, and all the indie staples blew from the speakers, no different from any other hip little college coffee house. But bibles were everywhere. And that vacant Protestant smile.

“Texas A&M ranked 13th highest for students who pray on a regular basis,” said Tim, looking up from his laptop. “And 17th least friendly for LGBT people.”

A thin-mustached barista donning a familiar bike messenger chic approached our table gently. “Your brother told me you’re riding cross-country making films,” he said to me. “I’m camping out in backyards all semester to save on rent. You’re welcome to join us tonight if you’re still in town.”

Riding out that day would have been a wet ordeal, and he spoke through the honest tone of an offer with no strings attached. Just as we began to vent about the alienation we’d been feeling, he continued talking. “At three o’clock I’m helping with a potluck at my church, and I would love to take you guys…”

We didn’t go. Just miles away was a free meal and the warm, nonjudgmental company of the first Christian bohemians I’d ever met—seemingly the perfect opportunity to confront our demons. But unable to swallow our pride, we spent the day riding around town poking our heads into grocery store dumpsters. We found nothing.

As night fell, we rode to the backyard where the Christian campers were staying and set up. They returned from their potluck and told us their story, eagerly listening to ours. In their last year of college, they’d realized that so much of the material luxury they’d been surrounded with was actually holding them down, distancing them from their God and salvation. So they committed themselves to austerity, untraining the more destructive cycles of consumption that chain people to the material world, using their new-found freedom to spread the word of Jesus Christ.

I paused and let the words sink in. I’m always skeptical when I hear ‘spread the word of Jesus Christ.’ But what was Jesus if not God’s misunderstood, impoverished, hippie of a son? His entire life has been taken grossly out of context, but these guys standing before us seemed like the real deal, actually looking to that man as a role-model rather than as justification for their sins—little specks of humble compassion in an sea of institutionalized dogma.

We all woke up with the sun, rolling out of our tents and hammocks and meeting eye to eye before sharing breakfast. “It was refreshing to meet you guys,” I said. “I’ve had bad experience with Christianity, but you seem to be in a good place with it.”

“That’s too bad,” replied one of them. “A lot of times it comes off as elitist and judgmental. Even we do it sometimes. I just have to remember that this is about sharing the changes Jesus has made in my own life.”

“Here, take this,” said the other as we packed up our bikes. They handed us a hammock tarp, a fuel canister, and a bag of dehydrated food. I was hesitant to accept the gift, but their eyes were soft and firm, and it was clear that by helping us, they were somehow helping themselves as well.

We began our last day toward Austin inspired by Christians—disciples of Jesus and not of the Church. Rolling deep toward the vibrant bastion of Texas liberalism, the roads were edged with dark brown foliage, a sure sign that summer was finally ready to subside. Before we knew it, we’d be huddled over camp fires and cocooning ourselves in goose down to get through the bitter nights.

But getting closer, the trees revealed themselves as pines—evergreens burnt to a brown and brittle crisp by the wildfires that raged through the summer drought. The dryness had lasted too long for the Earth to endure, and violent flames danced indifferently across the landscape, charring countless layers of life to a quiet, black void.

Was God punishing us for our sins? Was the Earth fighting back? Or was it all just a part of the cycle? Standing in the ash, it didn’t seem to matter too much—such questions have little to offer one and a half million trees blazed clean and sixteen hundred homes scorched to their cold stone foundations.

But people came to help. Gospel-preaching Christians and secular social advocates. Country singers held benefits, government workers fought for aide, and college students organized. Help came from all corners, and in the absence of divine intervention, simple actions spoke much louder than the noisiest words.

So many of us have been burned by religion—but there is shared blood. The culture wars of the United States will continue to be waged, and we all have heroes and prophets who guide us through the darkest threads. Few of them had the chance to exist at the same time. But if Jesus, Martin Luther King, and Muhammad walked into the same room, I doubt we’d see much of a fight.

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.”

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Jared took another hit of cheap beer and firmly planted his feet at shoulder length. His friends call him Lumpy. “I dunno what part of Jackson y’all went through,” he slurred, “but when I drove down I was thinkin’ I ain’t neeever comin’ through here again.”

“They gonna get this on tape man,” his older friend warned, leaning against the bed of his pickup truck. Lumpy just grinned and looked into the lens. “Let me put it this way,” he said earnestly. “I hate niggers.”

We cringed. Noticeably. Just typing the word now makes me uneasy, even carefully contained between quotation marks. “But aren’t there…” My mouth fumbled for words. “Black people… around here?”

“Yeah,” nodded his friend, “but they keep themselves straight.”

It was an awkward point in a wonderful evening. We’re not used to hearing such things spoken so casually, as undisputed matters of fact. But the entire conversation was littered with what we’d been taught was the ugliest word in the English language.

And they all seemed so nice. But then again we were young, white, American, and fishing. Probably straight and Christian too. The men marveled at our roadkill collection and eagerly shared fishing and hunting tips, even driving back to their homes to bring us supplies. One of them gifted us necklaces he had made, and another tossed us beer without hesitation. When we expressed gratitude, we just heard the muttered mantra, “Southern hospitality, man…”

The sun shot brilliant orange over the trees as we rolled in the previous evening, spotting two laughing locals drinking next to a rather blunt ‘no camping’ sign. We figured we’d ask anyway. “Well hell man,” murmered one under a faded camo baseball cap. “I don’t see why y’all can’t just set up right here!” We spread our roadkill collection out to dry—the numerous wings, pelts, and snake skins we’d collected over the last week were starting to stink—and fell asleep to the soothing lull of the Pearl River.

Morning hit softly. We ate breakfast and prepared to catch dinner, clumsily fashioning poles out of bamboo shoots, fishing line, and some bobbers we found on the side of the road. It isn’t as if we’d never been fishing before. We spent our childhood pulling food out of the Gulf of Mexico with our dad, but that was a full-scale military operation. We’d jet out with a double prop, armed to the teeth with sonar, GPS, and all manner of technological trickery. The goal was to extract fish from the depths as quickly and efficiently as possible. And it worked—we returned with more than we could possibly eat. Almost every time.

Our feet sank slowly into the muck at the water’s edge as we positioned a few rocks for make-shift seats. The worms squirmed violently around the hooks, lowered into the slowly rippling reflection of the river. After a day of steady relaxation, two little red bellies populated our bucket—barely enough for a snack. But somehow the meager catch felt like a massive accomplishment, even next to memories of overflowing coolers of grouper and snapper. Fishing this way was meditation.

Dusk began to creep over us, and locals started gathering for the nightly ritual of riverside drinking. Collin pulled a whetstone from his truck and sharpened our knives, and we decapitated and scaled the fish. We skewered the little guys with sticks and slowly roasted them over the crackling fire that our new friends jump started with half a can of WD40—it seemed to have burned off by now. But just as the brisk scent of fresh fish crept up into my nostrils, a firm hand shoved 32 ounces under my nose. “Here! I thought this might taste better’n them fish!” A white paper bag followed.

We munched blissfully on the fish and lustfully at the double cheeseburger extra value meals. Slurping up soda, we absorbed the group’s wisdom. How to start a fire with dry cow shit. Training a raccoon to sit on your shoulder for a motorcycle ride. Cooking up a tasty turtle soup. Tim and I told stories about camping out in the winter, roadkill squirrel dinners, and wild foraging. It felt like we were from different worlds, but somehow this river connected us. Their eyes blazed open every time they talked about the land, and they seemed oddly nostalgic for a time before they were even alive.

“There ain’t no outlaws anymore,” complained one. “I wish I coulda grew up back in John Wayne’s time. Be a lot better’n now. Have a dispute with a sonbitch, take care of ‘em. Saw someone you didn’t like just shoot their ass be done with it. You didn’t have all this bullshit around.”

“And everything’s getting so expensive,” said another, grinning sternly. “I’m poor fuckin’ poor. Broke. Done with. Ain’t got a dollar in my pocket. Ain’t got no bank to go to to get a dollar…” he trailed off into his beer can.

“How’s life?” I asked. He took a slow sip and looked square into my eyes. “Life’s great.”

We hadn’t planned an evening with a friendly pack of Louisiana rednecks, but these things have a way of happening on their own when you’re rambling about on bicycles. They were almost walking, breathing stereotypes, seemingly the opposite of what we’ve been looking for—people who somehow escape cultural conventions and blaze their own trail. In an American era that’s largely settled into an ethos of comfort and security, it’s the freaks who most embody the spirit of individuality, innovation, and revolution that gave birth to the American ideal.

And we’re finding no shortage of freak cultures kicking around The United States. Many have roots in cities and cyberspace, but a yearning to build their own world seems to pervade the subcultural spectrum. To rediscover farming and foraging. To fish, hunt, and build homes without relying on an endlessly impersonal global society. Each movement manifests with its own sense of urgency and relevance, but going back to land is nothing new in this country.

There’s a tendency to trace it to 60′s counter-culture, but it was going on long before dread locked, chakra talking communes started dotting the American landscape. The settlers who trudged west and southward were perhaps the country’s first back-to-landers. Freaks of their time, they left the confines of the Northeast and Europe to homestead land and give birth to a new world. It was these unlikely radicals who slowly built a country of rambling roads, small towns, and expansive farmland where communities could thrive on their own terms, away from the heavy hands of government and industry.

And just as many urban and suburban dwellers today are rekindling their relationship with the Earth, country folk all over are lamenting a time when localism was nothing revolutionary. People raised chickens because they were hungry. They farmed organically because petrochemicals didn’t exist, and lost a good deal of their crop in the process. Cooperative living and radical self-reliance weren’t luxuries of the hippie class. They were necessary to survival. And the many days it took to get from town to town in a wagon or on foot was a grueling journey, fraught with danger. A far cry from the feathery romance of our bicycle trip.

But who were these people? We hopped on The Natchez Trace Parkway up in Tennessee to find out, heading south and finally escaping the relentless noise of billboards and strip malls. The steady tunnel of quiet trees seemed to breath with us as we rolled through forest and modest farmland. Spring hit quickly, sending us into still-icy streams and slowly browning our skin. But as our own bodies began to wake up, the blessings of winter started fading. Our two main sources of food—roadkill and dumpsters—were quickly going out of season.

But it turns out some of this green stuff growing everywhere is food. A forest begins as a forest—a mysterious heap of growth with no beginning and no end. But as you go deeper inside, it morphs into a subtly interwoven organism and an elusive buffet. Yes, some of the dishes are poisonous. Most of them are indigestible or unpalatable. But on that rare occasion when your eye catches a patch of wild mustard greens or oyster mushrooms, the taste of the forest creeps all through your skin.

This forest was once foraged by large animals, and the Native Americans who followed them blazed the first footpaths of The Trace. As settlers flooded the region, the path was widened drastically, and wagons slowly trudged through the mud to trade and build. The interaction between the natives and the transplants swelled with conflict, until tensions finally culminated in the mass exodus of the tribes to land that is now Oklahoma. Many didn’t make it.

We were eager to absorb ourselves into the land’s history, but the endless nuances of our inheritance had been reduced to paved roads and painted signs, written by the victors. We read about disease and war. About the ‘education’ and displacement of natives, and the painstaking establishment of new settlements. Some signs even had the audacity to inform us that if we had arrived a couple centuries earlier, we would have been offered a hot meal and a warm bed.

Pre-industrial life in the countryside was hard, and as globalizing technologies advanced, small towns accepted them with open arms. Automobiles meant faster and easier travel. Factory farming meant cheaper, more diverse food. Television was a window to the outside world. But it was all embraced in short sight, and the ruins of rural America are haunted with regret. Blinded by the promise of comfort and availability, people failed to appreciate that their entire culture was at stake.

After a couple hundred gentle miles on The Trace, we needed to taste the grit of civilization again, so two days south of Jackson we woke up to the sound of traffic over our heads. Carefully rolling out from under the bridge, we headed right into Georgetown, Mississippi. At first glance, it seemed like just another depressed dot on the map, forgotten by even the locals. Downtown had been reduced to crumbling buildings adorned with fading shop signs, and vegetation was beginning to fill the cracks, slowly returning the town’s corpse to the Earth.

But right across the street, a modest white building breathed slowly. An older man with dark, oily skin stood outside holding a steady grin in his eyes, attentively setting up a welcome sign. “We don’t have breakfast,” Henry told us with a humble lull, “but we open at 11 for lunch… probably the best lunch you’ll find anywhere, in fact…”

He quietly went back to work as Tim and I glanced at each other. We were skeptical—we hadn’t had much luck with food lately. Sitting down at most diners in the region, you’d never even know you were right in the middle of expansive farmland. Finding fresh food is next to impossible, and buying food from local farms is often illegal. The best meals we ate were always those we cooked ourselves, usually huddled over a fire, away from the communities we were so intent on connecting with.

But the lunch here was a slap in the face, a stark departure from the instant potatoes and canned vegetables we had come to expect. Even the building itself felt eerily authentic. The décor was mostly scavenged from garbage cans and curb sides, and the tables and chairs were borrowed from customers who fondly remember when such a place wasn’t an oddity, when towns boomed, food was slow, and community gathered for a good meal. The whole patchwork felt vaguely human, a tiny but fertile oasis in the expansive desert of sterile chains and processed foods.

“That’s what i mean by love….” Caroline, Henry’s wife and the restaurant’s owner, said through a radiant smile. “People have lost what’s here. We talk. We eat. You at home. I want the tables and chairs to be matchin’ like the other restaurants you go into, that’s my dream…” She trailed off into a chuckle. “But this is just the best I can do. And they like it just the way it is.”

“Sets it apart from all these glamorous restaurants,” added Henry with a nod. “That’s the appeal. Food can bring people together. If it’s good food, it really can. Might go to different churches and different schools, but once they here they all the same.” He paused for just a moment as the words sank in. “It’s hard to find home.”

Those five words speak volumes. It’s somewhat shocking that this place is even worth mentioning, that a restaurant in the south that serves southern food to southerners is somehow relevant to any kind of bigger picture. But it was the only one of its kind we found on the entire ride, despite the people’s deep longing for what they took for granted growing up. It’s mostly all gone now, the nuances of small towns that once pulsed independently burned off by the ferocious flames of multinational industry.

It’s a rather clever process. In the modern example, McDonalds moves in, boasting jobs and hamburgers sold at lower cost and at two in the morning. But then the restaurant with a personal investment in the town goes under. Most of McDonald’s revenue gets sent elsewhere, the town becomes poorer and unhealthier, and in the end they’re living worse than they were to begin with. McDonald’s isn’t really any cheaper if its very presence impoverishes a community, but the illusion persists just long enough to get its foot in the door. By the time the town sees through the hustle, it’s already too late.

It seems to have happened everywhere. Small businesses couldn’t stay afloat and small-scale farming became economically unviable. Families spent their evenings at home watching sit-coms filmed in Hollywood rather than dancing to a jukebox downtown. As needs became fulfilled by organizations based far far away, local economies dried up. And with nowhere to take root, community and culture were short to follow. The options available to ambitious youth today are grim. Either get a job as a cog at The Dollar General and work your way up, or move away to chase bigger dreams.

These bikes have yanked us right from our comfort zone directly into worlds we never would have collided with otherwise. Barreling down the highway in a car, you can easily ignore the noise on the other side of the window, only exchanging pleasantries when paying for gasoline or asking for directions. But bicycles force you to feel every inch of every mile, and each little town you crawl through becomes a conversation waiting to happen. Most everybody seems thrilled to meet a couple of curious strangers rolling through town, and are eager to help out however they can.

Like the little league coach who spotted us in the park on a cold night and unlocked the heated concession stand. And the stern cop who woke us in a cemetery. He just apologized for the disturbance and wished us well. And there was the morning on the Pearl River in the ‘no camping’ zone when we were asked to move our site closer to the diner. They wanted to make sure we were safe. People would buy us meals and tell us their life stories, inspired by our journey and intrigued by its mission.

And through it all, the one truth that hits us over and over again is that everybody’s more or less human. The flimsy walls we build up between conservative and liberal, old and young, between redneck, punk, hippie, yuppie, and hillbilly, burn down quickly over a hot meal.

It’s easy to snicker from the sidelines at the backwardness of the South. But these people have deep roots, and yearn for many of the same things as the more progressive groups we’ve documented. Only rural Southerners aren’t holding it all on a pedestal as an elusive utopian ideal—it runs deep in their blood. And if we can ever learn to get past the rhetoric, see under the surface, and join together in solidarity, we might just stand a chance against the much more powerful forces that weigh down on all of us.

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.

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…

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.

This used to be a hippie commune. One of the first established, all the way back in 1971, when Stephen Gaskin came over to Tennessee in the aftermath of the Haight’s collapse with his caravan of flower kids. In its second year, the population shot up to over a thousand, and 10,000 visitors or so came through a year. Gaskin was the guru and leader of the community, and it wasn’t until 1983 that an uprising of sorts dethroned him, establishing an elected council. Called ‘the exodus,’ the period is a sensitive subject around here. In a new environment where people had to support themselves financially rather than putting their funds into a collective central bank, droves of people with no viable income moved out. Gaskin now mostly keeps to himself, secluded in his home on property, and the population lingers below 200. The Farm website describes it as a gated community.

Behind the gates lies a store, a school, a few social areas, plenty of garden space, some businesses, and homes spotted all around private roads traversed by cars and golf carts. The midwifery center is one of the most highly regarded in the world. It feels like a little high-tech village with plenty of beautiful fields and hiking trails spotted throughout. As an intentional community, people who live on The Farm property now pay dues and go through rigorous bureaucratic processes in order to build or work with their parcel. Many never get approval for more radical ideas. Even some of the most obvious hippie paraphernalia, like composting toilets, get denied.

The people who live here seem to love it, but many expressed anxiety to us about the younger generation picking up where they leave off. There’s an eerie generation gap here. In the four days we spent here, we met several people in their 20s and early 30s who moved to The Farm and were put off by the politics and conservative nature of the place. The result has been a collection of individual houses and homesteads spotted around the area where people have the luxury of being near the community but the ability to develop as they see fit, and as the original hippies here once did.

When telling people we were going to pass through The Farm, we got a lot of snickers and smirks. It seems it’s widely gained a reputation of being a hippie retirement community or country club. A museum of sorts where you can sit down for hours hearing stories about the good old days. It does feel a bit like a ghost town, and plenty of people are living out their golden years here. It’s pretty easy to poke fun at the place for what it’s become, but there are merits. They do garden vegetables, use solar panels, and live much more consciously than your average gated-community dweller. And we met at least one person in their 20′s (one of the four on the property we’re told) who has high hopes for the future of The Farm. It’s gone through many incarnations since its inception, and maybe we’ll be back one day to tell a fuller story. But for now it’s rather endearing to see hippies retiring in relative luxury, and to see that fire possess their eyes when they talk about the ideals that gave birth to the place 40 years ago.

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Everything moves more slowly now. People sleep more and work less. The weight of winter would continue to press down on us for a few months, but tonight was symbolic. The bitter cold would persist, but from here on out the days would slowly grow longer, minute by minute until we’d finally shed all these heavy layers and float with the colors of spring.

It was the longest night of the year. The sun had sunk behind the ridge before 4:00, and our evenings had been spent huddled near a wood-fire stove with ten or so others at IDA, eating homemade meals and falling asleep encased in goose down. The Winter solstice was little more than another cold, dark night here. Right over on the mountainside though, the Radical Faeries were preparing a pledge of renewal, remembrance, and rebirth.

We got in the car with Phil, who made his home in the area with The Faeries almost two decades ago. Phil has a zen-like jolliness about him, confidently calm and always grinning at an inside joke. And the icy roads were no match for his gleeful disregard for conventional concepts of safety. Floating between the lanes and blazing through stop signs deemed utterly ridiculous, we finally arrived at the potluck, plopping our dish with the rest before joining hands in the circle.

The faint thumping of drums crept into the kitchen after dinner, and as two people washed the group’s dishes, we wandered outside toward the sound, past the wood-fire sauna that was heating up. A full lunar eclipse hadn’t fallen on the solstice in almost 400 years, and the overcast sky slowly pulsed as the moon crept between its phases. Dazzle was down below building up the bonfire, long red eyebrows flaring across his gentle blue eyes. Violent flames engulfed the pyramid of wood as men came ever closer, bathing in its warmth.

“Tonight, we celebrate the reversal of darkness,” shouted Mountaine, slowly pacing back and forth between the crowd and the fire. “And sometimes that darkness outside reflects a darkness within.” It was a time for introspection. An opportunity to examine the year past and set out intentions for the year ahead. We all gathered around a circle of candles to shield the delicate flames from the wind, each of us lighting one and watching it dance. Compassion. Rebirth. Consciousness. Offering that which we most yearned for, we received each others’ intentions in a gentle, warm embrace. Nobody was present for miles to judge or interfere. It was just us and the mountain that night, where cynicism and separateness gave way to empathy and communion in the safety of the Short Mountain Sanctuary.

The place has been running for some thirty years now, one of the very first—some say the first—Radical Faerie sanctuaries in the world. The movement started back in the 70′s, when much of gay culture was expressed in enclaves of major American cities, often typified by the clone—aviator sunglasses wearing, massively muscle-bound, mustache growing, caricatures of masculinity. More mainstream gay movements, on the other hand, were seeking liberation through assimilation and hetero-imitation. But the Faeries had a radically different agenda.

“Faeries would go to gay pride and the gay men would just be horrified,” remembers Phil. “They didn’t want to be associated in any way with these people who were so wacky looking and cross-dressed. They wanted gay people to be perceived the same as the straight community. There was a conscious effort by the Faeries to shove it down mainstream gays’ throats that being gay isn’t like being straight except for being with other men. It is inherently different. And it’s really cool and really fun.”

The Faeries reclaimed the homophobic slur ‘fairy,’ changing its spelling to reflect the spiritualism of mythical faeries and embracing qualities the mainstream culture stigmatized as feminine. For the Faeries, the role of homosexual men in society was largely spiritual, as in some Native American cultures where homosexual and transgendered people often became spiritual mediators and medicine people. They were thought to have an insight into life that others could not attain.

“If you’re born with a different sexual identity than the mainstream is comfortable with,” reasons Phil, “you’re already at an advantage. You have to create who you are to discover who you are. You’re just set up from birth to have to figure out and deal with things that a lot of people don’t even know are questions in life.”

Faerie sanctuaries offered secluded land where gay men could gather, away from a judgmental and often hateful society, digging deep down to unearth their fears, vulnerabilities, and insecurities. They were places for men to heal together, being reborn as more conscious, loving individuals.

“When I first walked down the hill at the sanctuary, I had an overwhelming sense of tribe,” says Phil, eyes dissolving into a soft nostalgia. “Oh my God, these are my people. I didn’t even know they existed. I didn’t even know I was that different. I didn’t know.”

The radical Faeries was just one of many liberation movements that sought to free people from the clutches of heteronormativity—a set of cultural codes that impose appropriate behavior on us. It’s an intricately subtle game we play with one another. The many facets of biological sex are channeled into an M or an F, and from there the machinery of gender and sexuality is set into motion. We’re prescribed emotional and intellectual dispositions, types of clothing, appropriate work, and expected to experience certain types of sexual attraction.

In the 50′s, American culture was dreadfully unequipped to make sense of these things. Women were mostly confined to the home, “cross-dressing” was punishable by jail time, homosexuality was considered a mental disorder, and pretty much any kind of sex other than hetero intercourse was illegal in most states. But the next several decades saw a culmination of fiery movements where the options available to us multiplied dramatically.

Feminism shattered rigid notions of gender roles while gay and lesbian rights movements began to rust the iron-clad link between biological sex and sexuality. Transsexuals differentiated themselves from homosexuals and transvestites, compelling courts to redefine notions of man and woman. It was an era of activism, one where people successfully organized and carved out identities that the masses would be forced to recognize—although sometimes violently.

The Radical Faeries empowered men to embrace their femininity. Finding strength in what others saw as a weakness, they nurtured a culture centered around healing and compassion. But despite the central role of interpersonal connection in the Faerie ethos, they were historically separatists, restricting Faerie culture and community to homosexual men. Harry Hay, one of the founders of the movement and hero of gay liberation, clung to his separatist tenets to the grave, even as Faeries around him began opening their arms to people of different sexes and orientations. And separatism wasn’t just prevalent in gay male communities.

In the process of building their own cultures and fleshing out their own identities, minorities across the board fiercely pushed themselves away from one other. Some lesbians pegged male-to-female transsexuals as men trying to sabotage efforts for women’s liberation, banning them from women’s spaces. Some transsexuals derided gays for their immoral lifestyle, hoping to be recognized as heterosexuals trapped in the wrong body. Bisexuals were continuously told that they didn’t exist.

As minority groups suffered and prospered under an ever-expanding spotlight, more and more identities received recognition. Gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual, transvestite, asexual, pansexual, transgendered, butch, femme, top, bottom… it goes on and on. We’ve inherited an expanded conceptual arsenal to deal with the challenges of categorizing an individual.

The list has grown longer, but it’s still a list—a collection of discreet categories that carve lines in something that is anything but discreet. The subtleties of humanity have a dynamic nature that no number of categories can capture. And as long as we opt for a categorical paradigm of personal identity over one based in fluidity, we’re still stuck in a game of role-playing, presenting approximations of ourselves to the world in order to pass as something that isn’t quite us.

By the early 90′s, the amount of people interested in Short Mountain became too much to handle, and there was a decided need for more space. After considering land around the country, Phil and a few other Faeries settled on over 200 acres in a hollow just miles away from Short Mountain. An artist himself, Phil hoped to cultivate a space with spirituality and art as its pillars. So began IDA—an intentional community of artists with Faerie underpinnings. But it slowly transformed into something that nobody anticipated.

MaxZine met us in Smithville on his bike to take us in. Sometimes described as the mother at IDA, he takes on a whole host of responsibilities to nurture the space and make visitors feel welcome. After helping him adjust his brakes, we cut back through old country roads, cycling past baptist churches and farms before finally rambling deep into IDA’s hollow.

The words “Welcome Homo” greeted us, splayed across the front of a deteriorating barn full of old clothes, bicycles, and a stage for performances. MaxZine showed us around the property, from the houses being built and the solar showers to the spring catchment system and grassy fields where hundreds of people camp during Idapalooza, IDA’s annual music festival.

MaxZine moved to IDA during its first spring. Overwhelmed by seeing so many friends dying in the midst of the AIDS crisis, he was in desperate need of some space to slow down and get his head sorted out. But what began as a retreat slowly became a lifestyle, and 17 years later he’s still out there working every day. He’s developed an intensely intimate relationship with the land, foraging wild edibles and gardening in drag, mad scientist hair poking wildly out from his beautiful straw hat.

In addition to nurturing the land, MaxZine also acts as the primary caregiver to his friend Spree, a resident who was diagnosed with AIDS a couple decades ago. He’s is one of those people who routinely puts others above himself, acutely sensitive to interpersonal conflict and absolutely committed to outreach and inclusion. Some people credit him largely with opening the space to a new generation. He, Phil, and Spree are all middle-aged men with Faerie roots, but the other residents and most all of the visitors are something quite different.

“There’s been so many pivotal moments in IDA’s history that have helped to change the identity of the community,” explains MaxZine. “One of the visions that started to change early was the desire for IDA not to be a gay male space only. It started as a group of eight men in the woods. Then it became a gender free-for-all.”

When fleshing out a culture and common direction, the IDA residents had a party where everyone came dressed as their vision of IDA in the year 2020. Two of the few women involved in the space still hadn’t shown up when the party was well under way.

“They finally came up the stairs of the barn,” remembers MaxZine. “They had taken their shirts off, topless, and had painted women’s signs on their chests. ‘Here we’re dressed as our vision of ‘IDA!’ It felt like already in our second year the gender and identity of IDA was beginning to change.”

The present culture of IDA reflects a post-separatist liberation movement. As the space developed and began opening to women and transgendered people, the united concept of ‘queer’ began gaining considerable traction in society at large. A whole array of disparate movements began to speak in unison, finding solidarity where there was once separation. The lines finally began blurring between the ordained categories of sexuality, gender, and biological sex. And the spaces between and beyond the binaries are well-populated—much more so than we thought.

IDA now identifies as a queer space. The concepts of gay and lesbian seem fairly straight forward, but when asking people here about queer, we’d get scrunched eyes, long pauses, and constant equivocation. Everyone has their own notions. And it seems that’s just the point. Queer exalts ambiguity and contradiction, asserting that the boundaries placed on our bodies and minds aren’t real—they can be lifted just as easily as they were put down to begin with.

“Queer…” Phil trails off, searching for the right words. “I see it as primarily a cultural expression that is very fluid, open, and accepting of variation. Being uniquely yourself. It’s not only that queer people are different from straight people, but every person is different and all that difference needs to be celebrated.”

Around IDA, there are plenty of people with Adam’s apples and breasts or with facial hair and makeup. Female carpenters and male bakers, feminine lesbians and androgynous transgendered people, it all melts into a beautifully nuanced fluidity. Few of us ever have the chance to see sex and gender deconstructed right before our eyes, to watch ourselves come to expect a fluid genderscape in our day to day life. Men and women and everyone in between and beyond quickly become just people. Words like gay and bi and straight become blurry approximations—flags that some of us fly over our heads, but not the kind of thing that keeps us on separate fronts. It’s more than just a change in language. It’s queering your thought process—breaking down the biases and binaries between our senses and our brain.

Some of our most deeply embedded assumptions have been uprooted and scrutinized by the queer movement. The standard pronouns ‘he’ and ‘she,’ for example, are rather problematic here. For one thing, you might easily get it wrong. Some people are in periods of transition or experimentation, swimming freely in the fluidity of gender while most of the world tries to section it off as securely as possible. And some people don’t identify as a ‘he’ or a ‘she’, preferring instead third pronouns like ‘they’ or ‘zhe’.

It can all get very confusing, a testament to just how gendered our thought process really is, and it took a couple weeks before we weren’t walking everywhere on egg shells. Even most of the older generation in the area has difficulties connecting, often a point of contention. The greater queer community here was started by people who unequivocally identify as gay men, and when confronted with droves of younger transgendered people, some just don’t get it.

Prejudices and fears about what people are allowed to be are so deeply woven into the larger culture that it’s next to impossible for many of us to fully discover who we are. This was perhaps the most powerful truth that led to the birth of IDA. Often described as a queer safe space, IDA gives people room to express the repressed, to finally learn what it means to be themselves. But safety can be elusive.

“I don’t think that I would call anywhere a safe space,” reasons Cassidy. “Especially a place where people are encouraged to open up and communicate.” She chuckles, her laugh swallowing her face whole. “It’s not really a safe process. People have to learn how to both make themselves feel as safe as possible and also not to intrude and pressure other people. Encouraging a culture of individual responsibility.”

Cassidy is a carpenter and one of the organizers for Work Hard Stay Hard, an annual work party committed to improving IDA’s infrastructure. The magic of IDA lies in its ability to nurture a relatively controlled, heavily intentioned space free from some of the polarizing language and prying eyes that hover elsewhere—to create a comfortable bubble where people can feel safe, empowered, and more self-directed. It’s a lot of work. It’s hard enough to tend to interpersonal dynamics that might endanger the space, but creating your own world requires more physical work than many anticipate. Keeping chickens, growing food, building and repairing structures… living here is a full-time job for some.

With each day keeping warm by the wood stove in the kitchen, thumbing through zines, history books, novels, and biographies, the massive scope of queer became a little more clear. As we hauled dumpstered food in from town, tended the garden, and helped cook group dinners, we broke through the myriad shades of biology we’re all encased in, and the icy walls of identity politics thawed a little bit.

All kinds of thought patterns we never had to confront before suddenly surfaced and were slowly rebuilt into a more nuanced, enlightened perspective. Gender and sex are so deeply rooted in thought and language that it’s hard to notice, and most of us never feel a need to. But places like IDA offer room where a queer aesthetic and ethic can flourish, forcing us to reshape our own preconceptions about what people are and how they should be.

“What we assume about someone’s ability when we see them, what we consider to be an appropriate joke, who we decide to engage with closely and who we don’t make time for. Those sorts of embedded cultural assumptions… I’ll spend my whole life weeding them out,” says Cassidy, her light blonde goatee catching sun through the barn window. “I pick new ones up without meaning to and uncover roots from childhood all the time. It’s very much like a garden. If you’re not weeding it and tending it constantly, if you’re not finding the sprouts of it every day, it’s gonna be that much more work to redo the bed and to grow what you actually want.”

Most of us don’t even know rural queer culture exists, and we were lucky enough to stumble into one of the most robust pockets in the country. Bouncing between IDA, Short Mountain, and various other homes in the surrounding gayborhood feels like you’re in a different country sometimes. There are enough residents and visitors that you can have a full social life without ever leaving. But the minute you drive into town you’re right back in bible country, Tennessee.

We quickly settled into the area, finding inspiration in every pocket we explored. Some people weren’t too eager to be filmed for personal reasons, but our presence didn’t seem to stir much controversy. Before long though, distance started to developed. Rejeuvenating in the sauna at Short Mountain after a pot luck one night, one of the men, after learning that Tim and I were brothers and not lovers, asked if we were both gay. A few surprised heads whipped over at our answer. “Oh really?” he trailed off. “Well, you’re welcome here anyway!”

This was the prevailing attitude we encountered—we were mostly taken as people, judged by our people qualities. As long as we were respectful, inspired, and curious, we had little trouble making friends and feeling welcome in the community. But word got around quickly that we didn’t identify as queer, and some people didn’t take too well to the idea. One person who was incredibly warm to us at the beginning of our stay became increasingly cold and distant. A week later while we cooking up some eggs, they approached us. “So… I had a question about y’all’s film.” Their eyes darted between ours and the table.

They were uncomfortable with the idea of two straight people representing a queer space, and for that matter about foreign representation in general. This echoed through my own sensibilities, so I had to pause to gather my thoughts. I cringe every time I open a magazine, only to see a culture’s wisdom and ancient traditions reduced to a few photos of dirty skinny brown people. We take our prejudices with us wherever we go and in whatever capacity we work. Were we the kind of people they came out to the woods to get away from in the first place?

Open embraces sometimes were replaced by awkward small-talk, and the younger group began inviting us around less and less. Many who were enthusiastic about our project at the onset began to have misgivings. We dealt with it rather ungracefully ourselves, our own insecurities and confusions guarding ourselves quite tightly, further inhibiting dialogue. The video and audio equipment felt twice as heavy, twice as conspicuous. While most people came out here to let their guard down and feel like themselves, we often ended up doing just the opposite. Identity politics had been shoved back between us, the binary between ‘straight’ and ‘queer’ relegating us to different sides of a fence.

There was already sensitivity and resistance to us making a film about the community. Some people were afraid of exposure. After all, rural Tennessee is an unlikely place for a this kind of thing to be happening, and it sometimes can feel fragile. Some were afraid of hate crimes, and others just didn’t want extra publicity—plenty of people already participated in IDA, and too much exposure could overcrowd the place. And now there was the added anxiety of us maybe not being queer enough to represent the place at all.

This was a harsh reality check. Most people would probably call me straight, although I never wore the identity like a badge. The person I’m having sex with is a woman. And I’m a man. And when I’m attracted to somebody who happens not to be a woman, much of the world expects me to stop cold. “Oh, but I thought I was straight! Now I need to rethink everything,” the mind asserts. “Does that mean I’m gay? Or maybe bisexual. Or bi-curious. That’s a thing, right? Maybe straight guys can be attracted to other men sometimes…”

Pressures abound. Pressures to identify, to choose, to solidify your sense of self into a formula that excludes a whole array of potential behavior and expression. Why can’t I just be a person who is attracted to other people? Maybe most of those people happen to be female. Maybe some of them don’t. Maybe that will change as I live my life, and maybe it won’t. But this casual ‘is what it is’ analysis eludes our identity-centered culture. We feel compelled to lay claim to a category—to know what we ‘are’ and to stick with it, and to have a little existential crisis whenever we notice ourselves washing outside the lines we’ve so carefully drawn in the sand.

These thoughts are what attract so many of us to queer culture. The ideal of a world where identity politics don’t define and confine us to roles, where we can spontaneously assert our urges and express our feelings without worrying about how ‘appropriate’ they are or about how others around us will respond. But who counts as queer? How much does it have to do with sexuality? How much with privilege or lack thereof? How do you draw clear lines in a concept that is so intrinsically and intentionally blurry? There is no immediate answer to these questions, and the challenges of defining queer identity and even queer separatism spark a lot of strong emotions. Some people feel that it’s oxymoronic. Others see it as necessary.

“Queer identity, I don’t think it can be pinned down,” says Cassidy. “As soon as you stick a pin in it and say what it is it’s gonna split off and be arguable for the converse as well. Many people of various sexualities and genders come here which may or may not be queer to another queer. It’s not our job as a community to produce language that defines those things and says who’s queer and who’s not. I think everyone gets to be queer that pretty much wants to be.”

This dialogue is on the tip of queer culture’s tongue, everybody coming at it differently. How wide can the already massive umbrella of queer be spread while maintaining its integrity and capacity for radical organization? How fast can it be spread? And where are the right places to test the waters? After all, IDA doesn’t exist to welcome and educate straight people. It’s a very sacred place, quite different than a queer club in Berlin. Many people are constantly having to explain and defend themselves in the larger world, never able to just be. This is a place for them to heal.

Queer culture does seem exclusive to some of us. Homosexuals who are too mainstream, bisexuals with a partner of the opposite sex, heterosexuals who are curious or questioning, straights with queer lovers, friends, and family… but seen through a wider lens, it’s been a movement of inclusion, a historic merging of disparate groups. Gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, transgendered people, and other minority identities are all finally finding solidarity with one another.

But it’s slow going. Queer culture and identity is still very much in early stages of formation and definition, and in a world that is still largely unsympathetic to queers, heavily protected spaces are still a necessity. Many are eager to grow and learn from the wisdom and strength of queer, but there may still be a long process that needs to occur before some of us are more smoothly accepted into the fold.

Despite the conflicted tensions, the community welcomed us for the duration of the project, inviting us into their home and offering themselves as subjects for months. Finally showing the finished film felt like a heavy sigh of relief. We were graciously approached by the person who most vocally opposed our presence. To his surprise, he found the film beautiful. Our project had helped him consider a lot of his prejudices and concepts of personal identity. It had done the same for us. It may be connections like this that are slowly making cracks in that already fragile, final binary between queer and straight.

In some ways it was frustrating to be pegged so unequivocally as ‘straight’ by some people here, not given a chance to explore our own nuances in the way the space was created for. Only after leaving did we begin to fully respect the resistance and skepticism we encountered. We came in too lightly. Despite our eager enthusiasm for the malleable concept of queer, we’re not capable of fully understanding queer space—not on the level that people here do. I’ve never felt the confusion and isolation of being assigned a gender that wasn’t my own. Or feared for my life walking down the street at night, hand locked with a lover’s. No family member has ever disowned me. The only time I’ve really felt othered and ostracized due to my gender and sexuality is here. And maybe that’s exactly what I needed to learn.

We experience heterosexual privilege—our own gender-identity and sexual impulses happen to match up with what the greater society expects of us… for the most part. To pretend we fully understand the queer struggle would disrespect the burden our queer friends have carried throughout their lives. We needed to first watch and listen, cultivating sympathy and solidarity. I can only imagine how profound discovering IDA must be for people much queerer than myself, where the most subtle shades of gray and most brilliant colors unimagined by the world at large are celebrated ferociously.

However we identify—as queer, as straight, or as something else entirely—the queer movement can aide us in our pursuit of self-discovery and self-direction. We all have deep-rooted conflicts with gender and sex. Most will never be resolved. It’s just not worth the trouble, we assume, and most of us get by well enough just pretending they don’t exist. After enough pretending, we start believing it ourselves. Sometimes buried ghosts express themselves violently, but in the end most of us repress our queerness just enough to play the role the world expects of us. Even if it is just a role.

“Creating and sustaining a hetero-dominative world hurts straight people as well,” ponders MaxZine. “It forces people to uphold rigid gender roles, and any time we’re trying to fit into really rigid roles it creates a sense of inhibition. Your body gets more tight, your psyche gets more tight, and you’re closing yourself off in order to pass. People are wearing masks. And these masks are covering ourselves up and preventing us from being more open and free-loving individuals.”

We set out on these bikes to discover what separates us from one other—to push deep through the layers we’re buried under and dig up something authentic. And what’s more personal than sexuality? What’s more intrinsic than biology and what could be more pervasive than gender? These three basic concepts penetrate deep into our culture and deeper into our brains and bodies. The extent that we’re trying to conform to roles is the extent that we’re playing games with ourselves and our communities, pretending we’re something we’re not, expecting other people to be something they’re not, and ultimately perpetuating the entire separation that keeps us from connecting.

Every male pressured to appear dominant and every female who has feigned weakness is a victim of heteronormativity—a culture that forces us into corners irrespective of our individual needs and impulses. Most of us repress our queerness just enough to get by. But some people’s nature departs so far from societal expectations that to repress it would be to live a constant lie, never fully awake in their own skin. Little pockets of quiet activism like IDA make space for these people to fully come out, embrace who they are, and to find enlightenment and empowerment through their queerness.

As in the Native American traditions that inspired the Radical Faeries, some will step forward to offer their wisdom, strength, and guidance. They will invariably be the revolutionaries of gender and sex, the ones who dedicate their lives to creating a more tolerant and open world where normativity wanes and individuality can flourish. And a world where anybody, whoever they are, can look into a mirror and see a more honest reflection looking back.