2012

In 2012 we mosaiced a newly minted quarter into the greenhouse bottle wall as a date stamp. A patina dulls its shine from the accumulated touch of fingers, cat faces, and weather. As "the visible surface of a temporal depth"* this layer of grime lets you see that life happened. The 2X4s that framed the greenhouse window-walls rotted out, the old wood door decayed, and the greenhouse bubble is no longer a sealed up atmosphere, but patina lives on. It is the mark or scar of survival.

By 2012, potential catastrophes like food and water scarcity from climate change, or pandemics from chickens or pigs, had settled over the present as a nebulous threat. An ominous future saturated the moment with "affective facts,"* virtual events (at once real and/or imaginary) that demanded response and preparedness. Every year some wave of destruction crashed down on large populations, like Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, the tsunami and Fukushima Nuclear Plant meltdown in northern Japan, famine in East Africa... Such events drove new anxieties, moralities, ethics, and changes in ordinary habits. They saturated political and environmentalist discourses with what Susan Harding and Kathleen Stewart identified as a "pervasive apocalyptic sensibility"—a voice in American politics and publics that "mixes horror and hope, nightmare and dream, destruction and creation, dystopia and utopia."*** Some final retribution or redemption loomed.

Cosmic agents of planetary destruction also troubled people with fantasies of unavoidable ruin. The Biblical apocalypse had become unmoored from any savior's return. An asteroid might hit the planet and kick off a new ice age. The Mayan calendar ended December 12, and some New Agers thought the world would end with it in a final meltdown. The 2009 movie 2012 was a disaster spectacle released in time to rake in some money just in case its plot came true. Wild stories circulated on conspiracy radio: Planet X, a.k.a. Neburu, a hidden planet with hordes of demonic aliens, was swinging into orbit to enslave Earth. Or the billionaires behind the New World Order would massacre the masses, first weakening us with chemtrails. Why even get up and go to work?

It was as if the bleak future had concretized in the present, the concerns of one or five generations down the road urgently pressing on us now. Happening to us yesterday, not in a decade. The sky itself had a patina, the atmosphere smudged with greenhouse gas emissions. But somehow humanity survived in the billions. The catastrophists warning about Earth's peak carrying capacity maxing out by 2020 were as surprised that so many humans were still around as the 1970s' Casandras had been when we hit the year 2000. Certain ways of living had died. The fate of other species was also a different story, but genetic engineering made their final endings uncertain.

In those days the apocalyptic atmosphere felt like a homogenizing mood. After the world failed to end so many times, the post-apocalypse became a kind of patina, the visible surface of damage suffered that leant a gloomy beauty to what survived.  Patina's aesthetic quality suffused old things, worn infrastructure, and ragtag DIY techniques, giving them the queer charm of the survival circus. Rust was both inevitable and pretty.

We repaired the greenhouse bottle wall in 2023, embedding pennies in the mortar in a spiral shape. I patched a broken wine bottle with a smaller one cut down in length to fit. The clear gallon jugs cultivated a little habitat of mold mottled green, brown, and black. One penny popped off but I shine up the others with a scouring pad on a day with nothing better to do.

2038

*Madalina Diaconu, "Patina-Atmosphere-Aroma: Towards an Aesthetics of Fine Differences," Handbook of Phenomenological Aesthetics, (131-148), 132. Like patina, "the atmosphere [can also] be defined as a precipitate, as a cluster that brings together and condenses quasi-immaterial, invisible particles of inhabitants, that are at the same time highly personal and impersonal... The most common reaction to atmospheres encountered in public or private places consists in a spontaneous attuning or homogenising of moods" (137).  While patinas are aged skins, "the atmosphere is spatially open and itself opens moods and life-worlds... By experiencing an atmosphere spread out by a place, the contemporary perceiver is brought nearer to the anonymous succession of all those persons and generations who ever lived and left their olfactory traces there, and becomes himself part of an enormous collective organism. In this respect, feeling an atmosphere is a matter of symbiosis with nameless and faceless bodies" (137).

**Massumi, Brian. 2010. “The Future Birth of the Affective Fact: The Political Ontology of Threat.” In The Affect Theory Reader, Melissa Gregg, Gregory J. Seigworth, eds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010: 52–70.

***Harding, Susan, and Kathleen Stewart. “Bad Endings: American Apocalypsis,” Annual Review of Anthropology 28 (1999): 285-310.

Greenhouse

Just before the housing bubble went POP! and Code enforced the Cathedral of Junk to comply, Vince brought me by the Professor’s house, a south Austin old-timer who collects special rocks from the railroad tracks down the street. Over the decades a landslide accumulated: cairns in the yard, smothering steps and porch, covering the house’s floor, stacked around the bed in a nest. Then the water heater burned a hole in the house’s center. Rain-soaked sheetrock melted down on the rocks below. The Professor was living on the back porch with his red dog surrounded by piles of stones.

We were visiting The Old Place to help move windows stacked against the house, and to take some home. They're weatherproofed with coats of mistint paints, pink, lavender, and lime dribbles down the panes. Some had been there forty years, salvaged from the University of Texas’ Mary dormitory before its demolition. The Professor says they looked out on Town Lake before it was dammed, when a waterfall flowed where the pedestrian bridge now stands. He lives in and salvages fragments of Austin's lost landscapes, some thousands of years old, barely buried under the present. Traces of the past no one else wants or can see engulf his house, awaiting scavengers who can archive or make use of them. That is how dorm windows that looked out on the vanished city came to peer in on the dream habitats of art yards. The windows now form the glass walls of Ephemerata Garden's greenhouse, a workshop at Further Farms, Smut Putt Heaven's windows/crutches structure filled with San Pedro and other cacti, and seasonal forms at the Cathedral of Junk.

Rock pile couch, take a seat. The porch overlooks a big drained pond once full of tropical fish and water lilies. We watch grackles dig for bugs in the ruined pond’s roots while the Professor pours out stories in a creek talk of whirlpools, grabbing things from piles to illustrate meandering lectures. He pulls animal bones and skulls from a black suitcase. “See how the antler was scraped away to make it balance? It’s weighted to your hands. Put it around your neck. The Apache and Comanche who lived here used this as a tool.” He shakes a piece of glass and a little bulbous stalactite from a pill bottle: “This is a piece of fulgurite, from lightning hitting sand. And this calcite formation has been altered, carved into Ixchel, Mayan Goddess of the moon, who walks with a rabbit on her shoulder. You can see her when the moon is three-quarter’s full, and the rabbit is very clear on her shoulder.” Hanson earned the nickname Professor for this constant stream of learned discourse. But he thinks of himself as a smart aleck scholar, ready to deflate expert knowledge--all those experts who don’t take his relics seriously.

According to Hanson, this neighborhood was one of the first spots in Austin colonized by the Spanish. “They found this populated garden and took over.” Anglos eventually built a narrow-gauge railroad steam-powered by a wooden locomotive--forgotten history down the block, where the railroad still runs freight into town. With a big pre-invasion population having lived around the modern-day tracks, he finds hand-hewn rocks everywhere down there and hauls them back up on his motorized wheelchair. He says every rock, bone, and piece of metal salvaged from the tracks carries some trace of human tinkering. Some stones have been hewn and weighted to spin perfectly, or to stand upright on a ledge's lip. Others have exposed pockets of glimmering geodes, or concave fishscales from flint napping. You can see whirls of amber in a piece of fossilized palm wood. There are animal forms and profiles of women wearing elaborate headdresses, carved by women otherwise constantly grinding on matate. He passes around a heavy fossil mammoth bone excavated in the backyard while digging a well. Someone tuned this fifty-pound sitar-shaped limestone rock to produce two notes. See the wear marks where drumming fingers endlessly slapped the stone?

Like the rocks and relics, the drained pond embodies a possible past, tracing a lost ecology of relationships between characters and landscapes. While anoles, geckoes, spiny lizards, and the bugs they eat burrow in the rock cairns’ million caverns, the pond habitat manifested the animal realm most intensely. “It was one of the most successful things I’ve ever done. It just worked: I built it, and all the animals came!” Two kinds of native tree frogs live in Austin, and one species moved in to the habitat. Sometimes they visited Hanson’s bedroom. Once a Great Blue Heron came down to hunt them. Vince remembers blooming lilies and insect dramas. “There was sort of an arms race, where the spiders built big webs over the pond, and the dragonflies would come down and cut the webs where they joined the trees. They learned to cut all the right places.” Not so many animals, since the pond’s been drained. Now the pond’s a concrete ruin, awaiting mortar patchwork and resealing with paint. Papyrus, pickerelweed, and dehydrated water lily roots survive in shallow puddles. Every day mockingbirds pick for bugs. Like the bamboo grove behind the pond, the patchy landscape is in ruins, gone wild and overgrown. Sun spears through bamboo blades to magenta and sky blue wood planks leaned against the back of the pond. More salvaged materials are propped against a little hand-built house beside the pond. The scene draws out a feeling in me of wanting to get to work, see it unfurl.

But what Hanson really needs help with is moving all the salvage wood, windows, rocks, and relics way from the burned-out house so it can be repaired. One day we work on relocating rocks to clear a path to the house. Another day, Vince gathers David and Susan, Scott Stevens, and Jen and I to make human chains and get some windows out of there. A good crew of six--we could start a moving company. While Vince hacks a path through the bamboo, Jen and I offer Hanson a Museum t-shirt illustrated with a Moontower, Austin's first public lighting from 1895. He reminisces, “I lived right under a Moontower in west campus. Back then a lot more bugs clouded the lights, feeding flocks of nighthawks.” The bugs are gone now, so the birds are in decline, but the Moontower is preserved as a historic landmark. “There used to be a lot more bugs all over Austin--and butterflies!” Like the Colorado River waterfall that disappeared with the damming of Town Lake, this is the city that vanished. In the face of all this ruin, he sobs, “I identify with critters more and more, because the same people who want to crush critters want to crush me!”

The Professor likes old things, ways, and knowledges--anything that somehow survives--and The Old Place is a sort of database of these. "I've researched all kinds of hippie industries, like fruit silviculture, making soap, raising tilapia." One day I drop by to see his repaired house with wheelchair ramp. A few folded blankets sit on the floor beside the huge loom he made them on. We talk about trees, a Chinaberry grove at the street's dead end that Hanson watched grow about forty years ago out of a scrapmetal "junk ecology" that sheltered saplings from the mower. “It’s good wood--they used it to build China cabinets,” professes the Professor. I complain about Hackberries at our house constantly dropping branches. Planted for fast-growing shade during Austin’s 1950s housing boom, now you see them falling apart all over the city. But the smart aleck scholar argues, “It’s a food tree. People lived off hackberry pies in the Depression. Lots of birds eat them, too.” Now the Hackberries provision invasive monk parakeets and migratory birds like cedar waxwings.

At first Hanson's windows formed a greenhouse tacked on to our front car port. Last fall I
framed out a new greenhouse in the backyard with lumber, concrete, and UV-blocking plastic roofing from Home Despot. On the north side I poured a narrow foundation for a bottle wall to build this spring or summer or some other vague future. The glass walls can be seasonally broken down and removed. They're cobbled out of double-pane glass doors salvaged by a friend and variously sized windows from The Old Place and the Habitat for Humanity ReStore. Painted with gallons of cheap mistint lavender and bubblegum, Jen's mom nicknames it "Barbie's Greenhouse." It's an imperfectly sealed atmosphere that captures light and a little heat. We stuff all our potted plants in this bubble, just in time to survive winter.

2012

Hot Cold

Early September the temperature drops ten degrees from the summer's unbroken triple digits, falling down with scorched leaves. The feeling of winter coming on, when stars look brighter and sounds carry further in cold air. Early sunsets, less light in a day. In January, twenty-five degrees for five days, snow on the garden greens. When the weather is perfect, it is only shifting from one extreme to the other, a little window stuffed with feelings of anticipation for spring’s seedburst or the cozy melancholy of long winter nights.

We have been ricocheting between ever warmer summers and colder winters. This summer with the water blackouts the ground cracked open like it did in the middle of last winter's long freeze. The cracks are wide enough to shove down hay and manure. The ponds freeze six inches thick, goldfish and gambusia hibernating beneath the ice. Fleas and mosquitoes vanish. We weatherproof the chicken and bunny coop with shower curtains and heat lamps. In the summer a standing fan circulates the hot, stagnant air.

Sometimes we burn chopped up fallen branches in the chimenea, more for atmosphere than warmth. Compost heaps radiate free heat, warm enough to keep seedlings happy if you set them on top in the spring and rig up a plastic cover.* On hot days you can make a simple evaporative cooler by sticking your feet in a bucket of water. Wear as little clothes as possible.

We used to run an A/C that cooled the bedroom while shooting hot air at the pond. On the hottest stretch of days the A/C became useless with electricity blackouts. The big ice storm last winter knocked out the power but we still had water and gas. People are learning to conserve water and electricity not only because they got too expensive, but because they become unavailable to most for days at a time in peak use weeks. The cold isn’t bad because we have surprisingly cheap gas, but there’s not much you can do about summer heat.

Which is more inescapable and miserable, extreme cold or heat? Conditioned by air conditioners and heaters, bodies sweat and shiver outside. So vulnerable without our coolers and heaters, not to mention clothes. We get heat stroke, or body heat wicks off into freezing air. What are bodies, what is life, but this fragile balance of heat and cold?

2018 

* Gene Logsdon details his sheep manure heater for seedlings in Holy Shit: Managing Manure to Save Mankind (Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing [2010], 132-133). "I keep wondering, nevertheless, if I am taking as much advantage of this free heat as I should. Red Cat Farm in Germansville, Pennsylvania, is testing an idea to use that heat in one of its greenhouses." 

Tunnels

Stray animals seem drawn to Ephemerata Gardens. Don't get me started on the cats. One morning a young black and white bunny hops around the morning glory patch. The neighbors were raising rabbits for food, had too many babies, and let a few go in the alley. We put the bunny in our chicken coop, along with another we find the next morning. They seem to be sisters; we never see them mate. A few weeks later we lift up the cat carrier top that serves as their makeshift hutch to find a dozen squirming furry bean-shaped babies. The father digs his way out of the coop and vanishes.

The local feed store buys some of the babies to resell as pets, and we give a few away. The two we keep--the mother and her albino baby--can't stand each other, so I build a new hutch with a wire mesh floor. The albino tunnels through the chicken coop's floor. Excavated soil mixed with hay and manure maddeningly blocks the door. Every few months I hawl out around fifty pounds of dirt to throw in the compost. Another poop chore, like the kitty litter boxes, often overwhelming. Keeping furry animals requires daily feeding and watering, cleaning up their excreta, sometimes feeling guilty of neglect or resentment at the extra work. Anxiety that a dog could break in and kill again.

We keep the bunnies more for their poop than as pets. In a pinch they could become food for starving vegetarians. The hand-me-down rabbits are our belongings, living objects with an instrumental value that serves our consumption habits. They are little solutions to the agriculture crisis of the loss of fertile topsoil. I try not to think of them as prisoners, vulnerable in the coop. Much more than means to ends,* they desire to tunnel and escape. They want to eat lamb's quarters, amaranth, and sugary carrots. They're so soft, except for kicking back feet, and completely silent.

2012

* "Ecological crises ... present themselves as generalized revolts of the means: no entity--whale, river, climate, earthworm, tree, calf, cow, pig, brood--agrees any longer to be treated 'simply as a means' but insists on being treated 'always also as an end.' This in no way entails extending human morality to the natural world, or projecting the law extravagantly onto 'mere brute beings,' or taking into account the rights of objects 'for themselves'; it is rather the simple consequence of the disappearance of the notion of external nature. There is no longer any space set aside where we can unload simple means in view of ends that have been defined once and for all without proper procedure... 'No one knows what an environment can do,' 'no one knows what associations define humanity...'" Bruno Latour, The Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004, pp. 155-6.

Fertilized

Ephemerata Gardens is localizing its own manure compost production in a closed loop. We have always thrown the hay and poop from our combination chicken hutch/rabbit coop into the compost heap. But the two bunnies and two or three chickens only make so much nitrogen- and phosphorous-rich manure. The perfectly round, oderless brown balls dropped by the rabbits can be added directly to the mulch around fruit trees and tall food plants like okra. The chicken crap, with its whitish urine and grayish digested feed, ends up all over the yard as the birds scratch around all day. The dried poops are like dirt clods, easily crushed into dust. We harvest the manure and soiled bedding hay from the coop and throw it directly into the compost to age for a half year or so. But the animals' poop was never quite enough to meet our compost needs every fall and spring. This year we finally broke down and built an outhouse to start saving our poop, too.

Shit has become so valuable that people have been hijacking sewer mains to suck out the sludge. Even with its low phosphorous content, urban fecal matter is much cheaper to harvest than operating the phosphorous mines that have become depleted anyway. Farmers and warmongers alike cry "More phosphorous!" But with bat populations (and their amazing guano) so low from white nose syndrome and the coprolites all mined out, where can they turn? Coprolites are mineralized feces of ancient animals, including dinosaurs--important to paleontologists as trace fossils that offer direct evidence of diet. In the 1850s coprolites were mined near Cambridge, England as a source of phosphates for farming. When the mines reopened during WWI the phosphates went into gunpowder instead of fertilizer. Last year, still scraping by to stay open, the Sedgwick Museum at the University of Cambridge sold its entire coprolite collection to a Chinese fertilizer manufacturer.

Our new toilet is a small version of the Rhizome Collective's brownfield commode. As a volunteer at the Radical Urban Sustainability Training workshop in 2008 I helped hand-build Austin’s first city approved, code compliant public composting toilet engineered by David Bailey. It took four years of review for the City to permit the structure. We built the toilet's walls with over a hundred bags of concrete mixed in wheelbarrows, poured into a plywood form along with demolition rubble gathered from the land. The design is divided in half so that humanure in one side can cure for a year while the other side is in use. The resulting pathogen-free nightsoil feeds the garden downhill from the toilet. The system produces free fertilizer while saving water (and the energy consumed in water’s production and treatment: "Austin Water Utility uses as much electricity as all other city departments combined"*).

In two years we will be able to use our humanure in the garden as compost. Meanwhile we are experimenting with a compost tea liquid fertilizer made of chicken and rabbit poop that has cured for a month, with some of our urine thrown in for good measure. If it sounds disgusting, wait till you bite into one of our huge, juicy tomatoes.

*Asher Price, "Green toilet wins city approval: Composting commode is first to gain official stamp," Austin American-Statesman, June 18, 2009.

2018

Busybody

Visitors to Ephemerata Gardens often ask us how long we've lived here, how long did it take to get this way? How many thousands of hours tinkering? What sightseers see is only a snapshot of something non-visual: ways of living in atmospheres. Landscape patches are composed of different tempos and rhythms, the blur of hands seeding and weeding, the speed of root growth and heron migrations, the slow collection and decomposition of garbage. Yardist symbiont people become contented busybodies, endlessly encrusting landscape patches with aesthetic layers as the years fly by. Isaiah Zagar in the Magic Gardens grew three left arms because he works so fast: "My work is marked by events and is a mirror of the mind that is building and falling apart, having a logic but close to chaos, refusing to stay still for the camera, and giving one a sense of heaven and hell simultaneously." Far from being in control, a living machine's engineer just tries to keep up with emergence, just one of the processes that holds the superorganism together.

Over a dozen years every surface in Spunky Monkey Ranch became permeated with art. Visitors entered the land through a twelve-foot arch cobbled out of deadwood, skis, crutches, and scavenged wood panels painted with a bright monkey face and vibrating letters spelling out the yard's name. A smaller arch spanned the path down to the creekside bamboo grove. Held together by wire and tension, the arcs bristled with gravity’s potential, poised on falling apart; they want to move. They match David Pratt’s body – a shaky livewire, hands and boots tapping out excess energy. He likes to work fast to override making too many decisions, swinging lengths of wide transparent tape over a pile of collage scraps so static electricity sucks up an image. Slapped directly onto picture frames, compositions emerge with a depth of multiple layers, some obscured. Art lives off the frame, swallows it up, the same way Susan’s mosaics live on house walls and garden paths. They match her, too – still and patient. Susan has a quiet presence that blends in, then pops out with simple joy and generosity. Spunky Monkey Ranch embodied Susan and David’s still and jittery ways of being.

When they moved out to Further Farms in Elgin, some people were shocked that David and Susan could abandon the art environment and just leave everything to its fate. David and Susan accepted it as part of the place’s lifecycle. David wondered, “How can I take it with me when it all lives here? It’d be like dragging a heavy load around by my neck. I’ve never stuck around anywhere long enough to build a foundation like Vince has” at the Cathedral of Junk. David keeps moving, starting over. Maybe Further Farms will emerge as a foundation, maybe not. While their “everything must go” yard sale moved as much art, plants, and materials off the Ranch as possible, the rest stayed or got tossed. Vince helped move the mosaic Monkey King on his throne. What about the small portable pond? “Well, if it looks like it belongs here, it stays.” It belongs to the place, and maybe some other artist will tend to its life there (which is what happened to the mini-Old West town at Spunky Monkey Ranch in the first place). If not, it goes the way of all mortals and falls apart. Like any garden, it needs tending to exist. Art environments take on a life of their own, but need a spunky cultivator to repair things as gravity, weather, rust, plants, and animals shuffle forms around. Aesthetic patterns materialize through processes of constant recomposition – tending a place’s emergence, laying down layer after layer of endless care and repair. From one day to the next, art environments are never the same.

Before Spunky Monkey Ranch, Susan and David ran the Alternate Current ArtSpace in a rented building on the same South Austin lot. Opening in 1991, this live-in art gallery hosted unjuried gallery shows that art critics and careful curators described as “cluttered.” It was a hodgepodge place where anyone could show art. Themes for group shows were inclusive and quirky: “The Mojo Show,” “White Trash/Black Helicopter,” “He Said/She Said.” Their last show in 2002 focused on 9/11 only nine months after the event. Alternate Current aimed at being a habitat to encourage and support south Austin artists and connect them to an older generation of creative people. Both the gallery and the Ranch were places that gathered an eclectic public of artists, musicians, gardeners, filmmakers, and their kids into a welcoming intergenerational scene.

Like the Alternate Current art gallery before it, Spunky Monkey Ranch reveals the fluidity of places, how fast they change, the inescapable vulnerability of aesthetic patterns in time. In “The Vulnerability of Outsider Architecture,”* Roger Cardinal laments the loss of vernacular art environments as an almost inevitable fate. Given their improvised aesthetic compositions like mosaics or structures held together by gravity, these singular places share an in-built precariousness of form. Without their perpetually tinkering creators (who abandon them in pursuit of lower rent, or are institutionalized, or die, or commit suicide), the places swiftly fall to pieces. Often built of junk, the public can see them as eyesores or rat farms; arsons and vandals assault some places, while municipalities dismantle others on the grounds of code violations or health hazards. Very few are preserved by nonprofit institutions (like the Orange Show Foundation in Houston). As an art historian, Cardinal mourns not only their "extinction," but “that extinction should lead to oblivion: we can only guess at the number of outsider sites which have vanished across the years. The only consolation is that a number of demolished structures enjoy an afterlife” through visual documentation (2000:172). A powerful mode of melancholic narrative presents itself in vanished or decayed expressive forms, lost arts, and extinct species of beauty. The affective pull of lost places, or their potential loss, motivates preservation – the avoidance of "extinction" of singular atmospheres that will never grace the world again.

Is there really any way to freeze these places? Aesthetic patterns in vernacular landscapes cannot be preserved without preserving the process of perpetual emergence, the relationship between spunky monkeys and their homes. If "outsider architecture" takes form through the pleasures of unfolding processes – tinkering, gardening, creating, scavenging, dreaming, partying – preservationists should follow by shifting attention to the vulnerability of action. This reframes preservation and destruction as generative actions in themselves. Rather than a melancholic vision of the loss of place, the vulnerability of art environments helps us to see these landscapes as momentary triumphs of doing or living against the odds -- despite thermodynamics and capitalism. At the same time, animating places through historical narratives helps us understand what drives the pattern of vulnerability itself. Rent goes up. Economic development patterns recognizable as gentrification and code regulation bring about the abandonment and destruction of these precarious urban landscape patches.

Meanwhile, out at Further Farms, Susan’s mosaic and collage patterns begin to encrust the kitchen walls. The trailer’s living room offers plenty of wall space for a gallery of David and Susan’s paintings, collages, and mosaics, as well as art they’ve collected over the years. The sunny open spaces outside called for gardens, and the farm is taking shape as veggies watered with caught rain in raised beds of cinder blocks and car tires. Vince helped assemble fence wood and windows into junkitecture walls for the carport turned studio workshop. The circle of lean cedar elms suggested a sundial, and every equinox and solstice David is out there at sunrise calibrating a solar calendar out of metal poles and mortar chunks gathered from the land. A skeletal metal arch unfolds near the sundial with a chair up top like you could sit there and enjoy a fine view. David calls it "the East Gate to the Garden of Eden, or the West Gate, depending on which side you’re on." The potluck gatherings that connect generations of creative people and families continue at Further Farms with Thanksgiving dinners and Easter egg hunts, when people come together to catch up, share home-cooked food, and play some music. And then there is the new pattern of driving from the exurbs into town, where Susan works for the City, and David has seasonal work with the IRS or as a movie extra. Life is quieter out there, stars brighter, and the art of wildflowers, deer, and hawks graces the fields.

The busybody is ready to mosaic, aching to dig. The relationship between the busybody and living garbage surges with a dream or possibility. Never finished, always ready to start over or go further into what is emerging.

*Roger Cardinal, “The Vulnerability of Ousider Architecture,” Southern Quarterly 39, no. 1-2 (2000): 169-186.

Garbage Collectors

"Ephemerata Gardens collects all kinds of objects and life forms... It is a miniature version of the North Pacific Garbage Gyre (or Garbage Patch), a museum of plastics gathered by the clockwise vortex of oceanic currents. "

Posted on FlowTV.org.

The Symbiont

The teaspoon of Ephemerata Gardens soil I mailed to the lab tested positive for the Toxoplasma tinkerans brain parasite. I haven’t tested myself, but I’m sure I’m infected. The team of soil ecologists that discovered T. tinkerans last year hypothesize that the endosymbiont alters its host’s behavior by stimulating an obsessive collecting and arranging of objects, generating a landscape patch cluttered with rusty metals. Like the bacteria in early biobattery experiments, T. tinkerans eats iron oxide in soil solutions by prying off oxygen and metabolizing the freed up protons, giving the ground a mild electrical charge. The parasite reproduces solely in human temporal lobes. Hoarders, scrap metal collectors, and people with art yards simultaneously cultivate and are cultivated by the symbiont.

Inside each yardist’s brain is another small garden where the yardist symbiont dwells. Like its close relative Toxoplasma gondii, a transpececific brain parasite that co-evolved with cats, T. tinkerans makes its hosts do things and behave certain ways. Most notably, yardists begin to feel unsettled and uncomfortable anywhere but their yard. They must constantly tinker, becoming part of a living machine. They grow curiously affectionate towards certain kinds of trash, attracting it to them as if by arcane magnetism. The yardist symbiont cultivates secret powers in its hosts that range from an attunement to particular objects in roadside junk, to a dreamy state of awareness or sense of timelessness in which garbage gleams with promises of what it might become. Hosts become overly sensitive to a space's aesthetic saturation, in particular an atmosphere's maintenance needs and patterns of decomposition. Perhaps the oddest and most dangerous symptom is a nascent sense that money isn't everything which, untreated, can grow over the years into an acute dislike of accumulating capital in favor of blatently wasting time. Affection for the valueless eclipses the desire to amass set forms of value -- as if currency, not trash, was dirty and polluted.

How does the yardist symbiont spread? At first I imagined a mycelial matt camouflaged as ordinary sewer pipes and fiber-optic cables creeping out from the Cathderal of Junk beneath the rest of Austin. Working in the garden one day, the yardist-to-be extracts a small twist of wire from the soil and contracts the symbiont. More realistically, the vectors are not underground, but the environments themselves. Just setting foot there you run the risk of contracting the symbiont. It even seems to transmit over TV -- an invisible microbe that infects through visual media. Perhaps it spreads through tainted gifts, like the doll arm, head on a stick, and mullein pups Scott Stevens trasnplanted from Smut Putt Heaven to live in Ephemerata Gardens. Before you know it, an art environment takes over your yard and life. Over the course of a decade, structures like the East/West Gate to the Garden of Eden at Further Farms coagulate from a multitude of rusty taproots emerging directly from the yard. You start eyeing roadside junk piles, compulsively collecting body parts for the yardist symbiont to assimilate into its ever-creeping form.

T. tinkerans' discovery not only lets us better understand the psychobiogeophysical entities that have stimulated the growth of the City of Living Garbage. More importantly, we can propagate the City by inoculating human populations with the T. tinkerans endosymbiont. 

2021

Microscopic Cities

When you step into Ephemerata Gardens, right beneath your feet is a densely populated urban population, the sprawling megalopolis of Soilandia. Of all "Do-It-Yourself" activities, perhaps DIY soil is the one you do least by yourself. Compost heaps are buslting microscopic cities of macroinvertebrate mansions, amoeba apartments, and fungal factories. They say a teaspoon of good soil is home to 100 million to 1 billion bacteria. And the Archaea! Strange to think human food security depends on this galaxy of microbes. So much for doing it yourself -- only we can make soil in an ongoing collaboration with life forms that know just what to do with dead things.

In the drought/recession fall of 2008, Carol Ann Sayle's tour of Boggy Creek Farm opened with an invocation of threat to this we. “I know why you’re here. Things are tough, and we’re all worried. We need true homeland security.” Around sixty people gathered for the tour, most of them in their later years unlike the twenty-somethings drawn to the Rhizome Collective's RUST workshop.

Carol Ann addresses the crowd from her front porch. The house is one of the three oldest structures in Austin, built in 1840 in the bottomlands of the Colorado River with its rich alluvial soil (back when all farming was "organic"). Farms have surrounded the house for most of a century and a half. Carol Ann and her partner Larry Butler bought the place in 1992 and gave it its current name in honor of the creek with concrete banks a block away. Now three other organic farms share the neighborhood. The landscape patch's memories keep popping out of the soil in the form of wild amaranth and horseshoes. Archaeologists from the University of Texas at Austin have come to dig for 19th century debris like kitchen garbage, pottery shards, bones. On the Farm’s website, Carol Ann recognizes the house itself as “a physical testament to the labors of the African slaves who undoubtedly had a hand in its construction, and who worked the fields of this antebellum plantation. This page is dedicated to their memory.”

Our tour meanders from the porch to the front garden, where the gravel driveway and rocks in the soil soak up heat and keep the field a few degrees warmer than the back garden. Carol Ann's tour isn't about plants, but topsoil. “Focus on the soil and forget about the plants.” We linger around the compost heaps, twenty-foot long rows as tall as a person. Every few days they need to be turned with a front-end loader to keep the temperature right and replenish the oxygen inside. On cold days they steam when turned. Carol Ann describes soil production as “not an exact science ... more of an art or common sense.”

The art of composting involves science labs that analyze soil samples. Based on lab results, they add molasses, green sand, sulfur, and other amendments to the compost before putting it in the gardens. Getting the right ratio of 1 part nitrogen to 20 parts carbon begins in the compost heaps. Green plants and chicken manure make for good nitrogen, while fallen leaves, twigs and branches, dry grass, and other brown and brittle trash bulk up the carbon. Carol Ann sees the compost heaps as a form of carbon sequestration, as if they've trapped part of the sky.

Boggy Creek Farm used to collect the neighborhood’s curbside bags full of leaves. Sanitation workers appreciated their free labor. Now landscapers drop off their trash. The compost heaps need to be kept moist as a wrung out sponge to “keep the microbes happy.” Carol Ann pictures them in their giant home, “eating and pooping, mating and going on vacations.... there’s animals in there!” People stick their hands into the warm heaps as we walk by to the back garden beds.

Behind the 200-foot long beds is a small orchard of fig and citrus trees, and some random heaps of slowly decomposing rhubarb stalks. Because the bottomlands’ high clay content causes bad drainage, the beds are raised, but not by building them up in containers. Instead, paths have been dug down between the rows of plants. Before seeding new crops, the farmers walk the rows with a machine that gently fluffs the top few inches of beds that had gone flat over the growing season -– the no-tilling method.

Carol Ann cautions not to do this with a shovel because the beds are home to thriving civilizations. “Those civilizations die when you throw them up in the air like that. That’s what’s happening in Iraq and the Gaza Strip.” Carol Ann points to the chicken coop next to her house. The egg hens seem to know they won’t be killed, so they have “a sense of peace about them” that harmonizes with the microbe civilizations in the raised soil beds. Sometimes this sense of peace rubs off on visitors to the farm. Kids play in a shallow dirt hole near the coop, pushing around battered plastic dumptrucks in the pecan shade.

While soils amended with chemical fertilizers are composed of only .3% organic matter, the labs say 3-4% of Boggy Creek’s soil is rotting plants, manure, worms, fungi, microbes, and the like. To disturb the beds as little as possible, the farmers harvest plants by cutting them off at the stalk. Their nutrient-rich roots can decompose in the soil, and bacteria, nematodes, mycorrhizae, and other organisms are not yanked out of their civilizations. Then the machine fluffs the top few inches of soil, and people use hoes to pull decomposing mulch in the footpaths up onto the beds. Finally, they add an inch of revitalizing compost. A mulch of dry leaves or hay laid down on the paths holds in moisture and marks where to step. Now the rows are ready for planting seeds.

The cultivation of trash into soil takes time, machines, and knowledge. Without people an inch of topsoil forms in 300 to 1000 years, while with people's help, a tree can turn into compost in 1 to 100 years. To get an idea of the labor involved, replace the front-end loader that turns compost heaps with human-powered pitchforks, or the mulching machine with a hand-axe. But the ancient soil civilizations do all the essential work of transforming death into life. Soil is living dust, forming in geological time.

Ephemerata Garden's soil is a probiotic liquid, oozing to the landscape patch's low spots, churned by chickens scratching for earthworms and grubs. It is a vast seed packet, a surprising mycelial network with mushrooms that manifest overnight. The soil gets loamier every year. We build new beds with bag-it-yourself dirt from Natural Gardener, revitalize with locally-produced compost sold at Home Despot. We discover garbage pits of glass bottles and shards, a little walkway of paving stones. The soil city is a random museum where rusty nails, batteries, a pocket watch, half a pair of novelty hillbilly dentures, and other flotsam bob to the surface. The City of Living Garbage is built on this dense subsurface civilization. A restless churning of life forms and their layered traces of inhabitation.

2012

Slow Trash

One of the yard's back corners is our slow trash landscape patch. Five foot circle of food grade compost. Six foot tall brush pile with lazy anoles. One circle of wire mesh holds in pine kitty litter, and another, unbleached baby diapers. Taking up about a hundred square feet, this garbage collector leisurely breaks down our household biodegradable waste into soil and mulch for the yard. Who knows how long it will take?

The word trash (originally Old Norse for "fallen leaves and twigs") litters the English language with all kinds of referents, from broken objects to undervalued people. It shares in a dirty ontological category of stinky, rotten, untouchable things, dangerous with polluting powers. Trash is also an action. Mulch comes from the Proto-Indo-Eurpean base "to grind up," while litter’s etymology indexes how life forms lie down to sleep, reproduce, and shed waste. "Litter" referred to straw strewn on the ground for beds, but also all the animals born to a mother in a birthing bed. By the 1900s, "litter" had become a synonym for an undifferentiated mass of trash, garbage, waste, refuse, and rubbish clotting urban areas. In 1948, Ed Lowe marketed a clay-based product called Kitty Litter to replace the sand used in cat bathrooms. The name stuck as a generic one for all brands of litter box fill.

Like many other commodities, cat litter has a worrisome ecological life-cycle. Around 2 million tons of kitty litter enters landfills every year to join an estimated 3.4 million tons of diapers in a geological lump. Because the clay-based litter we used couldn’t be composted, we put it in plastic bags and threw it in the trashcan, the heaviest part of our household wastestream. By switching to pine litter that we compost in the yard, we cut the weight of our garbage roughly in half (but we still bag and toss the toxoplasmosis-laden feces).

The problems with kitty litter’s final resting place only add to its troubling origins in clay and bentonite strip mines. In 2001 the Oil-Dri Corporation (makers of Cat’s Pride and Jonny Cat brand litters) proposed new strip mining operations in Nevada’s Hungry Valley to save on shipping 140 thousand tons of litter to the western US. Their mine would be located 100 yards from the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony, prompting Paiute, Shoshone, and Washoe to fight the project with nonprofit environmental groups like Earthworks and the Sierra Club. Their concerns include respiratory illnesses caused by dust blowing in from the mine, potential groundwater contamination from arsenic used in processing, increased traffic, noise and light pollution, and irreversible violence against the land. In the words of colony resident Diana Coffey, “I want my grandbabies to have this land, and a lot of this has remained untouched for thousands of years ... Our people never had written language, so everything was handed down from showing and telling in stories. That means it needs to be quiet.”* The Washoe County Commission denied Oil-Dri the right to mine, but the corporation is suing for damages in federal court based on an outmoded 1872 Mining Law.** The Reno-Sparks Indian Colony remains poised to fight the kitty litter strip mine.

Our kitty litter and diaper composters are cylinders of wire mesh leftovers from garden fencing. Cardboard and green glass bottles stuck through the mesh keep the kitty litter in place. Plates, napkins, forks, and food from our wedding form the diaper column's bottom strata. Two-and-a-half year old diapers on the second layer are decomposing nicely, almost ready to become mulch. Very few of the diapers are poopy. Some agave and prickly pear cactus on top seem to be surviving. We never stir these piles to speed up the mulching process, because we have all the time in the world.

Once in a while I fluff the food-grade compost with a pitchfork and throw in some water. Maybe next spring it will be ready to use as a soil ammendment. Meanwhile we buy bags of "triple power compost" locally produced by Organics By Gosh. In 2011 the Keep Austin Beautiful program arranged a tour of Organics By Gosh's composting facility. Giant machines work among twenty-foot tall compost mounds – valleys of death full of vegetable scraps, meat, and bones. Dillo Dirt is also bagged here.*** Giant composting facilities like these are the very large intestines of the City of Living Garbage.

On the tour we learn that landscaping companies, grocery store chains, and large public events all contribute organic waste to the composting facility. The prison nearby is the biggest supplier of food waste: the worse the food, the more waste. Hospitals are finally getting on board. Organics by Gosh is one of only two facilities in Austin permitted by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality regulatory agency to process meat, bones, fat, and dairy. Their compost piles are so large they form valleys around you that steam when mixed with the front-end loader. Microbial digestion inside the piles pushes their temperature up to 160˚ F, killing off pathogens and slowly cooking non-vegetative trash.

To keep the microorganisms happy, the piles should be moist, so in the summer they spray water from a rain and well water retention pond on the low side of the property. Rainwater coming off the piles picks up microbial life, making the pond an accidental vat of compost tea. When it gets too hot, they do not water the piles since moisture soaks up solar heat and would cook the life forms inside.

As the front-end loader stirs up a pile, wafts of manure and carrion float by. Biomass ages in the piles for 9 months to two years before being ground up in a Dr. Seuss contraption with a long rotating tube and conveyor belt that churns out finished humus. It falls in a perfect cone that no longer stinks. Mo, one of three Organics by Gosh employees leading the tour, says “that’s how you make dirt look good.” It also looks good on my baby’s face. He’s been clambering up the foot of the mounds, digging his hands in and smearing it all over.

At whatever scale, making soil out of trash puts us in the position of running a science experiment. Hands-on, self-taught ecological knowledge comes through slow learning over the years in close collaboration with microorganisms. It also puts you into daily relationships with nasty trash. In response to concerns about soil loss and overfull landfills, or localizing organic food production to cut out oil and petrochemicals, people proudly and affectionately hoard strange trash like my kitty litter and diapers. There's the guy who discovered that pine mulch breaks down into great soil in about a year. "The following January, and every year since, I have obtained all of the Christmas trees that my city collected."**** And the visitor to Ephemerata Gardens who collects hair from eight salons every month. Organics By Gosh wants your rotten meat.

Something happens to slow trash even before it becomes good compost, as if the untouchable category itself had decomposed. I find myself liking garbage, wanting to get to know it a little better, spend some time together. Curious about the life forms it attracts, like the giant zipper spider that spins its web right over the compost, or the seeds that slow trash sprouts after a good rain.

*Nancy Wride, “Plan to Mine Clay for Litter Boxes Stirs Cat Fight in Desert,” Los Angeles Times, April 6, 2002, http://articles.latimes.com/2002/apr/06/news/mn-36559. Also see Scott Sonner, “Nevada Balances Economy, Environment in Cat Litter Fight,” The Berkeley Daily Planet, December 14, 2001, http://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2001-12-14/article/8969?headline=Nevada-balances-economy-environment-in-cat-litter-fight.
**Ann Ronald, Oh, Give Me A Home: Western Contemplations, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press (2006), 129.
***Dillo Dirt is a product of the Hornsby Bend Biosolids Management Plant. Sludge from Austin’s two wastewater treatment plants is pumped to the Hornsby Bend facility where it is mixed into mulched leaves and branches from curbside pickup and allowed to age long enough to ensure all pathogens in the sludge have been cooked out of existence.  If you buy Dillo Dirt in Austin, chances are you are purchasing your own shit.
****Tom Clothier, "Making Your Own Soil," http://tomclothier.hort.net/page24.html. Clothier's site is a proto-gardening blog that started in the 1990s, a repository of experience-based, self-educated ecological knowledge. Clothier's interests range from biological pest control to the packets he has recieved by "trading seeds around the world." Over the years Clothier carefully tests the theories of experts while advancing his own Fortean concepts: "I have a theory that seeds are living breathing entities that appreciate a bit of air exchange" (http://tomclothier.hort.net/page45.html).

2012

Rust

Iron oxides grow like lichens on Ephemerata Garden's cast-iron bathtub ponds, bottle cap snakes, cat food tins, and other metal detritus. Rust is an agent of collapse that can take out bridges and buildings. In our yard it has an aesthetic presence, something beautiful about its deep red flakiness breaking up painted surfaces. Iron molecules give both rust and blood their red, and both reveal themselves as wounds.

In 2008 I attended the weekend-long Radical Urban Sustainability Training (RUST) workshop at the Rhizome Collective’s live-in warehouses. Taught by Rhizome Collective co-founders Scott Kellogg and Stacy Pettigrew,* ecological engineer Lauren Ross, and assorted guests, RUST showcased the warehouses' permaculture systems like composting toilets, pedal-powered machines, rain catches, and gray water wetlands. RUST reimagines sustainability from a community-based DIY perspective, developing new practices that improvise with the richness of urban wastestreams. The workshop is a hands-on introduction to "autonomous technologies" that locally produce food, water, shelter, energy, waste management, health care, and the bioremediation of urban toxins. RUST also doubles as a crash-course in environmental and climate justice issues, with a critique of contemporary sustainable urban development as a new form of gentrification. Because “sustainability” had already been co-opted by neo-liberal capitalists, Scott used the term “radical sustainability” to insist on the entwined radix or roots beneath social and environmental injustices. The RUST workshop is an informal education in how to build the City of Living Garbage out of a world that's falling apart.

When the Rhizome Collective moved in to the warehouses, they depaved the asphalt loading bay, tearing up impermeable cover to make a thriving food garden where bees, butterflies, and migratory birds came to eat. They salvaged mulch from landscaping companies and added homemade compost tea. The compacted soil grew rich, shot through with white threads of mychorrhizal networks. In just a few years the landscape patch became productive and healthy. They free ranged chickens in the junkyard next door until the neighbor complained. They grew shitake and oyster mushrooms on logs, raised tilapia fish, practiced vermiculture, composted humanure – anything for food! They dreamed of gradually transforming the warehouses into an off-the-grid homestead – a zero-waste, closed-loop life support system.

In March 2009, the building was condemned by the Code Compliance Department. Eviction came after nine years of the City supporting and praising Rhizome Collective projects while officially overlooking their code violations. Building inspectors cited a dozen violations including exposed gray water, illegal composting toilets, and a second story addition built on the warehouse roof without a permit. Homespun electrical wiring didn’t help. Code gave a two-week notice of eviction to the nonprofits that operated out of the warehouses—Bikes Across Borders, Inside Books, and Food Not Bombs. The Rhizome Collective fought to extend the eviction to a month, then everybody moved out, struggling to find new homes for the bike shop, prisoner’s library, and kitchen. It was the traumatic end of an experiment in post-petroleum collapse urban futurism. The experiments continue on the south Austin brownfield deeded to the Rhizome Collective as part of an Environmental Protection Agency cleanup grant, now being turned into a recycling center by Ecology Action. Scott and Stacy moved on to Albany, New York, to found the Radix Ecological Sustainability Center, where current RUST (renamed Regenerative Urban Sustainability Training) workshops continue.

During the workshop I attended, Scott led participants around to aquaculture ponds full of tilapia, duckweed, and shrimp, a scavenged satellite dish arrayed with mirrors that focuses sunlight to ignite cardboard (or boil water), and a homemade wind generator that needed some work. The tour’s tableaux let you picture doing the various DIY projects, living the urban homestead life. Round the corner of the “microlivestock” pen and see Scott posing on a milk crate with the beautiful turkey. Dim the lights and watch him demonstrate igniting a torch of homemade methane gas produced by rotting water hyacinth. One by one, a slew of little projects, performed and described, kick-started a self-educated learning process that might not ever stop (or start). One thing blurs into the next as we run through far too many DIY projects to cram into one weekend.

Dogs, a turkey, chickens, machines, and all sorts of other nonhumans swarm at RUST. I hear roosters and someone playing piano while Lauren talks about water security. While learning about a Tupperware worm box that makes “black gold” for the garden, Scott’s daughter tries to feed the dog worms. Ignacio from Bikes Across Borders demonstrates a bike-powered blender driven by a modified roller skate wheel against the back tire, and offers us to taste the smoothie. RUST learning happens with multisensory events going on as parts of the scene. Whistling volunteers make lunch in the kitchen at the back of the big room where another presenter, Rafter Sass, extols “liberation ecology” – a mode of production that moves from extraction and exploitation to intense cultivation and connectivity. Having a kitchen without walls at the back of the lecture room complemented his ideas, keeping you in touch with the smells and sounds of cooking. What might be considered interruptions are nurtured by how spaces overlap, the kids playing in the nursery somehow adding to a multifaceted sensory education.

The ecological home improvement projects that RUST enacts are not as simple as replacing a filament light bulb with a fluorescent – something you can do and forget about. Instead, they fold the individual into the processes that make houses work, amplifying and refraining the house and city as a living ecosystem, inviting new species into the mix of machinic components. Appropriate technologies, animals, plants, and microbiological life forms serve as the technical means for collective security. Since you are their keystone species, these systems of beings require you to do things like tending water gardens or worm boxes. Rather than promising a final emancipation, altering the house with patchworks of DIY sustainability pulls you into relationships of dependency, as if parts of your house had become pets. Your garbage disposal turned into chickens. The compost heap needs fluffing again. But you also depend on these entities to keep the house going. Cultivation becomes the sharing of vulnerability, the individual body and its habits redistributed among interdependent life forms in a living machine. The RUST workshop teems with dreamy possibilities of an emergent probiotic urbanism – a sort of DIY superorganic bioindustrial revolution.

The DIY projects and community organizing taught at RUST are ways to mitigate fear by tinkering with the material contours of catastrophe, to get a grip on something in the midst of a world that seems to be falling apart fast. Crucially, their small-scale solutions to big problems draw individuals into new social networks and ongoing relationships of caring for living things. Fear, anxiety, and the gloom of future catastrophes might give way to other emotions, like the surprises and pleasures of habitats bursting with life. DIY tinkering opens up a slowness that "begins to reduce the anxious rush" of the time-is-money world.**

RUST also attunes the imagination to the scientific-invisible. Illustrations in the workshop handouts zoom in on earthworms with bacteria in their digestive tracts clutching napkins, forks, and knives, eating decomposition – a giddy scaling of beings within beings. Using a backlit microscope we peer in on nematodes, bacteria, and fungal mycilia in a slide of worm box dirt. Lauren Ross lectures on chemicals in urban water and soil, bioremediation using wetlands or compost tea, and the microbe agents in healthy soil ecologies. She warns us about the bad health effects of chemical pollutants in the food and water cycling between our bodies and urban landscapes. Chlorinated tap water sterilizes the soil in your garden, so we should all use rainwater. But you need to ensure that your rain catchments are not contaminating the water. Be suspicious of urban soil toxicity: homegrown organic veggies could carry loads of lead or heavy metals. Lauren promoted testing water and soil to mitigate these risks.

Rust is not necessarily bad for food-growing soil -- a little extra iron for your blood. Just below Ephemerata Garden's surface is a layer of burned timber and rusty nails. A little house in our backyard got struck by lightning and burned down. They just flattened it out across the ground and added a few inches of dirt. Building the City of Living Garbage involves major multispecies labor in remediating landscape patches from the ground down. Everything depends on the soil, and living soil depends on water.

2012

Note: Parts of this entry were first published in Scott Webel, “Free Water! DIY Wetlands and the Futures of Urban Gray Water,” Anthropology Now 3(1): 13-22.

*Kellogg and Pettigrew’s book Toolbox for Sustainable City Living: A Do-it-ourselves Guide (South End Press, 2008), wonderfully illustrated by Juan Martinez, goes into many of the environmental justice arguments and sustainable systems featured at RUST.

**In "Grassroots Modernism as Autonomous Practice" (Journal of Aesthetics and Protest 8, 2011), Meg Wade ponders critiques that DIY's little solutions are defeatist pitfalls of parochialism. "If what we need is in fact a change in the scale of our focus – a refusal to expand ourselves to the global reach and pace at which the persisting systems of exploitation encourage us to operate – what then?"

Amaranth Weed

"Seeds the size of little freckles potentially grow into plants taller than me..."

Posted on FlowTV.

A Bodiless Doll

Surviving outside through all kinds of weather, the doll head lost its hat and went bald. Little holes stipple the scalp where brittle hair had been. The face is dotted with extremophile mold that metabolizes rubber and plastic. Impaled on a short metal pipe staking up a young Satsuma tree, the neck sprouts two branches that gesture like nyad arms. Maybe the wide-open blue eyes and fixed smile will have eroded away twenty or thirty years from now. Meanwhile, it gazes around Ephemerata Gardens, mana from Smut Putt Heaven.

Scott Stevens gave us the head as a gardenwarming gift. His backyard cactus patch has been filling up with body parts for over fifteen years. A crowd of decaying doll and mannequin heads look in all directions at once. Held up on crutches and metal poles, each is in constant movement, bowing down after rain softens the soil or leaning back to contemplate sky and cosmos. Scott has done the impossible by finding a use for dumpster-dived haircutting academy heads. Decapitated dolls' eyes loll around, staring at their torsos dangling in the pecan tree. As the sun decomposes their polymer chains, plastic crackles into branching patterns like leaf veins or rivers. Fungus and mold spread across the humanoid faces – states of decay that look abject, but are profoundly non-violent. They are the material world’s slow unraveling, given time and visibility. Smut Putt Heaven (a.k.a. “Holiness Church of Wonders and Signs Following”) is a retirement home where decapitated heads and headless bodies can decay in peace. A kind of slow, roundabout way to heal decapitation by letting it dissolve into the landscape.

With fellow yardist Robert Mace, Scott Stevens organized the annual Austin Art Yard Tour in 2010 -- the first full-fledged micro-touristic manifestation of the City of Living Garbage! The Cathedral of Junk was closed by code enforcement at the time. The tour featured a dozen art environments that transform urban waste into otherworldly landscape patches. The 2011 tour featured over twenty sites like a South Austin bridge mosaiced by Stefanie Distefiano and Florence Ponziano’s house, where neighborhood kids gather. Each art environment is held together with signature items of living garbage (be they blue bottles, rusty machine parts, bowling balls, or bones), giving the impression that if every yard was an art yard, there would be no landfill. Scott never misses a chance to encourage people to “start your own art yard.” The tour is a major vector point for an infectious aesthetic, growing every year as tourists become yardists.

Some people see Smut Putt’s decaying heads and doll parts, and start to wonder ... is my neighbor a serial killer? After all, in one of Scott’s favorite movies, Rob Zombie’s House of 1,000 Corpses, the Mansonesque family has doll heads nailed all over their porch. Scott’s Heaven is other people’s idea of a horror show. His xeno-erotic paintings parade out of the living room gallery into the yard. Lately Scott has taken to painting cast-off ironing boards, starting with a larger-than-life Alice Cooper face. One of his signature Keyhole Girls lives on a hackberry log. Scott also hand-letters signs like the one at the backyard’s entry gate listing Sunday open hours. PRAY, says a painted shovel leading to the “Inner Sanctum,” a little brick sitting area hidden by cacti taller than people where orb weaver spiders, anoles and skinks, and stray kittens live.

You can pray for certain kinds of junk. Scott is a firm believer in attracting things by holding them in mind. “Whenever I needed something for my yard it would appear at the thrift store dumpster or elsewhere, almost like magic.” Yard art supplies materialize on the side of the road: “The pole lamps are bread and butter building supplies, the metal post plugs are perfect armatures for totem poles, the iron board (solid, no mesh) is great for painting on, and the curtain rod is screaming for a doll head to be put on it.” Keeping something in mind is a mode of attention to the world that makes things jump out, like when you learn a new word and suddenly read and hear it everywhere. This manner of following signs – selective scavenging – is best done riding a bike around the neighborhood on large trash day in a state of readiness to haul off good junk at a moment’s notice. This is one of the secret powers cultivated by yardists: an intuitive alignment or resonance between the world as it is and a desired world to be.

Methods of praying also include painting, yard work, digging out caliche, building garden borders with half-buried bottles, and assembling the plastic bottle cap snakes that festoon the pecan tree. Smut Putt Heaven got its start as a kind of playful therapeutic process around the time Scott stopped drinking. Working in the yard derails the mind from a boringly repetitive job or worries about friends’ troubles and loved ones’ health. Like other gardening practices, cultivating art yards pulls people into relationships with places that need them. Tending the yard is a way to “still and sober the mind, thus making it susceptible to divine influences” through creative labor.*

Some visitors pick up on these therapeutic qualities and encounter Smut Putt Heaven not as a yard stuck in Halloween, but as a "healing machine," a deeply peaceful place resonant with mysterious energy. For around thirty years, Emory Blagdon experimented with what he called his Healing Machine in a dirt-floored workshop on the family farm in Nebraska. Live currents of electricity charged intricate assemblages cluttering the room: hundreds of scrap wire mobiles, geometric paintings stacked like voltaic battery cells, and jars of chemical elements that toned the electricity with particular healing qualities. Visitors could sense “a tickling in your hair ... like electricity going through you; you could feel it.” Some described the spatial warping peculiar to this “panorama – even though it was a small room – it looked like a vast panorama.” Others experienced an atmosphere as different as water is from air: “you must adjust from the terrestrial to the underwater silence, light; the shock of entering another realm.”**

Where tourists experience such art environments as novel, panoramic DIYsneylands, the yardist encounters vastness – the universe in a quarter acre, swirling with ethereal beings and inhuman forces, magnetizing the right junk to the scene. As Scott puts it, “I feel most in tune with the universe when building something in my yard.” Tuning in to the universe like this, something happens to the perception of time. Just as art yards warp huge panoramas of alien worlds into tiny spaces, moments can turn into eternity. It is the same timeless-time that Scott describes as bike time:

Sometimes when I go riding my bike time is totally elastic. I think I’ve been out for an hour...but the computer says 35 minutes. All of a sudden two miles have gone that I have no memory of. I am lost...in thought. It’s not as if I am solving some great personal problem... my mind is empty. Is this akin to meditation?***

A way to pray? Why does turning into a cyborg connected to a shovel or bike induce this sense of timelessness? Computer time, being on the clock, and “time is money” are just as invested in cyborg body parts. Perhaps it is purposelessness that helps eternity slip into time. Rhythms of peddling and coasting, not rushing to a destination but biking just to bike. Stopping to pick through roadside piles. Building something in the yard, working and resting at the same time. No grand plan directs future development. Puzzling together pieces of junk, lost in thought, mind empties and forms assemble themselves. Everything just happens.

One thing that happened is that the single mullein plant Scott gave us went to seed, and now every spring babies sprout up. The second year they turn into tall Mullein People with yellow flowered stalks that make thousands of tiny seeds. One year they migrate out of our landscape patch into neighboring yards. If you need cough medicine, harvest a baby, dry the leaves, and mix with dry mint to make tea.

* John Cage, paraphrasing the Indian musician Gira Sarabhai in an autobiographical statement. Cage expanded musical expression by experimenting with silence, methods of chance composition, and openness to unintended sounds in order to generate contemplative modes of attention in composer/musician/audience.

** Quoted in Leslie Umberger, “Earthly Power.” Raw Vision 59 (2007): 22-29. In 1986, Blagdon died of cancer that had gone undiagnosed for ten years. Art preservationists working under the Kohler Foundation disassembled the Healing Machine from the workshop, uprooting the interconnected mobiles and paintings to climate-controlled storage and occasional exhibition in a gallery. Other parts were sold to collectors. Outsider art historian Leslie Umberger recognizes that the Machine’s components “were not meant to be gazed at or contemplated – they were meant to function.” The emergent powers of the atmosphere did not emanate from any particular part. Now that the disassembled fragments are frozen in time for future gazing and contemplation, can they still heal us?

***Scott Stevens, "Elastic Time on a Bicycle," Kickapoo's Myspace Blog, March 8, 20-09, http://www.myspace.com/26690280/blog#!/26690280/blog/475448844.

2012

Farm Waves

"A farm homestead grows among the wireless waves that cross our backyard garden patch..."

Posted on FlowTV.

Mangled Plastic

Raccoons are the anti-engineers in our backyard pond living machine. Thermodynamics incarnate, they thin wetland habitat by snapping stalks, ripping out roots to eat, and stirring everything up hunting goldfish. The dead plants rot and eutrophy the water if not vigilantly removed while cursing. I wake up after midnight to splashing and peek out to see them destroying everything. Worse yet, scratching or savage fights in the attic in the dark, silent hours.

The large trap catches cats as often as raccoons. In the morning the hissing raccoon has transformed the plastic dish for food bait into an unrecognizably mangled, flattened shred. The local wildlife rescue grudgingly accepts the raccoon for relocation. "Next time just let them live in the yard. If you catch a nursing mom, the babies will die." But the pond is wrecked the next day by one of the disappeared's family members, and there's a clear message in the little crossed logs of scat beneath the figs.

Horrible things happen. One night I forget to coop the two chickens, and in the morning our Plymouth Rock has become patches of feathers scattered around the yard. Too busy to clean out the pond, goldfish die, their oily decay further poisoning the water. The raccoons demand response; the pond must be defended. You can buy fox urine to sprinkle around and scare them away, but the cats would evacuate, too. Time for some vigilanty wildlife relocation?

Raccoons are experts in garbage-making, master artists in the urban aesthetics of nature's irreversible demolition and gleeful mutilation. Their excess makes people snap, like the guy who "heard the coons in his attic again, after months of coon-proofing strategies... He got a shotgun and shot big holes in the living room ceiling. Blood and guts dropped out and fell onto his wife's new white carpet."* You can legally trap and kill raccoons on your property, but you can't release them somewhere. They have broken into urban landscapes and attics permanantly, generations of squatters who come back no matter how many times evicted.

Destructive characters like raccoons or monk parrots can cause a dilemma for people trying to decide who lives here and how to remove or eradicate those who don't. If the problem is defending human territory, the dilemma is deciding how to engineer (temporary) eviction. People outdo raccoons in the destructive arts, with hordes of chemicals designed to decimate certain pests and weeds available at your local Home Despot. But the problem of protecting habitats, native species, and the like makes a double bind. After finding an eagle nest raided by egg-smashing raccoons, Gerald Wykes fantasizes about violent opportunistic revenge:

Should I happen upon this eagle nest robber when I'm behind the wheel next time I will swerve toward it.  I will not carry it further than that because I can't blame the raccoon. I can hate 'em, but I can't blame 'em. People, you see, are the single most destructive agent when it comes to ... nest destruction. We have destroyed so much native nesting habitat over the decades that it makes the exploits of one raccoon pale in significance.  I would be running over myself if I carried out that vehicular varmiticide.**

Redemptive violence is marred by the recognition that we are mega-raccoons.

Contrary attachments to destructive characters can also take hold. Ephemerata Garden visitors tell stories about the crazy lady who fed raccoons in her attic for fifteen years until neighbors complained about the smell of aggregated feces, or the couple who finds and raises a baby that gets into everything and winds up tangled in yarn. They offer excessive tips for adapting to the raccoon's presence, like electric fencing around ponds. Some become endeared to the raccoon's bandit mask and baby-like hands, love the sound the infants make, or admire the sheer tanacity of raccoon inhabitation. It's as if we built all this and keep our garbage cans filled with food just for them.

*Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects, Durham: Duke University Press (2007), p.85.
**Gerald Wykes, "Why I Hate Raccoons," Naturespeak blog, http://www.blogsmonroe.com/nature/2008/05/why-i-hate-raccoons, accessed July 8, 2011. Even environmentalists set aside a special hatred for raccoons. The blogosphere seeths with tales of tipped trashcans, trashed ponds, butchered koi, and rabid acts of human revenge (shot through with pathos for the babies).

2015

Monk Refrains

Throaty heron caws, bluejay songs, monk parrot squawks. Heron fledglings fall through the fig trees into the yard. Six pack rings drop from the pecan where junkitect bluejays build a nest with plastics and frayed rope scraps. They call out beautiful two note whistles and mad barks at the cats. Monks vibrate the sky with their racous chatter, calling it down to your sensorium. Look up and see them in the busy blue nonhuman city among red cardinals, starlings, little migratory birds, vultures, butterflies, dragonflies, airplanes, longings, nothingness. The monks' calls are only one aspect of a multisensory art project that crosses the sky over Ephemerata Gardens.

Monk parakeets are native to extreme climates of Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay, where their communal nests can weigh up to a ton. They prey on human crops, colonizing tall, non-native Eucalyptus trees cultivated on plantation borders as windbreaks – perfect aeries from which to launch pirate raids on grids of crops below! In the 1970s, Argentina launched an eradication program against the pests. Although a government bounty “resulted in a return of over 400,000 pairs of monk feet in two years” and 64,000 birds were exiled to the US as pets, native monks are still at large in Argentina.¹ Ornithologists consider them an invasive species to North America (where European settlers made the continent's only indigenous parrot, the Carolina Parakeet, extinct by the 1920s). Naturalized colonies of escaped and released monks have popped up in California, Florida, Texas, Washington, Connicticut, New York, and other states. One ornithologist who visited Ephemerata Gardens said monks might be like pigeons in a hundred years, flourishing in every city. Todd S. Campbell with the Institute for Biological Invasions remarks, “monk parakeets are probably not beyond control from a biological or logistical standpoint, but they are likely beyond control from a public sentiment standpoint” thanks to human guardians who mobilize against their eradication.¹ Urban monks construct communal nests on cell phone towers and electricity junction boxes. In winter 2005 public protests broke out when Connecticut’s United Illuminating (UI) dismantled monk nests on electricity poles. In addition to rallying at nest removal sites and launching a press campaign against UI, people from neighborhoods where nests were being removed built fake nests installed in their backyards. Not many monks moved in.

Monk nests remind me of yardist David Lee Pratt’s description of his interlaced arcs of mangled rebar and other scrap metal at Further Farms: architectural forms that use no nails, no concrete, just intuitive balance to puzzle together a structure that gravity keeps from falling apart. Monks sharpen one end of a stick with their beaks, then jimmy it into the other sticks. Each mated pair builds four or so rooms. They defecate inside, then use their waste as stucco so the house interior becomes sealed against wind and rain. The nests are constructed using the improvisational principles behind the Cathedral of Junk and the open-air rooms at Biosquat. They are composed by weaving things together; they are never finished being woven; they are all built of trash (especially Monk nests, given trash’s etymology of “fallen leaves and twigs”); they are all "beyond control." Like Austin junkitects, monk parrots build something out of nothing, and in the process, pull together communities through their semi-public homes.

As immigrant settlers or refugees from South America, the monks haul tropical sounding atmospheres north in advance of global warming. Like the sonic envelopes of TVs, sirens, and traffic, birds give atmospheres trembling contours, making them moodily alive through repetitions of sounds and colors. Monk parrots alter what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari call refrains, “an act of rhythm that has become expressive, ... become qualitative... Not the constituted mark of a subject, but the constituting mark of a domain, an abode, ... the chancy formation of a domain” through synaesthetic labor” (315-16).² Monk refrains crystallize as chatter, green flashes, and patterns of sticks. The concept of refrains does not approach aesthetics as symbolic arts limited to people, but rather, as embodied expression or distributed somatic intelligence that communicates directly through the senses, literally making sense, sustaining life. Refrains double as a vocabulary for describing patchy landscapes, but also as a compositional methodology. We cannot talk about refrains without making and sensing them. This non-representational approach to built environments recognizes the aesthetic agency of plants, animals, microbes, and machines in composing sensations of unison.

Deleuze and Guattari elaborated the concept of aesthetic-ecological refrains by mining natural history and behavioral ecology to illustrate how nonhuman artists throw out “planes of composition,” design territories that improvise homes out of chaos. They love “the magic bird,” the bowerbird (331), that flies into their writing to perform refrains.³ These natives of Australia and Papua New Guinea create elaborate nests to dance around inside, their patterns of color and gesture resounding with songs, including those of other birds. Bowerbird refrains are made of synaesthetic “sounds-colors-gestures” that shuttle between bird and forest (333). In this way, “landscapes are peopled by characters and the characters belong to landscapes” (320). Refrains fly away, a nonorganic life of sounds coexisting in the forest with bowerbirds that is open to becoming something independent of them.⁴ Refrains are the becoming-forest of the bowerbird, the becoming-sky of the monks.

Music, melodies, and refrains breath life into regions, landscapes, houses, and other atmospheres. They are alternative energy forms that power the City of Living Garbage under the banner "The Survival Circus Marching Band!" Try it: whistling and humming when hungry or tired can recharge you. The affects of sound are strong sensory forces that jump between and vibrate sentient beings as their medium. Katherine Hayles notes, “researchers in virtual reality have found that sound is much more effective than sight in imparting emotional tonalities to their simulated worlds” (219).⁵ Lawrence Grossberg explores music's “unique and striking relationship to the human body, surrounding, enfolding, and even invading it within its own rhythms and textures” that open up feelings of possibility, freedom, and belonging with such force that it can hold together social movements (152).⁶ Refrains are collective  improvisations that express Ornette Coleman's harmolodic musical theory. “Harmolodics is the use of the physical and mental of one’s own logic made into an expression of sound to bring about the musical sensation of unison executed by a single person or with a group” (43).⁷ Coleman grasps sounds as belonging to landscapes (e.g., in regional musical styles), but also as expressions of individual intelligence released into refrains that recompose minds and moods. The collective song is its own form of life or "unison" that endlessly doubles back into and out of the musicians that colaboratively release its expression. This form of life needs musicians and instruments to shape its refrain, but the harmolodic refrain becomes the aural house where musicians live and that gave them life and instruments in the first place.

So the monk parrots' chatter and green feathers expressed tropical Southerness even as they refrained a tentative inhabitation: is this the South? Can we live here? Can we enter the fossil record and become native to this new place? 

2012

1 Campbell, Todd S. “The Monk Parakeet.” The Institute for Biological Invasions, posted December 2000, http://invasions.bio.utk.edu/invaders/monk.html (no longer accessible).
2 Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Vol. 2. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
3 They also fly into Jill Noke’s description of the Cathedral of Junk’s domes as bowerbird nests (Yard Art and Handbuilt Places: Extraordinary Expressions of Home. Austin: UT Press, 2007, p.99).
4 While researching Kaluli ornithology in Papua New Guinea, Stephen Feld asked his informant Jubi to match up bird sounds with species until Jubi clarified things for him. “Listen – to you they are birds, to me they are voices in the forest” (Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression. 2d ed. Philadelphia: University of Pensylvania Press, 1990, p.45). Jubi’s remark helped Feld to understand why the birds and their sounds require separate taxonomies among Kaluli ornithologists: they are distinct beings. The bird artists of Papua New Guinea sing and dance refrains, the sounds of which become nonorganic life forms captured by Kaluli songs and dances. The birds’ sounds and colorful feathers enter into a becoming-human through Kaluli ritual practices of “becoming a bird” or “man in the form of a bird” (236).
5 Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
6 Grossberg, Lawrence. We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture. New York: Routledge, 1992.
7 Quoted in Gioia, Ted. The Imperfect Art: Reflections on Jazz and Modern Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Arc

The arc of rebar abandoned in our backyard took only a little bending to make a half-circle. Simon Rodia used train tracks to leverage rebar into Watts Towers arabesques. I used my body, standing on one end and bending the other, rocking back and forth to get the right shape. I snipped metal siding from a demolished shed into letters painted white, yellow, and sky blue that spell out EPHEMERATA GARDENS and wired them to the arc above the gateway to our food patch. That's the name of a tenuous possibility, a roadside attraction/wildlife sanctuary/permaculture sideshow. A survival circus. Maybe one day instead of real jobs I can tinker in the yard as tourists drop by and leave donations -- enough to live off in a humble way. Maybe with enough labor and learning the yard will grow most of our food.

Micro-tourism business models combine wasting time playing, tinkering, yearning, and daydreaming with the pragmatic matter of earning a living somehow (or having good things to eat, paying the mortgage, etc.). The cultural form of DIYsneylands (itself a vulnerable survival that goes back to Rodia, Zagar, Finster, Blagdon, Prisbey, and others who built lively yard art environments) are living machines that capture engineers who must hoard and categorize junk to feed their monstrous patchy landscapes. The engineers live off money tithed by toursists, subsidized with a steady job or multiple odd jobs. While cultural tourism and eco-tourism manufacture voyages to somewhere authentic or pure (linking up a big world through traveling machines), with micro-tourism, the neighbor's backyard becomes a fantastical realm where an odd but friendly character tinkers endlessly on their peculiar atmosphere. There may be big plans for mosaic grottoes or wheeltowers. Sometimes hallucinatory forces speak through doll heads and other mediums of reincarnated trash, or visions of the future puncture the ground and infectious desires for inventive simplicity or a slower life permeate tourists with "ideas."

The survival circus is an atmospheric mode particular to times of ecological apocalypses and economic calamity.* Forms of making due driven by a lack of money or resource scarcity have crystallized as an aesthetic variously identified by home and gardening magazines as shabby chic or Japanese wabi-sabi. Texture, rust, distressed "antiques," patina! The Transition movement more seriously arcticulates survival circus as a move away from oil and back to DIY assemblages of communal self-sufficiency in advance of social/economic/ecological collapse. Things that survive through these social aesthetics include weathered wood and furniture, ceramics (re-replacing plastics), backyard chickens, and various skills like canning or sewing that strive to retreat from global circuits and relocalize. "Voluntary simplicity" might involve giving up habits like cars, A/C, or refrigerators in moral spasms. The arc of threatening futures animates and saturates survival forms. Individuals catapulted along this arc's trajectory begin a dense reinhabitation of patchy landscape, hunkering down into the recycled, homemade home, its worn wood benches or railroad ties on cinder blocks, the gardens that need constant tending. You become a character in the landscape.

When tourists come they like to pose under the arc for pictures. Some take photos of our chickens and others talk about their beloved Plymouth Rocks. We trade plant tips, and they rattle on about their determination to garden even just one edible cantaloupe off the potted sidewalk vine, or what to grow in Maine, and when. They get inspired by the raised bottle beds or wonder what's wrong with us. Maybe one day I'll build a cement stalactite grotto against the back wall, with a mosaic of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Something to draw the tourists.

*Thanks to Halide Velioglu for honing in on "survival for fun" in her writing on Sarajevo, where a televisual imaginary of a post-Soviet stateless existence of subsistance farming sits uneasily against rural poverty in Bosnia.

2012

French Sponge

A ghost creek haunts our backyard. The neighbor remembers the fold of earth that once cut across our properties, down to the end of the block, and on through the neighborhood to connect with Boggy Creek. Now there's a buried culvert for street runoff, and when it pours, a ghost flows between our houses and through our backyard.

The water poured into the next yard until I built a French drain. The idea came from Vince at the Cathedral of Junk, who engineered the way water flows through his yard. He'd talked about the possibilities of geological A/Cs by digging a long underground tunnel that opens up a hundred or so feet from the house. If you had an attic vent, it would suck air through the cooling underground and into your house. French drains usually route water out of the yard (and into your neighbors, or wherever). Henry French, not the French, suggested the design in his 1859 book, Farm drainage: The principles, processes, and effects of draining land with stones, wood, plows, and open ditches, and especially with tiles. How the south was drained. He laid curved roofing tiles along the bottom of trenches, then filled in different sized gravel as filters. These days, instead of roofing tiles, landscape architects use various perforated tubes and geotextiles to do the job.

Wanting to save as much rainwater as possible, not shunt it off the land, I used the principles of the French drain to build a sponge. I shoveled out trenches two feet deep in an L shape at the yard's heart, drilled a hundred holes in PVC scavenged from a backyard pile, laid them in the trenches, and filled in a half ton of gravel. While excavating I found an old path of paving stones a half foot underground. I moved dirt displaced from the trenches to form a swale that routes the ghost creek to our fig trees. Wrapping the PVC in geotextiles would have helped absorb water and reduce clogging from roots and migrating soil. If I were doing it all over, I'd encase my PVC in used baby diapers, an undervalued and underestimated geotextile that lines landfills everywhere. Maybe diapers would have leached bad things into the soil. Now the ghost creek soaks into the French sponge, the fig and pecan trees, and the Boggy Creek watershed.

Just upstream at the old airport, backhoes and bulldozers dug out a stormwater retention basin surrounded by restored Blacklands prairie as part of the Mueller Development. Street runoff from the New Urbanist housing/retail development floods into the basin, filling it up to slowly soak in. A sprinkler system beneath the Blacklands prairie keeps the wildflowers blooming even in drought years like this one. The pond/prairie patch is a machinic landscape or living machine designed to save rainwater that, through its deployment on the land, engineered that water's flow out of the Boggy Creek watershed to the neighboring Tannehill Branch Creek watershed. The pond, stocked with native fish, bubbles at the center to prevent eutrophication. You can jog or walk your dog around the pond on a hilltop path overlooking the water, riparian plants, waterfalls, and a wild old tree on a peninsula. Many benches to sit and contemplate nature.

Wheelflowers

Wheelflowers, wheeldomes, wheelwalls, wheelarbors, wheelbarrow shrines, welded-wheel bike racks, wheelgardens, and wheelmachines bloom everywhere in the patchy landscapes of the City of Living Garbage. There are bicycle-powered tablesaws and foodblenders, bike rim domes at Biosquat hunkered over hand-dug clay quarries and another at the Cathedral of Junk that incorporates a cosmic satellite dish and whirling A/C turban. Rubber tire planters, sometimes cut into fanciful bird forms or spiky crowns, grace yards and sidewalks. Earthship dwellers inhabit rammed-earth car tires. You enter Ephemerata Gardens through a wheelarbor of bike rims with an arced PVC/metal pole/guardrail skeleton that hosts moonflower and heavenly blue morning glory. In the backyard, three wheelflowers sway over our fig trees. White wing doves pause on them to survey the cats hunting on the ground below.

The wheelflowers bloomed when some side-of-the-road hubcaps, junk bike rims from the Yellow Bike Project, and PVC and metal pipes abandoned in our backyard met a little bit of wire and earth. They are doubled overhead by car and bicyclist emissions, with the small hubcabs centered in the web of bike spokes having a bigger share in the atmosphere's composition. The circles make a pattern with the sun's arc, the bottles stacked as retaining walls for raised bed gardens, and an arch of bent rebar with cut metal letters spelling out our garden's name.

Wheels compose landscapes of circular repetition and movement. Cars and bikes are so different -- the moods they stir up in traffic, their repair costs, the ways they spend time and energy, their relationships to the sky or hills (not to mention soil: cars are heavy and compact earth; they have to drive on non-permeable cover; food-powered machinery runs on agricultural fields and cars run on drilled land- and seascapes; you could go on and on). Car wheels, chained to machine engines, don't have the DIY flexibility of muscle/food-powered cyborgs like the bike or shoe. People are walking or biking into livable futures past junkyards of electrified and corn-fed automobiles. They build signposts out of vehicular debris, fenders welded into a huge gateway that reads "BIKETOPIA." The Nowhere City of Velocipedopolis.

Biosquat started out as a summertime homestead for outdoor living, with wintertime dwellings somewhere south. Their living experiment was to become bike nomads following bird migrations through a seasonal city stretched out across what David Santos calls “the New World Twilight Zone” in his onscreen epic, Wheeliad. The Zone is a north-south flyway for migrating monarch and snout nose butterflies, Mexican free-tail bats, hummingbirds, and hundreds of other beings of the sky who teach nomadic survival. The Zone's hourglass shape hosts supernatural anomalies at its tapered heart – “a geographic singularity of weirdness centered loosely on Mexico." Austin, Oz-Town, “a prime node in the twilight zone,” incubates mutations for survival in the ecological catastrophes wracking the early 21st century.

Biosquat's caretaker, Ed Sapir, leads us along paths winding through this edible landscape dotted with salvage architecture. The hillside gardens can be irrigated with rainwater caught in a homemade 600 gallon cistern that runs on a solar powered pump Ed designed. We visit the little egg-shaped dugout “hobbit hole” with a dome of welded bike wheels and curvy benches made of red clay mixed with sand. Climb up into the wheelegg treehouse, with its pointy end north and its wide side south, open-ended to the sun’s arc and cooling wind. Wired with electricity, but built for open-air, A/C-free summer sleeping, the treehouse lets you slumber in the sky. The treehouse’s rough cedar plank floor comes from a factory outside town. The egg’s pointy end is half of a satellite dish with an over-arc of bike rims wired to aluminum sailboat spars bought cheap – surplus junk. Political candidate signs make up the roof, but Ed wants to replace them with metal tiles. He envisions an elegant vernacular architecture akin to Finca Exotica's "tiki modernism" where the makeshift political signs, crumbling in the sun, no longer fit in. A beautiful curvy wheelbanister is held together by strong wire running in a circle surrounding the balcony in a structural hug. Ed says you could charge at it and just bounce off, it’s so strong. It’s the tension.

Everything at Biosquat is just hatching, all the time. Ed imagines the bike wheel domes
and red clay mortarwork as archaeological sites – readymade ruins or follies, overgrown with flora. While we sit and talk he plucks weeds in an ongoing shaping of the landscape. Like Santos’ online writing, Biosquat is devoid of any illusion of closure, permanently in progress, and alive. Half-born wheelforms accumulate for however long it takes for them to come together. Salvage architecture takes patience in a slow accretion of puzzle pieces. There are finished and inhabitable projects like the treehouse, and there are things in more elementary stages of coming through the pipedream bottleneck. Everything is many things at once, and nothing is what it was.

Biosquat plays out how cities might finally catch on to the ecstatic bounty of the post-industrial age – the trashed world. Beautiful houses have been built of waste. This radical tinkering revels in the surplus of decomposition, experimenting with new and unanticipated forms and landscapes out of mobility machines that are falling apart. Like a circus of scrappy novelties, it is an alternative, temporary urban zone that gets on with celebrating life in the face of ecochaos. Rolling with the cyborg bicyclist/bike body, it keeps human muscle power and feats of endurance like bicycle migrations at the center of possibilities. Carnival sustainability is “victory-in-advance,” as David Santos puts it – “victory-in-the-attempt” to bike out of peak oil collapse into the paradise of the City of Living Garbage.