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.