Timewasting

Far above the fruit fly's lazy circle a red-tailed hawk glides for food. Leaning into the backyard's cushiest chair, I see chores to do like changing the chicken's water, tinkering with the museum window displays. More laborious projects like moving the limestone blocks to build up a new garden bed. I should go in and write. But right now it's time to stare at the sky and watch plants grow.

There is this work of looking around that leaves no trace, and then the hard, fun, gradual, collaborative labor of assembling atmospheres as viewsheds—land- and cityscape vistas designed to be looked at from certain perspectives (but that also sound and smell certain ways). Ross Ward was a sign painter who settled outside the ghost town Madrid, New Mexico, in the ‘60’s. One of his signs reads, “‘Tinkertown’ was begun as a hobby in 1962. It was not intended as a public display, until your interest helped build ‘our museum!’” Over the years he and his wife Carla built up bottle walls to house their collection of miniatures arranged in a long homemade display case. Their tiny objects and figurines live on Tinkertown’s Old West-style main street, where garbage becomes anything but what it was. The saloon’s bar stools are spent spools of thread. A big old roll of canvas becomes the circus Big Top. Years of public intoxication at Madrid's Mine Shaft Tavern transform into glowing bottle walls built of mortar and sunlight. If you look closely you'll find the bottle with Tinkertown's slogan: "We did all this while you were watching T.V.!" You can look at Tinkertown forever and still catch something new.

Leisure time, viewing habits, hobbies that become lifestyles or all consuming full time jobs. More than full time – never enough time to tinker on the (unpaid) labor of building DIYsneylands. Vince, who can never go on vacation because tourists drop by the Cathedral of Junk every day of the year, talks with a visitor. “This started out as a hobby. Some people play video games, or go fishing or whatever.” The wise visitor says, “You don’t even have to catch a fish.” “Exactly. Catching fish isn’t the point.” Later I see a bumper sticker “I’d rather be fishing” on the same truck as “I used up all my sick days so I called in dead.”

Tinkering, and sitting back to gaze at what you tinkered, taps this longing to be dead to labor. Realms of ordinary aesthetic production like cooking, gardening, or playing music disengage the efficiency or scientific management of goal-oriented labor that drives formal economic production. These activities unfold in special spaces for timewasting, like the front porch. You have the privilege of leisure time and spend it hard at work on your hobby. Maybe productive wastes of time like playing guitar or baking cookies is all you really want to do, but it doesn’t pay the bills. It is a block of time and sensation that slows way down, saturating a moment with its own density and repetition that starts to feel like a little eternity.

Getting around the city can also involve this slowing down and wasting time. The commuter train's flashing red light gates swing down at the railroad crossing, making traffic back up to the next major intersection. Cars swerve out from behind buses stopped to unload passengers. Sustainable forms of mobility like riding public transportation, biking, and walking generally all waste time compared to car travel. We want to be like digital information, with its magic trick of moving instantly from here to there. It seems to be nowhere and everywhere at once (but you know this is a false perception when your hard drive crashes or you lose your phone). This is why time on a walk or jog or bike ride feels like it puffs up – because you are loitering in the ordinary liminality of commuting.

Music seems to float in the in between. A song is an infinite stretch of things to know through hearing or feeling out the rhythm, or to remember in your muscles. You could waste eternity improvising variations of a song. The song and instrument teach you things in an education that never stops.

At Tinkertown, “Otto the One Man Band” is an antique machine that plays a single song on drums, accordion, and glockenspiel with the notes punched out of a player piano roll for the automaton to feel. Ross Ward also carved a band of puppet hippies on their porch playing fiddle and guitars and hooked them to a found mechanism to make them move. Feed it a quarter to watch them perform and hear the tinny prerecorded song. Before his death from Alzheimer's in 2002, Ross salvaged and repaired these machines, playing around with them ‘til they worked right. They were antiquated things beached in the ghost town. At the Mine Shaft Tavern, Ross’s paintings tell the story of Madrid’s rise as a coal company town and its post-war abandonment. In a way the whole town became garbage like Otto, waiting to be recycled and repaired by the hippies as a tourist trap, the perfect place to drop out, waste time, see what happens next.

We were drifting through town on the scenic Turquoise Trail National Scenic Byway heading from Albuquerque to Santa Fe. After a tour of the Old Coal Mine Museum, stopped for lunch and a beer at the Tavern and got to talking at the bar. A local pointed out Ross's paintings of Madrid all lit up with Christmas lights in the '30's, back when the coal company supplied free electricity. Then the company leaves town and the houses become dark skeletons. He said we had to backtrack to Tinkertown, and we were welcome to camp on his land on a hill top under red mine tailings and stars. Wasting time opens up these kinds of discoveries, as if the landscape's micro-tourist enchantments only become sensible when immeresed in spare time.

2012

DIYsneyland

Somehow my sense of the good life got pinned on Ephemerata Gardens and the Museum of Ephemerata, a sort of do-it-yourself Disneyland that I dream one day will become my way of making a living. People say, "You should start a non-profit, move into a store front! Make it into a business!" But my role models are people like Grandma Prisbrey, Reverend Howard Finster, Isaiah Zagar, Ross Ward, and most close to home, Vince at the Cathedral of Junk, all of whom wound up living off micro-tourist donations and other support from visitors to their little worlds without setting out to do so. It just happened. Of course there are plenty of cautionary tales of people whose art environments engulfed them in an insular retreat, like the hermits Emory Blagdon in his Healing Machine and Legler in his Valley of the Moon.

Around the time Jen and I reopened the Museum of Ephemerata in Tucson in 1999, we visited the Valley of the Moon on the outskirts of town. In the 1920s, George Phar Legler, a postman who raised rabbits on his land, built up hillocks of desert plants, foothills clustered with little fairy and gnome houses made of smooth river stones cemented together. A little dirt path through the miniature town leads to the Wizard’s Tower, BunnyLand Theater, and the Enchanted Garden, a waterfall grotto with built-in seats. It opens into an underground house called the Cave Room that exits beneath a waterfall.

Following his Spiritualist beliefs, Legler built the Valley of the Moon as a healing environment where people could go to rejuvenate their bodies and minds by exercising imagination. Every week he offered free guided tours: “Fairy Tours” that appealed to children’s magical sensibilities and “Metaphysical Tours” that unpacked the mysteries of life to adults. After Disneyland was built in 1955, a reporter for the Tucson Citizen opined, “Should Disneyland cover the entire State of California, not one corner would speak to childhood as does this imperfect, perfect little theater.”*  In the early 1970s some high school students found Legler, then in his 80s, living in the Cave Room, subsisting on vitamins and milk to appease his chronic stomach pain. The students’ families adopted him and started the Valley of the Moon Restoration Association. Legler lived to 97, long enough to see his lifelong project listed on the Arizona Register of Historic Places and preserved by an association that would care for his environment into the future.

The Valley of the Moon’s enchanted concrete structures recycled the fantasy architectures built on the estates of European elites in the 18th and 19th century. They built grottos of ferns and fake stalactites, as well as landscapes dotted with follies--artificial ruins overgrown with plants, inhabited by gentle fauna. Aristocrats delivered tours of their estates and curiosity cabinets to visiting dignitaries in performances of power, of owning the whole world. By the end of the 20th century, these microcosms had broken away from the realm of the rich to become mass leisure spaces--Coney Island’s parks, Disneyland, and a slew of knock-offs, second-rate theme parks, and seedy roadside attractions. Fantasy worlds also drifted into the yards of people like Legler, possessed by some vision of an other world that manifested in gradual accretions of concrete and masonry work where fairies and bunnies lived.

In Gardens of Revelation: Environments by Visionary Artists, John Beardsley makes the case that such “visionary environments represent a survival in popular culture of a form long out of favor in the institutional world”: the cabinet of curiosities (19).** Some visionary environments (like Tinkertown outside Albuquerque, or the Orange Show in Houston) are built as mini-museums, while others cobble together and embed collections of wondrous objects into the environments themselves. “Survival” points to how Beardsley sees curiosity cabinets as genealogical origins in a line of cultural forms that went extinct as far as institutionalized collections are concerned, but that still survive in vernacular patches. In 19th century anthropology and folklore, “survivals” were cultural forms that should have been wiped out with industrialization and rational thinking, but that still existed among backwards peasants and uncivilized cultures as shreds of the past, living fossils that never went extinct.*** The old practices and forms barely surviving civilization could be salvaged and preserved by folklorists and anthropologists (often driven by intense concern to save something unique from disappearing forever). They were seldom seen as survival tactics in themselves, struggles to recover ways of life from being trampled under a march of progress into a future that deemed them obsolete.

Beardsley continues, “both gardens of revelation and Disneyland involve entering another world” (19). In tours of the Museum's “impermanent collection,” we flow from Wunderkammern to dime museums and Coney Island, implying that the enchantment of curiosity cabinets survives in amusement parks of all kinds. But for Beardsley, the overly-simulated, nostalgic, and sanitized environments of themed spaces atrophy imagination by replacing local culture with corporate schlock. Disney worlds avoid and repress the countercultural sensibilities expressed in visionary art environments. Theme parks exist to profit off fantasy, whereas visionary environments exist regardless of money. As Tressa Prisbrey says of her Bottle Village, “Anyone can do anything with a million dollars. Look at Disney. But it takes more than money to make something out of nothing, and look at the fun I have doing it.”****

Although Beardsley sets up Disneyfied spaces as the anti-gardens of revelation, the well-funded tinkering of Imagineers directly inspires some homemade projects. As one do-it-yourselfer writes on his 'how to' website, "You, too, can have the best of Disneyland in your own backyard. After all, Disneyland was essentially Walt’s backyard."***** The Orange Show’s Jeff McKissack wanted his creation to rival Disneyland as a roadside attraction; he was in competition. In Hamtramck, Michigan, near Tyree Guyton’s Heidelberg Project, Dmytro Szylak started making his “Ukrainian Disneyland” on the roof of his two garages after retiring from the General Motors factory. At the Museum, we’ve borrowed Disneyland tactics like hiding fences in plain sight, camouflaged as décor. Our Pepper’s Ghost illusion was partly inspired by the Haunted Mansion’s ballroom scene of transparent dancing ghouls. Rather than being the opposite of bad Disneyland, some vernacular environments consciously adopt the park’s aesthetics and tactics with admiration (albeit without massive funding or status as mainstream tourist destinations).

Such places are do-it-yourself amusement parks of informal economies that slip into utopian gift economies--DIYsneylands created not to make money, but because habitats for dreaming and tinkering are wonderful places to call home. The immersive process of making them is better than being in any theme park on earth (not to mention, free). They become something to live for and belong to, a relationship of creativity, care, and upkeep that brings an inhabitable future into being at the humble scale of a small patch where you can imagine growing old. They might attract tourists, and entertaining visitors becomes another adventure. Once ‘discovered’ by popular/institutional/mainstream culture, things can change for better or worse. Being made public can vault their makers out of their houses, into the official art world of gallery shows. Or ruin their privacy and make them want to tear it all down. Or threaten them with code violations and the dreaded bulldozer. Or it doesn’t matter and they keep on tinkering like nothing happened. Above all, what is happening in DIYsneylands is lanscape play, a kind of affective labor that immerses players in a layered environment that is at once ecological, aesthetic, historic, and noetic, without any of these layers being “the point.”

Yard art environments are generally viewed as large-scale forms of folk art that express aesthetic and technical abilities rooted in class, ethnic, and religious identities, instead of the economically and academically established realm of fine arts. Jill Nokes sidesteps this usual framing of ‘vernacular art’ by approaching such places as “vernacular landscapes” (3).****** ‘Vernacular’ indexes amateur, self-taught, indigenous, or local forms, practices, and knowledges (as opposed to, say, invasive forms, standard practices, or expert knowledges). Nokes traveled Texas searching for peculiar homes and gardens transformed by their inhabitants into “powerful [gestures] of hospitality and sociability” that convey “the story of a person’s life” (5, 13). She focuses on what vernacular landscapes mean to their creators, but how do these landscapes work as urban ecosystems, parts of the City of Living Garbage? What kind of learning and teaching do they assemble? Some of the art yards in Nokes’ book operate as vernacular forms of ecological restoration. They transform urban wastestreams into wildlife habitats and act as informal educational institutions as community gathering places. These patch dynamics are not planned so much as emergent, sweeping up their makers into unanticipated worlds. "Do-it-yourself" isn't quite right... a person's life becomes part of a singular landscape, able to act only through relationships with many others--living garbage, plants, the knowledges and feelings of like-minded yardists...

Whatever you want to call them, and whatever these places do and don’t have in common, otherworldly yards and houses have proliferated in hundreds of sites across America: some big, some small; some young, some decrepit; some well known, others as yet ‘undiscovered’; all vulnerable. There seem to be as many books, magazines, websites, blogs, and online galleries about these places as there are places. Self-taught photographers go on pilgrimages to see the work of self-taught artists and architects. Fans of these places make a life out of visiting them on roadtrips. I’m ready to retire, get an RV, and hit the road myself. Of course, being discovered and catalogued brings the people behind the places in touch, and some become extremely knowledgeable about their fellow art environments. They get caught in a spiderweb thrown across roadside America, trapping unwitting passers-by in DIYsneylands similar to something they’ve experienced before, but not as fastidiously engineered by teams of experts. Not as permanent as Disney’s sturdy, constantly repaired facades, and much smaller--a city block or house lot. Not quite as sprawling as zoos, botanical gardens, or restored ecologies you may have visited, but overgrown and crowded with plants and animals nonetheless. And most remarkably, made of cast-offs, bric-a-brac, junk no one else would touch. A million wandering forms of life gather and find a common home here. As the venerable Reverend Howard Finster put it on a hand-painted sign of blocky letters in Paradise Gardens:

I TOOK THE PIECES YOU
THREW AWAY AND PUT THEM
TOGETHER NIGHT AND DAY,
WASHED BY RAIN, DRIED BY SUN,
A MILLION PIECES ALL IN ONE.

2012

*George Phar Legler Society, “Valley of the Moon,” http://www.tucsonvalleyofthemoon.com

**John Beardsley, Gardens of Revelation: Environments by Visionary Artists, photos James Pierce, New York: Abbeville Press, 1995.

***Stocking, George W., Jr. Victorian Anthropology. London and New York: The Free Press, 1991, 164-78.
****Grandma Prisbrey's Bottle Village, http://home.roadrunner.com/~echomatic/bv/history.html.
*****T.R. Shaw, “Backyard Imagineering,” http://www.hiddenmickeys.org/Imagineering/
Imagineering.html
******Jill Nokes, Yard Art and Handbuilt Places: Extraordinary Expressions of Home, Austin: UT Press, 2007.

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

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