One year ago, I visited the East Bay Depot for Creative Reuse, a shop in Oakland, California that supplies teachers and artists alike with craft supplies. The store takes in community donations and provides bin after bin of glorious junk. It’s also highly photographable. Some of these photos have been among my most popular of all time. Can you guess which?

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Post tags: alternative, art, California, community, east bay, featured posts, junk art, Oakland, photography, recycling, reuse, starving artists, sustainable, teacher supply

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Enjoy the show, and I’ll see you next week.

© jessicareeder for Uprooted, an eco/travel blog, 2010. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: California, ecotourism, ecotravel, environment, featured posts, Humboldt, nature, outdoors, photography, Siskiyou, travel, water

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This is what I found in Oakland dumpsters this morning. Well, this and a croissant which I burned already in the toaster oven.

Today’s grocery run took about an hour and cost me $0, plus I got a workout biking across town. I came home with 3 loaves of artisan bread (sour, sweet, rye) and half a loaf of sliced sourdough; a head of organic lettuce; a bunch of organic sweet baby broccoli; 3 peppers; a half cantaloupe (still shrinkwrapped); a bunch of fresh sage and parsley; and a container of mango-papaya salsa.

This is the second time I’ve gone dumpstering since I got to Oakland. The first time took much longer, as Lex & I had to bike all over town to find the good spots. That time we supplemented our booty with some ground beef from the store. When we got home, the whole house pitched in and we had some kickass burger kabobs (like hamburgers, but on a stick and roasted in the firepit. Inspired by a Christmas ornament, but that’s another story for another day).

A few of my temporary housemates have worked in food service, which helps when you’re trying to figure out if something could be contaminated. And yes, that’s extremely important. I won’t get into the details of dumpster-diving etiquette, but if you’re interested, you can find a lot of information here and here.

What I can say is that it’s really not that hard, OR as messy as you might think. It’s fairly easy to find good, unspoiled food—and once you find good dumpsters, you can usually visit them over and over.

If you’ve got the right kind of friends, you’ll soon find that there are hidden treasures and well-kept secrets that provide steady streams of free food. I’ve heard of a few places where store employees have a deal with local freegans, and vast amounts of fresh-enough, still-sealed goods change hands in midnight parking lots.

Dumpstering is a good way to survive in the city without having to shop constantly, which is good for my wallet and just a useful skill to have. I’m still buying meat and dairy from the store, and taking my vitamins; if I were planning to stay in Oakland longer, however, I might try to make a real go of the urban-freegan thing.

As it stands, though, I’m headed North in a couple of days. Time to get back to the woods! See you there…

PS – Punks, freaks, and bums aren’t the only ones dumpster diving. Check out this article on Burt’s Bees’ $25,000 trash-unpackin.

© jessicareeder for Uprooted, an eco/travel blog, 2010. | Permalink | 5 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: adventure, alternative, buy nothing, California, featured posts, freegan, garbage, reuse, starving artists

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We’re installing an arbor to surround Faithful Fountain. I bet you never thought about how all that big art was installed, did you? Yeah, me too.

The arbor is made of rebar. It was built in the metal shop, which is down by the house. In order to move it up the hill to Dandelion Ballad, Candace and Loren had to cut it into four sections—each of which is still bigger than a truck can easily carry. I honestly have no idea how they got it up the hill. But I know one thing for sure: these folks can really work with what they have.

Introducing the Power Wagon.

click to enlarge

Yep, that’s an old Dodge (circa 1948) with a boom lift mounted to the front. It takes us (and by “us” I mean “Loren”) hours to get the boom positioned correctly and ropes tied just right so they don’t take off the top of the fountain, but damn if Loren doesn’t work it out.

And then, we start raising it up. It goes a few inches at a time: lift it a little, put cinderblocks underneath, shorten the ropes, lift again. I am full of doubt: there’s no way this will work, the angles are all wrong, it’s too heavy, etc etc. But before long, lo and behold, we’ve got it a couple feet off the ground!

click to enlarge

So now comes the positioning. It’s got to be just right, so that the arched doorways are aligned with the center. Candace and Loren and I all take turns staring at it, hemming and hawing, pointing, lifting, turning the arbor until it looks pretty much right-on. My favorite part is when the boom needs to move to the right a hair: Loren just puts a jack under the left side of the truck, and cranks it up until the positioning is better.

And there it is. Next Loren busts out a transit level, and we get the heights just right. From there it’s a simple matter of hammering in about a zillion stakes (which we make by welding together lengths of recycled rebar) and mounting the arbor so it stands on its own. Tedious work, that, but it gets done despite my griping.

All told, it takes us nearly four days to get that crazy thing in the ground. But the closer we get to finishing it, the better and better it looks; by the end, our furrowed brows have turned to big grins, and dang if we don’t have a piece of art on our hands.

Another victory for Dandelion Ballad!

© jessicareeder for Uprooted, an eco/travel blog, 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: adventure, art, featured posts, starving artists, voluntourism, WWOOF

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Still, it’s too much! I can’t walk far with all this weight. Even after dumping all my winter clothes (some of the stuff in that video didn’t end up making the cut), my pack is big enough that old guys comment on it. For some reason, it’s always the old guys.

“That’s a heck of a pack,” they say, smirking.

“Tell me about it,” I usually reply, feeling a mix of resentment and shame (note: old guys never help you with your pack, either).

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Read the rest of Adventures in Packing (how to load a backpack) (307 words)

© jessicareeder for Uprooted, an eco/travel blog, 2009. | Permalink | 23 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: backpack, backpacking, camping, featured posts, how-to, packing, rubber chicken, totem, tourism, touristry, travel

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bye-bye Paonia…

We’re gonna jump ahead a bit here. A lot of time has passed since I left Colorado, but most of it was vacation-time for yours truly. Here’s how it went, in glimpses and photos:

Paonia, CO » Winnemucca, NV

I found myself yet another successful rideshare, with Howard from Abundant Life Farm (word to the wise: if you see Abundant Life at any farmer’s markets this summer, try the melons). He and I drove to Grand Junction, where I caught the California Zephyr headed west.

The train ride was lovely, except that dusk fell just as we entered Gore Canyon. The tracks wound alongside the green water of the Colorado, past rafts pulled up onto shore for the night. Families in outdoor wear waved at the train as we cruised along the red-lined canyon walls. I saw a few rock formations fading into the dark, and then the sun was gone.

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Read the rest of Fast Forward! (325 words)

© jessicareeder for Uprooted, an eco/travel blog, 2009. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: adventure, amtrak, California, garbage, gorge, outsider art, photography, rideshare, river, spring, starving artists, tourism, train, transportation, travel, volunteer, wild west

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The Navigator has a long story, I’m sure. Unfortunately I don’t know most of it, and he doesn’t talk much.

What I do know is this: I found The Navigator (then just an unnamed, fist-sized and uncomfortably realistic rubber chicken) in a corner of the floor at NIMBY. He was covered with black dirt and seemed very abandoned. Despite his kind of disgusting appearance, I knew I was onto something special.

It didn’t take long (after a bath, that is) for The Navigator to assume his rightful position: pointing the way. I strapped him to my bike handlebars with a compass around his neck, and we rode together for months.

When I decided to start this lil journey, it seemed almost absurd to leave him behind. I made him a cape, and keep him with me every time I travel long distances. I don’t have to worry about getting lost, because The Navigator points the way.

And so I’m off, and this journey is really beginning. Winter is drawing to a close; I’m about to leave California, my lifelong stomping grounds, to see what the rest of the world holds. I’ll be incommunicado for a few days as I make the trip to New Mexico and get settled in Taos. But don’t worry about me, I’ve got a Navigator and an Elephant* and a solid travel plan too.

Toodles!

 
 
*more on Elephant later

© jessicareeder for Uprooted, an eco/travel blog, 2009. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: art, rubber chicken, superhero, totem

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You know, after reading all that freegan stuff, and after my super awesome experiences with dumpster diving, I was all amped up to try hitchhiking.

 
That lasted about two hours, and then I remembered I’m too scared to hitchhike.

I know, they say it’s really not all that dangerous. Like, maybe only one in a hundred people who stop to pick up female hitchhikers is a convicted felon. Or maybe even less!

As for me, I’ve been known to make a couple highfalutin’ speeches about the culture of fear and how you have to take life by the horns, yada yada. But when the chips are down, I am NOT going to stand by the side of the road with blonde pigtails and pepper spray, thumb-out and hopin’ for the best.

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Read the rest of Try This at Home: Rideshare! (266 words)

© jessicareeder for Uprooted, an eco/travel blog, 2009. | Permalink | 5 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: adventure, California, craigslist, energy-efficient, freegan, rideshare, transportation, travel

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611 street view

Yep, it’s possible, and 611 EcoVillage is the proof: you can live sustainably, and artfully, and even happily, all in the middle of a city.

Of course, it helps if you’ve got founder/builder Dan Antonioli’s temperament: love for life and a passion for creative construction. And it helps even more that he’s done it first, because now you can follow his lead. So let’s see what he’s done, shall we?

611 is a sort of eco-tastic rooming house created from two neighboring buildings in Oakland’s “ghost town” (the area between freeways and BART, Temescal and West Oakland). From the outside, it looks like any other place, but as soon as you pass through the gate you can see differences.

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Read the rest of Green Living in Oakland: 611 EcoVillage (800 words)

© jessicareeder for Uprooted, an eco/travel blog, 2009. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: art, California, design, ecovillage, energy-efficient, green building, Oakland, solar, sustainable, voc

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yeahhh arms & legs $5.00 good price

steel tins

It’s a lovely, one-of-a-kind place: a hybrid of thrift store, recycle bin, and craft depot that puts big-box stores like Michael’s to shame. Art supplies sold by artists, and at prices artists can afford? Genius. Not to mention that by putting recycled materials to good use, the Depot keeps massive amounts of junk out of landfills.

Fueled entirely by donations, this place has been providing art and school supplies to starving artists and under-funded classrooms for over 30 years.

The shop itself, a creatively cluttered storefront on Telegraph Ave, is never the same from one day to the next. Linda, the Depot’s director, points out a few items from the current displays: a mountain of stainless-steel containers that were donated because the lids are too tight for kids to easily open; a stack of tote bags, still in the plastic, left over from a medical conference; rows of pressboard folders arranged by color. The Depot is selective about the donations it accepts, picking things that are in fine shape and can be resold— but you just never know what someone will donate next.

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Read the rest of One Man’s Trash: Recycled Art Supplies (331 words)

© jessicareeder for Uprooted, an eco/travel blog, 2009. | Permalink | 19 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: art, California, education, featured posts, garbage, Oakland, photography, recycling, reuse, starving artists, teaching

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