This August, we are taking a homemade floating monstrosity down the Mississippi. When we started we didn’t know much about boats or rivers, and we didn’t have any money. (We know this is craziness, but if the idea makes your eyes glow like coals then you understand!) For several months we met, made phone calls, held benefits, and drew up blueprints. We collected scrap wood from all over and hammered it together piece by piece. We had benefit parties and socked away brown rice and dented cans. We organized mostly out of New York because that’s where we live, but we were joined by folks on the West coast as well as in the Midwest.
We met in Minneapolis in late July with sections of our raft in tow. We pieced together our pontoons and filled them with salvaged blocks of foam. We tie on anything that floats, adding it to our junk armada, our anarchist county fair, our fools ark. Our precious cargo is everything we hold dear: pieces and parts of the culture we are already creating. Our ’zines and puppets, sewing projects and poster campaigns. Our Nothing to Lose Navy musical review and amateur(!) variety show. Plus our thoughts and dreams and irrepressible energy.
Our flotilla is built as green as we could muster with precycled materials, biodiesel, and solar. We’ve got a floating garden, a wind-powered movie theater, and a bicycle-propellered raft-lette. We want to steal hippie technology from the hippies.
We are a small group of people with extensive experience making big insane projects. In the past we have taken twenty-person bands to Mexico, pulled off town-square-sized guerrilla theater in Berlin, and fed hundreds of people with garbage and love. We know this idea is ridiculous and impossible. That’s why we’re obsessed with it.
We’ve just left Minneapolis (August 9) and are currently coasting down the Mississippi, but dates are hard—we don’t know how fast we’ll be moving. Follow our path on www.missrockaway.org, or, better yet, get in contact with us by phone or by email. Between Minneapolis and St. Luis, we’re looking for places to play, shores to pull up to, people to eat with.
thevillagemagazine said,
August 15, 2006 @ 7:42 pm
This sounds amazing. My spouse saw something about this on a Progressive Islam site, and immediately thought, crimethinc!
I wish you all the good fortune in the bioregion. I’ve been a river rat forever. If you feel like sailing up the Illinois, up the unnavigable Sangamon, to the capitol of Illinois, we’d be glad to put you up for the night, and feed you some good grub. There’s nothing like floating down the muddy river.
sharqi