May 12: Leaving Spokane, Beginning a Journey

Prologue: Marc’s on the road as of Wednesday, May 12, 2010, heading for his first camp site outside of Billings, Mont. He hopes to tent up by 10 p.m. Then, onward, outside of Denver for a rest-up. Then, Day 3, Arkansas. He’ll be in Louisiana on Saturday. (Our daily check-ins have a rubric – a system of questions we’ve developed so Marc and I can be somewhat consistent in this process of Marc experiencing and telling back and me transcribing and writing his travel-ecology log. He’s open to all sights, sounds, points of view. His camera will be his heart, mind and ears.) We’ll be putting up photos of his load out of town — his 20-foot sea kayak is longer than the compact Toyota he’s driving those 2,300 miles one way. He also laid out some of his own bucks for a 12 megapixel still camera that shoots underwater images. Those photos will be our visual lifeline if Marc can get to electricity, a computer, some internet connection. He is coordinating some of the trip through Alyssa Krafft, his significant other, who is holding down the farm here in Spokane. One additional element to this Dispatches from a Disaster is that we’re looking to contact media outlets, newspapers mainly, along the way, for the return trip so he can get this adventure, Spokane-grown, in the press around the country. We need people anywhere we can find to get them to understand that this adventure is really about awareness, and that the germination and blossoming of the idea and the final cut of that film, Dispatches from a Disaster, when Marc returns, is all Spokane’s very own. Now to the Dispatch: Documents and other sources to underscore the plundering and other violents acts against the environment: As part of this effort to make the oil disaster reality to us, 2,300 miles away and a world apart from Louisiana and that entire off-shore drilling world and those tidelands and such, we have added some resource lifelines – like articles covering the British Petroleum catastrophe, opinion pieces, books of interest, and video. We will look at the bigger issue of oil and big energy and drilling and the environmental and human impacts. Spokane Falls Community College’s library staff will be creating an oil spill resources page, linked here when it’s up and running. We have Marc’s film on the Colville forest coming here soon so the reader can get to know his work on issues centered here in our own backyard. And, Paul Haeder’s numerous interviews on his hour-long weekly show, Tipping Points: Voices from the Edge on KYRS-FM, include some relevant doozies like the ones of experts and authors working on oil, energy, post-carbon society. All these authors have web sites linking to their work and material. Those will be added soon.