I jumped the guard rail, with my portfolio clutched under arm, my heavy back pack swinging above my small stature like a tortoise and made it to the other side of the freeway.

“Head North back towards where you started.” I thought.

It was windy outside the shelter of the red Fiat. The sun had dipped behind the dark grey clouds sitting above the Slovenian Alps blowing in words of warning, that rain was coming and night was falling.

With my cardboard sign still in tow, I unfolded it, picked some new flowers to punch through the paper and thought of my destination, I was going to catch that plane in Zagreb. It started to rain, and the cars passed without looking. I couldn’t have a repeat of the day before, stuck and sleeping at a rest stop.

I walked up to a group of kids, who looked approachable.

“Excuse me,” I began.

“Yes California, that’s great man, are you really from California?”

“Yes and I need to get to Zagreb.”

“Well, you’re on the wrong side of the freeway, you need to be on the other side.  This way goes to Austria.”

“Yeah I know and that way goes to Italy.” I said, pointing.

They were getting into their car, their patience running down.

“We are going to Austria, I’m sorry we can’t help you.”

They drove away. I was left holding a map.

Back to it. More cars passed, more time ticked by.

A young couple, smiled as they saw the sign but kept driving, or so I thought. They turned around, rolling the window down to the bucketful of rain coming down and me standing in it.

They said something in Slovak that I didn’t understand.

“Sorry?”

“Oh! Are you really from California?” They asked.

“Yes.”

“Hahaha! Wow man, I think most people who see you here think you’re crazy, you know? This road goes to Austria and Italy! You are far from Zagreb!”

“I know, now I’m just going to try and get to Ljubljana or something.” I answered, edging on a nervous desperation.

“Oh, OK man, we are going to Ljubljana, we go to watch a movie there. We can drive you to the train station, they have trains going to Zagreb…I think.”

“Wow, that would be great, oh man I was really thinking I was going to be stuck here.” I smiled, getting into their car.

They were from a little village in the mountains and came down to the city on a date. They were teachers at an elementary school in the village. I told them how I got dropped off there by the stoned Austrian kids. They told me how that sucked.

They chose this photo,  http://www.nomadsight.com/works/a-memory-from-the-future/, took a picture with me and wished me the best.

I was worried about getting a train. My plan had been to hitchhike across the border, with a hope that the car I was in wouldn’t get checked. I had been in Europe for a year, I had planned to leave before my tourist visa expired in September, but things came up that I don’t feel like writing about here, which kept me in Europe past the terms of my passport. I read that if caught, it would be a fifteen hundred euro fine, with a five year ban on E.U travel, and an “Illegal Immigrant” stamp in my passport . (I didn’t mind the last one so much. Illegal immigrant? Please! It’s our planet and our life and we are free to choose and be where we want). Now that time was pressed, with my flight from Zagreb to San Francisco a mere twelve hours away and my anxious feet still in a different country, I bought the fourteen euro train ticket and hoped for the best.

I heard them before I saw them. Two Americans, “Maybe I can blend in with them.” I thought. I made my way down the aisle sitting across from them and their game of cards.

Even with the anticipation of the border imminently approaching, it felt so nice to sit and watch the landscape go by. Greens made gold with the setting sun, lakes, rivers and mountains filling the view. The train rocked me calm.

Until it suddenly stopped and shut down, silent and dead. The guards boarded and said something in passing, I wanted to pretend I didn’t understand, as everyone else pulled out their passports.

With that done, I decided, instead of going back up to Hamburg and working a music festival with Felix, that I wanted to go South and set up exhibits in different cities. I needed to make some money, I had fifty euros and I used that to print pictures and buy paper to mat them on.  I got permission from a five star hotel in Wiemar called Hotel Elephant, an “unofficial” approval from the city and the UNESCO committee to place my photos on a house that used to belong to Joan Sebastian Bach. Tour groups stopped in front of the exhibit I put up daily. In three days I made three hundred and fifty euros selling my photos, mostly to residents of Wiemar. One guy walked up and started pointing at them saying,

“That one, that one and that one. How much?”

You know, part of it for me is the narrative I’m creating through this journey, but it’s nice also to know that my photos can stand alone on their own merit.  I ended up taking the photos to this man’s house. I was nervous at first, what was this man’s house going to be like? I was afraid it would be more like a storage space than anything else. I was wrong, I walked into a space full of really impressive art work. It was so nice to see the future home of some of my images safe among respectable pieces.

With money made I went to a music festival in Dresden, with my friends from Wiemar. One of the performers was from Sacramento (small world), we had our goodbyes there after living with them for almost three months!

Dropped off on the side of a freeway, I started hitchhiking my way to Prague. I got picked up by a man from Austria, who was an engineer for a pipeline company bringing natural gas from Russia to Austria.  We talked about fly fishing, which is a love of his. His dream to go to Wyoming and fly fish. He spoke hardly any English, but we communicated well enough as we raced along the autobahn in his Mercedes to Prague.

I stayed there for two days and placed my photos on the National Museum, until wind prohibited it. I tried hitchhiking out of the Bohemian capital, spending six hours in one spot, two in another and meeting a Polish kid trying to hitch as well. It got dark, so we decided we would try again in the morning. That night we set up his tent in a field South of Prague, full of wild rose bushes. He was so happy and so was I. He took a picture with me, laughing,

“My American friend shares a tent with me!”

The next morning we tried again, two hours and then a little old lady walked by us, she too was trying to get a ride. “This is the spot,” we think, but no one picks her up either. All these cars with single drivers, safe and consuming, blind to others smiling and open, ready to be their friends. They appear only to think of what they have to lose, not of what they could gain.

I appreciate the support, I know it’s what I would give from that side.

I see names of towns that will have more meaning later, now they appear as places to place myself, to leave parts of me on shelves for those who live to collect.  That view, as I knew when I set out, is elevated, placed by time and pattern, run into groves deeper than the prints in the sand that I place.

I went to the Louvre, it’s huge, an endless mass of a building.

“We’ll go to the Louvre, Eiffel Tower, get on a train, go to London, see the bridge, or whatever. Buch’n'ham Palace, go to Dublin, drink Guinness, I love Guinness, it’s so good, you know and then the next day… I Iove Europe, it’s so nice ”

The next day? The drunken college tour. Fun? Sure. Fun filling…with alcohol? Yes, but you won’t see a place, it will all just be a blur.

“What country are we in?”

I had to get out of the hostel, no way, it stopped raining and the great outdoors called.

“Where is that sound coming from?”

I kept following it, it got louder. The river, I made it to the river Seine, still, I followed up river toward Notre Dame cathedral.  Here it is, under this bridge by the river, neighbors of Quasimodo. I wonder if he knows international sign language or French…hmm.  I unrolled my pad and sleeping bag and crawled in.

I want to reduce myself too.  I have money, I could sleep in a hostel, talk to other people my age with “similar views” and talk about school and travel blablablabla.  I choose not to.  I want to know the limits.  Answers are everywhere, of course. They can be found in the specific,we go to school and study the specific, start broad, “ge”, now you have to pick a “major”, follow a path down to a point and hopefully, oh god give me meaning, hopefully blaze that path forward on the foundation of the many steps before.  I could not even attain that and fill myself up with as much as I could, blind to the countless other lines that lead down to their forefront. But way up there, almost out of sight from the point that we follow it down to is the answer. And no it’s not sex.

Herman Hesse
Narcissus and Goldmund
(Settemio and Allen)

At times it’s hard, hard to communicate, to be with you, you are not with me, you are in your home, at your job.  Together we laugh at how I have done nothing or how I have done so much, at how I am free.  I write to tell you where I am and what I have done.

I am in Bilbao, Spain, as called here in Euskera, Bilbo. I’m in a room with blank walls in a flat in the old town, winding cobblestone streets, shops open and busy until two in the afternoon, when everything then closes and people relax until four or five. I’m living with Javi, Borja, and Amorigiah and Pott the cat. All elf like loving creatures with music in their fingers and laughter on their tongues.

After cooking at the hostel in San Francisco for a year and living in the dorm, I was curious at how many people I lived with in that time, in my room roughly 1470 people and in the building 36,750.  All of who I cooked for three nights a week.  My twin brother was set to get married in Santa Barbara, so I left the hostel and watched my brother get married. I watched him in visions as he stood and promised to be, to love forever, I saw him run across the field at twilight with a bottle of frozen water, his skinny legs propelling him to the other boys.  I saw him as me with no future, with only this room, our room, with our toys, with the farthest thing away being our birthday and really only seeing our dreams being made then as we played. It’s in this way that the unimaginable becomes reality.

I flew to Portland where I met up with a friend. Together we drove a woman’s car from Portland to New Jersey in ten days. I never met the woman; she posted an ad online seeking someone to drive her car, saying she would pay for the gas.  I stayed with friends along the way; I met up with Forest in Minnesota and saw him and his band play on a rainy night. We drove into Indiana and stayed with my cousin and talked to his mom about my mom. We camped by a river in West Virginia with cicadas and opossum and gas attendants saying,

“You be careful now, you hear?’

We met the woman whose car I drove and I asked her why she did that. We talked about how nice it was that in a world, where we seem to make connections without flesh being present, that we can still respect and trust each other, as we always should.

I took a Chinatown bus from Philadelphia to New York for ten bucks, got on the subway and made it to New York airport with my fly pole still in hand. I flew into Dublin, with the rain still following me. I took the bus from the airport to Drogheda and waited for the New Grange bus, all too familiar for me.  The building was the same, new people, but a photo of me still on the mantel in the lodge. I was home.  I fished with Dave, my skills exposed to him.

“Big Al, what are you doin?! You’re waving it around like whip man, it’s ten and two, ten and two!”

I got Megan’s address and made an adventure of finding her home in the suburbs of Dublin with sunflowers in hand and five hours gone by in the rain still, I knocked on her door. She smiled and sneezed, she had hay fever.

I flew into Toulouse got online to see where everyone was meeting and saw that I was a day early. I got onto couchsurfing.com and within an hour had a place to stay that night. A French girl and her mom took me in.

I watched the unfolding of a dream, a château surrounded by sunflowers and grape vines, delicious food and wine presented to all of us.  I had made it my destination with the others, but my difference was this, was it no future beyond Auty France. I ended up leaving with Jami and Donovan, driving into the Pyrenees to sleep on a mountain, then to the French coast to surf a perfect wave and into Bilbao, where I met up with Javi who I first met in San Francisco when he was traveling from Spain. I am here now sharing a room with him, learning the local language, cooking for new friends, walking the winding streets to the shops, going to bars and eating pinchos, reading my book by the river and writing you.
Love
Allen

P.S. The best mullets are in Spain!