the following essay is from Vincent Scotti Eirene’s upcoming book The Day The Empire Fell:
In 1994 I left my shelter for the homeless, Duncan and Porter House, to see the United States. I had been living in Manchester, on Pittsburgh’s North Side, for a number of years, and I needed a sabbatical. All the people killing each other in my neighborhood, the Crips and the Bloods and the drug deals gone bad were beginning to take its toll. I went on the road for almost two years, ending with my imprisonment for crossing the line at Los Alamos in 1995, the fiftieth anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In doing so, I would face “the Guns of Navarone,” the M-16s there, and I wanted to make sure that I saw some of the world before I was possibly killed. I traveled from Pittsburgh to Denver, from Denver to Eugene, from Eugene to Seattle, and finally back to Eugene to live for a while with Hungry Bear, a hemp cook and farmer, and an advocate for medical marijuana.
When the time came for me to leave Eugene, I met a woman who asked me to drive with her to Dixie, Idaho, where Earth First! was fighting the loggers.
I said, well, isn’t Dixie, Idaho a long way from here?
No, she said, it’s not that far. And it turned out to be some nine hundred miles.
read the whole thing: here.
