Maps to the Other Side: Adventures of a Bipolar Cartographer

Maps to the Other Side: Adventures of a Bipolar Cartographer

by Sascha Altman DuBrul
Maps to the Other Side: Adventures of a Bipolar Cartographer

Maps to the Other Side: Adventures of a Bipolar Cartographer

by Sascha Altman DuBrul

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Overview

Part mad manifesto, part revolutionary love letter, part freight train adventure story—Maps to the Other Side is a self-reflective shattered mirror, a twist on the classic punk rock travel narrative that searches for authenticity and connection in the lives of strangers and the solidarity and limitations of underground community. Beginning at the edge of the internet age, a time when radical zine culture prefigured social networking sites, these timely writings paint an illuminated trail through a complex labyrinth of undocumented migrants, anarchist community organizers, brilliant visionary artists, revolutionary seed savers, punk rock historians, social justice farmers, radical mental health activists, and iconoclastic bridge builders. This book is a document of one person’s odyssey to transform his experiences navigating the psychiatric system by building community in the face of adversity; a set of maps for how rebels and dreamers can survive and thrive in a crazy world. The author, as Sasha Scatter, was in the band Choking Victim and is a co-founder of The Icarus Project.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780978866501
Publisher: Microcosm Publishing
Publication date: 03/31/2013
Series: Travel Series
Edition description: New Edition
Pages: 192
Product dimensions: 5.00(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

From the anarchist squatter community in New
York City to the Lacandon jungle of Chiapas,
Mexico, to the Earth First! road blockades of the
Pacific Northwest, Sascha Altman Dubrul has been a pioneer in urban farming and creative mental health advocacy. He is the co-founder of the
Bay Area Seed Interchange Library and the Icarus
Project, a radical community support network and media project that’s actively redefining the language and culture of mental health and illness. Among certain crowds, he is well known as the bass player of the classic 90s punk band Choking Victim. He lives in Berkeley, California.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

JUAN CARLOS' GRANDFATHER

Juan Carlos' grandfather had fought in the Mexican Revolution, and as our boxcar swayed back and forth, the rumbling sound of the train grinding along track like the ocean or the rain coming down hard, Juan Carlos told me stories his grandfather had told him of Emiliano Zapata's soldiers riding from town to town on the same freight lines, gathering troops, spreading the word and supplies. He spoke of the peasant uprisings and fought against the Federales with the battle cry of land and liberty, the re-appropriation of land from the wealthy haciendas by the poor armies, the traditional indigenous ejido system of communal land ownership, and visionaries like Ricardo Flores Magón1who dreamed of a future free from the tyranny of corrupt leaders and brutal authority.

It was nearly a century later, in post-NAFTA2 Mexico that the two of us rode on a north-bound freight train filled with desperate men fleeing the poverty of their hometowns, risking their lives to make the long journey to the border of the U.S. As the creaky old train carried us through small pueblos with thatched roof houses and corn fields, we stared into the hot sun and made a pact of eternal friendship, swearing that we'd spend the rest of our lives fighting for justice and breaking down walls put up by our governments and the societies that had raised us.

Juan Carlos was from the state of Aguascalientes and was a fiery young anarchist punk on his way north to find work in a hotel and send money to his seven brothers and sisters. I was a gringo from New York City, traveling alone and slowly making my way back after working as a human rights observer in the Lacandon Jungle in Chiapas with the Zapatistas. We'd met at the anarchist library in Mexico City and traded good stories and the T-shirts off each others' backs. After half a year of traveling and working volunteer jobs down in rural areas, I was suddenly back in the city, the fast paced slangfilled chilango Spanish much more akin to my native urban tongue, full of swears and cuss words. There was a whole crew of punks from Guadalajara that Juan Carlos had hooked up with, and they were leaving that night to head home after a weekend of playing a big show with their band. We traveled together up north on passenger trains as Juan Carlos and his friend rode freight, and we all met up in a punk house on the outskirts of Guadalajara a couple days later.

Just like most of my anarchist friends back home, I'd ridden a few freight trains in the U.S. I knew how to dodge a bull and read a train map and use a crew-change guide. I knew how to get on and off a moving hopper car or 48 well, hoist myself onto an open boxcar, hide between strings of track and tell which trains to ride by the number of units and what cargo they carried. I'd heard a few stories about the freight trains in Mexico and how dangerous they were, how they were full of bandits and thieves ready to knife you for a dollar and leave you dying in the desert sun. When Juan Carlos offered to take me on the freight lines in Mexico, I had no idea what I was getting myself into and how the short trip would change the course of my life forever.

It was a magical ride. After a loud and beautiful farewell party from the crew of punks, the two of us caught a train of empty boxcars out of the yard in Guadalajara and rode it up the coast to Mázatlan. By the time we had passed through all the yards. The train was full of people; it took us two nights and a day. The car we rode was full of corn scraps and as the train sped along the track, Juan Carlos and I threw handfuls of the grain off the sides on to the earth around us, laughing and singing to each other about sowing the seeds of the revolution. It was the middle of spring, and when our train sided amidst acres of mango orchards, hundreds of us jumped off the train and filled our pockets with handfuls of the huge red and green fruits. At night we watched shooting stars from the door of the boxcar and during the day we watched the huge jagged mountains fly by in the distance.

Unlike the trains back home, where the sight of another tramp was rare if ever, the freights in Mexico were literally covered in riders. Our boxcar was filled with people, all men, all full of stories of hardship and suffering. Some had made the journey before. For some it was their first time. All of them carried few or no possessions and all of them had dreams of life on the other side of the border. They called themselves las trampas and when they spoke of the U.S., they always called it El Otro Lado, literally, The Other Side. The men on the boxcar next to us were from Tegucigalpa, Honduras, and each of them had money saved to pay to the men who were known as coyotes to guide them across the border. There was a Salvadorian family two cars down, a thick-mustached man, his wife, and two little children who would smile at me when I passed. Everyone was friendly to me, the only gringo on the train. They asked lots of questions about the Zapatistas and my travels and treated me like a brother.

After a day and a half on the train, I started to have an intense realization — riding freight trains south of the U.S. border was like the accounts I'd read of riding during the Great Depression in the U.S. It was straight out of a John Steinbeck novel except it was Mexico in the 1990s. After a day and a half on the train, listening to people's stories, having time to reflect on the months I'd spent in Guatemala and Chiapas, as the mountains and towns blew by the door of the boxcar, I started thinking about the inevitability of revolution. I started to think about how so many of the people who have been fucked over by the U.S. and their own nationals in league with American business, left without recourse, slowly but surely make the journey across the border solely for survival. I started to realize that the men I was traveling with were refugees fleeing the wasteland that had been created by the economic equivalent of a scorched earth policy throughout Mexico and Central America. Everyone waiting at the militarized border were desperately trying to get a tiny piece of the riches horded in the U.S. If these people couldn't be confined to urban slums, they'd surely end up in prison or dead. A geographical divide cannot sustain the wealth disparity for long. I shivered in the warm, tropical air.

I crossed the border in Tijuana a few weeks later, scruffy and broke. My Zapatista literature and photos had been confiscated back in Mázatlan by the Federales, but all I had to do was flash my passport and I didn't get a second look by the immigration police.

When I returned to the Bay Area, I rode freight trains with a crew of friends to Active Resistance, the anarchist gathering in Chicago. During those summer travels, waiting in the hobo jungles and on the edge of yards and in the towns along the train line, I began to notice that most people I came across on freight trains were from Mexico and Central America. I recognized Spanish graffiti under train bridges and on the trains, calling out hometowns and Central American countries with scrawled grease sticks.

I became obsessed. Back in New York, after a friend taught me to use the internet, I began to look up articles and press releases from the U.S. rail companies. I found news articles on labor websites about modern day Mexican train robbers, poor peasants who would put rocks on the tracks and rob the trains for corn and sugar as they passed through their towns. And it wasn't an isolated incident I read about — it was happening all over Mexico, from Durango to Veracruz to Gómez Palacio.

At the same time, along with everything else in Mexico in the postNAFTA economy, the Mexican railway was being privatized and sold to U.S. corporations. I started to see a pattern. As rail lines in Mexico were consolidated into U.S. conglomerates, and the country became evermore impoverished, the people lost respect for the system. The railroads in Mexico had been an icon of nationalism since the revolution. It interconnected the different rural areas. It was the way that low-income people got around. The freight lines were thought of as fourth-class travel, a necessary social service for the poor and destitute. The global economy was robbing them of their only means of transportation.

After living in Oakland for the winter, I spent spring and summer riding trains up and down the West Coast, working in the day-labor spots with immigrants and sleeping in missions and hobo camps, writing stories about the men I met and the life and struggle on the road. I had a plan to write exciting travel stories to educate people about the global economy and give voice to this population. My plan was to cross to the other side of the border and ride freight to Tapachula, the industrial city in Chiapas on the border of Guatemala, where the train line ends and the journey to the U.S. for so many begins. I never made it.

I ended up in jail in Texas for stealing food. I ended up in love in California. I ended up living on a farm on a tiny island in British Columbia with my girlfriend. I was determined to learn how to grow my own food so I wouldn't be reliant on the agribusiness death machine for the rest of my life. I grew weary of carrying all my stuff in a backpack and dreaming of having a room of my own somewhere.

One of my struggles, as I traveled and wrote, was that I didn't know why I was doing it. Who was I writing to? Why was I writing at all? After writing zines for my friends and dreaming of being a writer like my father, I thought this was going to be my first big story that would launch me on my career as an up-and-coming journalist. But my days along the Texas-Mexican border convinced me that the world was too fucked up for another gabacho travel writer trying to pass through Mexican people's lives and pitch self-indulgent stories to U.S. leftist weeklies. I was sick of being an outsider and I was sick of being so lonely.

The traditional path for someone from my economic class and culture would have been to go to college and get a job with the Peace Corps or a nongovernmental organization working for justice. To use my white skin privilege and education to make the world a better place in a socially conventional way, to have a comfortable and stable life. But I just never fit into the place that I came from. Some part of me carried around the feeling of a perpetual underdog. Something about my temperament led me to the world of the anarchists, who taught me about the difference between charity and mutual aid, about finding my allegiance with people's movements rather than the governments or big organizations that claim to represent them.

Underground Tradition

Once upon a time I had this cool girlfriend who taught me how to ride freight trains. We practiced getting on and off boxcars and grainer ladders together in a switch yard in West Philadelphia. We had met in the summer under the big Texas sky and traveled with friends to the West Coast, packed into a van full of carnival dreams of revolution. We caught a hotshot out of Roseville, California, in the middle of the summer and rode it up through the Cascade Mountain range through the thick, lush forest land of Southern Oregon. I was hooked. Something alchemical happened to me during those summer travels. I got a taste of freedom and never wanted to turn back.

The railroads were the first corporations in the U.S. who monopolized transportation and transit. Before highways and cars outnumbered people 11 to 1, trains were a way of traveling the country and moving goods. Now trains are a relic from a period of history; a reminder of how things once were, with lessons to teach us — if we listen to their stories.

We can learn so much about this country by looking at the rise and the fall of railroads, reading the stories in the names of the old rail companies painted on the sides of cars and the years on the steel bridges spanning across rivers. The trains can be read like memoirs and unbiased history texts; robber barons who ransacked the public good to make their fortunes, pillaging of Indian lands, the boom and bust of train towns, sweat and blood of thousands of immigrant workers who died laying track, migration west in search of fortune and the acquisition of new territory after the Mexican war, industrialization and growth of cities, the appearance of national rather than regional markets, and the development of the modern interdependent American economy and culture.

But like the Chinese rail laborers excluded from the photos of white men in suits celebrating the opening of the Union Pacific's transcontinental railroad in 1869, there is a social and economic history that is not taught in school or documented in our history texts. While luxurious passenger trains brought the wealthy from one side of the country to the other there was a hidden class of passengers whose story is rarely told. While wealthy speculators and small businessmen rode on seats with room to stretch their legs, relax their arms, and were fed culinary delicacies by waiters in uniform, hordes of poor and displaced people rode freight trains. They were hobos and tramps, economic outcasts of society who lived on the social fringe in the jungle camps at the edge of train yards. These two stories transpired simultaneously, but only the first was widely narrated.

The common thread of war and work throughout history is the story of the poor doing the work of the rich. The first hobos were lost armies of Civil War veterans looking for work, traveling on the newly completed iron network of tracks built during the wartime economic boom. No one seems to know for sure, but the term hoe boy is reputed to be the name given to guys who would travel with their possessions tied up on the stick of their hoes, riding trains looking for farm work on the plantations of the wealthy.

The hobo's ranks grew as the U.S. began industrializing on a mass scale in the middle of the 19th century. New machines displaced workers from iron, coal, printing, glass, shoe factories, and flour-mills. The economy needed a growing workforce that could follow the new industries created at greater distances. They found work at the railroad construction sites, in the mines, in the timberlands, on the sheep and cattle ranches, in the grain belt, and in the orchards. The wandering mass of homeless men traveling by railroad was an important source of labor that fueled industrial expansion. The drive of American industry westward opened these new kinds of jobs — jobs remote from family and communal life. The labor was irregular, in scattered and often isolated areas, and the men who answered the call to work had to be mobile and adaptable.

When the Great Depression hit in the 1930s, hobos swelled into the millions as the search for work sent men and women out onto the rails. A thriving subculture emerged throughout the country with its own slang and symbols written on walls. Hobo colleges were setup by visionaries who dreamt of empowering and educating homeless travelers. The Industrial Workers of the World, an anarchist labor union, sent men all over the country on the trains in an attempt to organize itinerant workers with their dream of creating the "One Big Union."

But that was a long time ago. After World War II, massive public subsidy into the highways and airlines took a toll on the railroad industry. In the early 1970s, many lines went bankrupt and were saved by the federal government. The 1990s saw a huge consolidation in the railroad industry as corporate giants ate each other and tightened security. When I tell people that I ride freight trains, they laugh or get wide-eyed incredulous. They didn't realize people did that anymore.

When you travel the rails it's possible to get a different grasp of what's going on around the country. You see forest clear cuts, factories spewing towers of chemicals, barbed-wire lots of rusted-out cars — the backyard of capitalism away from highway rest stops. When you travel on the trains, you can talk to guys at the missions, the labor pools, and the hobo camps — the ones trying to float up to the thin layer of wealth like a thin layer of oil on water. The very thing that once had the power to unite the disenfranchised masses is a purgatory, straddling dreams of the past and a grave, impenetrable present.

And then, of course, there's me and my friends — the anarchists and the activists, the crusties and punks, riding to gatherings and radical communities and Earth First! camps. We do it because it's a free ride on The Man. We do it because it's pure adventure and adrenaline, sweet like sex, and as dirty and beautiful. My friends and I have this whole other map we read when we travel across the country — grainy and faded, it's a forgotten path, blazed long before those we are familiar with today. We have our underground networks of friends that pass information about catch out spots to each other, the crumpled crew-change sheets at the bottom of all our backpacks and the rail maps drawn in each others' journals.

(Continues…)


Excerpted from "Maps to the Other Side"
by .
Copyright © 2013 Sascha Altman DuBrul.
Excerpted by permission of Microcosm Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

Part I - Golden Thread,
1. Juan Carlos' Grandfather,
2. Underground Tradition,
3. La Esquina,
4. Selling Out,
5. Escape from the Monocult,
6. Back on the Road,
7. The Battle in Seattle,
8. BASIL (Bay Area Seed Interchange Library),
9. Guerilla Gardening in North Oakland,
10. Portait of a Protest,
11. Too Close to the Sun,
PART II - Wax and Feathers,
12. Walking the Edge of Insanity,
13. Original Icarus Project Mission Statement,
14. Navigating the World of Mental Health as a Radical in the 21st Century,
15. Time Travel and Alternate Realities,
16. A Handful of Seeds in a World Full of War,
17. Underneath the Wild Garden Waits to Grow,
18. Blinking Red Lights and the Souls of Our Friends,
19. How I started Believing in Ghosts,
20. Return to the Other Side,
21. Adventures in the Land of Greasecars and Fireflies,
22. Dangerous Gifts,
23. Never Never Land and the First Big Icarus Meeting,
24. Friday Night Suicide Hotline,
25. Plan For Not Going Too Crazy,
26. Germantown Community Farm,
27. We Are Our Own Safety Nets, We Weave Together,
28. In Memory of Brad Will,
29. Breathing New Pathways Into My Head and Heart,
30. Gravel Angels and the Social Freak Brigade,
31. The Unraveling,
33. Faith in the Mad Ones,
34. The Edges and In Between Spaces/When You're Burning,
35. Bellevue Hospital Center Chart Review,
PART III - Bipolar Cartography,
36. Spiral Bound,
37. Mad Adventures and the Imagined Communities of Icarus,
38. Ashram Dreams,
39. We Are Cursed to Live in Interesting Times: Gestalt Awareness Practice/Drama Therapy/Generative Somatics,
40. Unraveling the Biopsychiatric Knot: a Future History of the Radical Mental Health Movement,
41. The Opposite of Being Depressed — An Interview,
42. Generative Narratives and the Counterculture Psychiatrists,
43. Mindful Occupation,
44. Epilogue - Maps for the Future,
45. Acknowledgements and Mad Love,

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Sascha DuBrul is a madly gifted storyteller. . . . Whether he is writing about seed-saving, or madness, or the history of punk, his is one of the most passionate and relevant voices of these crazy times. So read this book. It will inspire you and make you feel good to be alive."  —Ruth Ozeki, author, My Year of Meats and All Over Creation

"Crack open this book at your peril. For this way lies madness . . . divine madness. Witness the concrete visions and subterranean journeys of a 21st-century vagabond, captured here in plain English."  —Eric Drooker, author, Howl, and illustrator, Illuminated Poems with Allen Ginsburg

"There's black pride, and gay pride. And if 32-year old Sascha DuBrul has his way, "mad pride" will become equally ubiquitous. That's mad, as in mentally ill. DuBrul's Icarus Project believes that part of the problem with mental illness is the words we use to describe it. Diagnosed bipolar when he was 18, DuBrul says he could have dealt better with his diagnosis if it had been framed differently, not in clinical terms but as a "dangerous gift." Now Sascha and others are going across the country giving workshops to change the language around mental illness."  —Weekend America, Public Radio

"How did the New York underground of punk rock music, squatting, and homeless protest give rise to a thriving and innovative peer-run mental health community? Are there creative gifts to be found in the depths of madness? Does the future of Mad Pride lie in the joining of activism with spirituality? Icarus Project co-founder Sascha Altman DuBrul discusses his escape into apocalyptic visions and psychiatric hospitals, and how he was inspired to challenge the identity of bipolar disorder."  —Madness Radio

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