Getting organized to be on the road for a year has been kind of a lot of work, especially because I only got news of the McKnight funding a month ago, and without that funding as a basis, I don’t know that I would have had the courage to take on this River Project in its full incarnation. Getting everything settled in NYC for a year away, catching the Ethan Allan to Rutland Monday, and sleeping in my tiny cabin on my land in Brandon the last two nights has been a really THRILLING first step! I feel such a strong sense of finishing one phase of my life and beginning anew. It’s pretty great to wake up along with the brightening sky and lie here looking out at the clouds and the mountains and the sun gradually adding light and heat to everything.

Last night I started reading a book about Dorothea Lange’s fieldwork in 1939 for the Farm Security Administration. One inspiration for my River Project is the idea that I want to understand this country at this moment in history. For so many years, I didn’t really feel like this was my country, exactly, and the election changed that. And the current financial crisis made me think a one-person WPA project (since even Obama’s administration is unlikely to imitate FDR and hire artists to travel around the country documenting and interviewing!) might be a really worthwhile thing for me to take on. And since I’m a musician, my documentation will start from sound rather than image, and my relation to words is also different from a writer or historian…

So last night, I was reading about how in 1958, Dorothea Lange taught a course at the California School of Fine Arts called “The Camera, an Instrument of Inward Vision: Where Do I Live?”

“To ask ‘Where do I live?’” wrote Lange, ”presupposes that one lives in a house, or a trailer, or a house boat or someplace with a certain amount of things–personal things. ‘Where do I live?’ could also suggest a type of dream-land full of ideas and ideals, or a social structure which seems to have established a guiding class ethic. Yes, this is where I live: in a land of road markers and guide posts; yet every man must still find his own way.“ [p. 45]

When I think about the question ‘Where do I live’, I realize that on one level, I have lived in the same apartment in NYC for twenty years, and I am rooted there about as deeply as a person can be rooted in a place. On another level, I really don’t have a clue where I live. And I hope this journey will help me find out.