Recycling Our Highways: Part 4
Marty Pigue has continued collecting cans, glass, and plastic throughout the heat of summer, only things may change if and when the California budget gets approved.
I went over to Vidal Junction, Marty’s home base, last week and found him still hard at work although he said that he’s now sharing a small cottage next to the California Agricultural Inspection Station. Further, he’s applied for a job there, taken and passed the tests, and they say he’ll come on board when the California budget gets approved; meanwhile there’s a freeze on new hires.
My main reason for stopping was to give Marty a full set of hardcopy printouts for the three stories I’ve written and hardcopy versions of their images. I went on to the salt mine in Milligan and spent a few days there collection information for a story on how the mine and processing center are being rescued from oblivion (more on this later). When I came back through Vidal, Marty had copies of the printouts and images tacked to his notice board.
When I asked him how he was doing financially he said, “OK,” but needs to save enough to get organized for something that passes for everyday life.
While Marty doesn’t have a bank account, you can reach him C/O Kim Price, HC 20 Box 444, Vidal, CA 92280. Cell: 760-464-9352.
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Love this story. I’m not sure how just now discovering your writings. I have not stopped reading for days
Glad you like the stories. I’ve more or less stopped putting stuff up here as I’ve been busy elsewhere. I also post stories to iReport; the latest two are here:
Highways unleash America’s wandering, restless spirit (about me)
http://www.cnn.com/2011/TRAVEL/10/19/highway.stories.irpt/index.html
Occupy Phoenix, October 14,15 (about Phoenix)
http://ireport.cnn.com/docs/DOC-690901
I caught, “Highways unleash America’s wandering” while flipping through the CNN site the other day and that’s how I discovered your stuff. You have a very unique way of telling the “down home” story.
Until Nicole wrote that report I never thought of myself as a storyteller, just long winded. But now that it’s been brought to my attention I realize that I’m basically following in my Dad’s footsteps who often told stories of what he or somebody else he had met had done.
This way I can speak freely as I’m talking about what I’ve seen with my own two eyes — with photos to back that up — instead of making simple statements of alleged fact without any evidence, or gather evidence for the general case which only handles one-standard-deviation-from-the-mean reality.
If you dig down further on iReport you can see a bunch of reports on my Red States, Blue Highway project where I traveled from Mexico to Canada interviewing people and writing stories during the last 30 days of the 2008 Presidential Election
There’s an even larger bunch of reports on Open.Salon for the Small Town America project where my wife and I traveled 15,000 miles north, south, east and west across American stopping and interviewing people in small towns. These stories are here: http://open.salon.com/blog/dave_mclane/2010/02/18/defining_small_town_america
Some day when I have the time I’m going to move the stories from both those projects onto Actual-Life, but no time right now. My wife and I are banging our heads together how we can do an Occupy Southwest project where we would gather information in the six southwestern states and post stories in various places. I would put mine on iReport, Open.Salon and Actual Life. She writes for Shukan Kinyobi, a hardcopy weekly magazine in Tokyo, and has her own blog http://www.newslogusa.com (both are in Japanese).