I’ve been all over this country of ours, and briefly around Germany, but historically I chose not to take pictures, or videos, and instead consciously chose to live in that moment nix visual souvenirs, probably because my ma was so enwrapt in taking pictures. But, beginning when I went to Germany, I began to take photos of the things I wanted to share with my folks back home. So, about a year and half ago, in May of 2022, I flew up to Las Vegas Nevada to see my family, to steal my baby brother, and to go galavant around the desert for a while and these photos are the artifacts left of that time, mixed with some from my time in Big Bend last Christmas.

In my last video, you heard that I engage in both the minimal and maximal DIY veins and I think traveling, or at least reminiscing on travels, participates in that. Hodgson’s Post-Digital Rhetoric and the New Aesthetic “situates the bricoleur as a do-it-yourself (DIY) practitioner,” writes that the bricoleur is a tinkerer, one who “improvises with the material and nonmaterial possibilities at hand,” and says, “the bricoleur’s work is emergent and response to the material and nonmaterial conditions available to the productive situation” (143). Hodgson’s text also connects the DIY-Bricoleur to Edbauer Rice’s “mechanic” and states that do-it-yourself creation is “rooted in the personal–from personal projects to the personal connections one finds with the available means of expression” (143). Thus, if the bricoleur-mechanic-DIYer is a tinkerer who works with the available means and is rooted in the personal connections within and among those means, then the act of travel writing (or narrating) is a DIY activity since it is a creation made of the deeply personal, unrepeatable, experiences a traveler has with the material artifacts they have available, the higgledy-piggledy photos and videos one chooses to take. 

Traveling and DIYing is not only connected through the act of creating new material out of the primary texts taken during a road trip but roadtripping is also connected to DIYing in more transcendental ways. While Emerson’s Self-Reliance was speaking of a capital S “Self,” and discouraged wandering, Thoreau’s Walden exemplified the merger of capital and lowercase S self-reliance but stayed at home. Keroac’s On the Road carried on that merger of lower and capital S Self-reliance but took that show on the road. I think it is in this tradition that the DIY attitude of a tinkerer, creator, mechanic meshes with the tradition of “walking the earth,” perhaps as material for creation, but perhaps also as the act of self-tinkering, self-mechanicing, self-creation.   

All of this, of course, may be just an excuse to share some of the rad things I saw through the affordances given me by digital media and pixels. Though my viewers may never truly experience the Chisos mountains in 10 degrees on Christmas Eve or wake up 20 yards from the edge of a sheer Utah cliff, they can see it through my lens. And, while there is a peacefulness and fullness to a solo journey kept only to oneself, true to the spirit of shanghaing my little brother into the journey, adventures are often more fun when they’re shared with others, either in the moment or post-fact.