Part One - Backpacking Across the U.S.
This is my story. Well, part of it anyway. I worked so hard in undergraduate and graduate school. I not only labored through a gaggle of academics, but I positively slaved through a series of art courses. Except for art history and art education, all of them were studio classes. I learned to draw, to paint, 2-D and 3-D design, sculpture, jewelry-making, screen printing, lithography, and etching.
My obsession to become an artist and to teach art at the university level proved to be difficult, but achievable. Finally, after five years of non-stop work, I prevailed. I was an art instructor at a university. This was my dream. I used to say, “If I were independently wealthy and had no need to earn a living, I would still teach art on the college level.” And, I meant it.
Now that you know my struggle to earn this position, you might be inclined to ask, “How could you throw it all away? How could you trash an almost lifetime dream…a dream you realized?”
How indeed? By championing my students and their sometimes petty and invalid criticism, and sometimes legitimate complaints, of the shortcomings of higher education. My support for my students did not go unnoticed by my employers. I made myself unwelcome in the halls of academia. We’re not talking about anything illegal here. Just misplaced support. Unknowingly, I had bitten the hand that fed me…more than once.
Consequently, at the age of 29, I was open to the call of the road. No longer having a regular schedule of teaching, making art, sex and drugs; I’m to be a purposeless wanderer. What had I to lose? Without my label — instructor of art, I had lost my identity…an identity for which I had worked so long and hard. Rudderless, lost and alone, with no immediate direction, I had no status, no connection, no identity. Who was I? An instructor without a classroom, an artist without a studio, an unemployed…what? There has to be more to life than this.
