These are special times for all of us activists who weren't activists a year and a month ago, but who are now veterans of the cold streets and who dress for the cold nights and make crazy signs to hold over highways and jump cyclone fences to take pictures and show up in parking lots to work with people we've never met before and stand over passing traffic in the bitter windchill holding lit letters that spell a message of accusation and hope, making advertisements for our own movement since we can't afford the slick billboards that separate the land from the landscape or the Koch-fueled blipvert agitprop saturating all channels proclaiming with Orwellian mastery, "It is working, Wisconsin. It is working. It is working…"
We had been contacted last week by CJ, an activist from Appleton, who wondered if the Overpass Light Brigade ever got up his way. It is over 200 miles round trip, but what the heck! I asked him if there was a good location, and he shared with me the specs of a great pedestrian bridge that continued a foot trail through some beautiful grasslands, connecting the Fox ValleyTechnical College on one side of busy Highway 41 with some local arena on the other side. A quick search on Google Streetview verified that this was indeed a great location. So there we were at 3:00 in the afternoon of a stormy winter Friday packing the van in our Milwaukee driveway and hitting the highway.
It had snowed heavily on Thursday night and a storybook fluff softened every visible surface. Tree branches bent under the weight of tight water, and the wind threw ice crystals like sand. By 4:00 the sun was occluded, a dim incandescent glow behind layers of threatening grey. I wasn't even sure that people would show up in such weather, but there we were after our two hour drive, in the parking lot of Fox Valley Technical College, making introductions while people just kept coming. These folks were dressed for it, too: snowmobile suits, snow pants, knit hats underneath hoods, gauntlet gloves holding hand-warmers, lots of red, white and black, with a bit of green and yellow thrown in. These were no-nonsense activists, hardened, they proudly proclaimed, from months of gathering signatures in the cold, and months before that, spent marching the streets surrounding the state capitol.
There were more folks there than we've ever gathered, and people kept arriving through the evening. I guess they had set up their own Facebook page, "The Overpass Light Brigade Coming To Appleton." It was a really diverse group: a couple of young kids and their mom and dad, some teenagers, middle-aged activists, a young man in a wheelchair, older activists. Our simple bridge-occupation even attracted the attentions of the local press. Everyone was excited to be a part of OLB in spite of the weather. Hell, who knows, maybe it is powerful because of the weather. It is certainly powerful because of the people. Something about seeing the silhouettes of all the Holders of the Lights shifts the event from mere signage propaganda to an odd kind of testimonial. It is the main lesson of the Occupy movement: that bodies matter, and radical action can be defined by bodies in space standing against overt and covert assumptions and assertions of totalizing power.
After people settled in on the bridge, I jumped a fence to get down by the highway to get some good pictures. It is tough work in the cold and dark. The tripod keeps things steady for long exposure shots, and I've gotten used to the moonwalk action of taking an outer glove off, putting my reading glasses on to see the settings, focussing the camera, taking the inner glove off to take some shots, looking for my reading glasses which fell in the tall grass, putting my inner and outer gloves back on because outer space is cold, finding my reading glasses which were in my deep pocket afterall hiding among the cell phone and hand warmers, then scoping out a new location for some even better shots… all the while tunneled into some weird sonic space as the semi-trucks roared through the darkness, their solid sides melting into extended exposure, the ghost tracery of running lights writing lines across the night.
As we came off the bridge at the end of our occupation, I ran ahead to get some shots of the signs in slow parade across the marsh trail. It was a surreal processional: lit letters in single file, floating through the grassy wetlands. Our video camera was out of juice, so I rapidly set my tripod, and shot time-lapse as fast as I could. Back at the parking lot, everyone was ready to get warm, we packed up and said our goodbyes. Some of the kind folks even handed me gas money. The money is helpful, as the costs do accrue, but the thought and gesture is way more meaningful to what we are trying to do.
The drive from Appleton to Milwaukee should have taken less than two hours. After a grueling 3 hour drive cringing along at 30 mph over the ice-glazed highways, we arrived safely home. Somewhere near Fond du Lac we began to see cars kissing ditches. We counted over twelve in various states of off-road stress, with a stream of State Troopers flashing blue and red warning lights next to tow trucks figuring the best angle for cables and hooks. The anxiety parade of strobing lights and sirens and cars with flashers on made for a tight grip on the steering wheel. Even the big 18 wheelers carefully crawled the hammer lanes, humility forestalling the dreaded jackknife. We made our slow progress, looking for the raking yellow strobes of salt trucks to try to get behind. They were out, but seemed overwhelmed by the ice.
It is hard not to think about your life while driving, especially when you see EMTs trying to extract someone from a car that spun down a steep embankment. "Are we crazy to be doing this?" I asked badscience, my partner in art and activism. "Are you kidding?" she responded. "This is where the coolness of art meets the urgency of resistance."
This is where we are in our lives: the coolness of art and the urgency of activism. The road can get slippery at times, but I couldn't think of a better one to be traveling.