January 18, 2012

Passing on DC and an end to the Occutour

I almost got off the train in Washington D.C. yesterday. The OccupyCongress #J17 action was taking place and my good friend Michael McCarthy from Occupy Providence was there.

On the other hand, it was the last day of the 45-day Amtrak ticket I bought and I was in striking distance of being home after a month-and-a-half on the road.  I told McCarthy I was probably going to pass but reserved the right to change my mind.

Which I did.

I grabbed my pack from the luggage rack and actually got off the train during the five minute layover. Then I had second thoughts, and got back on. This is ridiculous, I thought, it’s pouring rain out and I’m physically and emotionally beat.

Then I second-guessed my second thoughts. There are Occupiers from all over the country convening on the nation’s capital today, how can on Occutour be complete without hitting that up. So I got off again, and sent McCarthy a text telling him I was going to meet him and began to lug my 48-pound pack and accompanying briefcase with laptop in it into a rainy DC day.

Moments before the train pulled out for good, however, I jumped back on, stored my pack back in the luggage rack and decided to take that train right back to Rhode Island, effectively ending my seven-week adventure on the road documenting the Occupy movement all across the country.

My project was never really about the direct actions, it was about the encampments and the local incarnations of the movement. A protest, while fun to cover, would do little to shed additional light on that narrative.

So after traveling for 49 days, visiting 23 cities and 21 different Occupy groups, logging at least 10,000 miles and spending almost all my money, I decided to finally head home – which is where I am writing this post from.

Now comes the hard part.

After a much needed rest, I’m going to pull out all these notebooks I’ve filled up at Occupations from Boston to San Diego and start digging through the information I collected in my reporting. There are still many stories to be told of my cross country trip. In fact, so far I’ve really only tackled the low-hanging fruit. The interesting tales will be when I start to really analyze the movement as seen through a broad cross-section of groups from almost every corner of the country.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll post stories on what I learned from spending seven weeks visiting as many different Occupations as I could armed only with a laptop, an iPhone, a train ticket and a couple hundred bucks. In the meantime, check out this interactive map of all the stories I’ve told to date:

— Bob Plain