It turns out heaven is a place on Earth, bathed in a cloud of dust on the tracks between Black Butte, Oregon and Mt. Shasta, California. That’s where train hoppers have created the Black Butte Center for Railroad Culture, a museum celebrating the splendor of transience, complete with a zine library and punk venue in two refurbished antique boxcars. When I visited the Center during a summer gathering, I couldn’t help but marvel at the togetherness of such a collective, and the very existence of a place where a phrase like “queer feminist train hopper” is nothing to gawk at.

Amidst such a vibrant sub-subculture, sometimes resident and full time punk virtuoso Robnoxious is well known for providing a good bit of community glue through his zines, illustrations, and screenprint designs. Heavyweight zine distro Microcosm now carries a wide selection of Rob’s prolific output, exposing a much broader audience to gems like You Fucked Up– a dreamy post-apocalyptic anarchist fantasy series whose fourth and final installation arrives in early 2011.

Shut Up and Love the Rain, released in September, is an earnest and hilarious comic diary of young Robert’s discovery of human sexuality and his own latent queerness. He doesn’t stigmatize or shy from the details, and the result is a narrative that empowers us all to utter our tales of awkward adolescence. As much as I enjoy Rob’s bare, yet whimsical illustration style, my favorite sections of Love the Rain are his text memoirs. These may be the most frank accounts of youthful experimentation I’ve ever read, and his triumphant tales of masturbation will have you fetishizing the banana in ways you never imagined. The latter half of the zine takes on a more sentimental tone– featuring an intimate interview with Rob’s parents about his father’s transgender coming out story (you can also read this section on his blog). It’s a sex-positive feel-good family dramedy for the rest of us.

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A couple years ago my friend Billy hit a deer driving back to Eugene on one of Oregon’s winding two-lane highways. Always an opportunist, Billy put the doe carcass in his pick-up and took it home, where he skinned and gutted the animal in the side yard between his house and the sorority next door. He made venison chili, but the head was left over, and for months he kept the last evidence of his crime wrapped in a plastic bag in the communal freezer.

This is everyone’s favorite story about Billy; it takes a truly audacious person to turn a tragedy into dinner. And roadkill reclamation has a way of satisfying our morbid curiosity with death and collision—without the ethical implications of rubbernecking at car wrecks or attending human funerals a la Harold and Maude.

The California Roadkill Observation System provides another ethical framework for gawking at roadkill. In the name of science, university researchers and volunteers out of my home town, Davis, California, have been fanatically photographing steamrolled animals in and around the Central Valley. The research will apparently be used to design better highways in the future that would decrease the real-life, recurring episodes of Car vs. Wild (as in the Discovery show, the man and his invention usually prevail over “the wild.” Though everyone loseWeight Exercises when a deer goes through a windshield.)

In its current manifestation, however, the Observation System is most useful as an access point to hundreds of categorized images of dead animals splayed heroically across the state highways. While there are certainly an abundance of gross-out roadkill photo albums online (enough to be spoofed in Nigel Grimmer‘s Roadkill Family Album), this one is uniquely thorough and unapologetic. Better roadside landscaping may be the reason behind the images, but the camera is clearly focused on the animal–the carnage often lining up with the rule of thirds. Which leads the online viewer to wonder: Why is it necessary for the data in this research project to be publicly accessible? When I compulsively visit the “Mammal (large)” section of the “Roadkill Photo Gallery,” will it actually influence whether or not I run over more of my large animal friends in the future?

The photos are stark obituaries for the deceased fauna. In human obituaries, one reads about the mundane hobbies of the dead and wonders in private how it all ended. In roadkill photos, the death scene is our only access to the animal’s life, while everything that came before remains a mystery.

“Both deer had been dead about one week, the first one probably an older kill and the 2nd within one week,” says one entry. “What was curious was that they went all the way down to the lake before dying near each other. Normally deer would avoid another dead deer.”

More photos after the jump; you can’t look but you can’t look away.

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When thumbing by the side of the road, there is often a moment of doubt. Would anybody pull over here, I wonder, and can they even read my sign? Every car that drives by is a betrayal, and the one that finally stops revives my trust in humanity. And I love getting picked up by other women. It’s a rare treat—a relief from the double edge of chivalry and predation that one fears when accepting a ride from a male stranger.

That’s how I met Ms. Alexis Wolf of Olympia, WA and her charming zine about Mary Wollstonecraft. Hyena in Petticoats is a 60-page fan zine for the author of 1792′s A Vindication of the Rights of the Women and mother of early sci-fi novelist Mary Shelley.

The zine includes a series of journal entries from Wolf’s “quiet pilgrimage” to London, where she lived with anarchist philosopher William Godwin until she died in 1797. When I met Alexis I was at the close of my own, destination-less pilgrimage around North America, on my way back to Oregon.

Alexis looked like someone I would know. And, as we came to realize, she actually knew my oldest best friend from Davis High School, Molly Raney, whose musical alter-ego, “Poppet,” had performed recently at Alexis’ house in Olympia. Alexis, with her band Letters, would soon be on her way to return the favor by playing a show with Molly in Davis.

She knew all the lyrics to Molly’s songs. It was one of those meetings that makes a person feel both at home and utterly disoriented. I will stop short of the word “coincidence,” or “serendipity,” because things like this happen when if you travel enough, and Olympia is the capital of small worlds. When I finally sat down and read Wolf’s zine, it was love like being wrapped in a down comforter during a rain storm. I immediately checked out two books of Wollstonecraft’s letters.

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Nudity: the way it approaches you tends to shape your emotional response.

Last week, for example, I was out with my old roommate, discussing his new roommate: “It wouldn’t bother me if the guy walked around totally naked all the time. It’s just that he walks around wearing a shirt with no pants,” he said. “Like, he’s got a t-shirt on with his dick hanging out. It sneaks up on you.” “Does he wear shoes too?” I asked. “Oh no. Thank god no. If he was gonna do that I’d just move out.”

In graphite and pastel self-portraits, Toronto-based artist Zachari Logan has got the perfect approach down. For several years he has sustained a body of work featuring only his own body (and the occasional cat) as a masculine archetype. I especially like his collection of specifically pants-less drawings, which seem to explore the sort of phallic narcissism that my former roommate fears at his current residence.

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If I was going to characterize my Oregon home with a particular song, I’d go with Tom Wait’s “All the World is Green.” It’s a song my hippie roommates sing by the fire when it’s raining too much to leave the house. It’s melancholy, like the blanket of clouds over Eugene that never really breaks from September through May. It longs for things to grow back that we have destroyed, like relationships and forests (“We can bring back the old days again, when all the world is green.”) The title describes one observation that many people have when they first visit Oregon, before they see between the trees and notice all of the scars on the land.

In February I took up a photography project to document the ongoing conflict between Earth First! activists and the logging industry. Here, activism still has a physical battlefield. The environmental anarchism that characterized Eugene in the 90′s has waned since the federal government made a number of arrests in the early 00′s (the “Green Scare”). Still, the forest defenders come back every year.

View the rest of my photo essay after the break. Listen to Tom Waits while you watch for a more complete sensory experience. It’s a love song, I know, but the color is just right. (more…)

[ Note: Please give a warm welcome to Future Shipwreck's newest contributor, the lovely Grace Pettygrove. I've known Grace since high school, and she has never failed to help me see what others miss in the world. I can't wait to share her many talents with all of you! - Graham ]

Oftentimes photography feels like a form of thievery. The artist steals facial expressions and sunsets from their larger contexts, dropping in through the skylight and crawling away with life’s most visually provocative moments.

Then there are other photographers, like Alessandra Sanguinetti, who document change in a radical way: by staying in one place. In two essays, spanning a decade, Sanguinetti photographed a girlhood friendship in the Argentinean countryside. Guille and Belinda, as girls, explore “the Enigmatic Nature of Their Dreams.” The earlier images of their youth are intimate, fly-on-the-wall portraits of dress-up games and moments of utter inseparability—moments so particular to the friendship of little girls—interspersed with staged scenes that seem to remind the viewer of the ultimate mortality of young relationships.

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