In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

I guess it all started the day I quit. In December 2001, I resigned from a position as a tenured professor at a large Arizona university, and settled back in to my old stomping grounds of Fort Worth, Texas. I knew that, at best, this move would leave me a gap of eight months or so until I might or might not locate the next academic position in the fall of 2002. This gap in turn meant that, in the meantime, my only guaranteed income would be whatever few—and I do mean few—royalties might trickle in from my books. But it also meant that I had an eight-month period for unfettered Weld research—if only I could Wgure out a way to survive economically while doing it. Given my long-standing personal and scholarly interest in the often illicit worlds of scrounging, recycling, and secondhand living, the answer seemed obvious, if risky: I’d try to survive as a Dumpster diver and trash picker.1 I’d try to adopt a way of life that was at the same time Weld research and free-form survival. So early in 2002 I rigged an old Wfteen-dollar black-and-white Schwinn bicycle with a 1 Sordid Signs c e ce c e c e c e 1 secondhand front basket and some extra bungee cords for the back deck, and set out mostly on this bike, other times on foot, to see what I could Wnd. With very few exceptions, all my subsequent scrounging was undertaken in these two-wheel or two-footed modes; as an avid bicyclist, I’m not much for the destructive ecological politics of the automobile in the Wrst place, and besides, my guess was that the value of whatever materials I could scrounge would hardly balance against the unrelenting cost of running a car.2 In fact, as the months of scrounging rolled on, and this old bicycle gradually fell apart, I replaced it not with an automobile but with another bicycle, an old one-speed BMX model I scrounged from behind a Dumpster and repaired with scrounged bicycle parts. This approach to personal transportation seemed appropriate to the worlds of both scrounging and bicycles, by the way. After all, the Wrst modern mountain bike emerged from the doit -yourself scrounging of legendary bicycle designer Gary Fisher, who in 1974 “blacksmithed the now famous klunker from scavenged objects.”3 I’m not much for shopping, either, and so, taking my natural proclivities up a notch, I all but boycotted retail establishments during these months, instead relying as much as possible on what I could scrounge for my daily needs. As I found, and as I’ll explain in subsequent chapters, urban scrounging did in fact provide me all that I needed for daily survival, with the exception of some food items—and these could likely have been scrounged as well, had I cared to make that my focus. In fact, my scrounging yielded so much material wealth that I sent much of it on to friends, homeless shelters, food banks, and charitable organizations. Patrolling the neighborhoods of central Fort Worth, sorting through trash piles, exploring Dumpsters, scanning the streets and the gutters for items lost or discarded, I gathered the city’s degraded bounty, then returned home to sort and catalog the take. These urban neighborhoods in turn provided a wonderfully varied setting for my work and my research; within an easy bike ride of my house are old industrial areas, rail yards, million-dollar mansions, working-class neighborhoods, middle-class suburbs, little commercial clusters, and the large downtown business district. The scrounger’s world, I found, oVers many a spatial permutation. Mention of “my house” suggests an important qualiWcation that shaped this undertaking. During these months I did indeed have a very modest home, and a partner working some thirty-Wve hours a week at the generous corporate wage of $9.50 an hour—and while neither of these factors would exactly qualify either of us for middle-class approval, both certainly disqualify me from any claim of somehow and suddenly becoming for these eight months a destitute soul dependent entirely on my own scrounging. The point of the endeavor was neither to pretend nor imagine that I was a homeless Dumpster diver, anyway, but rather to explore and embrace the rhythms of urban scrounging as best I could. And besides, as I 2 Sordid Signs [18.119.160.154] Project MUSE...

Share