Empire of Scrounge: Inside the Urban Underground of Dumpster Diving, Trash Picking, and Street Scavenging

3. Street Knowledge

Excavated for their possibilities, the city’s streets, trash piles, and Dumpsters yielded items in such assortment that scrounged materials seemed simply to wash over my various needs and desires. Shoes and booze, shelving and bolts and buckets were as easily discarded by others as they were available to me, so long as I was willing to wander the city and, sometimes, wait a bit for their appearance. So bounteous was my daily urban harvest, in fact, that it regularly provided not just the material solution to my own needs, but bedding for animals, clothes for homeless shelters, gifts for friends and family as well. Certainly the streets and alleys can’t sustain every person who turns to them for survival, nor should they be made to; my experiences in no way write a prescription for general urban sustenance, nor in any way excuse the conditions of inequality and injustice that leave so many with little else than the Dumpster and the street. But for me— privileged as I was to have my health, a bicycle, and a steady place to sleep—the empire of 73 Street Knowledge c e ce c e c e c e 3 scrounge oVered up a daily exercise in freeform self-reliance. Still, I was after more than this. While my primary task was to survive day-to-day by way of my scrounging, I also set myself the task of examining my own scrounged survival, and more broadly set the goal of understanding the empire from which others and I gleaned daily existence. This search for understanding, it seemed, oVered both an opportunity and a test: Could I rely on the empire not only for my material needs, but for the very perspectives by which to make sense of it? Put diVerently, if the empire could oVer a sort of shambling material self-reliance, could it oVer some sort of analytic and aesthetic self-reliance, too? Such questions, by the way, did not occur to me at the beginning of my scrounging adventures. Early on, my plan was simply to scrounge the city and record what I found—and if, later on, I did decide to write about it all, I assumed I would bring to bear the usual array of exterior analytic models. But as the days and items accumulated, so did the moments in which I realized the empire oVered scraps of knowledge and bits of beauty along with its other accumulations—knowledge, even, of the empire itself, and of those who had discarded something of themselves in becoming part of it. These moments began to suggest to me that, while I was out there collecting shoes and shirts and silver spoons, I might as well also scrounge the city for . . . some understandings. Some Understandings Chapter Four will explore in some detail the practical process by which scrounging over time loops back on itself, with scrounged backpacks, hand tools, storage containers, sturdy clothes, and other items becoming a self-sustaining material support system that facilitates further scrounging. But a diVerent sort of looping reXexivity also emerged from scrounging, one that I found especially enjoyable while attempting both to live from scrounging and to make sense of it. This process built from the regular discovery while scrounging of discarded books, instruction manuals, magazines, and other sources of information—and from the further discovery that many of these resources could in fact help me understand the experience of scrounging itself. It seemed entirely appropriate, really: I learned to scrounge analytic tools as well as hand tools, to scrounge the very ideas and information by which to understand my own scrounging. Years before, during my days in the world of urban graYti and underground urban art, I had learned this dynamic from street artists who scrounged canvases and paint, and who scavenged discarded objects to use as stencils in their artwork—artists who utilized the city as a resource for creating the very art with which they decorated it. I soon realized that the same dynamic was available in the empire of scrounge. Information of all sorts was lost out there in the city—and Wnding it 74 Street Knowledge meant, in many cases, Wnding out about the world around me and my place in it as a scrounger. Scrounging rides so often led to the discovery of books and magazines, in fact, that I soon learned another lesson: my love for...