San Antonio Regional at Ruta Maya

What do you get when you pile 11 people, 2 baby strollers, a crib, and a cooler for an 11 day trip?

You get the 2006 National Poetry Slam in Austin, TX!!!

There's something distinctly familial about this slam thing.

One of the organizers of this year's NPS is from New Mexico. She's also 7 months pregnant, and her parents trying, to save them time/money dropped off a high chair, two stroller, and a crib so that we could take them too her. So, the first challenge, a sort of tetris challenge was to get everyone's personal gear in a 15 passenger Chevy Van:

which, despite having room for 15 passengers, does not have any luggage/trunk space, so the big comfy sleeping seat in the back became our luggage/trunk space.

Let's just say the ride is uncomfortable, but we made it, driving across central/west Texas in the early morning where conversations descend into just random stories that the navigator tells so that I stayed awake as dawn crept up over Abilene and I saw windmills on the horizon, smelled gas and feedlots, and listened to somebody snoring in one of the cramped back seats.

And yes, Texas is hot. And humid.

The first stop on the trip is a small 8 team event at Ruta Maya in San Antonio. Featuring teams from San Antonio, Austin, Boston-Cantab, Berkeley, Bowling Green, Corpus Christy, a pick up team, and Albuquerque. Split into two 4 team bouts, with the top two teams moving to a final round (with a one poem slam-off between the two 3rd place finisher to round out the 3 round, 5 team bout), the bouts were competitive and engaging.

Using the amazing duet between Damien and Jessica, ABQ jumped out to a quick lead and cruised into the final bout. In that bout, ABQ had to work but pulled out the win in the last rotation with a great solo piece by Damien. Good work Damien, and good call Kenn with hopes of doing well tonight in Dallas, which I'm not going to because I'm in Austin helping out with the last minute preparations.

So, blogging from the road and ready to listen, this is Don McIver, signing off.

Comments

Peregrinating the Albuquerque Bosque

The Map. Overview: Starting in the San Juans in Colorado, the Rio Grande "is the twenty-second longest river in the world and the fourth or fifth longest in North America" ( Texas State Historical Society ). While the river is characterized by the area it flows through, the river from Elephant Butte Dam to the south to Cochiti Dam in the north is called the Middle Rio Grande. And in the middle of the middle Rio Grande is the roughly 20 plus miles that flows through Albuquerque. From an airplane, the Rio Grande is a brown ribbon bordered a green ribbon. That green ribbon is the Bosque . I've always been fascinated really exploring an area, getting a sort of overview of an area then drilling down to really get it. It's led to me hiking the Sandias from end to end and then hiking outlying trails multiple times, biking all the trails in the Cedro Peak area because someone put them on a map, trying different routes to get to ...

"That's Scaughtland for ya!"

The United Kingdom Up at the top of that map, basically the top half, is a tiny nation with a big footprint. With roughly the same population as Minnesota, Scotland has a land mass the size of South Carolina, yet there are more people in the United States that have Scottish and/or Scotch-Irish ancestry than live in Scotland. My family is one of those. In the course of growing up, I was indoctrinated to celebrate my Scottish ancestry (primarily by my grandmother but we'll talk about that later). So a year ago, my wife took a trip with her mother to Japan. I looked at the pictures that she posted, and when I'd talk to her on the phone, I noticed something. She was happy. This is not to say she's always unhappy, but this was different. She was having a good time, engaged in the world, curious, and happy-like no matter what the challenge. And traveling to Japan with her mother posed some interesting challenge...

A Year of Thursdays in the Bosque.

Ran into a friend in the Bosque, and we both remarked about how low the rio was, and I jokingly said, "I almost feel like I should take a picture of the river every week to sort of document it." She said, "Yeah. That'd be interesting." As she continued with her dog walk, I thought, "I should do that." With rare exceptions, I walk my dog in the bosque every Thursday morning. And with rare exceptions, I walk the bosque behind the National Hispanic Cultural Center (sometimes parking at the NHCC and sometimes parking at the small pullout lot south off of 2nd Street). My idea is to the take a picture in the same spot every Thursday for a year to get a photographic record of how much the river changes over time. I understand a lot about this caged and managed river. Indeed, Reining in the Rio Grande is probably the first sort of scientific, historical, political book on the river I've ever read. That's not a genre I usually read. ...

Confessions of a Human Nerve Ending

Search This Blog