I'm a fan of small vans when it comes to helping minors (or others not into driving personal vehicles) get around. The martial arts school down the street, here in Asylum District, upper Hawthorne, has some well appointed, branded vans to round up the trainees and later take them home.
In some cases a van route might intersect a city bus route, plus today we have more individualized taxi options. No one size fits all. The van might cover a last leg of the journey, into the hinterlands and onto the farm or jungle garden (some ecosystem).
I learned about the importance of transportation, to one's program, from an AFSC tour of duty that took me to a planning meeting the Daniel Ellsberg Manhattan Project Part 2: the cleanup. He knew about Hanford and such places (Chernobyl and Fukushima had not happened yet), where the water table was endangered.
The Portland office paid my way, as back then I was young enough to be considered a youth leader, and what I focused on was how to program around the youth. Square one: you might need a van, or a fleet of vans. I later, as an older guy, clerked the Latin America Asia Pacific program, “clerk” being different from being on paid staff; I was more like an outside consultant.
Glenn Stockton and I entertained similar visions, for a youth center, but with seniors too, all ages, that was all about skill sharing. Making video, jewelry, clothing... Portland is already somewhat ablaze with maker spaces and this was to be in that ballpark, as a teaching center. Glenn had the institute’s name picked out. We would be a respected studio.
Glenn had plenty of supplies in storage (for lapidary, for metalworking…) and was always on the brink of finding was to truck it out and assembling personal workstations, variously specialized. I’m remembering the basement of Dollar Scholar, the time he came closest but the store had to close. Finding space for a maker-space is not always that easy, given the state of the market, plus Glenn despised the term “maker”. CubeSpace was long gone by then, with WeWork soon to follow. Yet the whole idea had not died.
We had another property picked out later, but it went for more conventional uses. Then another after than (more like a house than a commercial building). Two guys with a nice banter don't a full blown business make in the eyes of money lenders. AFSC was never really on board with that first one anyway, as a nonprofit with some clout as in street cred. It was more in the process of closing down our Portland office (the one I had worked in over the years, including as a contributing editor for Asia-Pacific Issues News).
Later, our project morphed into the Ghost Church property, one of those Methodist hulks that no longer attracts churchgoers, despite its enormous legacy charm. We toured the place and imagined beaming a signal to/from OMSI, and having like an extension program. Fun science fiction.
I've always been a source of improbable plans. But aren't we all in some way? We plan our lives, to an extent, but then always have to leave room for randomness. A plan might be more like a direction sometimes, an intention. The wake behind is nothing like a straight line in retrospect.
