Drift Assessment #3

Describe three surprises or unexpected situations you encountered on your Drifts and in the days that followed. The surprise could stem from your expectations that conflicted with "on the ground" realities, cultural or social issues of which you were previously unaware, feelings and reactions that you did not expect to have, appearances and soundings of things you did not expect, good or bad outcomes of "on the spot" decisions you had to make, or the discovery of "deeper" realities in the materials you brought home. (Again, skip anything technology-related!)

When I began my second drift, I was not sure what my image capturing strategies would be. My first thought was to just take pictures of trees because I knew I could get a lot of footage out of it. So I started walking by trees, and the more pictures I took, the more I began to see the tree branches as hands/fingers reaching down to grab us. There was this particular tree that began to make me feel that way. It was on Lake Drive and it was one of the creepiest trees I’ve ever seen. From that moment on in my drift, the trees had a completely new appearance to me; they were no longer just plants but living forms that were bending over and trying to reach down to grab things with their branches. Even now when I’m driving by trees, I still think of that drift. A second surprise came when searching for my second image capturing strategy. While walking on my drift, it began to occur to me that I was constantly surrounded by signs. So, I thought, ‘Ok, I guess I can concentrate on signs’. I began to take pictures of every sign I passed and I began to think, ‘Wow, there is a sign almost every step, telling us what to do!’. You could not get away from the signs. I started to resent the signs, because, like any teenager, I didn’t like being told what to do. I started to get the feeling that the signs were controlling everything we did when we stepped outside our house; I realized that in our society, we are constantly surrounded by rules and regulations. A third surprise I had came in my first drift. I was recording the beeping sound a truck makes when it is backing up. I was concentrating solely on that sound. When I played back the recording, I found I had recorded a very clear recording of a bird singing. I decided to keep the bird singing in the recording with the truck because I loved the contrast of the sound; the contrast of nature and technology.