The Road Book

When Sky was living full-time on the road she didn't always carry her camera because things were just too chaotic. But as an artist she still felt the need to document her day-to-day travels, so during that time she carried art supplies and created this art book. Every single one of these pages represents a different story and experience that comes alive in her mind when she looks at that page.

The Road Book is such a physical object that she wanted to introduce it as such, something you can touch and feel, with heft and solid energy. To her this book truly captures the energy of living on the road and being completely free.

The ice cream pages! In the summer of 1991, I attended the National Rainbow Gathering, held in the mountains of Vermont. I arrived early to help set up, and stayed late to help tear down, which meant I lived on the mountain for a month. I had fallen into the routine of spending my evenings dancing at the drum circle found at the main meadow campfire. Usually the stars were so clear and I would track them across the sky as I danced the night away.

Very late one evening there were around seven or eight of us left at the fire—a few drummers and some dancers. Suddenly two older men walked up carrying two large containers. They were dressed in regular clothes and looked like they had showered recently. The men set the containers down and introduced themselves as Ben and Jerry, going around to shake hands with each one of us. It took a couple of minutes for my mind to put together that they were the ACTUAL Ben and Jerry! Whaaa?!?

They told us they were bringing ice cream to each kitchen and they wanted to drop some off for us too. They were testing out some unusual flavors on the Rainbow crowd. One of the flavors was grandma's apple pie and I don't remember what the other one was, but it was weird, like sweet potato brittle or something. The containers they brought were huge — like the kind they use at ice cream shops. They sat down and chatted with us while we scrounged up utensils and ate all the ice cream we could. After many weeks of eating beans and rice I cannot tell you how good that ice cream tasted! Eventually we all went back to drumming and dancing, but way more crazy because of our sugar high.

At some point they got up and off and wandered off. The whole experience was so weird and there are many unanswered questions lol! It was late at night (prob 3am) and we were out in the middle of nowhere. It was about an hour's hike into the forest to reach the gathering so how did they get all of the ice cream in? How come it wasn’t that melted? How come it was only the two of them? Did they carry it in lol? I will probably never know. But I do know that Vermont is their turf and they represented themselves well. It was a really cool experience.

We were stranded at a rest area near the Oregon / California border. I was trying to sell my hats, Shona her necklaces and Rabbit was offering to wash peoples windshields for spare change. We had no food and no money for gas. A guy walks up to us and asks us some questions about our lifestyle, like what we ate and how we made food stretch. We didn't think much of it because we were always getting questions. But then he wants to know how long we would be at the rest area. We laugh and tell him we will be there until we collect enough money for some gas, so who knows! He asks us not to leave and he drives away. A couple of hours he pulls back up and hauls out four grocery bags of food. On top of one of the bags is a twenty dollar bill for gas. We were absolutely floored at his generosity!

So we eat our food with gusto, drive to get gas for the van and head back out onto the road. When it got to be night we stopped to sleep in some random field because we couldn't sleep in the van — earlier that week a gas can had spilled and the entire van reeked. We had been driving with all of the windows and taking turns sitting by the windows.

The next morning we got up super excited to have breakfast! We make our sandwiches and start to eat them. As we are chewing we look at each other very puzzled because the sandwiches taste really, really weird. Like super off. It took us a minute to put it together but they tasted like gas. It turns out that the food had sat overnight in the van soaking up the gas fumes and at all now tasted like gas.

We were torn.. we were so fucking hungry but it was GAS. Let me tell you, we talked about the pros and cons of eating those sandwiches while our stomachs rumbled. Eventually, Rabbit says fuck it, and he ate his sandwich. And then someone else ate theirs. We all ended up eating those gas soaked sandwiches.

We got back on the road and we felt a little off. And after a while we start burping… a lot. And it tasted like gasoline. We day long we drove along burping out gasoline. It was so weird & gross but also funny. Needless to say, no one touched that food after that. We sadly threw it all away and went back to spare changing for food money.