
ΔΙΑΦΗΜΙΣΗ

ΔΙΑΦΗΜΙΣΗ

Matt Derrick: I went to a Christian high school and I left home at the age of 18 and I just fell into the entire lifestyle by accident. I was already into punk rock and some metal, crust music, things like that. But it wasn’t until I tried to move to LA and my car broke down in Eugene, Oregon and I ended up hitchhiking and meeting these other travelers that I really got into the whole scene.How has the community changed over the past decade?
For a long time with STP, everyone was like, “Oh, the train hopping message board.” And that’s pretty accurate. But last time I rode a train was in 2008, and after riding trains and hitchhiking eight years or so, I got really bored. And at the same time, everyone was really into this website, but I didn’t feel like supporting a lifestyle online that I wasn’t really involved in anymore. Basically at that point, I started looking into turning it around to all different types of subgenres of traveling and alternative forms of independent travel. And that’s where I’m going with Punk Nomad.What's your vision for Punk Nomad?

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That’s true. A lot of things have happened in the subculture in the past ten years. There’s been this rise of what I call the Scumfucks, or Scumfuckism, where it’s just these completely apathetic douchebag kids with tattoos on their faces and drunk and stinky, all the time, who just don’t give a fuck about anyone besides themselves. That’s one of the reasons I’ve started steering the website away from train hopping, because that completely took over the train hopping culture, in my opinion. They wanna get away from the world and society and they do it with alcoholism, too. It’s all escapism, you know.Back in December 2010, a squat caught fire in New Orleans—the most killed in a fire in 25 years, and it was all travelers. From what you know of that squat, could it have happened earlier?
Absolutely. It could have happened to anybody. Basically, from what I understand, everyone basically died of carbon monoxide poisoning before being burnt to death. When people get just totally blitzed out of their mind every day, something will happen, like they’ll leave the fire burning or a squat candle burning in a building and that’s how a lot of that happens—you pass out and you’re too drunk to wake up and there’s flames around you, or the smoke chokes you to death. It’s happened before.
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That word used to mean something completely different like ten years ago. In 2001, I used it to refer to junkie street kids. Today, the definition of it is basically an inexperienced street kid usually doing something stupid that kind of fucks things up for other people, because they’re new and they don’t know what they’re doing. I think it’s a little bit overused, and I don’t call anyone Oogles or anything like that, but I think it’s funny, the way people use it.

Someone pulled up the other day here, and he literally had it on top of his car. And I was like, “What the hell is that?” And they’re like, “Oh, it’s a Rail Rider. You put it on the rails like a Go-Kart.” And I remember five, six years ago, seeing one or two videos of railriders you could bike down the tracks, and thinking that was so amazing. And so just to see someone pull up with it, I just flipped out. I was like, “Oh, my god you have to take me for a ride.”Aside from hitchhiking and train hopping, what else do you plan to explore with Punk Nomad?
I’m really fascinated with sea travel. I don’t think there’s enough anarchists or punks doing this. There are a couple small groups which I’ve been really inspired by, like the Miss Rockaway Armada. They built a barge and then sailed it down the Mississippi, classic traveling tactic, but it was a huge art barge and just all this art and people playing music. That’s a really free, independent way to travel and see things that people never fucking see. And then you got people like the Floating Neutrinos, who are the first people to sail from the East Coast of America to Spain or France on a ship made out of trash. That was back in ‘91 or ‘92, I think. And then you got blueanarchy.org. There’s a guy in San Francisco Bay, Moxie, he takes over abandoned boats and fixes them up and teaches people sailing. And then there’s the guy who built his own island out of recycled plastic bottles. He was on Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! back in the mid-90s, I think. And he built his own island out of 600,000 recycled plastic bottles, water bottles, just laid dirt down on it. It’s like 300 feet wide. It’s got trees and a two-story bungalow and he can move it with a stick down the river. It’s gorgeous and it’s like, why aren’t there more people doing things like this? That’s why I want to document them and show everyone else what’s possible out there.So there’s sea, air would probably be difficult because of the FAA and their regulations.
I think there’s definitely room for airships.Space travel…
Yeah, one of these days. And there’s other things, too, like trying to book passage on a cargo ship, instead of flying across the ocean. That’s one of the things I’m looking into, but it’s really expensive everywhere I’ve looked. I have a bucket list. Like, I want to drive coast to coast on a moped. I would like to build my own ultralight airplane and fly it across the country. Just like any way I can do amazing, incredible things and be free and live the way I want.And help other people do it, too.
Yeah, that’s the entire point of Punk Nomad is to help other people gain more freedom in their lives and have better experiences.