Day 11: Playlist Across America

Learning Festival in Tazewell, VA — 0 mi, 0 ft

We needed this nice calm day in the midst of the chaos of the days before and after (spoiler alert). Our team woke up in the huge church-house which we were inhabiting alone and LARPed* as a big happy TV-show-esque friend group who lives in a mansion together and has nothing to do but hang out as we leisurely cooked the most beautiful breakfast together, with Jack Johnson’s “Banana Pancakes” playing in the background. Our spread consisted of pancakes (plain, blueberry, and caramelized banana) and bacon (cooked by our very own Bacon Carmen!!!) and eggs (scrambled in an extremely generous amount of bacon grease) and buttermilk biscuits and grapes and strawberries and applies with creamy peanut butter and milk and orange juice and Fanta (for Drew) and Sprite (for Nate). We keep eating like we burn 4000 calories a day, except today was actually a teaching day!

Today’s learning festival was at the United Methodist Church in Tazewell, Virginia. It’s a small learning festival in a small town, which means we could really feel the effect of our learning festival .Sometimes I forget that what to us just feels like a day of babbling about random chemistry concepts and asking kids to stop making balloons out of their nitrile gloves is actually a day that kids have been counting down the days for and remember for the rest of the year until Spokes 2027 comes. Just hearing these words from a few of our students made the entire day worth it for me, despite the significantly lower team energy and morale from yesterday. I have so much respect for all the teachers I’ve ever had; I have no idea how they find the will to keep showing up every day full of energy for just a couple intermittent words of thanks. Pretty sure this is called breadcrumbing, but wow it really works.

Carmen and I teach a workshop on chemistry through a cool color change iodine reaction for the older kids and a workshop on genetics through a design-your-own-monster-child crafting activity for the little kids.

At lunch, I did a grand show and tell of all my scrapes and bruises from yesterday’s tree crash with a tall tale about getting attacked by a grizzly bear as I biked on a road in between a mama bear and her cubs. Nobody questioned me, and I can’t figure out if it was because kids are so easy to lie to or if they just didn’t care enough to ask. Then, because it was such a hit at the last learning festival, we threw Nate and Drew under the bus again and told all the kids that they will race them in the church parking lot. Let it be known that they both actually tried and still lost, and let it be known that as they did their 20 punishment pushups there was a circle of kids dancing around them with Ls on their forehead to make sure Nate and Drew really understood that they were freaking losers. Then we took the kids inside where Drew played a beautiful piano rendition of Let it Go as the kids sang along, before finally resuming the workshop.

I took my first nap of Spokes at the end of today, after ten days of nonstop action and ten nights of barely seven hours of sleep. Feeling restored, Tatana and I decided to join the ladies group of the United Methodist Church. Many of them had grown up in Tazewell and have been friends for fifty years now, supporting each other through the highest highs and lowest lows of life. They welcomed us very warmly, and we shared prayers for the people in our communities and blessings for everything we were feeling lucky about (mine was my team, retweeting nunu’s love letter). Although I’m not very religious, I’ve been starting to understand the human connection and structure and third space and love that church provides, and why no matter how small and secluded the towns we pass through are, we can always find a church to stop and take rest at. 

This was the first time on this trip where we got to chat with and paint a picture of the lives of people in the towns we were passing through beyond our hosts. Since everybody has been sharing the real main reason why they joined Spokes on the blogs recently, I’ll let you all know that mine was exactly this: to get to know people across America whose life paths mine would not ordinarily cross with, to understand their stories and struggles and dreams. 

In that vein, I’ve been collecting a playlist of Favorites Across America. I’ve tried to ask every stranger I’ve felt touched by on this trip what their all-time favorite song was as a kind of souvenir of the summer, and here are the results so far.

• Great Gig in the Sky, Pink Floyd – Yasmin, Judge Faruqui’s intern who stuck by my side for a rough first learning festival
• I Like Me Better, Lauv – Jen, who gave us plenty of advice we’ve been following after hosting years of Spokes teams
• Miracles, Jefferson Starship – Jimmy Baker, an angel who fell from the sky at a gas station near Luray, Virginia and donated us a thousand dollars on the spot
• On the Nature of Daylight, Max Ritcher – The one and only GOAT Pam
• Truly Madly Deeply, Savage Garden and Time, Pink Floyd – Chrissie and Dirk, who took us on a river adventure and cooked us an incredible pasta bar complete with s’mores for dinner
• Highway 61 Revisited, Bob Dylan – Theresa, our current host in Tazewell with the warmest and kindest heart

LINK: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1z0IdXR7hqCHqFuielSLBx?si=4c20a1a17a45496b

Please note that I’m not a diligent enough person for this list to be comprehensive; there have been so many people that only in hindsight I’ve wished I had asked! 

Sending lots of love to everyone we’ve met,

Aarushi ❤

* Live Action Role Play, a favorite hobby of mine as introduced by my dear friend Ria Verma