Description:

Van Log ’94 is an edited transcription of a series of audio tapes recorded during a road trip from Indiana to Alaska in May, 1994. The Van Log was a good companion in 1994 - a battery-operated one-speaker cassette recorder/player, a confidant, and a witness to a cross-country trek of four Hoosier youths in search of adventure and fortune in the Alaskan fish processing industry. Adventure is easily had for such an optimistic and desperate troupe as we were. The notion of finding fortune (the other goal of our journey) in fish processing is, of course, absurd. Van Log ’94 is a collective narrative - instead of identifying individual speakers, I just blended everybody's comments into one running commentary. The same paragraph may incorporate statements made by any or all four of us. Van Log ’94 is a travelogue rather than a fictional account, so character development is unnecessary; though I occasionally place conversational dialog in quotation marks to indicate a dialog is taking place between two people.