Aaron Kramer still remembers a dog he met on the bike trip he took last year. “She was this wonderful part Lab, part pit bull dog who would do amazing things like take a coconut, tear the husk off, get down to the coconut, chew on it until she could open it up, drink the milk, and then eat the insides.” He met the dog and its owner on a beach in Brunswick, Georgia, and a few months later he met up with them again in the Florida Keys.
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Kramer’s been back in Chicago for about nine months now, but his tiny apartment is still stuffed with memorabilia from the trip: about 60 assemblages, a map marked with his route, sketches he drew while traveling, and a “window frame” made of twisty buttonwood. “That was my picture window in one campsite,” he explains. “I was camped out under a tarp–it tended to rain like crazy for ten minutes and then get sunny and beautiful again–and I figured my shelter could use a window.”
He also brought along a small box to carry whatever he might pick up along the way. Before he left, he had made some assemblages for friends with stuff from craft stores and junk shops. “I had an idea that I wanted to collect things along the way, but I really didn’t know what the end result would be.”
He made Shell Game in Florida in late 1988, using shells he found along the beach and casings from discharged bullets. “I don’t know if you remember: in Miami there was that whole thing where a cop shot two black guys on a motorcycle, and it sparked a whole series of riots.” So Kramer used the riots to make what he calls a one-liner: not so much a joke as a pithy commentary.
For now, though, the pieces function best as they were originally intended: as trip logs. “I can look at all the pieces, and each one is a paragraph to a much larger story,” says Kramer. “There are threads that run throughout them.” A piece of the worn-out dog leash ended up in How the West Was Won, but it’s Mystery Vehicle that reminds Kramer most of the dog: Kramer found its main element, the blue-crab shell, on a walk along that beach in Georgia.
