The final addition of a two-part series following Joe Penner across the United States. Read the first section, Not Your Average Joe.
Story by Victoria Davila
Photo by Brittni Zacher
Illustrations by Joseph Penner
Having clocked more time behind the wheel in one year than some people can boast in ten, Joe knows a lot of things these days. Joe knows that not every bar is a friendly one. He knows what it’s like to give out free hugs with a sign in Times Square. He knows miracles can happen. He knows the taste of America.
Louisiana is a burst of popcorn shrimp smothered in zest and washed down with plenty of booze. Mississippi tastes rough, like mud in your mouth. Florida packs a puzzling pungency of a Cuban sandwich that should be toasted but is just stuck at a sick room temp. New York is abrasively spicy. It awakens your taste buds and forces your eyes farther open. Colorado tastes overwhelmingly natural, seasoned with herbs that can ping and zing in your mouth. Nevada is simply psychedelic, like a snozberry from the Wonka factory.
When twenty-four-year-old Joe Penner began his journey in December 2009, he set out to find his path in life, get into some sketchy situations, and make the transition from AVGJOE to the Postmodern Comic. Behind his thin-rimmed glasses, there was the fire of anticipation in his kind brown eyes.
When we last left Joe on his adventure in spring 2010, he was driving from city to city in the South. Letting go of formality, his hair grew slightly shaggier with each city. He was surfing from couch to couch of friends, family and hosts met on CouchSurfing.com with his traveling partner Brittni Zacher. Since then, a slew of stories have been collected and cataloged by way of blogs, comics and songs. Each new person he met became a character, a new ingredient creating the overall flavor of the trip. Without any of them, the meal wouldn’t be complete.
Two Guys Walk into a Bar, [Insert “Joke” Here]
Luke Wylie joined the journey in New Orleans, Louisiana, or NOLA, after Brittni’s departure in February 2010. Luke, who has one of the biggest hearts on the planet according to Joe, has been an inspirational friend to Joe since their freshman year at University of Oregon. With Joe’s spirit of adventure and Luke’s travel experience, at times the two got more than just a taste of America but a full flavor blast from the melting pot of the country. Together, Joe and Luke became “Joke.”
In March they followed the Mississippi toward Arkansas to mine crystals. Confederate flags popped up left and right along the bayou and were given nothing more than a sideways glance. And when a bar also popped up along side the road, they decided on a nightcap before setting camp for the night. They didn’t know the local bar was essentially locals only due to the middle-of-nowhere location.
Southern hospitality took a new meaning as the bar door opened and rather than seeing cheerful smiles and drunken good times, they were met with suspicious looks that soon turned to confused stares and  backs turned in anger. A black Sambo character was pictured behind the bar, with signatures that crossed out the character. Joe nudged Luke’s attention to the image. They quickly finished their beers before being stopped on their way out the bar by the bartender. “Where you boys from?” he asked with a drawl. In a short but strange conversation, the bartender suggested they head to Memphis for its blues. Joe took note of the irony of a racist bar that played Stevie Wonder and a bartender that recommended blues in Memphis.
Taking a subtle cue, they head out but got stuck on a Mississippi dirt-turned-mud road for more than an hour before they were finally able to escape. Joe now knows to watch out for warning signs of hostility, especially in the South and says, “Sadly I think [racism is] more of a bonding agent then an actual white superiority ideology.  Their exclusivity gives them a sense of community whether they really believe in why the other people should be excluded.”
An Ultra Spring Break Experience
Florida proved to be a living stereotype of itself as Joe encountered spring breakers, a wild music festival, and a town full of wealthy fifty-plus residents who drive nothing but top of the line luxury cars in late March. Chaotic situations including lost friends, monsoons, and lack of parking culminated at Ultra: the weekend-long annual electronic dance music festival in Miami. There, a dance partner turned into a two-week companion whose friendship led to a long stop in Naples, Florida.
It was in Naples that Joe met a businesswoman with more than a few stories to share. One such thought provoking tale was the crystal ball. The woman told Joe that a group of divers found a crystal from an underground city and received a message telling them to take the crystal, leave, and never return. The crystal has since then traveled the world producing different images depending on who was holding it. The ball reportedly cracked at the same exact time as the Chilean earthquake on February, 27, 2010, that is said to have coincided with a change in Earth’s kundalini – center of energy. Less than a week later on March 2, NASA reported that the Chilean earthquake had indeed altered the Earth’s axis and changed the length of a day.
Florida had its fun moments and Joe tried to take meaning from stories such as this. But Joe only scratched the surface of the state and feels he never quite got to its heart and soul during his time there.
Treasure Mining at “Manifest Mountain”
Urban exploration of New York in late May and June led to drinking beers in Central Park, exploring the streets of Brooklyn, and accidentally going clubbing downtown. But like someone rejecting caviar for a slice of New York style pizza, Joe and Luke picked chilling on the tops of roofs rather than elite after-parties with endless alcohol.
It was a short two-hour drive out of the city where “Joke” found themselves at a nice little farmhouse on a hill out near the Adirondacks on Manna Mountain: the home of Bob and Wendy, a couple in their mid thirties whose last name is unknown. “The energetic vibes of pure awesomeness” gave way to the unofficial renaming of the hill to “Manifest Mountain,” as Joe calls it.
It had been three years since Luke visited the couple and they were both greeted with open arms. Luke originally met the pair after staying on the property of an old Dead Head woman who would allow anyone to stay and get crystals in the area. He then stayed with Bob and Wendy, a step up from the reportedly unstable woman. Within a day or two, Joe and Luke were mining for calcite and Herkimer quartz, a type of rare high-value crystal that is among the oldest of its kind at roughly 500 million years. The rare crystals are just some of the souvenirs that now bring a smile to his face. Now his prized rocks, stones and fossils from the trip are reminders and protectors.
Joe and Luke managed to repay Bob and Wendy for their kindness by fixing their roof, which had withered away from years of harsh winters. Luke earned 300 dollars selling crystals in Union Square and headed back on a bus to NOLA.
It was after dropping Luke off that Joe met Rob, a young man with knee length dreads wrapped like a bird’s nest on his head and a scraggly goatee. He was selling quartz crystals in Union Square when Joe first encountered the free-spirited entrepreneur who had always had stones in his hair and overalls pockets. Joe now explains that if one were to ask the man where he was from, he would answer “the stars.”
Rob was a true character. “A lady once asked him if his hair was real,” Joe says. “[Rob] quickly replied, ‘Are dreams real? Is life real?’” In a true life pay-it-forward experience, Joe passed on his knowledge of crystal mining gained from Luke by taking Rob to find crystals for the first time. And although they may not see each other again Joe knows that while reality is based on perception, their friendship is real, endless and extends beyond this plane of existence to the stars.
A Lesson from a Lucid Dream and a Lockup in Jail
Continuing on his crossing to Colorado in August, Joe had a lucid dream in Telluride.
“I had been wanting to accomplish some sort of spiritual or extra sensory or contact a dead relative or see the future or something like that,” he says.
In the dream Joe was tubing down a river and got called into a house of strangers acting as friends. In the house was a mysterious hallway leading to an empty dark room that others in the house jokingly said was a meth lab. Confused, Joe walked in started asking questions to the room. “What’s my purpose? Who am I? Where did my dead grandmother go? What is reality?” he asked. The face of an elderly man began to form from smoke and a garbled voice answered, “You have to learn the hard way.”
Upon waking, Joe took the dream to believe he needed to use spiritual practices and meditation to find his answers. Without much further thought, Joe sets out for a concert to see the American jam band Phish. While selling quartz crystals from an open tray case an unexpected offer for an ecstasy pill for a crystal arose. Thinking he can trade the pill for something else later, Joe accepted and put it into a case with a hit of molly from a similar trade weeks prior. It was then that a policeman saw the activity and began to walk toward him. Combined with the hash also just given to him from a friend, Joe was taken in for three felonies in Colorado.
The specific charges brought back the memory of his lucid dream. In the dream, people told a confused Joe there was a meth lab in the house. Joe was confused again when he was initially charged with one count of marijuana concentrate, one ecstasy pill, and one count of methamphetamine. Joe first protested, “Meth, I didn’t have any meth!” unaware that molly contains methamphetamines in it. The words from his lucid dream, “You have to learn the hard way,” echoed in his head as he walked back to his cell.
After three days in jail, Joe finally got his parents to wire his bail money and his lawyer postponed the trial until the second week in September, after Burning Man.
A Burn of a Different Kind
Burning Man didn’t go as exactly planned, but nothing really did on Joe’s trip. The week-long festival gathering in late August was supposed to be the final stop on the voyage. But Joe had grown since his first burn in 2009 and was of a different mindset and emotional being. What it became was “one really great hurrah, one chance to be completely free, before having to face some difficult times,” says Joe of having to return to Colorado for court and perhaps jail time.
A combination of situations created another surreal experience for Joe. His cousin-in-law, a tenth year burner, scattered the ashes of his cousin whom Joe never got to burn with.  Joe also met different people from all over, even some that seemed other worldly. He was open to it all. But most of the time Joe spent riding around on his camp’s official art car. His camp, Schwartown, cut off the back top of a mini van and made it into a penguin that slowly roamed the festival as people jumped on and off to explore the art and get to know the other intriguing individuals.
Joe plans to return to La Playa again at least this summer, if not the next three years. Joe knows that each Burning Man holds a new experience of what is possible when people come together to create and learn together.
Taking the Path Less Traveled
One day prior to the dreaded court date and the trial was postponed for more than two weeks because the District Attorney went on vacation. “Well this sucks,” Joe recalls thinking at the time. “I’m out of money; I have already taxed out my time on my buddy’s couch, and don’t know what to do.”
After spending a couple days listlessly lounging, Joe decided to turn his frown upside down with a nice climb on a mountain trail. But for a moment, his life was literally turned upside down with a life or death situation. Joe took an unknown trail and tried to find his way to the top of the cliff face where a path was supposed to lead. Steeper and steeper, he continued on without fear at first. Joe told himself he could always go back. But eventually up became the only option left, and a scary one at that as he faced a tall cliff side not meant for climbing and ground of sharp loose rocks far below.
Holding on only to small cracks in a cliff side he planed to make his way up the dangerous climb. Disregarding every advice he ever heard about climbing, he made the mistake to look down. His muscles burned. His thoughts filled with prayers. He was alone, facing near death and no one knew where he was.
Somehow, success. Joe pulled himself up and collapsed on flat ground before looking down at what he had just scaled. He screamed at the top of his lungs. He danced. He even literally skipped the entire trail back singing praise songs to God, life, and everything around him.
“I was so grateful to be alive,” Joe says. “Then, the next morning I shit you not the lawyer called me and said he talked to the DA told her my situation and she dropped all the charges.”
Expecting the unexpected was the unwritten motto from the beginning of Joe’s trip. He started with an idea. He put that idea down as a path and walked it. The path went some crazy places. It had some bumps in the road. But in keeping his attitude positive, his spirits high and his intentions positive, Joe completed his journey and finally settled down in Portland, Oregon, in December 2010. He is now working on paying the bills while continuing his numerous artistic projects on the side.
Initially Joe thought his trip would be a solitary journey of self-discovery. But life didn’t let him keep to himself as much as originally thought. Most all of his accommodating hosts wanted to show him a good time, which left little time for the “street performance hustle about the states” that Joe had envisioned for his year long trek.
He does not have a record deal, but he did get professional advice from a CEO at Def Jam South Records and the host of a venue after a hip hop showcase in Manhattan. His comics are not on shelves in every bookstore, but they are on the shelves of some comic books stores and wound up in the back pockets of famous comics such as Janeane Garoffalo and Jim Gaffigan. Joe’s artistic vision is far from completion. And while Joe did not gain all the fruits of labor he first set out to find, he did plant the seeds and, as he puts it, “they can only grow from this point.”
“My theory is that if one person runs across the connection between the street art, the music, and the comics in different cities it will make an impact, no matter how slight; and that’s all I am really hoping for,” he says. Joe knows that while not all his goals have been accomplished, we are all walking works in progress. There is still the fire in his eyes, but with it the embers of some wisdom gained from his travels also burn strong, ready to grow as well.
Joe wants his work to intrigue people, to propel them to see his future work at just the perfect time to see it all incorporated together. Joe’s still AVGJOE to a lot of people, the Postmodern Comic to some, and he’s waiting for the world to see what his friends already do when they slyly call him the Above-Average Joe.

See how Joe’s journey started.

Gallery • 8 Photos

Joe Knows