THE IDEA seemed obvious, if risky: I’d try to survive as an urban scrounger, adopting a way of life that was both field research and free-form survival. As an academic criminologist, I’ve spent much of my adult life inside illicit subcultures, researching life on the margins, so the plan appealed.

I resigned from my position as a university professor and my wife and I moved back to my home town of Fort Worth, Texas. There was a gap of eight months before a new academic job.

So I set out to see what I could find. Daily I rode round the city on an old bicycle, digging through trash, exploring rubbish skips, scanning streets and gutters for items lost or discarded, then returning home to sort and record my findings. Within a bike ride of my house were old industrial areas, rail yards, upper-class enclaves, working-class neighbourhoods, middle-class suburbs, commercial clusters and the large central business district. The world of the urban scrounger offered me a remarkably self-sustaining way of life, and many a situation in which I and others negotiated the boundaries between yours and mine, old and new, law and crime.

RIDING along, I see ahead a big kerbside trash pile, and two people digging in it, their half-filled shopping trolley sitting in the middle of the street. The man — ruddy, heavy, perhaps a little drunk — grunts as he ploughs through the pile. The woman — older, grey hair — strikes up a conversation. She says: “The man said we could look around in here so long as we put it back and don’t leave a mess.” Guessing that she is referring to the homeowner, I answer: “That seems like a fair enough trade.” “Yeah,” she says. But the old guy says: “Yeah, but who’s gonna put it back?” “Well, I’ll pile it back up before I leave,” I say.

The woman, meanwhile, is pulling clothes out of the pile and handing them to me. She passes me a couple of vintage US Navy wool uniforms. I tell her: “I’ll take these if you don’t want them, but you were here first.” She assures me that I should have them. “Is there anything in particular you’re looking for?” I ask. “I’m trying to find a curtain to match the first one I found,” she says. I ask the colour and we look for it, without success.

A four-wheel drive with tinted windows rolls towards us, its large, middle-aged occupant looking us over. “Honey, get your cart out of the middle of the street,” the women tells her partner. “It’s in that guy’s way.” He doesn’t, but the SUV eases past.

A few minutes later the old guy is ready to take off. “Goddammit, we’re gonna be late,” he tells her. “All right, I’m coming,” she says, but she hangs back, still poking around, showing me finds, talking, looking for the lost curtain. This little couple’s dance, I think to myself, could just as well be taking place at the shopping centre.

By now, he’s reclaimed the trolley and headed down the street, still admonishing her. She gives up her scrounging, begins to walk to catch up to him, and I stand up from my scrounging and tell her: “Good luck to you.”

“And to you, too,” she says. A minute later, they’re out of sight.

The SUV rolls up again, the driver easing down the power window. “Anything good?” he asks. “I don’t know, most of it seems to be broken,” I say, hoping to put off any well-heeled interlopers. But I sense that he’s less interested in checking on the rubbish than in checking on me.

A while later, ready to cycle away, I take stock of my finds: the Navy uniforms and some other uniforms, a signed silver-plate bowl, a Cadillac insignia, eight-track tapes and 45rpm singles, Albert Camus’ The Stranger and Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha; Cool-Ray Polaroid clip-on sunglasses, a vintage Seventies woman’s leather jacket, a Neiman Marcus black-and-white striped woman’s sweater, 14 plastic bottle-stoppers and 32 shiny and unspent silver bullets.

Over the next eight months I regularly find bottles of drink and unopened cans of beer. More worrying is the number of empty beer cans on major roads, a suggestion of pervasive drink-driving that provides me with a steady supply of redeemable aluminium, not to mention bottle openers, hip flasks, wine racks and hotel corkscrews.

Bullets are almost as common. I find them everywhere: in the streets, in the gutters, in car parks, in rubbish piles and skips. By the end of those eight months I have filled various containers with bullets found one at a time, whole boxes scavenged from rubbish piles and gun accoutrements such as shotgun-carrying cases, barrel-cleaning rods and bore brushes.