There was me: ORCH, PP, 8, $27.50. Marooned between the aisles and crammed in a velvet clamshell seat that deeply resented the intrusion. I resented it back, so we were even. Have you ever felt odd sitting quietly in your seat at a show? I’ve heard of the raucous shows in Ireland, which has somehow become my concert-going fantasyland. In Ireland I imagine the audience rarely sits down and therefore gets to express more freely what the music makes them feel.

In my limited experience in America, we take too long to get warmed up. I suppose it’s polite to stay seated for those around you who may not be inclined. I suppose it says We’re focused and we’re listening, which confers respect on the artist. In Ireland, I believe I’ve heard Josh say, that rowdy audience can turn on you. It’s not a passive bystander, and as such, it makes its demands and voices real-time critique. This all begs the question of what it is to be an audience, and that’s something, given some recent events in my life, that I’ve been pondering.

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Boston came round eventually:
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There’s a brand new album, and those startling new songs made up 40.9% of the setlist. On “Rattling Locks” Josh pressed long screeching chords into the keyboards and grinned like a maniacal congressman perched over a podium draped with the Idaho state flag. Zack Hickman showed off his lovely voice with a dramatic departure in the middle of “Harrisburg.”

I heard the sneer of Bob Dylan (standing himself on the shoulders of others) in “Folk Bloodbath”
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And I’m looking over rooftops
and I’m hoping that it ain’t true
that the same God looks out for them
looks out for me and you

and the bouyancy of Paul Simon in “Lark.” We got one of Bruce Springsteen’s most poignant portraits when Josh did his familiar cover of “The River.” Sam Kassirer’s mother recited Edgar Allen Poe’s poem “Annabel Lee” while her son carried us to the famed kingdom by the sea on the current of the instrumental “The Edge of the World.” I listened to the lines, thinking of past literary adventures prompted by this blog and the hope for new ones.

Well there’s a freebie, I thought.

Josh spoke of sensing an existential crisis, joking about his (bottomless) curiousity driving him toward the dictionary for a defintion. But one can’t simply look up existential, he said, drawing laughs. In the dark period that finally gave way to this new album, he said, he frequently watched nature shows to lift his spirits. “You’re luckier than the antelope, at least,” he explained.

. . . That antelope caught in the jaw of the wolf—of the lion?

Lucky to be alive, I wondered?

Let’s listen and see.

When she is there, a white piece of paper on the ground gives explanation: The performance is called “The Human Cost of War.” Each stone a remembrance for an individual killed by war in Iraq or Afghanistan. Each stone paused over and placed reverently. One hundred each day. She moves slowly, my observations suggest too slowly for the surrounding city. An audience that won’t be held captive.

So few pause for longer than a few seconds.

But to watch is to witness. I noticed first in January, the artist’s boots tracking a deep groove in the snow. Blizzards came and blanketed the stones. Then one spring morning a scene of destruction: the pile decimated during the night, stones scattered everywhere. I stopped abruptly and stared, anger welling, weighing whether I could take time to put it all right again. I didn’t, and by evening it was restored.

Another day a female police officer strode up and barely glanced at the paper before calling to the artist to stop. Someone quickly intervened and explained that the performance is hosted by the church that owns the grounds. On June 19th the stones were placed amidst the chaos and euphoria of a parade celebrating the National Basketball Association Championship.

I go and I watch, maybe once every week or two. I marshal my thoughts on the reality of war, though workday stress often seizes my focus. It is difficult to slow down—mentally and physically—and match her pace. My mind wanders, my knee jiggles. I note the subtly changing placement of the noon sun, the angles of the shadows. I wonder if her knees ache from the repeated kneeling, whether she counts out the stones the night before, and I marvel at the fact that she will continue through another series of seasons, for the performance will go until October 6, 2009. There will be over 70,000 stones by then if the site goes undisturbed. I watch long enough to regain control of my focus. I meditate on names and faces.

I think about Josh Ritter’s girl in the war. Could this be her? In the song apostles Peter and Paul exchange viewpoints on a crisis. “But I got a girl in the war,” Peter insists repeatedly, seeming to reject some of Paul’s recommendations either out of principle or desperate grief.

Peter says

But I got a girl in the war, Paul
The only thing I know to do
is turn up the music
and pray that she makes it through

A pile of stones grows beside a well-trod path, and the music gets louder for me. I sense myself ready to grab the dial and twist it up on some others. I look toward November and I bear witness, pondering the power of keeping present, of daily action, resolving to take more myself.

For starters, Sam and I made a video.

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[Watch it at YouTube here]

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So that album: is there a song whose opening bars make you reach for the Forward>> button? Do you instinctively head for the stereo as one track is ending so as to skip that one you never seem to want to hear?
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All that love all those mistakes
What else can a poor man make?
I gave up a life of crime
I gave it to a friend of mine
Something else was on my mind
The only ghost I’m haunted by
I hear her howling down below
Idaho, Idaho

Wolves oh wolves oh can’t you see?
Ain’t no wolf can sing like me
And if it could then I suppose
He belongs in Idaho
Packs of dogs and cigarettes
For those who ain’t done packing yet
My clothes are packed and I want to go
Idaho, Idaho

Out at sea for seven years
I got your letter in Tangier
Thought that I’d been on a boat
‘Til that single word you wrote
That single word it landlocked me
Turned the masts to cedar trees
And the winds to gravel roads
Idaho, Idaho

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I used to skip over the song “Idaho” off the (beloved) album The Animal Years. Because I used to listen to it in cafes while I wrote, and the song was too quiet, I reasoned, for the surroundings. But I think truthfully it broke my concentration, even during those times I was listening to not really have to listen. The drawn-out phrases (howls, really) taking flight above barely-there guitar drew my thoughts away from clinking glasses and toward unblinking melancholy, and I was already about as sad as I could stand. The other sad songs were okay, somehow. “Idaho” I didn’t do very often.

My last post chronicled a recent road trip to my native Michigan, and I decided then I’d tackle Idaho. Because it’s a song about home, I figured. (Josh is from Idaho.) But when I looked back at the words I was surprised to find it never mentions home. It’s a unquiet ghost (verse 1), a longed-for destination (verse 2), a place whose very name is escape hatch to transform ocean to land (verse 3). It sure feels like home, and we’re pretty loathe to presume around here (eh hem), but it seems fair in this case.

But what else about this speaker. He reminds me of the poor chap from “Best from the Best,” another wind-blown, wayworn adventurer who winds up on a boat for a spell. But I think “Idaho” puts us on a boat for a spell. How does it do this? By playing with the meter:

I gave UP a LIFE of CRIME
I GAVE it TO a FRIEND of MINE
SOMEthing ELSE was ON my MIND
The ONly GHOST I’M HAUNTed BY

Lapping, rolling waves, a rocking boat; a Michigan kid needs no more. Note the pattern breaks with “I’m,” which I like. There’s a lot of “I” in this song. It plays with meter in the opening lines, and word meaning too. The result is simple and elegant.

All that love, all those mistakes
What else can a poor man make
I gave up a life a crime
I gave it to a friend of mine

Love and mistakes issue from the same source—the same verb—the same impulse?—and who ever thought you might actually give to another the thing you gave up. I always think [insert *grin*] after that fourth line. Despite the desperation, the emptiness, the despondency, there’s a gentle shrug of a shoulders. And it almost all rolls off.

I confess: I don’t know who he is. Well, actually I think he’s made up, like the composite sketch in “Best for the Best.” But perhaps you know of a pirate Idahoan minstrel who once descended into hallucination upon receiving a letter in Tangier? Or a Seven Year War vet. I’ve been looking, but nothing so far.

But . . . there is the Black Avenger of the Spanish Main, a once-amorous, then-wounded soul pressed into piracy after ticking off his sweetheart:

Since nothing would do them but to be rid of him, let it be so; and let them blame him for the consequences—why shouldn’t they? What right had the friendless to complain? Yes, they had forced him to it at last: he would lead a life of crime. (The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, 108, emphasis mine)

He grabs his soul’s sworn comrades and the adventure is jolly—”It’s nuts!”—at first:

The Black Avenger stood still with folded arms, ‘looking his last’ upon the scene of his former joys and his later sufferings, and wishing ‘she’ could see him, now abroad on the wild sea, facing peril and death with dauntless heart, going to his doom with a grim smile on his lips. (ATS, 113)

Homesickness comes to haunt, however, and the pirates’ lust begins to flag. They try to pawn the life they’ve chose off on one another, and the Black Avenger does defect, for a night, and then goes back with a plan to bring them all home to glory.

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Ain’t no wolf can sing like me

In the late nineties Nora Guthrie, daughter of folk icon Woody, asked English protest singer Billy Bragg to come over and look through a heap of silent lyrics and poems left behind by her father. Never recorded, they’d lost any melody for good upon Guthrie’s death in 1967. The words were filed away at the Woody Guthrie Archives in New York—typed or scribbled on scraps of paper. Bragg came to America “searching for the spirit of Woody Guthrie,” as he puts it in the 1999 documentary Man in the Sand. The film opens with footage of him—presumably early on in the project—driving through the streets of Woody’s hometown. Stark black letters adorn the nearby water tower: “HOME OF WOODY GUTHRIE.” Bragg gets out of the car to look. He wants a picture that frames him and water tower, but he’ll have to trespass onto someone’s front lawn to get it. He’s visibly reluctant.

“They might get loads of people doing it,” he says, glancing at the front door and hurrying across the grass.

His concern left me feeling a little sad. A few scenes later one can reasonably conclude that Bragg has realized his mistake.

Playing over those opening scenes are the lyrics to a song Guthrie wrote, “Way Over Yonder in the Minor Key,” in 1946. Actually I’ve been wondering if Woody sang it in a minor key. Bragg chose a major one, and he wrote a jaunty, boastful melody reminiscent of summer childhood days to enliven the words. I’ve been playing the hell out of “Way Over Yonder in the Minor Key,” a triumphant tale of prepubescent seduction-against-the-odds set in Woody’s home county of Okfuskee, Oklahoma. There’s a dauntless speaker with a plucky refrain: Ain’t nobody who can sing like me, he says.

Bragg’s passion for Guthrie’s music is inspiring and insightful—

Woody was great at falling in love—obsessive love—with people who weren’t really there.

I like him already.

And it’s not that far of a leap—I swear—to Mark Twain, it turns out. I’ve barely read any books yet and twice already Woody’s been compared to Huck Finn: once by daughter Nora and once in the forward of a biography. As you now know I have recently read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. And maybe it’s the weather and the longing for the freedom and friends of a summer vacation circa 1987, but I could not help thinking that Guthrie’s words and Bragg’s tune together go rather beautifully with Twain’s tale from his own boyhood . . .

Oh just give it a go. Push the play button to hear “Way Over Yonder in the Minor Key” (words by Woody Guthrie, 1946 & music by Billy Bragg, 1997) and see below for a little mash-up.

Woody Guthrie

Samuel Clemens

I lived in a place called Okfuskee
And I had a little girl in a holler tree
I said, little girl, its plain to see
Aint nobody that can sing like me
Aint nobody that can sing like me

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Saturday morning was come, and all the summer world was bright and fresh, and brimming with life. There was a song in every heart; and if the heart was young the music issued at the lips. There was cheer in every face, and a spring in every step. The locust trees were in bloom, and the fragrance of the blossoms filled the air. (The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, 11)

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She said its hard for me to see
How one little boy got so ugly
Yes, my little girly, that might be
But there aint nobody that can sing like me
Aint nobody that can sing like me
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When she cautiously faced around again, a peach lay before her. She thrust it away; Tom gently put it back; she thrust it away again, but with less animosity. Tom patiently returned it to its place; then she let it remain. (ATS, 59)

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Way over yonder in the minor key
Way over yonder in the minor key
There aint nobody that can sing like me
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“Put on your bonnet and let on you’re going home; and when you get to the corner, give the rest of ‘em the slip, and turn down through the lane and come back. I’ll go the other way, and come it over ‘em the same way.” (ATS, 64)

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We walked down by the buckeye creek
To see the frog eat the goggle eye bee
To hear that west wind whistle to the east
There aint nobody that can sing like me
Aint nobody that can sing like me
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“Do you love rats?”
“No, I hate them!”
“Well, I do too—live ones. But I mean dead ones, to swing around your head with a string.” (ATS, 65)

Oh my little girly will you let me see
Way over yonder where the wind blows free
Nobody can see in our holler tree
And there aint nobody that can sing like me
Aint nobody that can sing like me
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“Now, Becky, it’s all over—all over but the kiss. Don’t you be afraid of that—it ain’t anything at all. Please, Becky.” (ATS, 67)

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Way over yonder in the minor key
Way over yonder in the minor key
There aint nobody that can sing like me
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Her mama cut a switch from a cherry tree
And laid it on to she and me
It stung lots worse than a hive of bees
But there aint nobody that can sing like me
Aint nobody that can sing like me
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“I reckon it’s wrong—but—”
“But—shucks! Your mother won’t know, and so what’s the harm? All she wants is that you’ll be safe; and I bet you she’d a said go there if she’d a thought of it. I know she would!” (ATS, 223)

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Now I have walked a long long ways
I still look back to my tanglewood days,
Ive led lots of girls since then to stray
Saying, aint nobody that can sing like me
Aint nobody that can sing like me
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Most of the adventures recorded in this book really occurred; one or two were experiences of my own, the rest of those boys were schoolmates of mine. Huck Finn is drawn from life; Tom Sawyer also, but not from an individual; he is a combination of the characteristics of three boys whom I knew, and therefore belongs to the composite order of architecture. . . . .
Although my book is intended mainly for the entertainment of boys and girls, I hope it will not be shunned by men and women on that account, for part of my plan has been to try pleasantly to remind adults of what they once were themselves, and of how they felt and thought and talked, and what queer enterprises they sometimes engaged in.
(Mark Twain, Preface to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, 1876)

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Way over yonder in the minor key
Way over yonder in the minor key
There aint nobody that can sing like me
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. . . I’m curious what is meant by being master of the minor key. Is it simply a testament to resilience in courtship, in hard times? Or is there a little . . . manipulation going on here? Is he saying he sings the blues to spark concern and then affection? Hmmph. That works, in my experience. Moving on.

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Packs of dogs and cigarettes

“Idaho” may also pay homage to the album at left, De Stijl by The White Stripes. The speaker in “A Dog’s Best Friend” is going in the opposite direction of our man in “Idaho:” away from home, away from love and community. Human community, anyway. But check out the final verse of track nine: Mere coincidence?

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That single word

My money’s on Idaho.

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I thought our relationship might be ruined one day when my intricate mind’s eye map of the one-way system malfunctioned, and we came to a sudden stop at an intersection facing the oncoming, one-way traffic that was stopped at a light. We were late—there’s a hefty fee for that—so I was on my cell phone with Zipcar, trying to extend the reservation. The light changed and I made the sort of crazy decision I’m prone to under pressure: I pulled forward and wove through two blocks of one-way honking, outraged traffic. I gripped the steering wheel and held my cell phone to my ear and focused on the parking spot I needed to get to in—shit—ninety seconds. To this day Sam cannot speak calmly about his experience in the passenger seat. Anyway, we made it.

Now Sam’s moved away, my younger sister lives here, and none of us own a car. It might be the single most shocking thing we have to confirm to extended family members each year when we’re home for the holidays. That’s because we hail from Michigan, where the automobile figures rather largely in the (now ailing) economy, and in the state’s and many families’ history: many of our relatives worked at one time or another in the automobile plants. My aunt spent one college summer installing dashboards. My father once operated an air impact wrench at Pontiac Truck and Coach, screwing the motor mounts onto the engines as they came down the line. Once when his wrench was malfunctioning and stripping the bolts, he pushed the panic button.

“The alarms went off and ten white-shirts appeared out of nowhere,” he told me. “They were right in my face. They didn’t care if the bolts cracked right in half. They made it crystal clear you never ever stop the line.”

My father drove a lot of miles in his career, and driving was certainly our transportation mode of choice for vacations. I remember fighting to stay awake while he drove the long dark road home, worrying over his weariness, wanting to keep him company, but drifting off and waking magically in the driveway to be lead to bed.

We have a cabin two and half hours north, and in his retirement my father often goes up for the day, sometimes only to get out of his Suburban and hop on some other piece of machinery in the barn. My family likes motors; we have motors for every season. Driving is a badge of honor, and most my relatives don’t bother with mere cars:
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(That’s from a family picnic last summer.)

My father taught me to drive, and I’m not sure there’s anything I wanted to excel at more in his eyes.

“Drive defensively,” he urged, and I nodded. Then he kept repeating it, and by the time I realized this would become his most important tenet, it was too late to confess I didn’t have the faintest idea what it meant.

Driving is an activity somewhat frozen in time for me, one inextricably linked to home.

And so when I got the news that Josh Ritter would be appearing in that old hometown . . .

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Hmmmm. . . Actually, that banner contains a small oversight. I’m sure nothing was meant by it, but we are a proud community, slightly sensitive to the snub ever since we got Da Vinci’s famous sculpture American Horse and one journalist said installing it in Grand Rapids was akin to hanging a prized Picasso in—well, in your bathroom. So if you don’t mind I’ll just—

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There. Josh Ritter would play Grand Rapids on Monday, March 3rd. And when I saw just where he would play—
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—I figured it was a fine occasion to make the first road trip home. It’d be long, sure—I was due back in four days—but I’d happily put the driving atlas that I’m always looking at to use. I’d try not to rush, try to make the highway an end in itself. I’d resist planning. Best of all I’d link up some new familiar roads with the old ones, this new home with Home. A long time ago I realized that, even carless, I have my father’s love of maps, of direction, of knowing where one is with the certainty of one who has physically covered the ground—by foot or wheel—in question. I sort of only trust a place if I’ve walked it. Failing the ability to do that, driving will do.

Oh, and the timing was lucky because my parents were slated to return from the biggest trip of their lives—two months in Australia and New Zealand—on Saturday. They hadn’t been able to crack the phone system, so we’d barely spoken. A few emails, a bungee jumping rumor. A kiwi camper van returned, fitting of any self-respecting Michiganders, with an eye-popping addition to the odometer. We missed them. I’d sent my Dad an email about my trip a week beforehand, asking that he not worry and that he keep it a secret from my mother.

While packing late Friday night I hit the first snag in my young life as a non-planner: I flipped open my passport to find it expired. This was unnerving on a few levels, but the most immediate was that I’d been planning to drive through Canada, and hadn’t they just passed a law requiring a passport? Conflicting information was everywhere, but it seemed I’d need two government-issued IDs and I only had one.

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Saturday

I left anyway in the morning, a duffel bag full of CDs in the passenger seat, telling my friend I might make it and I might just go look around Western New York. It was snowing hard. But I got going and got settled, figured out how to change the langue of the Display in the Prius’ touchscreen from French to English, slid a hotly-anticipated new Scottish album into the CD player. I chose right; it’d be my go-to disc for the entire journey. It’d be my best music discovery in awhile.

The weather across New York was thrillingly variable: sunny skies with racing clouds would suddenly darken and snow flurries would whip round the windshield. Twice I walked into a Travel Plaza in a blizzard wearing my sunglasses. It took a long time before I stopped concentrating on slowing my brisk city-walking, hurry-up gait. Travel Plazas are by nature not somewhere one lingers, but I did, taking in an entire wall of beef jerky. Listening to the high-pitched chatter of a high school sports team in matching sweatshirts. Reading the “History Happened Here” kiosk.

Night fell and I inched along the map, rounding Lake Erie, heading toward the town that had made me smile when I spotted it along my revised, domestic route.

I’ll look for you in old Honolulu, San Francisco, or Ashtabula

“A-S-H-T . . . ” I recited to an American Express travel agent on my cell phone. He spent fifteen minutes trying to find it in his system to book me a hotel there. I wasn’t sure I’d make it, though, so I hung up telling him I’d call back if I wanted to make a reservation.

“Ma’am,” he said with slight exasperation, “Make sure to tell the next agent to use the CLEVELAND CODE for Ashtu—I mean AshTAbula, Ohio.” I don’t think he really believed there was such a town.

I’d hate to cause offense, so I’ll just say I didn’t stay there. But it was late, and of course I had no idea where to go. I got back on the highway toward Cleveland and found a Fairfield Inn.

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Sunday

The next morning I was in striking distance of familiar territory—
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—and by mid-day I had crossed into Michigan and was pointed straight at my beloved college town of Ann Arbor. I met my best friend from college—she’s in graduate school—at Cafe Zola downtown. I got to meet her boyfriend, who she forced to leave—despite my protestations—after he drained his first cup of coffee. We talked and talked, as is our way, charged with the novelty and coziness of being together. We traded heartfelt compliments and then deflected them with deft self-deprecation. When we got out on the street I linked my arm in hers and suggested we walk one block in the mild air.

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“Did I tell you I have to dye my hair now?” Kate asked disgustedly as we walked along, just as I was admiring—like I always do—her dark chestnut curls. When they get unruly and her fair cheeks flushed I think she looks like the cover of a romance novel. She insists she looks like a milkmaid come in off the farm.

We got back to the crookedly parked Prius over an hour later, having done a familiar circuit around the snowy campus. We laughed about the time my upper-classman boyfriend brought me up to the roof of a prominent building when I was a freshman . . . and suddenly the huge inert telescope we didn’t even realize was there lurched into motion and slowly began to turn. There were people in it—astronomy students—and I thought I’d be kicked out of school. Or die of embarrassment.

When I got on the road from Ann Arbor I turned up the music and performed my own concert for the windshield. This was my road, the one I sped up and down, back and forth, for my four years of college. I was into country back then, and I’d roar down the highway belting at the top of my lungs, banging on the steering wheel. The Dixie Chicks’ song Wide Open Spaces steeled my courage to move to London after graduation. (And I’d thought they were just words, but a Big Mistake I did, in fact, make.) I’d slide in behind a speedy “front door” like my dad taught me. I drove way faster than he would have allowed, but no faster than he drove himself.

I turned off the headlights when I pulled into the drive, rang the doorbell, and stood there with my heart in my throat, like a kid starting to lose the battle with the keeping of a secret. My mother appeared, wine glass in hand.

“WHAT are you DOING here?” she shouted, laughing. It echoed out in the silent street.

We sat at the kitchen counter, drinking wine, the tales of two trips tumbling out of our mouths. I told my mom I wasn’t the only person of interest who was in town.

“I heard Josh Ritter in a cafe in Auckland last week!” she gushed. “Can you believe it? The only other band I can recognize is The Beatles, and here I was, asking the lady, ‘Is that by any chance Josh Ritter?’” Last autumn while at the cabin I was carrying Life on the Mississippi around everywhere, and, curious, my parents borrowed my CDs.

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Monday

Grand Rapids has its own case of fandom for one Gerald R. Ford, the 38th president of the United States. Our modest airport was renamed The Gerald R. Ford International Airport in May 2000, just a few years before my English ex-boyfriend would fly in from London, survey the two small terminals, and start a long running joke about Grand Rapids’ small-town identity.

President Ford was born Leslie Lynch King in Omaha in 1913. His mother fled an abusive marriage to Grand Rapids when he was just two weeks old, and Ford eventually took the full name of his stepfather. His presidential museum is in Grand Rapids, and my mom and I stopped by there for a couple hours on Monday. Despite our sharing a hometown and an alma mater, I was not too familiar with Ford’s presidency.

The first room of the exhibit contained all kinds of 60s and 70s paraphernalia. My mother paused a long time at a glass case of clothing and accessories.

“We made all our own clothes. We all did this,” she said, pointing to the macramé. She looked up at the television screen to find Bobby Kennedy. “For awhile in college I kept waking up to find out someone else was shot. It was like you didn’t want to go to sleep. And every day there was a protest—We protested everything. There was so much . . . unrest. And The Beatles! Aren’t they cute?”
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“I guess,” I said.

“I liked Paul,” she said wistfully. “Everybody liked Paul.”

I was quite intrigued by the glass case of implements used in the Watergate break-in. It is still an extraordinary story, with the resignation of Nixon’s Vice President, Spiro Agnew, like an extra dollop of madness in a maelstrom. Ford was serving as House Minority Leader when Nixon named him Vice President to replace Agnew in October 1973.

By August 1974 Nixon was completely backed into a corner—those crazy tapes!—and on the 8th he announced his resignation. Ford had been advised by Nixon’s Chief of Staff on the 1st that he should prepare to be president, and on the 6th Ford had warned Nixon that he would stop speaking publicly about Watergate. On the steamy Saturday of August 3rd my parents were married.

There is stirring footage of the bicentennial celebrations of July 1976 in the twenty-minute film “A Time to Heal,” which summarizes Ford’s presidency and is on loop in a large auditorium throughout the day. I was born in October of that year, just weeks before Ford held his final campaign rally in Grand Rapids. He conceded the race to Jimmy Carter the next day.

“Were you angry at Ford for pardoning Nixon?” I asked my dad when he met us at the Red Ball Jet Cafe for lunch.

He rolled his eyes and nodded slowly.

“Everybody was.”

“But now, today, do you think it was the right thing to do?” I asked, having formed my own tentative opinion.

“Probably,” he replied.

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It was the night Josh Ritter came to town

The Ladies’ Literary Club of Grand Rapids flings open its gates and bids you enter, on this occasion of your [so-called Canadian Tour]. We welcome you, good friends, to our city, our halls, our homes, and to our [frozen] fields of thought.

Bring to us, with these [bracing winter] days, the [blizzard] of your wide experience, kindle, we pray, the torch of truth that shall shine with no uncertain light. Balance for us an even scale of justice that we may judge wisely all the plans and purposes of life. Lift aloft a right and true standard of honor to guide and direct our days.

Adapted from an invitation issued by the Ladies’ Literary Club in 1891. No “Drop by sometime!” from these Ladies, as evidenced here.

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It was a tall order, but they managed it. My mother used my spare ticket, went in ahead to grab seats, and bumped into some former teaching friends of hers. They’d won tickets through the local radio station and were sitting in back to allow for an early getaway.

“You won’t want to leave,” I said. “Trust me.”

It was a generous set list. It seemed like they played most everything, though I suppose that can’t be true. Josh opened with a gorgeous Idaho, the homesick song that’d been on my mind as I covered the miles to Michigan. The word that never fails to . . . lake-lock me, I’d thought, smiling. Josh was rather enamored of the nature of the venue, remarking on its Masterpiece Theatre vibe.

“Are there any . . . ladies here?” he grinned. “Literary ladies?”

My mom squealed when Lillian, Egypt down shifted into a disco beat during the encore. At the end Josh offered his thanks to Jane Austen, Daphne du Maurier, and Charlotte Bronte.

“Thanks for comin’!” He shouted one final time as he left the stage.

“Thank you for coming,” my mom said, hugging me tightly in the driveway. I’d convinced them of the wisdom in my getting a start that evening, so we’d loaded up the Prius. My mom rooted through the pantry looking for the makings of a portable snack. My father spread out the AAA TripTik he’d picked up that afternoon on the kitchen counter. I zipped the certified birth certificate we’d retrieved from the basement into a pocket of my purse.

“Thanks for coming,” I said, picking out the lights of downtown as I took the long circular ramp onto 96.

I crossed the border at 2:30.

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Tuesday

The next day I stopped at a frozen Niagara Falls, Canadian-side. It was windy and misty and bitterly cold but I’d been digging the Canadian air since I took a deep breath at a Husky service station near Hamilton. It’s eminently breathable, winter Canadian air, like cold water on a parched throat. It feels like it might purify your spirit, as though it could clean you right out.

The water beneath the falls was frozen in ragged, Abominable-Snowman chunks of ice. Of the handfuls of people braving the cold I seemed to be the only native English speaker.

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I lingered too long, setting myself up for a punishing final push. It lashed with rain, very time-pressed SUVs appeared suddenly like hulks in my rear view mirror. I flew past some cops, resisting the urge to slam on my brakes. I got mustard on the steering wheel, and I swear I lost my cell phone, my camera, the CD lyrics, and my toll ticket in regular rotation county after county after county. Do not rent the pale green Prius from Hertz at the airport: Some sort of cosmic Bermuda triangle for Lost Stuff is centered right on the driver’s seat, I’m sure of it.

That new Scottish CD I mentioned before came through. In light of roads untraveled and new adventures I will tell you that Iain Anderson of BBC Scotland has delivered me yet another favorite: he’s Grant Campbell, and he’s just released his second album, Beyond Below. I do think it’s a record especially suited to a road trip, but I’ve given the car back—two toll tickets sacrificed to the gods—and I’m still listening. A lot. He’s got a staggering voice that hits undulating notes so low and big and rich you’re paralyzed by your own ear for a few seconds. This guy feels it, you can tell. I love the ethereal Lila, the bold confession of Annabelle, the searing pain and awareness and resignation of Fuel the Fire. The impossible beauty of the imagery and the notes—those haunting low notes—of Lowlands.

Bob Dylan pledged survival:

I’ll see you in the sky above,
the tall grass, and the ones I love

Grant Campbell wasn’t asking for the moon:

Tomorrow go easy don’t break my heart

I thought back over Josh Ritter’s words

The straight of the highway and the scattered out hearts

And it was only in the final hours when I couldn’t listen anymore. It was just me and the frantic wipers and the stillness inside, some plastic-wrapped processed food in the cup holder. The horizon glowed various shades of black, and I thought all kinds of things over.

You don’t tell everything to a blog—or to anyone—so I’ll just say it’s nice how the road somehow enables one to tell more to herself.

And lastly—

“Thanks for coming,” I’ll say to you.
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[Starting Line by Grant Campbell]

But now I was free, English degree burning a whole in my . . . my . . . where’d we put that thing anyway? No matter. Any job in America was open to me for the taking, and even with the bubble burst, so much with regard to employment seemed to be happening online. This seemed very convenient as my parents’ home was not exactly situated where I wanted to be employed.

Apply online! Attach your resume! DO NOT CALL US. I did and didn’t do exactly as I was told.

I clicked Submit, Submit, Submit, etc etc etc. And I waited.

I got a temp job working four to midnight data inputting Bills of Lading for a trucking company. (I thought “Bill of Lading” was a grand short story title.) I applied for the bigger stuff during the day. I’d decided I wanted to work around books. Anything to work with books. I crafted the wittiest (but not too witty), smartest (but not too smart) cover letter I’d ever seen and I fired it off, cold, to bookish companies and corporations all over America. I sent it snail mail too, just to be safe. I signed my name with the unmistakable flourish of a future exec.

“Are you sure these things are even going anywhere?” My mom asked, peering into my computer screen as I clicked another Submit button on an application. I’d sent out fifty applications and not had any response.

“In my day we didn’t sit around waiting for some email when we needed work. You need to get out and shake some hands,” my father said through his newspaper.

By the end of the summer the trucking company had figured out I graduated from one of the state’s better universities and offered me a day job (I declined), I’d had one interview and offer in Chicago (I declined), and stung by their indifference, I’d forbidden my writerly brother Sam and myself to publish any of our future literary classics with most the major houses in America.

“No promises,” he said.

I was saved—truly I think these six years later I might still be at that kitchen table—by a walk in the woods with my dad’s old college buddy Jack. We were up at the cabin over Labor Day.

“I think my cousin works in books,” he said absently.

She did. Sight unseen she invited me out East, let me sleep on her sofa, and took me to work for a week. By the end I was through the first round of interviews with a rival firm. I did the second round on the phone at my parents’, circling the house as I formulated and articulated my answers, pausing to look at my earnest reflection in the grandfather clock. I got the offer. I got on a plane and moved East.

I was over the moon to work in books.

It’s almost six years later and I work at a different firm, but I still work in books. In fact this week, after hours, when these sorts of things take place, my belongings were moved into a new office, my name plate torn with that recognizable crackle off the old velcro and affixed outside a new door. A promotion. I was rushing past the HR office when I had this vision of the heavy cream resume paper and jet-black ink on the kitchen counter back in Michigan. I’d sent one of my letters here, to this building, so desperate to get in. I never heard anything. I pushed the button on the elevator, wondering for a few moments where that letter had gone.

Of course—you know this is coming—I know now it’s a little less . . . romantic than I envisioned it when I pinned it with so much desire and hope. On the worst days business can even ruin books.

How we hated our coffee mugs! our mouse pads, our desk clocks, our daily calendars, the contents of our desk drawers. Even the photos of our loved ones taped to our computer monitors for uplift and support turned into cloying reminders of time served. But when we got a new office, a bigger office, and we brought everything with us into the new office, how we loved everything all over again, and thought hard about where to place things, and looked with satisfaction at the end of the day at how well our old things looked in this new, improved, important space. . . .

It’s true, I am pained to admit. But it was only a couple days after my office move before things went back to normal this week: I spotted another paw print on the copier.

. . . There was no doubt in our minds just then that we had made all the right decisions, whereas most days we were men and women of two minds. Everywhere you looked, in the hallways and bathrooms, the coffee bar and cafeteria, the lobbies and the print stations, there we were with—

Wolves.

Oh—sorry, I mean, there we were with

our two minds.

(All quotes above from) Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris (p. 7)

When I got thinking about Josh Ritter’s song Wolves, I had to ponder my life at work and how, especially over the last year, the pull of things outside seems to have grown stronger. The wolf in that song (and as I discussed, in much of Jack London’s work) might symbolize a source of nature, of wildness, of a call in each of us to do what is in fact part of us. What makes us feel most alive, or as London has it, what make us forget we’re alive. For me—no revelation even in this cozy blogging community of 2.5M—writing is the thing.

Writing is how I keep the wolves at bay, or how I join them, however you see it. They need constant attention and care, or else I get to feeling not myself. Crabby. The more I work at writing, the bigger my ideas, and the harder to fold them away into the cracks and crevices left over after the rest of my life has claimed its nonnegotiable time.

Why was it so terrifying, almost like death, one morning of a hundred, to walk back to your own office and pass alone through its doorway? Why was the dread so suffocating? Most days, no problem. . . . But one out of a hundred mornings it was impossible to breathe.

Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris (p. 56)

It happens, and for me the frequency is not so kind as one in a hundred. But it’s so tempting to pit our creative pursuits against our professional lives. It’s so tempting to quit so you can have the time you need and make that long-suspected discovery that actually, you’re Charles Dickens.

When someone quit, we couldn’t believe it. . . . Where had they found the derring-do? (p. 57)

Anyway, I figured I’d write a bit about work. No ritzy debut novel, mind you—for that I do recommend Ferris’ book. I figured if the wolves are going to show up at work—and they have— they better be ready for me to go in there looking around the way I usually save for everywhere else.

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“Welcome aboard!”

The first thing I should tell you is, Look out for the bully. He’s sneaky. The first email is all Welcome Back! But snooze for one day and the next morning find an angry red exclamation point in your Inbox. This is a repeat reminder! he chides. He’s the Out of Office Agent, and it’s nice he alerts people that you’re out while you’re away. But he doesn’t like overtime. Once you’re back he’s done. I picture him running around in there, clipboard in hand, pencil behind ear, angrily shouting out names. Is Johnson BACK or what? Send him the Reminder. So remember: Enable the Out of Office Agent before you go away, Disable him right when you get back, and you won’t have any trouble. There’s something quite dissatisfying about being reprimanded by your computer just as you’re taking your first sip of morning coffee, clinging to the rapidly fading vacation glow.

The other wily electronic personality to look out for is . . . let’s call him Larry. He runs the Dial-by-Name service. You speak the name, he connects you. That’s the theory, anyway, as far as I can tell. Larry and I have never, ever seen eye to eye.

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Name please? he asks brightly.

“Judy Johnson.”

Thank you. Ringing . . . Ed Mancini. To cancel, press star.

***!
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Cancelled. Name please?

“JEW-DEE Johnson.”

Thank you. Ringing . . . Penelope Sanchez. To cancel, press star.

***!

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Cancelled. Name please?

“You’re an idiot.”

Thank you. Ringing . . . Greta Westinghouse. To cancel, press star.

***!

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Cancelled. Name please?

&*%$# $%#@*!!

Thank you. Ringing . . . Chuck Boo. To cancel, press star.

***!

Cancelled. [With exasperation creeping into his tone, as though to say "I really don't have time for this:"] To reach a help message or reach an operator, after the tone say either “Help!” or “Operator.”

I confess, I have exhibited very bad behavior while trying to deal with Larry. I am considering a conflict seminar.

It’s good to have a theme song to pump you up as you’re walking in. Stay away from Maggie’s Farm if it’s a bad day. For awhile there I liked Kanye West, if only because I liked weaving through the cube farm whispering

You should be honored by my lateness!

After a few weeks you’re going to be away from your desk, somewhere, and a phone will ring and you will instinctively feel like picking it up. It’s a—what do they call it—Pavlovian reflex. Don’t worry. It takes a few months, but eventually your ears grow completely accustomed to the exact volume level of the ring of your phone when you’re sitting at your desk. You’ll be having a conversation six months from now, a phone will ring 5.5 feet away and someone will say “Isn’t that your—” and you’ll confidently say “Nope,” just as the person on the other side of the wall picks up.

There will be sneezing. Decide right now whether you’re a “Bless you” person or not. It’s very awkward sitting there debating on the fly. For what it’s worth, I think you should be: it’s polite. But if you’re the only one carrying the torch, and you set a precedent, this can become annoying. Especially if someone nearby gets a persistent cold. Or has allergies. Perhaps there’s an etiquette: a certain person says it every time, or people sort of take unscripted turns. I would think most sneezers prefer not to hear a chorus each time, but I’m not sure. Take the cues of those around you.

Learn the three letter acronyms (“TLAs”—yes, we really call them that). I don’t know about yours, but there are a lot of these in my industry. It’s the generic ones that I find amusing however. I laughed the first time I saw this

“I am WAH this morning.”

WAH should be something better than Working at Home. I am WAH!!! we could all say. There’s EOM for End of Message (in case you were confused) and someone emailed me WTG! after my promotion was announced. All my eye could process was WTF(!?), though, so this was slightly unnerving. WTG is Way to Go.

If you really need someone to do something and you really need them to understand you really need them to do it, but you really don’t want them to think you’re really pushy, you can always go all assertively, clairvoyantly grateful and say Thanks in Advance. Or TIA if you’re in a hurry. Our emails suggest we are all in a desperate rush.

Our chatter suggests we are all tied to a chair at a huge banquet table trying to consume an endless meal.

“He has a lot on his plate.”

“I need to get that off my plate.”

“This should be on their plate, not ours.”

I personally don’t use the plate metaphor. I don’t like it, but it’s up to you.

It’s good to be kind to the people who work in the coffee bar or the cafeteria, the ones that empty the trash or clean the bathrooms or change the light bulbs. The ones who tear off our name plates and roll our stuff across the floor.

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The position of cashier in our cafeteria has a very high turnover, I’ve noticed. There was the tiny Asian woman who must have loved math because she’d look at your total and before you’d even unzipped your wallet she’d have the change ready in her hand. If you gave her exact change, she’d simply drop the readied coins right back in the drawer, not caring at all how many superfluous mathematic computations she carried out in her head. I liked her. She was so slight that she went out on maternity before any of us knew she was pregnant.

The next guy—a young kid—was a night owl and every morning my heart broke to see him standing there, eyes at half mast, dead on his feet. The cafeteria shift is six thirty to two. He napped through all his breaks on the only soft surface available to him: the furniture near the elevator banks. We all walked past his slumped figure—sometimes his head tipped back and lips parted in absolute exhaustion—not sure whether to tiptoe or talk to his supervisor. I sorta thought, You go, kid. I told him I stayed up late too and pretty soon we’d be having this contest every morning.

“How late’d you stay up?”

“1:30. You?”

It wasn’t fair because his shift started so much earlier than mine. Anyway, he didn’t last. The next girl, Elizabeth, was chatty so we were friendly before long and one morning while she was finding me some milk she told me about a guy she’d met online. For a couple weeks they emailed and then one day she excitedly announced they were meeting in person after work. I came in the next morning—I was wary, I confess—and she smiled timidly, painfully.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said, shaking her head.

I overheard her talking to her mom on her phone in the bathroom about a hotel desk clerk job. A couple weeks after that she was gone.

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Romance & magic

Romance is Not Recommended in the workplace, we all know that. But I’ve had some innocent brushes with something just approximating . . . kindness, really, that did endear me to me the place. For two years I greeted the rotund young security guard downstairs, Tom, and then one day as I flashed my smile and my identification badge, he reached into his pocket.

“I wanted to tell you that today’s my last day and . . . er . . . ” He pulled out one of those miniature pocket spiral notebooks and flipped open the lid. “I just thought if you ever wanted to . . . um, you know, email me . . . Here.” He tore off a piece of paper. I thanked him, wished him well, got in the elevator, and held the paper up to my eyes. Name, email, phone number.

I sat down at my desk. Was every page in the pad a carbon copy of his contact information? Was he ripping them off, like numbers at a deli counter, handing them to all the girls as the day wore on, hoping someone might buy on this his last day, his last chance? I decided to believe a more flattering motive, and I pinned the paper up in my line of sight for awhile. My eyes fell on it when I was feeling down.

There was a very bright but utterly ill-suited-to-the-corporate-world Project Manager who was hell to work with but who I will forever remember. Fondly. He was a brilliant writer and took to slipping subtle compliments and hints at affection in his emails to me. Innocent ones, mind you. Kindness, really. He’d tiptoe up to the precipice of Inappropriate, write some gently lovely thing, and then close with “Excelsior!” He once told me after a meeting that I entered the room to a heavenly choir backing track. Despite the missed deadlines and constant contrariness and kvetching about the headaches to my friends, some days (still) I need that backing track. So I don’t hold a grudge. It was nice to be liked, even at work. He’s now engaged.

But lest I appear the object of affection on all sides, let me assure you I’ve struck out a time or two. Or once, actually, the one and only time I stepped up to bat at work. He was a guy who works in the building, not in my firm. I rode down in the elevator with him one summer night. We got talking and walked across the square. I liked his easy smile, I loathed my then-broken heart. I found myself looking for him whenever it was time to get on the elevator. I shared this crush with an enterprising friend, and she immediately had a Plan.

“Put your business card with your security badge. Give it to him next time you see him.”

Reader, I did. Brave, huh? Do not underestimate the determination, if short-lived, of a broken heart. (I’ve never done it again.) It didn’t end well . . . well, it did. And it didn’t. Voice shaking, I gave him my business card in a (mercifully) empty elevator, invited him for a drink, went to a meeting with an addled brain, and came back to this—

To: Girl in the Gloaming
From: Guy in the Elevator
Sent: 10/13/2005 02:54 PM
Subject: Your card

Hi,

Thanks again for your card, that was a surprise! This is likely going
to sound odd, but I did want to mention that I’ve been seeing someone
for a couple years now. My guess is I’m assuming way too much but
always better to make that known. There’s really no way to know that,
is there?

In any event, nice delivery, I’m flattered, and someone should write a book about that. And in the event that I AM assuming too much, my apologies in advance!

Best,
Mark

To: Guy in the Elevator
From: Girl in the Gloaming
Sent: 10/14/2005 12:14 PM
Subject: RE: Your card

Hi Mark,

It’s entirely appropriate for you to have said so — not odd at all! In fact, it might be considered odd to be handing out business cards to near perfect strangers, but I thought you seemed nice (and alas, all evidence says yes!) and well, I figured it was worth a shot. Please know I really don’t make a practice of it.

Thanks for your kindness and sensitivity in allowing me to not regret an attempt at being brave. (I’m afraid “nice delivery” is a stretch, but I appreciate you saying so!)

I do hope we can still say hello in the elevators!
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To: Girl in the Gloaming
From: Guy in the Elevator
Sent: 10/14/2005 12:17 PM
Subject: RE: Your card

It’s all about taking that step into the unknown, I think it’s great. And not too bad for my ego either!

Mark

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—That’s how it went. I swear, I haven’t altered a word.

My friends all praised his kindness, his encouragement. “He’s so nice,” they said softly, reading the printout. “Oh, he’s so nice!” we wailed as the reality of it all sunk in, and we relived and rehashed the tragedy of his non-single state over and over. He still says Hello, wherever he is, whatever he’s doing, nodding over someone’s shoulder while he’s in conversation in the cafeteria, raising his arm in greeting across the stone courtyard. I’ve seen him on the subway with the girl I presume is his girlfriend. They look happy. He still meets my eye and smiles warmly. I smile back weakly and look down, but I appreciate it.

And if not exactly rip-roaring romance, a little magic? Yes, we’ve got that too. I have a magic wallet, for one. It didn’t come from work; it came from the department store across the street. Thing is, I unwittingly stole it. I was looking at a handful of them, I decided to defer the decision, and I walked out of the store. It wasn’t until I got into the bathroom at work that I realized I had a contraband wallet amongst my belongings. I went back and paid for it; I couldn’t bear the guilt otherwise. And good thing too, because it’s charmed.

Case in point: I once left it on the roof of a Zipcar and drove—not exactly gingerly—three miles before I stopped, got out, and found it up there, on the brink of falling to the street. But better: I once left it (yes, yes, it’s a problem) in the bathroom at work. When I went back it wasn’t there, and I was really getting quite anxious when Alfred the mailmen turned the corner and handed me a lumpy interoffice envelope addressed, with a shaky hand, to my name.

Inside was my wallet. The money was gone, but everything else in tact. I just stared at it for twenty minutes and never told anyone. I was too embarrassed.

By the way, do not underestimate the interoffice envelope, that cousin to the old-fashioned Valentine: you can send it completely anonymously, no postmark even. Try sending your friends or enemies or perfect strangers anonymous notes of encouragement, small-amount gift cards to the local cafe or book shop. Try sending some gift of gratitude to the undoubtedly unsung mail person. It makes everyone feel good. It gets management scratching their heads, which is always a good thing.

It may not be magic, but here’s a tip for the sandwich bar downstairs: order a “half” sandwich from the super speedy Mexican man, and he’ll slice a thick piece of multigrain bread the long way, pile it high with tuna, put the second slice on top, and hand it over with a smile. I don’t know if this is how they do it in Mexico, or a mistaken translation of the word “half,” but don’t ask questions: it’s plenty for lunch, and half the price!

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The Book Table

We have a Book Table, a graveyard for our own personal books read or never-read and discarded. Don’t be fooled by the dog-eared pages, the dust, the old copyrights. It’s worth a look. Donations coiled in the coffee mug go to The United Way. I found The Ninemile Wolves on the Book Table, and yes, I found Then We Came to the End there too.

Then We Came to the End has an epigraph that comes from an essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson. It’s called The American Scholar. I found it and read it in conjunction with the novel. It’s another post—another blog—four times through and I’m still reeling—but there was one passage that I will shamelessly take out of context now.

In light of Josh Ritter and Wolves and that fine album The Animal Years and this blog and—God, everything, really, I think this is beautiful:

The theory of books is noble. The scholar of the first age received into him the world around; brooded thereon; gave it the new arrangement of his own mind, and uttered it again. It came into him, life; it went out from him, truth. It came to him, short-lived actions; it went out from him, immortal thoughts. It came to him, business; it went from him, poetry. It was dead fact; now, it is quick thought. It can stand, and it can go. It now endures, it now flies, it now inspires. Precisely in proportion to the depth of mind from which it issued—

Heads up!

Precisely in proportion to the depth of mind from which it issued, so high does it soar, so long does it sing.

From The American Scholar by Ralph Waldo Emerson (emphasis mine)

So long, so high. Indeed.

You know, I found Josh at work too. Just one April afternoon while I was listening to a personal hero, Iain Anderson of BBC Scotland. I was—I am—no music aficionado. Had I just stepped away, had I been out on vacation—I miss a lot of Iain’s shows. Had I been embroiled in some project, not truly listening, just too busy to look up the artist and find his website . . . maybe this would be a Ralph Waldo Emerson blog. Or Neil Diamond. Yipes.

Can it come to her business, and go out poetry? Joshua Ferris wanted to find out, I guess. What a poetic final paragraph, what a chilling last line. The truest thing I can think to say of the drive to write is that is transcends time and place and circumstance. I think about quitting my job—I have some book ideas that would take me away, but I think it’s important to look hard at that choice. To have no illusions. (I’m good at illusions.) I am mindful that only a handful of years ago this is exactly what I wanted. This. Here. I think it’s important to practice, and practice, so that’s what I’ve been doing. Even if life gets pretty hectic.

Still. Some days I dream of telling that Out of Office Agent that I finally found the derring-do. That the next time somebody says “Welcome aboard!” I better have one foot on a sailboat. I’d tell him I’m outta here—never to be welcomed back—and then disable him forever.

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There’s a huge, lone Christmas tree in the center of the tundra that is the square, in the shadow of a famous church. It’s strung with white lights, and when illuminated one can see that it’s listing. Tipping right over, as though trying to lay down for a nap. I will it to hang on as I hurry by.

[L]ate at night I like to imagine that they are killing: that another deer has gone down in a tangle of legs, tackled in deep snow; and that, once again, the wolves are feeding. That they have saved themselves, once again. That the deer or moose calf, or young dumb elk is still warm (steam rising from the belly as that part which contains the entrails is opened first), is now dead, or dying.

They eat everything, when they kill, even the snow that soaks up the blood. (NW, 3)

It’s a fine time to talk about winter-loving wolves, who are often photographed with a snowy backdrop. Their muzzles attract the flakes a little like cake crumbs, I’ve thought, which can make them look—for a fleeting moment—silly. But then there’s the pictures where teeth or nose have been dipped in a telling red, and I remember what they are. What they do. They love winter because their big paws allow them to run over the surface of deep snow. The long slender legs of their prey—deer, elk—poke through, slowing them down.

The wintry weather is likely just another challenge of a hard existence wolves seem thrillingly and incredibly willing to embrace. Imagine if instead of closing a menu and announcing your choice, every meal meant risking a broken skull, broken ribs, getting kicked or trampled. Sifting and sorting tirelessly through a herd, looking for the weak link, locking in, running oneself to exhaustion, darting in from behind, eyes wide, biting down—

They don’t have thumbs. All they’ve got is teeth, long legs, and—I have to say this—great hearts. (NW, 3)

That quote and the one above is Rick Bass, the Montana resident and writer, taken from his 1992 book called The Ninemile Wolves. He’s tells a good story; he’s a great fan. But I’m getting ahead.

There’s an intriguing song called Wolves on Josh Ritter’s fine record The Animal Years. It’s about a guy having some trouble with wolves, possibly Canis lupus irremotus, roughly translated as “The Wolf Who Is Always Showing Up.” The wolves in the song show up in a big way, zeroing in on a tender scene. Going in for the kill, leaving the speaker with only a vivid, persistent memory.

Here’s how it goes:
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I still remember that time when we were dancing
We were dancing to a song that I’d heard
Your face was simple and your hands were naked
I was singing without knowing the words
But I started listening to the wolves in the timber
Wolves in the timber at night
I heard their songs when I looked in the mirror
In the howls and the moons round my eyes

So long, so high

Then winter came and there was little left between us
Skin and bones of love won’t make a meal
I felt my eyes drifting over your shoulder
There were wolves at the edge of the field
But I still remember that time when we were dancing
We were dancing to a song that I’d heard
Your face was simple and your hands were naked
I was singing without knowing the words

So long, so high

Then one day I just woke up
And the wolves were all there
Wolves in the piano
Wolves underneath the stairs
Wolves inside the hinges
Circling round my door
At night inside the bedsprings
Clicking cross the floor
I don’t know how they found me
I’ll never know quite how
I still can’t believe they heard me
That I was howling out that loud

So long, so high

At times in the frozen nights I go roaming
In the bed you used to share with me
I wake in the fields with the cold and the lonesome
The moon’s the only face that I see
But I still remember that time when we were dancing
We were dancing to a song that I’d heard
Your face was simple and your hands were naked
I was singing without knowing the words

So long, so high

~Wolves by Josh Ritter
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I love that blissful, impromptu-feeling opening image. A few muffled bars overcome the static and someone leaps up from the dinner table, darts across the kitchen, cranks up the volume on the stereo. Or a new CD—purchased for that one intriguing, unforgettable, unfamiliar track—is crowbarred open and a lover called in from another room to hear. Suddenly—before there’s time to pick up what we carry—there’s dancing, a few precious moments where face and hands are stripped clear . . . of resentment, burden, judgment, whatever. One enters a place where words can’t follow, and finds that actually, you don’t need them.

We know they’re coming, though. There’s that galloping drum beneath even the vocals of the first words. It beats an ancient song of pursuit; I see a furious spray of snow, the skidding tracks. He starts listening to another song, a howl so long, so high, and things go south with the girl. They’re starving by the second verse, the wolf pack massing at the border. Then he wakes up and the wolves are in the house—everywhere—and it’s curtains. It ends and he’s alone, lonely, telling us for the third time about that time when we were dancing.

I still remember, he keeps saying. I still remember, like a mantra. Does that memory haunt him or hold him fast—mercifully—to a thing that’s gone?

I first read this piece as metaphor for the end—the depredation—of a relationship. You do often see it coming—once glimpsed it can feel inexorable, like that drumbeat. The good times loom up with such temptation—you keep remembering, remembering, thinking you’ll get it back. Then comes the unavoidable end. You go down fighting, like the deer.

But there are other clues, the most telling that glance in the mirror, and the lines I still can’t believe they heard me / I was howling out that loud. In the last verse he wakes from a dream in a field, staring at the moon. Who—what—is he, exactly?

Are the wolves indeed coming to kill? Or are they coming to claim him?

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Old longings nomadic leap

There’s a prominent American author who was a little obsessed with wolves. He printed them on his personal stationary and bookmarks, named his dog Brown Wolf and his house Wolf House. He referred to himself as Wolf and asked others to too, and he wrote, extensively, about wolves. I’ve read that he is the most widely read and translated American author in the world. I’m not sure how to corroborate this, but it could be. He published a beloved novel in 1903 that was commemorated in 2003 as America’s Greatest World Novel. Beloved—I have to say this—especially by my seventh-grade English teacher. I still remember the look in his eye when we read the story about the guy and the fire.

The man—the writer, the wolf lover—is Jack London. Do you know the story of Buck? The dog who, captured in California and enslaved as sled dog in the Yukon gold rush, answers The Call of the Wild.

That book begins with this brilliant poem called Atavism by John Myers O’Hara:

Old longings nomadic leap
Chafing at custom’s strain;
Again from its brumal sleep
Wakens the ferine strain.

Brumal is an archaic word meaning indicative of or occurring in winter, ferine a synonym for feral, ie having escaped domestication, wild.

It’s the story of Buck’s waking up to a stirring, primal call, the one of his ancestors. Like our speaker in Wolves, Buck falls in love, and it complicates things:

[Buck] was older than the days he had seen and the breaths he had drawn. He linked the past with the present, and the eternity behind him throbbed through him in a mighty rhythm to which he swayed as the tides and seasons swayed. He sat by John Thornton’s fire, a broad-breasted dog, white-fanged and long-furred; but behind him were the shades of all manner of dogs, half wolves and wild wolves, urgent and prompting, tasting the savor of the meat he ate, thirsting for the water he drank, scenting the wind with him, listening with him and telling him the sounds made by the wild life in the forest, dictating his moods, directing his actions, lying down to sleep with him when he lay down, and dreaming with him and beyond him and becoming themselves the stuff of his dreams.

So peremptorily did these shades beckon him, that each day mankind and the claims of mankind slipped farther from him. Deep in the forest a call was sounding, and as often as he heard this call, mysteriously thrilling and luring, he felt compelled to turn his back upon the fire and the beaten earth around it, and to plunge into the forest, and on and on, he knew not where or why; nor did he wonder where or why, the call sounding imperiously, deep in the forest. But as often as he gained the soft unbroken earth and the green shade, the love for John Thornton drew him back to the fire again. (CW, 65-66)

Buck dreams a lot of his ancestors hunting with our human ones. I like that Wolves uses sleep and dream too: the wolves show up on a day when the speaker just woke up, and at the end he wakes up—dreams of waking up?—beneath the moon in a field. As wolf or man? Not clear. That’s the thing: I think this song is about what happens when the purest forces act on us, how we do or don’t reconcile the calls that humans hear. On one level I do think the wolves come to claim him, that it’s not just fear he’s feeling when he’s looking over her shoulder—It’s thrill. I think the song’s about how we’re part wild—some more than others, perhaps—like the wolves. Like Buck.

The refrain So long, so high, So long, so high, it occurred to me, might capture a wry farewell (So long) to that blissful time (so high) that he keeps remembering. For I think that listening to our call sometimes leads to sacrifice of even the the happiest, most life-giving things. It’s the conundrum we live with; it’s why we break our own and each other’s hearts over and over. It could be why he’s alone in the end, having made a conscious or unconscious choice. He’s so lonesome, but I wonder: is he also the slightest bit relieved?

Too far, I hear you saying. You’re right, there’s no textual evidence for that. Still. If not relief, I wonder if he’s looking up at that moon, some part of him knowing it was never going to end up another way. As dear as that memory—that girl—is.

I still remember, he keeps saying, and I wonder whether it’s to tell us, or to keep reminding himself. That he’s capable, that it’s out there, that it could happen again.

I won’t tell you how it ends for Buck, other than to say it does so with a song. (And you were right, Mr. Versluis: It’s lovely. I’m sorry your great enthusiasm went to waste in a junior high classroom. We just couldn’t get it.)

We do a lot of diving beneath allegories to peek around metaphors only to try (and try) to pry the lid off symbols around here, so I might as well say I like pondering what sounds the call. I mean, it’s the wolves here, but it could be anything. In Wolves it’s a song (that I’d heard) that prompts the joyous, cozy opening scene, and also a song (in the timber) that ultimately lures him away. Seems fitting for a musician. Such is the double-edged nature of a calling—of passion—I think.

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“I mean, it’s just—they like to move.” ~Biologist Mike Jimenez

It’s an interesting time to be learning about wolves. I read Rick Bass’ The Ninemile Wolves, published way back in 1992, when an important chapter of an ever-lengthening story was being written. The book follows the fate of a pack in the Ninemile Valley, located in northwestern Montana. They were the first known pack in Montana to try and settle outside protected national park territory. The hope back then was that they’d make it to Yellowstone.

Why weren’t they in Yellowstone already? Because we killed them all. Well, first we killed all the bison, which were an important source of prey for them, then as Bass has it, we “tam[ed] the dry rangelands of the West into dusty factories of meat.” (NW, 35) The wolves turned their attention to the livestock, we turned our attention on them—

The wolves preyed on the [livestock], without question, but ranchers and the government overreacted just a tad. Until very recently, the score stood at Cows, 99,200,000; Wolves, 0. (NW, 5)

—and from the 1930′s to the 1990′s there were no wolves left in not only Yellowstone, but the entire American West. I mean, we really got into it, with government-issued bounties and everything. Hunters brought in their ears as evidence of a kill. Whether you love or hate them, you’d have to admit it was horrible. In 1974 wolves were put on the Endangered Species List. And in 1995—three years after Bass’ book came out—fourteen Canadian wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone, amidst controversy. You can follow that extraordinary story in the National Geographic film Wolves: A Legend Returns to Yellowstone.

The fate of wolves, and our ongoing relationship with them is a hot topic, as we say in my family. I said it’s an interesting time because the twisting tale is about to get another chapter: the federal government seems to be on the brink of removing wolves from the Endangered List. It could happen this month. If it does, states will take control, free to set individual hunting seasons. Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming seem keen to do so. If the wolf population drops below a certain threshold, they’ll go back on the List and be protected. Two weeks ago seven conservationist groups filed a lawsuit over the setting of the population threshold.

I don’t feel informed enough to enter the fray, but it’s quite tempting to share Bass’ enthusiasm after reading his book. My favorite part is when the pups are orphaned, and Mike Jimenez, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service biologist, is working like a madman trying to save them without their knowing, howling to them in backyards, dragging in road-killed deer (wearing gloves to mask his scent), hunting deer when there is no road-kill, protecting the meat from bears, propping dead deer up against trees in a running position to try and teach the pups how to hunt.

I won’t tell you the fate of the Ninemile—Bass will, in the 2003 Preface—or that first pack from the Yellowstone reintroduction, other than to say wolves seem to favor surprise endings, which I rather love.

They’re also fiercely territorial, hierarchical, family-oriented:

[W]olves are not about individuals, or green eyes, or howls, or big feet, or the kill. The story of wolves is about packs, about societies. (NW, 127-128)

And perhaps most important, they roam:

[T]raveling, and movement, seems to feed the wolf’s soul, as well: it’s nothing for them to cover twenty miles overnight on a hunt. (NW, 13)

Only one pair—the alpha male and female—in the pack mates each year. If a wolf is particularly aggressive or ambitious or feeling like an outcast—or hearing a call, I like to imagine— it will disperse. They roam, sometimes huge distances, looking for each other. For a mate. Bass spots lone wolves from his Montana window and is moved by their lonesome demeanor. If the disperser finds a mate, the pair roams some more to find an unoccupied territory. If they find one and mate, they’ll likely do like other wolves, and take an extra extra long ramble before the birth in the spring. According to the National Geographic film, all wolves—aunts, uncles, siblings—love and take part in the raising of puppies.

I wonder what it is to be so hard-wired for the pack, the society, and yet heed the call to disperse. I think about the speaker in Wolves. I think—I worry—about me, sitting at a desk day after day, looking into this screen. It’s not just the males that disperse; females do too.

I think about singing without knowing the words, how those inexplicable times really do imprint on our memory, how we call on them over and over, even after we’ve left them behind.

Forever trying to remember the time we forgot:

There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive. This ecstasy, this forgetfulness of living, comes to the artist, caught up and out of himself in a sheet of flame; it comes to the soldier, war-mad on a stricken field and refusing quarter; and it came to Buck, leading the pack, sounding the old wolf cry . . . He was sounding the deeps of his nature, and of the parts of his nature that were deeper than he . . . (CW, 39)

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The Ninemile Wolves by Rick Bass

Wolves: A Legend Returns to Yellowstone (DVD)

“Where I’m Calling From” by Ray Carver (Short story)

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The Debate
The Grey Wolf according to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. Best quote:

Biologists have identified a few of the reasons that wolves howl. First, they like to howl. . . .

Fear dominates wolf delisting debate (Plenty, Jan. 31, 2008)

Rocky Mountain wolf killing rule goes to court (Environment News Service, Jan. 28, 2008)

I did watch a movie about Irish rock music. I learned more about the showbands from my last post on Josh Ritter’s song Monster Ballads. Some revising was in order, some rethinking and quite a bit of rewriting. It’s done and I feel better. See the sections on the showbands, chorus, and last verse if you’re interested.

You’re likely not interested.

Recently I casually mentioned my Katy-the-train Monster Ballads theory to a friend and fellow fan.

“Really?” She paused, and then shrugged. “I guess I thought Katy was just a girl.”

“Maybe she is,” I sighed, and we laughed.

Maybe she is.

What can I say—I enjoyed the journey. I wanted it to feel right—right for me, not capital-R Right. The song kept changing before my eyes, changing with me through time. There’s just enough to entice and elude you, the perfect balance. You hear what you want or need to hear. I realize that. I love that. And I bet you I’ll change my mind all over again someday.

But for now I’m working on something new. No steamboats, no Mississippi River, no Twain. No Katy. I thought I’d put a deadline up in lights, say February 12?

‘Til then.

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Turns out I was wrong. Well, I suppose we don’t get to know, but I’m saying I was wrong. I’ve come up with something I like better. Even if it’s rather strange.

I’m talking about my interpretation of Josh Ritter’s song Monster Ballads off the album The Animal Years. It’s been a revelatory week around here, all put in motion by one insightful reader. All put in motion by one little four-letter word.

To recap where we are:

I wrote a post called “Complicated unities” about the cryptic and beloved song Monster Ballads in early October. I’m not going to link to it here because you shouldn’t read it if you haven’t already. Not yet, anyway.

A week ago ritterwriter stopped by and left a comment—it’s up—in which she politely took issue with some of my points. When I read her thoughts I knew she was on a very good track. As I pondered it I suddenly saw a new meaning for the fateful word around which much of my former analysis had turned . . .

And that correction of course set off another extraordinary journey. From the Mississippi River and the mining camps of the Nevada Territory in one century . . . to a sweaty wayside dance hall in Ireland in the next . . . to a wandering, worried, wondering soul hurtling down a ribboned desert highway in the one after that. Do you have the strength? I barely did. But here we go.

[<< REWIND.] Track 3. Play.

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First verse.

Radio waves are coming miles and miles
Bringing only empty boats
Whatever feeling they had when they sailed
Somehow slipped out between the notes

A ghostly, mysterious, foreboding image. Empty boats summoned by radio waves, drifting aimlessly, robbed of feeling, purpose, passion. It slipped out between the . . . notes? They can’t be only boats. I don’t think anything is one thing only is this song, let’s be clear. Let’s see, there’s radio . . . and notes. Music.

Next is the chorus, which we’ll get to:

Out on the desert now and feeling lost
The bonnet wears a wire albatross
Monster ballads and the stations of the cross
Sighing just a little bit, Sighing just a little bit

. . . But first we need the second verse and some history for some important clues.

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Second verse.

And I was thinking ’bout what Katy done
Thinking ’bout what Katy did
The fairest daughter of the Pharaoh’s son
Dressed in gold ‘neath pyramids

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Steamboats

In 1858, as the Civil War loomed, the man who would later be widely recognized as America’s greatest writer was at work learning every bend of the Mississippi River. Samuel Clemens (who became Mark Twain), twenty-two years old, was nearing completion of his steamboat pilot apprenticeship and eagerly awaiting the day he could collect the licensed pilot’s handsome salary of $250 a month. He’d always known the river: he’d passed his boyhood in the port city of Hannibal, Missouri, where every boy’s most fervent and enduring wish was to be a steamboatman, and each day was brought to life and then left for dead with the arrival and departure of the daily packet from St. Louis. Piloting a riverboat was a dream come true.

August of 1858 also marked an historic event: the very first transatlantic telegram was sent via under-the-sea cable from Queen Victoria to President Buchanan. Twain, ever enthused by new technology, later recalled, “[a] wave of jubilation and astonishment . . . swept the planet.” (MTE, 10) Passengers would have had lots of company if they wanted to discuss the exciting news: the heavily freighted steamboats navigated a crowded river. They were enjoying the final of their glory days.

The outbreak of the Civil War ended Twain’s pilot career, but it was the greatest source of nostalgia throughout his extraordinary life. In his middle and old age he longed for the river, saying if given the chance to live his life over he’d never leave it. In letters he reminisced about the hot rolls served at supper, the fragrant coffee coming through the pilot house door on a steward’s tray, the red-faced, sweating, swearing first mate and the tumbling deck hands, the bells that clanged through one’s slumber.

With the invention of wireless telegraphy, or radio, at the end of the nineteenth century, boats gained a way to communicate with each other and those on shore. But once radio operators had begun traveling on ships—in the early 1900s—the Mississippi was a far different place than it was when Samuel Clemens was a cub pilot. Boats had vanished from the levees, once-bustling passenger decks were empty. Twain himself accepted this mournful truth back in 1882, when he famously returned to research his book Life on the Mississippi. He wrote

Half a dozen sound-asleep steamboats where I used to see a solid mile of wide-awake ones! This was melancholy, this was woful. The absence of the pervading and jocund steamboatman from the billiard room was explained. He was absent because he is no more. His occupation is gone . . . Here was desolation, indeed. (LM, 172)

What was to blame?
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As Twain writes [emphasis mine]:

The towboat and the railroad had done their work, and done it well and completely. The mighty bridge, stretching along over our heads, had done its share in the slaughter and spoliation. . . .

. . . Mississippi steamboating was born about 1812; at the end of thirty years, it had grown to mighty proportions; and in less than thirty more, it was dead! A strangely short life for so majestic a creature. (LM, 173)

One particular railroad began a historic service to open up the remote Indian Territory to and through Texas when the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad, known as the MKT, or Katy, was christened in 1870. Railroad fever was everywhere—there was a race on to offer transcontinental service, and the evolving feasibility of western migration fired imaginations. In 1873 the Katy acquired the Hannibal & Central Missouri Railroad, which had been leased previously by another company that serviced the track from Hannibal through Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. Katy supervised the traffic on these tracks until 1897.

The fairest daughter of the Pharaoh’s son
Dressed in gold ‘neath pyramids

Egypt. A descendant of . . . Moses? Well, Katy did set off into the unknown, lending a hand in leading a young America into what it considered (albeit unfairly) a promised land of sorts.

And she went east out of Hannibal too, leading her passengers through a sluicing sea . . .
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The bridge in the foreground is the Mark Twain Memorial Bridge, built over the Mississippi in 2000. The harbinger of slaughter and spoliation behind it—half a mile away—is the Wabash Bridge, built for the railroad in Twain’s hometown of Hannibal, Missouri, in 1871.

And pyramids . . . indeed.

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Showbands

(Bear with me here.)

In the 1950s, one hundred years after the majestic steamboats ruled the Mississippi, the stage was being set for a musical phenomenon to sweep the dance halls and ballrooms of Ireland. It’d be an act never replicated in any other country, likely helped along by the media vacuum that existed on the island. It’d be how future stars like Van Morrison and Rory Gallagher would get their start. They’d have names like The Clipper Carlton and The Royal. They were showbands, formed through the combined influences of 1) big bands and orchestras, which were more prevalent in urban areas and performers of popular hits of the day and 2) céilí (pronounced “kay-lee”) bands, which performed native Celtic music.

Their venues were often simple barn-like structures on the outskirts of town, destinations often reached by carpool or bicycle. The Catholic Church’s strong hold over social customs propelled the dance halls and ballrooms to a crucial status in town and village life; they were the most popular place for people to meet. Men stood on one side, women on the other, waiting for an invitation to dance. In his 1972 short story The Ballroom of Romance, William Trevor writes this about a night at the fictitious eponymous hall:

Dust and cigarette smoke formed a haze beneath the crystal bowl, feet thudded, girls shrieked and laughed, some of them dancing together for want of a male partner. The music was loud, the musicians had taken off their jackets. Vigorously they played a number of tunes from State Fair and then, more romantically, ‘Just One of Those Things.’

The showband era is a cherished and nostalgic one for many, but one wouldn’t want to suggest raising a glass to the showbands if she were to bump into, say, Bono in the pub. The rock music documentary Out of Ireland (distributed as From a Whisper to a Scream in the UK) disposes of the showbands in a handful of minutes after the opening credits, but not before a series of rockers and other industry luminaries try to do outdo one another with their insults.

Bono says this

Showband music was just—It was the enemy.

Criticism stems from the bands’ lack of creativity and innovation, for in their prime the showbands mostly covered popular hits of the day—often American ones. Irish musician and activist Bob Geldorf charges the showbands merely with arresting any and all progress in Irish music during their reign, praising his countrymen for the gymnastics required to overcome the disaster:

Socially the showbands were important. Musically, and every other which way, they were a death, which is why contemporary Irish music took so long to develop. And it came out of the Irish tradition, vaulting over the years of desert—the desert years of the showbands. It vaulted over because it’s a strong, true music.

So, the showbands were “an appalling travesty,” Geldorf concludes. (Did he just say desert?) And just to drive home a delicate point—

The showbands were CRAP!

They were at their height in the early-to-mid ’60s, just as Ireland began opening up to the rest of the world. The RTÉ One television station was founded. The Beatles arrived and the music industry took a jolt. People began to buy records. In 1962, The Royal recorded the very first showband single, a cover of an American bluegrass standard penned in the same year. Tom Dunphy sang the vocals.

Know what it was?

Come Down the Mountain Katy Daly
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[photos credit: www.irish-showbands.com]

The record sleeve above doesn’t mention The Royal Showband, but you’ll find it on this page dedicated to that band on the enthusiastic and rather fabulous irish-showbands website. I know the spelling is Katie, but you’ll see that Katy was the original spelling, and that’s how it’s listed on the showbands website.

And I was thinking ’bout what Katy done
Thinking ’bout what Katy did
The fairest daughter of the Pharaoh’s son
Dressed in gold ‘neath pyramids

See this discussion for the lyrics (and information about the spellings and origin) of Katy Daly. The words do conjure an image of Moses (ie daughter of the Pharaoh’s son). Come down the mountain, a “judge” sentencing her. Next time you’re in Belfast, you could have a drink here.

I know this whole line of investigation may sound mad but at its heart is this: while we follow Mark Twain in his journey in Monster Ballads, I think we follow someone in this century too. While the train Katy was responsible for weakening Twain’s beloved steamboats, and is therefore a touch point for nostalgia and loss and longing, I wonder if Katy the record may be a symbol for something about the showband era that may have a relevance today.

So what could Katy the record have done? Could she have kicked the showbands off the circuit, like the trains did the steamboats on the river? To be honest I don’t know anything about that particular recording by The Royal Showband. But the advent of records and radio and television in Ireland did not help the showbands thrive:

From the mid-1960s exposure [in Ireland] increased, especially in urban centres, to newer forms of rock and pop music, performed by original artists. This was due to access to British television and radio stations, pirate radio, and new record shops catering to these tastes. Young people increasingly saw showbands as old-fashioned and rustic.

Maybe Katy, as symbol for copycat music, held up the condemning mirror that would end the drought of originality in Irish music. And as Bob Geldorf explains, Irish rock music would heed the call, finding its voice despite the showbands. In a moment I’ll talk more about the notion of voice in this song.

But before we go on I think it’s only fair to add that the film Out of Ireland has wonderful footage of showband performances that captures packed ballrooms of smiling, jostling, shoulder-to-shoulder patrons, ready to dance. Quite simply, it seems showbands knew how to perform, how to entertain. How to provide an opportunity to escape, and connect. Everyone can at least agree they had a significant social influence. Mentions of showbands are often accompanied by just how many people they touched: the huge and regular audiences, the explosion of constantly-touring bands. Their hallmark was passion, perhaps their major contribution to history rebelling against the more dignified disposition of the big bands. I wasn’t there, I’m no music history expert, but from what I’ve seen and read, it all seems quite—honest.

And it all reminds me—the passion and joy and professionalism and suits and squeaky-clean smiles—(just a little) of some wonderful concerts I’ve seen by a singer-songwriter (or rocker, or front man, or whatever he’s going by) that I rather like.

So there’s a little part of me that doesn’t want this (albeit precarious) connection to the showbands to be entirely critical. I wonder about the parallel of then and now with regard to isolation, the need to connect with one another, and the change brought about by the media. In the next section I’ll explain my thoughts on commentary about the digital age in this song. I love that the showbands put on such a grand, interactive show, and going to see them was, for a certain time in a certain place, woven into the fabric of everyday life. I wish I could go just once, whatever Bono says. Actually I wish we all went more often, like they did back then.

And as long as we’re in Ireland and talking about radio and performance, I’ve got one more thought on the identity of Katy. You know her, that girl famously declared the Northern Lights. She was a big hit in Ireland, as far as I understand, on the radio and everything. She’s a showstopper if you go see Josh Ritter live. I don’t know much about his early career, but it seems like the song Kathleen has done some very good things.

Whatever or whoever she is, Katy’s dressed in gold ‘neath pyramids. Note the showband record sleeve above is gold.

And would you humor me all the way here:

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That’s the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, located in Cleveland, Ohio. They’ve got an exhibit called The Roots of Rock that has a section called Country/Folk/Bluegrass. They’ve also got an exhibit called Hang on Sloopy: The Music of Ohio. Remember Katy Daly is an American bluegrass standard, and know the man who wrote it, Paul “Moon” Mullins, was recently honored for his long-standing radio career in Ohio.

I suspect they’ve got lots of records there—gold, platinum, the lot.

And pyramids.

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Chorus & bridge.

Out on the desert now and feeling lost
The bonnet wears a wire albatross
Monster ballads and the stations of the cross
Sighing just a little bit, Sighing just a little bit

Ones and zeros bleeding mesa noise
And when you’re empty there’s so much space for them
You turn it off but then a still small voice
Comes in blazing from some vast horizon

I am still inclined to find a meaning for Sam Clemens here. He ended up out on the desert after he left the Mississippi River in 1861. He traveled west in a Concord stagecoach (in which the bonnet wore a wire albatross?) with his incredibly straight-laced brother, Orion, who had employment in the Nevada Territory. Sam didn’t have employment, and he didn’t want it. But he was by no means free of ambition, or pressure:

But of two things [Clemens] was certain. One: he had no intention of following one of the usual professions, such as law. . . . Two: he was not going home until he was rich, even if that took more than three months. Fortunes were to be made. He wanted one. And the eyes of the homefolk were on him. He would not return without the wealth that would prove him estimable in their eyes. (SMK, 93-4)

Silver had been discovered in nearby Virginia City in 1859, and an excited and optimistic Clemens flew headlong into the mining business, investing the modest capital he had and traveling long distances between mining towns:

[For the first three months of 1862] his mind was almost entirely on ledges, ledges in Humbolt, Virginia City, and Aurora: how many feet could be bought at what price with what promise of return. (SMK, 95)

Ones, zeros, dollar signs flooding his thoughts from the mountains, the mesas, the desert. He didn’t strike silver or gold. Instead he got homesick, exhausted, frustrated, blistered and broke. And feeling lost, presumably. While mining he’d somehow found time to write and send in two letters using the curious pen name “Josh” (yep) to a local newspaper, and he finally gave up and in and reported—dusty and disheveled—to the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise in September 1862. Staff writer. Though the banality of daily local news left him uninspired, nineteenth century journalism allowed for the blurring of fiction and non-fiction, seriousness and satire.

Clemens seized that opportunity, and into the lines of the goings-on in a rather wild frontier town, a voice—small, for now—began to settle into a register. In February 1863 he woke up after a late-night party and signed his first article Mark Twain. That year he poked fun at himself (though he had certainly not sworn off investing or hoping for return) by announcing to his increasingly amused readers that he’d founded the “Unreliable, Auriferous, Argentiferous, Metaliferous Mining Company.” (L1, 252)

But he was not free from hardship: it followed him to San Francisco, where he was fired from a journalism job and spent some months “dead broke,” clinging to one desperate dime to avoid destitution. He later spoke vaguely of a suicide attempt. When his buddy Steve Gillis got into a barroom fight, Twain posted $500 bail. The police soon came for Gills, and both men fled town. They ended up in a rustic bachelor-pad cabin in the middle of the Sierra foothills where “hygiene and cuisine were minimal.” (SMK, 129). The men lazily panned for gold by day. Twain did too, but he was no longer convinced of or obsessed with his ability to strike it rich.

Instead he began keeping a regular journal that bore the unmistakable markings of the writer’s notebook. The biographer Fred Kaplan says this happened on Jackass Hill:

For the first time . . . Twain’s observations were tempered by and mediated through a literary self-consciousness, a sense of self that he had not had before. (SMK, 128)

Twain first heard and sketched a very important story for his career in that cabin. My favorite image is that of him laughing to himself as he wrote by firelight—quiet and calm and free of the urge to join the others outside digging for gold—a funny story about a jumping frog that would introduce a border ruffian to readers on the East Coast. Despite what happened to Michael Lewis, someday I’d like to visit Mark Twain on Jackass Hill.

But back to the twenty-first century.

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Out on the desert now and feeling lost
The bonnet wears a wire albatross
Monster ballads and the stations of the cross
Sighing just a little bit, Sighing just a little bit

Ones and zeros bleeding mesa noise
And when you’re empty there’s so much space for them
You turn it off but then a still small voice
Comes in blazing from some vast horizon

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Someone is lost, sighing, empty—echoing the empty boats in the first verse. Turn off the noise and in blazes a still small voice.

Bonnet, if you take the UK meaning—automobile hood—places one in the car. Perhaps the wire albatross—which can be defined as something burdensome— related to the radio. My last interpretation of Monster ballads and the stations of the cross relied heavily on a biblical meaning; lately it feels a little like a red herring. Perhaps it’s all he can find on the radio of his car—there are organ pieces called Stations of the Cross. (In September I’m afraid I even bought this CD. Perhaps I’ll do a giveaway.) Ballad is a loaded word in the history of music and radio. I like the idea of stations of the cross referring to the notion that station is a word meaningful for both radio and train.

And I do hear a meaning for Twain: his days out west were wild (monster ballads), his courtship of a devout heiress (and future wife) marked by fervent spiritual awakening (stations of the cross). He’d be lost and found all over that map in his life.

Mesa is where I think I went slightly wrong last time. I read it as being the manufacturer of guitar amps of the same name. I know, it doesn’t sound likely, but I read that mysterious refrain Monster ballads and the stations of the cross as being two extremes, as an either-or choice. The mesa noise paired with the Monster ballads songs—it seemed acceptable to link hard rock with noise—and the still small voice with stations of the cross.

But then, as I’ve said, a clever reader left a comment saying this

In the context of 1 Kings 19:11-12, I picture computers and televisions and cellphones and all other digital noise (ones and zeros) as the great, flashy, sometimes destructive forces that seem so important (the wind, the earthquake, the fire), and the ringing silence when all that is shut out as the still small voice, the truly essential and beautiful element of faith, music, life.

And suddenly I saw this

And I thought, Huh. A mesa. And then I thought . . . Duh.

Given this piece I’m going to go with mesa noise referring to the radio, and by extension, music. Here’s a simple explanation of how digital radio works. And, while God is indeed (and often) somewhere, I’m going to favor the still small voice as referring first to that of the creative spirit of the conflicted or searching or embattled—show me one who isn’t—artist.

So.

So.

That’s my best guess at what it all means, but of course that still leaves what it all means.

Today, for me, in light of the above . . . I think the words and images and dual narratives go to the heart of the artistic journey: to the sacrifices, the challenges, the doubt, the resilience required (and the magic that can happen) when the river gets pulled out from underneath you, or it feels like nobody’s noticing. It’s likely this song turns a critical eye on the music that’s getting played on the radio. Those empty boats in the first verse could be songs.

The refrain of being out on the desert now and feeling lost makes me think of this quote in which Josh Ritter talks about the selection of the album name The Animal Years:

I was thinking back on the period of my life leading up to this record and my experience up to that point was, you get up, you start to play music and you tour. It’s such a strange life style. In a lot of ways I felt like I became this thing, half-man, half-animal, out in the middle of the country, playing. It was so bizarre. Everyone else is living their lives and doing things that are a bit more normal. Man, after a year and a half on the road, 16 months of touring for Hello Starling, I became the proto-hunter-gatherer, going out wherever and doing stuff and trying to find a way to make sense in a human way. But, really, in the end, you’re just trying to get food in your mouth. I think back on that time and feel definitely, those were my animal years. 

And here’s what he had to say when he stopped off at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame while on tour for his newest album in October 2007:

The real rock halls of fame are the venues that hundreds of bands pass through each year. These places, from community halls to old vaudeville theaters to tetanus traps in big and small towns across the world are where the real histories are made. These are the places where the house sound guy is cranky, the bartenders come in early and manage to work through hundreds of soundchecks, where guest lists and attendance numbers are haggled over, where posters are hung and taken down and hung again and where people – strangers – come and hang out with each other to listen to music played in the moment by other people. I think these kinds of halls are great enough.

from Nebraska Rock and Roll by Josh Ritter (posted 10/17/2007)
[Check out the picture he posted from the museum.]

I hear a shadow of these sentiments in Monster Ballads. I think about those Irish showbands and the joy of live music and the irony of isolation in this new digital age.

Lastly, for me, this song is certainly about the triumph and perseverance of passion. For that we need the last verse.

.

Third verse.

And I was thinking ’bout my river days
Thinking ’bout me and Jim
Passing Cairo on a getaway
With every steamboat like a hymn

I forgot to tell you one thing about the steamboats and the showbands, something about that organ we hear in verse 1 and 2 of Monster Ballads. Some steamboats (often called, er, showboats) had a calliope, or steam organ, with which to entertain passengers. You can hear a calliope here. And the showbands, they replaced the pianos reminiscent of the big bands with . . . an organ.

The stripped-down instrumentation of this quiet and exceptionally beautiful last verse gives us pause. We lean in and listen. It is poignant that there is no organ; I think that’s a clue. I wonder about a subtle connection to this song, released in 1963 by The Kingston Trio.

And as for Huck Finn, the narrator of this final verse . . . or is he? Could it be Twain himself? Do you know what Mark Twain did when he got back from that historic and revelatory reunion with his beloved Mississippi? From looking in vain for the steamboats crammed like sardines at the wharf, from saying this about his old friends:

[I can] call their names & see their faces, now: but two decades have done their work upon them, & half are dead, the rest scattered, & the boat’s bones rotting five fathoms deep in Madrid’s Bend. (SMK, 382)

Well, upon Twain’s return home he slogged through the grueling composition of Life on the Mississippi. He hated writing it. After he finished he turned to a manuscript he’d begun all the way back in 1876. And suddenly he was granted a “literary cakewalk,” flying high through the ecstatic completion of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. (SMK, 393)

He successfully—brilliantly—enlivened the river of his boyhood, no matter what had happened to it since. His work—his voice—enabled him to get back and share what he loved so well.

I think that’s one way of trading this

Sighing just a little bit

for this

Smiling just a little bit

As for Huck Finn—just for one last leap—here he is talking about me and Jim:

It’s lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky, up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made, or only just happened—Jim he allowed they was made, but I allowed they happened; I judged it would have took too long to make so many. Jim said the moon could a laid them; well, that looked kind of reasonable, so I didn’t say nothing against it, because I’ve seen a frog lay most as many, so of course it could be done. We used to watch the stars that fell, too, and see them stream down. Jim allowed they’d got spoiled and was hove out of the nest. (AHF, 179)

Just the other day I remembered a similar partnership:

Me and Jiggs staring at the ceiling the stars above the radar range

A railroad and a record, steamboats and showbands, Cairo and the county line. Katy, Twain, Huck, and Jim. Kathleen, Jiggs, and Josh. Maybe some Irish music history. As my sister says, That’s all I got. I leave it up to you.

But back to Twain’s deserted river one last time:

[I]f Twain hoped to hear his name sung on the river, he was disappointed. [He wrote,] “They do not call in the singing tone at the heaving of the lead as they used to, nor do they sing when leaving port.” (SMK, 386)

This fall Josh Ritter took his show and his extraordinary band on the road. Monster Ballads got slightly rearranged, but it still did every bit what I like to think Josh wrote it to.

We came in off our deserts—streamed in from our tiny cities made of ashes—and took out our ear buds and powered down our phones and held high our cameras and chose for one night a different noise in the theatres and clubs and halls and rooms. A cultural center, a playhouse, a ballroom, showbox, academy, and cafe. From cradle to empire.

Josh thanked us repeatedly for coming, of course.

And we did for him what they didn’t for Twain. We sang our hearts out.

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. .
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. .
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[Postscript]

One does not leap to these sorts of wild conclusions overnight.

If you’re dubious about Twain connections in the album The Animal Years, you may find my post Girl meets Mark Twain interesting.

To see what I had to say after I braved the 400+ pages of Twain’s Mississippi River fantasia . . . and missed (so close!) these Monster Ballads connections altogether, see Reading the Mississippi. There’s a Dr. Seuss mash-up!

Last June I got nostalgic thinking about the final verse of Monster Ballads while I was moving across town—that’s River days.

And to see my previous post on Monster Ballads, which I’m going to leave up, see Complicated unities. It tracks a telling journey and unwittingly illustrates some of the magic of the song.

I carried it to the cash register as though entrusted with a precious secret. Placing it on the counter, I searched the clerk’s face for recognition, for a twinkle of eye to meet my own. There was none. Pretty soon the conviction that everyone must hear would eclipse my shyness, and I would embrace evangelism, but that day I kept silent. I stepped out into the sunshine feeling excited and proud and cool—this always a novelty—and connected to something great, somehow.

Then I waited a few weeks to open the CD.

I stowed it in my suitcase and brought it on vacation to my parents’ cabin in northern Michigan in September. On the first night I took the stairs down to the lake and lowered my head onto the boards of the dock. In the incredibly harried and hectic preceding weeks, I’d envisioned that moment a number of times. I watched the harvest moon.

I listened to the album, but only part of it, because by the time I had the sudden, shiver-inducing sense that someone—something—was standing nearby, I had repeated the opening song maybe five times. It devastated me. I lurched up on my elbows and twisted round to find my mother at the end of the dock, white nightgown glowing eerily. She was talking and waving her arms. I yanked the earphones out of my ears.

I got into bed and listened a little more. Then I fell asleep, and the next morning I rolled over and wrote gladden a gun.

I don’t know what to say about the below. I keep starting sentences and turning back again. So I guess it’s just this: I had a great time writing it. I love To the Dogs or Whoever. It will likely inspire some (more) reading. And as I told a friend when she found me giggling and scribbling in my notebook at the coffee shop: I’m really beginning to understand why I love the things I love.

I think that goes to the heart of being a fan.

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The Ghost of a Trace

Deep in the great north woods I found him
Wrapped with the Milky Way around him
Lifting my eyes to the night’s chandelier
Daddy, do you think he’ll ever come down here?

I love the way your songs win but don’t fight.
I lose my fear and my doubt and some sleep, then I write.
You make the most of your words, and you’ve taught me plenty.
When you want to come home, I’m here and I’m ready.

.
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Her united kingdom a horror museum
Through the roar of a train wreck she thought she could hear him
Like laughter he sang to the heart sick and broke
Just a silver bell ringing through a thunderstroke
There was blood on the tracks and it started to storm
She was begging for the notes of the final chord
He sang to her often, she was sure she was dying
But it was hard to stay down when he never stopped smiling. I thought I heard somebody

calling.

In the dark

I thought I heard somebody’s song.
.
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Butch never cared about the played out scenes
They’re still waiting on a train in the Land of Hope and Dreams
Said, “Christ walked on water, I’ll take the Kid for a swim.”
He asks but I won’t show him where Bolivia is.

.
.
Was it Peter Parker or that kid from the Shore
Who could rescue us all and still live next door?
He’ll kiss your hand, and he’ll conquer the world
And this empty heart—it’s too much for a girl.
So pity the tickets and pity the fans
Who all find their place in the same sad plan
We sit pretty and pining, all lined up in a row
We think, If Kathleen won’t, take me. I’ll go. I thought I heard somebody

calling.

In the dark

I thought I heard somebody’s song.
.
.

Now the girl begins her day to the scream of the steam
She wipes the sleep from her eyes and gets back to her dreams
Out stretches the trail, against a blue sea clouds sail
She says, “I love the way the sun is a’sparklin’ on the rails.”

Will wrote lyrics to be sung by the page
I was thinking of him when you came on stage
Serenade on your breath, the spot in your hair
Did I mention how I love you in that suit you wear? Deep in the great north woods I found him
Wrapped with the Milky Way around him
Lifting my eyes to the night’s chandelier
Daddy, do you think he’ll ever come down here? I thought I heard somebody

calling.

In the dark

I thought I heard somebody’s song.

Gloaming refers to the window of time between the sunset and complete darkness. The soft, waning glow is provided by the upper atmosphere’s reflection of sunlight on the Earth. Dusk is a synonym. According to my source, around here the gloaming lasts for an average of thirty minutes a day throughout the year, beginning as early as 4:13pm (shopping-crazed late December) and ending as late as 8 o’clock (sit-on-the-stoop nights in June). The duration of the gloaming depends on your distance from the equator. The closer you are, the shorter the gloaming. Should you find yourself in Barrow, Alaska (71°18′ N) on January 23rd, go ahead and start that hockey game at sunset: the gloaming lasts a rather satisfying two hours and thirty-one minutes on that day. But then there is also no gloaming at all for a good part of the year—135 days by my count—when the sun is continuously above or below the horizon..
..

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Twilight is given as a synonym for gloaming, but this slightly confuses matters, for twilight actually refers to the time before sunrise, too. Astronomers talk about something called civil twilight, which begins before sunset, goes all day, and ends in the evening when the sun sinks six degrees beneath the horizon. I like the term civil twilight, but I draw the line at civil dawn. I am a chronic night owl.

I spent some time in the gloaming in October. It was easy: the sunset was working its way from 6:30 to 5:30pm, about the time I’m usually walking out of my office building. The quality and quantity of the natural light is dictated by the atmosphere and the local weather, I learned. It’s amazing how different one night is to another. Some nights I walked west feeling as bruised as the sky in front of me: the horizon glowed a murky yellowish green, night’s clear blue in pursuit.

On the weekends I got a Zipcar, my driving atlas, and out of town. At farm stands I sipped hot cider and read agricultural news clippings on bulletin boards, on hiking trails I beheld a forest on fire. I felt like a stranger—an alien—amidst all that natural beauty, all that sky. And that fact made me feel even stranger. I put a gourd on my desk at my office, and I got to thinking about the autumn as the gloaming of the year. I celebrated my birthday, and let the storminess inside take my nerve. I looked resentfully on this place and my place in it, and I worried over the notion of the gloaming of one’s life. I gazed up and mocked the one star—the only star—that ever shows its face around here. And I took some pictures.
. .

. .
To stand small amongst these knife-edged buildings in the gloaming is to watch a changing of the guard. A greedy city stands ready to upstage the sun. Streetlights flicker on against a dying but not-yet sky. Shadows reappear on sidewalks. The fine things and people glimpsed in shop and gathering place windows promise a fleeting warmth. Windows shine, traffic signals beat, headlights beam. The city says Forget the sun.

“Can I take your picture?”

A woman-shaped blur obliterated the steeple in the lens of my camera. I lowered it, stood up from the cobblestones, and started to laugh.

“No, I—” She had a greying bob, a fringed shawl slung round her shoulders. The searching smile of a stranger offering random kindness.

“Well—Okay,” I said. She took the camera with a celebratory air and took a few steps back. My eyes darted over her shoulder, scanning the street for familiar faces. Office workers streamed toward the subway station across the street.

“One! Two—“

I looked into the tiny amber light, suddenly feeling naked and idiotic. I pressed my shoulder to the streetlight pole, looped my arm around its ridged trunk as though it was traveling companion. And there, two blocks from my office, I grinned and grimaced into the flash.

“Perfect! There you go,” she said, tugging at her shawl and handing the camera back to me.

“Thanks.” I nodded, startled by a wave of gratitude. I wanted to ask what she saw from the other side. I had the urge to follow her, wherever she was going.

“Have a great trip!” she called over her shoulder as she wandered off down the street.

With the turning back of the clocks the gloaming has slipped behind workday hours until February. I’ll sneak out when the atmosphere is right for a violet veil. I’ll do more than that, I tell myself when I’m feeling brave. I’d like to spend some time where they leave night well enough alone. Maybe out there in all that quiet, in all that dark, I could get up for the sunrise.

The gloaming is a blink of in-between, a few stolen moments to have both—light and dark, beginning and end—and despite its almost eerie peacefulness (even, sometimes, in the city), it is alive: each minute is different. Having pictures proves this. When you’re waiting wistful—watching—I decided, it’s the part of the day that feels most like home.

The picture of me and my lamppost is out of focus, the result of an old camera and my failure to instruct the photographer in how to use it properly. But I like the stupid, blurry grin and the beautiful—for it is—new-old city behind, playing dress-up, just like me. It reminds me how little it takes to change everything.

It makes me think about angels everywhere in our midst.

I haven’t decided. But I’m looking. Even up—I still pray.And I’m trying to make peace with that one steadfast star. I’m thinking I’m going to need it, once I’m sure of my wish.

. .

. .

Favorite is a fickle word, but with regard to the songs I know, it flirts shamelessly with Josh Ritter’s Monster Ballads. Months and months ago I went through a troubled time when the world and God and my own heart seemed to be asking too much of me. After some time submerged in grief I began to write, and if music came to the rescue—and it did—Monster Ballads was the rope.

I didn’t know how or what or why, but I kept writing, and when it got hard and I was feeling lost I often listened to The Animal Years, and then returned to and replayed Track 3. Over and over. I didn’t know what the lyrics meant; I didn’t know what I meant to find in my words, but I found I could write them listening to that song. And it took a long time, but things got better.

I once described Monster Ballads as a beautiful ivory canvas proffering a brush. It’s true: it’s confusing. It’s mysterious. But it’s vivid, and so powerful that you don’t need to understand the words. It’s probably too cryptic to fully understand the words. I think the point may very well be that we cannot understand the words.

But it inspires me, and I was curious, so I went on a journey and came home and got out some paint.

Along the way I saw this—

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

“Notice” on page 1 of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

—and my resolution wavered for a moment. But then I thought, Oh no, Mr. Twain, you would have never heeded such a warning if it got in your way. Of all the things you’ve taught me, that’s my favorite.

And anyway, I think that while the point may be that we can never fully understand the words . . . actually . . . let’s just go already. Track 3. Play.

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In the soothing and steady bass line find the wheel in your hand as you stand high up in the silent pilot house, the river’s most famous and prodigal son returned with watchful eye to see how she has fared. Rise and join the 4am watch so as to catch the singular Mississippi summer sunrise and find it as splendid in 1882 as your memory of your happiest days just over twenty years ago:

First, there is the eloquence of silence; for a deep hush broods everywhere. Next, there is the haunting sense of loneliness, isolation, remoteness from the worry and bustle of the world. The dawn creeps in steathily; the solid walls of black forest soften to gray, and vast stretches of the river open up and reveal themselves; the water is glass-smooth, gives off spectral little wreaths of white mist, there is not the faintest breath of wind, nor stir of leaf; the tranquility is profound and infinitely satisfying. Then a bird pipes up, another follows, and soon the pipings develop into a jubilant riot of music. You see none of the birds; you simply move through an atmosphere of song which seems to sing itself. When the light has become a little stronger, you have one of the fairest and softest pictures imaginable. You have the intense green of the massed and crowded foliage near by; you see it paling shade by shade in front of you; upon the next projecting cape, a mile off or more, the tint has lightened to the tender young green of spring; the cape beyond that one has almost lost color, and the furthest one, miles away under the horizon, sleeps upon the water a mere dim vapor, and hardly separable from the sky above it and about it. And all this stretch of river is a mirror, and you have the shadowy reflections of the leafage and the curving shores and the receding capes pictured in it. Well, that is all beautiful; soft and rich and beautiful; and when the sun gets well up, and distributes a pink flush here and a powder of gold yonder and a purple haze where it will yield the best effect, you grant that you have seen something that is worth remembering. (LM, 228-29)

Squint into the “blank, watery solitude” knowing you are unlikely to come across another vessel, and remark on the impressive, depressing solitude of the “stupendous flood,” yearning for the days when you trained as a cub pilot and the steamboats were crammed like sardines at the wharf. (LM, 198) Remember back even farther to your hometown of Hannibal, Missouri—river town—where every single boy’s most fervent and enduring wish was to be a steamboatman, and each day was brought to life and then left for dead with the arrival and departure of the daily packet from St. Louis.

Look in vain for the wood-yards that used to dominate the shores. Go back in time courtesy of three bright notes, the gentlest of bass drums, and remember the hot rolls served at supper, the fragrant coffee coming through the pilot house door on a steward’s tray, the red-faced, sweating, swearing mate and the tumbling deck hands, the bells that clanged through one’s slumber.

Find yourself in New Orleans, customary departure time—between four and five o’clock—gearing up for a long upstream voyage, the smell of burning rosin and pitch pine, and a cloud of coal-black smoke hanging over the boat and inching toward the city:

Two or three miles of mates were commanding and swearing with more than usual emphasis; countless processions of freight barrels and boxes were spinning athwart the levee and flying aboard the stage-planks; belated passengers were dodging and skipping among these frantic things, hoping to reach the forecastle companion way alive, but having their doubts about it; women with reticules and bandboxes were trying to keep up with husbands freighted with carpet-sacks and crying babies, and making a failure of it by losing their heads in the whirl and roar and general distraction; drays and baggage-vans were clattering hither and thither in a wild hurry, every now and then getting blocked and jammed together, and then during ten seconds one could not see them for the profanity . . . The ‘last bells’ would begin to clang . . . with the cry, ‘All dat ain’t goin’, please to git asho’!” . . . People came swarming ashore, overturning excited stragglers that were trying to swarm aboard. One more moment later a long array of stage-planks was being hauled in, each with its customary latest passenger clinging to the end of it with teeth, nails, and everything else, and the customary latest procrastinator making a wild spring shoreward over his head. (LM, 138)

Or trade the rising sun for shooting stars and, under the cover of darkness, shove out to the middle, giving yourself up to the current as you float through the night on a rough-hewn raft. The organ’s tremolo the ripples rolling fast and close—and then nothing— off the plonk of a river stone’s return to its bed. Legs dangle in the water, two thin trails of pipe smoke drift behind.

Listen and look while on a journey whose purpose—freedom—has slipped away and is now shrouded with uncertainty. En route to nowhere, begin to make a most unlikely friend, and slip past the sleepy eyes of the leadsmen aboard a giant steamboat as its wheels churn resolutely against the current:

Sometimes we’d have that whole river to ourselves for the longest time. Yonder was the banks and the islands, across the water; and maybe a spark—which was a candle in a cabin window—and sometimes on the water you could see a spark or two—on a raft or a scow, you know; and maybe you could hear a fiddle or a song coming over from one of them crafts. It’s lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky, up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made, or only just happened—Jim he allowed they was made, but I allowed they happened; I judged it would have took too long to make so many. Jim said the moon could a laid them; well, that looked kind of reasonable, so I didn’t say nothing against it, because I’ve seen a frog lay most as many, so of course it could be done. We used to watch the stars that fell, too, and see them stream down. Jim allowed they’d got spoiled and was hove out of the nest.

Once or twice of a night we would see a steamboat slipping along in the dark, and now and then she would belch a whole world of sparks up out of her chimbleys, and they would rain down in the river and look awful pretty; then she would turn a corner and her lights would wink out and her pow-wow shut off and leave the river still again . . . (AHF, 179)

Or push ‘Play’ and be entirely clear of the Mississippi, rocking gently west on the adventure put in motion by the Civil War enveloping the river and your reluctance to take sides. In the first beats of the drum feel the wheels of your Concord coach—a “cradle on wheels,” you call it—grip the gravel and begin to turn. In the singsong guitar see the horses’ heads nod up and down with the rhythm of exertion. Remember the envy with which you regarded your brother’s status as traveler just before he invited you along:

Pretty soon he would be hundreds and hundreds of miles away on the great plains and deserts, and among the mountains of the Far West, and would see buffaloes and Indians, and prairie-dogs, and antelopes, and have all kinds of adventures, and maybe get hanged or scalped, and have ever such a fine time, and write home and tell us all about it, and be a hero. And he would see the gold-mines and the silver mines, and maybe go about of an afternoon when his work was done, and pick up two or three pailfuls of shining slugs and nuggets of gold and silver on the hillside. (RI, 1-2)

But stop short of the romance that pervades your ghostly river, for it was something else that happened out on that desert, and not a moment too soon.

. . . Lastly, push ‘Play’ and see an endless highway framed by the windshield of a car, the journey’s purpose and promise growing fainter as the odometer spins, the wordless questions posed by eyes drifting over the desert and up the sky. The turning and turning of the radio dial, thumb tapping the steering wheel. Stop in a foreign town, the gentle bump of two railroad tracks beneath the wheels . . .
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In the summer of his twenty-third year, Samuel Clemens was nearing completion of his steamboat pilot apprenticeship on the Mississippi River. He’d always known the river: he’d passed his boyhood in the port city of Hannibal, Missouri. But though the relationship while training to be a pilot would grow a bit stormy, he loved the Mississippi, loved it and longed for it his whole life. His beloved younger brother had died in the horrible, dramatic explosion of the Pennsylvania near Memphis in June, but I find it intriguing that I can’t unearth any evidence that Clemens ever blamed the boats or the river or considered leaving them because of the tragic association. Instead he blamed himself—relentlessly—for myriad reasons, perhaps chief of which was that he thought his good-natured kid brother by far a worthier soul.

August 1858 marked an historic event: the very first transatlantic telegram was sent via under-the-sea cable from Queen Victoria to President Buchanan. She cabled, “OMG, Jimmy boy!!! I am totally putting this on my blog.” Just kidding—she said Congratulations. (And isn’t it amazing to think . . .) Twain, ever enthused by new technology, later recalled, “[a] wave of jubilation and astonishment . . . swept the planet.” (MTE, 10) Passengers would have had lots of company if they wanted to discuss the exciting news: the heavily freighted steamboats navigated a crowded river. They were enjoying the final of their glory days.

With the invention of wireless telegraphy, or radio, at the end of the nineteenth century, boats gained a way to communicate with each other and those on shore. But once radio operators had begun traveling on ships—in the early 1900s—the Mississippi was a far different place than it was when Samuel Clemens was a cub. Boats had vanished from the levees, once-bustling passenger decks were empty. Of the vision confronting him when he returned in 1882 to gather material for Life on the Mississippi, he wrote

Half a dozen sound-asleep steamboats where I used to see a solid mile of wide-awake ones! This was melancholy, this was woful. The absence of the pervading and jocund steamboatman from the billiard room was explained. He was absent because he is no more. His occupation is gone . . . Here was desolation, indeed. (LM, 172)

What was to blame?

As Twain writes:

The towboat and the railroad had done their work, and done it well and completely. The mighty bridge, stretching along over our heads, had done its share in the slaughter and spoliation. . . .

. . . Mississippi steamboating was born about 1812; at the end of thirty years, it had grown to mighty proportions; and in less than thirty more, it was dead! A strangely short life for so majestic a creature. (LM, 173)

One particular railroad began a historic service to open up the remote Indian Territory to and through Texas when the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad, known as the MKT, or Katy, was christened in 1870. (It had been founded five years earlier under a different name.) Railroad fever was everywhere—there was a race on to offer transcontinental service, and the evolving feasibility of western migration fired imaginations. In 1873 the Katy acquired the Hannibal & Central Missouri Railroad, which had been leased previously by another company that serviced the track from Hannibal through Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. Katy supervised the traffic on these tracks until 1897.

I wonder if it’s a riddle that describes both Katy (fairest daughter of the Pharaoh’s son) and Moses (fairest daughter of the Pharaoh’s son). Katy, descendant of Moses? Well, there’s this: the father of Hannibal, Missouri is Moses Bates. He founded the town in 1819.

But the much more famous Moses, the one who feels more comfortable in that Egyptian imagery . . . Well, Katy did set off into the unknown, lending a hand in leading a young America into what it considered (albeit unfairly) a promised land of sorts.

But Katy went east out of Hannibal too, leading her passengers—yes—through a sluicing sea.

The bridge in the foreground is the Mark Twain Memorial Bridge, built over the Mississippi in 2000. The harbinger of slaughter and spoliation behind it—half a mile away—is the Wabash Bridge, built for the railroad in Hannibal, Missouri, in 1871. And pyramids . . . indeed. .

.

Clemens ended up out on the desert after he left the Mississippi River in 1861. He traveled west with his incredibly straight-laced brother, Orion, who had employment in the Nevada Territory. Sam didn’t have employment, and he didn’t want it. But he was by no means free of ambition, or pressure:

But of two things [Clemens] was certain. One: he had no intention of following one of the usual professions, such as law. . . . Two: he was not going home until he was rich, even if that took more than three months. Fortunes were to be made. He wanted one. And the eyes of the homefolk were on him. He would not return without the wealth that would prove him estimable in their eyes. (SMK, 93-4)

Silver had been discovered in nearby Virginia City in 1859, and an excited and optimistic Clemens flew headlong into the mining business, investing the modest capital he had and traveling long distances between mining towns:

[For the first three months of 1862] his mind was almost entirely on ledges, ledges in Humbolt, Virginia City, and Aurora: how many feet could be bought at what price with what promise of return. (SMK, 95)

Ones, zeros, dollar signs flooding his thoughts from the mountains, the mesas, the desert. He didn’t strike silver or gold. Instead he got homesick, exhausted, frustrated, blistered and broke. He’d sent in some writing using the pen name “Josh” to a local newspaper, and he finally gave up and in and reported—dusty and disheveled—to the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise in September 1862. Staff writer. Though the banality of daily local news left him uninspired, nineteenth century journalism allowed for the blurring of fiction and non-fiction, seriousness and satire.

Clemens seized that opportunity, and into the lines of the goings-on in a rather wild frontier town, a voice—small, for now—began to settle into a register. And in February 1863 he woke up after a late-night party and signed his first article Mark Twain. That year he poked fun at himself (though he had certainly not sworn off investing or hoping for return) by announcing to his increasingly amused readers that he’d founded the “Unreliable, Auriferous, Argentiferous, Metaliferous Mining Company.” (L1, 252)

Mark Twain is not the only person in these lines; he may not even be the primary one, may be just a shadow, or a diversion; he may be a figment of my imagination. The wire albatross (a covered wagon? a stagecoach?) . . . monster ballads . . . stations of the cross. There’s another speaker, of course, one listening and looking, one lost out on the desert and sighing, one on a journey whose feeling is flagging.

Maybe he’s listening to some hard rock songs, heavy on the grieving guitar, maybe some other stuff, maybe this. Maybe that’s the only stuff he can find on the radio of his car.

Somwhere there’s a Bible.

And emptiness—silence?—to fill.

He offers two things that stake out impressive extremes on the spectrum of human experience: the loud, self-important, worldly and dissolute bad ass rock stars, and the humble, solemn, sad story of divine suffering and death that prompts the culmination of the Christian faith.

Sighing indeed.

Well . . . I purchased a single of Skid Row’s I Remember You in seventh grade, and I locked myself in my room and turned the volume up until my ears rang and my boom box shook and my heart beat as though pounded by an insane drummer and three minutes in that electric guitar lost its shit, and I thought I might rock myself to death before my mother’s approaching footsteps could reach my door—and wouldn’t they be sorry then— and she could yell, “What in the world?!?!? Turn it DOWN!”

I remember the uncomfortable look in her eyes as she glimpsed the music videos we were watching: the long-haired heads banging and the feet stomping up and down the stage, the features contorted and wincing as though the guitar strings stung their fingers. The wanton demolition of perfectly good instruments. The camera panning to a girl in the tenth row, completely overcome, blue eye makeup translucent with tears—her eyes wide and blank with anxious yearning.

No, the adults in my adolescent world didn’t like the rockers, and there’s no need to talk about the church. It and the world told us we’d have to choose, and that’s what I was thinking of when I read this in Kaplan’s fine biography of Mark Twain (emphasis mine):

Roles were important to Twain, who played many, both within himself and in public, including the Hartford baron and the Boston literary celebrity. When it came to business, he was a New York entrepreneur and investment financier; in domestic life, a devoted husband and father. In another mood, he was a restless adventurer pining for Hawaiian simplicity and bachelor life in a boardinghouse. In accent, he was still Missourian. In social and cultural values he belonged to the northeastern elite; in intellect, he was independent, satirical, and skeptical, particularly in regard to Christianity and what he considered inherited prejudices and stupidities. Using his own logical razor, he delighted in dissecting irrationalities. His own he had tolerance for, increasingly convinced that life combines contradictions into complicated unities, sometimes unstable but mostly cohesive amalgams that provide the reality of self and society. (SMK, 388-89)

For Mark Twain’s life had barely gotten going when, having already lived in a number of cities and had a brief spell as a Confederate soldier and mastered the Mississippi River and scoured Nevada dirt and rock for silver, he came in off the desert to be a writer. He was only twenty-six years old, only up to page 120 of a 650-page biography.

Despite his modest roots and raucous time in Virginia City and skepticism of the Christian faith he would court and marry a devout East Coast heiress. (And then she would mellow out.)

He would live to see and be a great many—and contradictory—and some not-so-great—things, and he would claim them all:

In a speech to the New England Society of Philadelphia in 1881 [Twain] presented himself as the American amalgam: ‘I am a border ruffian from the state of Missouri. I am a Connecticut Yankee by adoption. I have the morals of Missouri and the culture of Connecticut, and that’s the combination that makes the perfect man. . . . The first slave brought into New England out of Africa by your progenitors was an ancestor of mine—for I am of a mixed breed, an infinitely shaded and exquisite mongrel.’ Like himself, America was a mongrel singularity that could reach an even higher level of exquisiteness if it would understand and accept that many bloods and cultures flowed through its veins. (SMK, 389 & SP, 163-64)

So what do we do with Monster ballads and the stations of the cross?

I trekked through the stations verses of the Bible thinking about those old songs. I sorta knew it was wrong, but I had to smile as I thought of that patented rocker passion versus The Passion, as my eyes drifted over the names Stryker, Queensryche, Slaughter on my CD . . . and then Golgotha, Barrabas, The Sanhedrin in the Bible. Fourteen tracks, fourteen stations. That lead singer of Skid Row looks strikingly . . . something . . . around one minute and twenty-two seconds into the music video, and when I glimpsed that awe-struck girl with the makeup in another one, yeah, I smiled and thought Mary. At church on Sunday I watched the candles morph into the flames of a rolling sea of cigarette lighters.

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At the very end of his story Huck Finn tells us he’s “got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest” so as to avoid getting collared and sent home with Aunt Sally and all her rules. (AFH, 433)

I wonder where we find him, how we find him, when he appears and reflects on his river days, telling us how he’s been thinking and thinking, about his old friend and their lawless adventure, about the boats and their hymns? The mesa chords and the high, soft, far-off piano melody are silenced now. The organ is gone too, but these quiet lines and bars are holiest to me—as simple and beautiful and true as the heart of Huck’s boyhood tale. For when Jim is betrayed after their long journey and sold back into slavery for “forty dirty dollars,” Huck despairs over what to do: honor a conscience that has been ingrained by the law and the church and society by returning Jim to his rightful owner, or honor a heart’s desire—with nothing to recommend it beyond the tug of his memories of a journey and a friend—to help him get free. (AFH, 314)

His conscience grinding, Huck reproaches himself for the part he’s played in Jim’s escape, working himself into a fright over the apparent divine retribution in Jim’s capture. So he resolves to pray and be a better person—immediately—but on his knees he finds he can’t say a word:

I knowed very well why [the prayer] wouldn’t come. It was because my heart warn’t right; it was because I warn’t square; it was because I was playing double. I was letting on to give up sin, but away inside of me I was holding on to the biggest one of all. . . . You can’t pray a lie—I found that out.

So I was full of trouble, full as I could be, and didn’t know what to do. (AHF, 316)

Write a letter to Miss Watson, he decides. Tell her Jim’s whereabouts so she can come and reclaim him as her slave. See if you can pray then. So he writes the letter, and feels redeemed momentarily, and then like his older self and his creator in the earlier verse he thinks, and thinks and thinks—could he feel the eyes of a nation waiting, waiting?—could he hear me listening, listening?—remembering Jim’s kindness and care . . . sighing just a little bit . . . “[N]on serviam . . . . the embodiment of [Twain's] own commitment to think for himself, to make up his own mind about what was true. . . . Although he might defer to authority if expedient . . . . when it came to what went on in his own mind, [Twain] had begun to recognize no master but himself” . . . sighing just a little bit . . . “. . . out in the middle of the country, playing . . .” . . . sighing just a little bit . . . song as profound and beautiful and true . . . as the notion of the story’s most lost boy ultimately refusing the world’s fallacy in its opposition of two things, inadvertently calling the bluff when it said Make your choice. (SMK, 76) Big enough to recalibrate conscience to the desires of a supposedly wicked heart. Brave enough to search and listen and think and think, and to sacrifice his salvation for the resulting conviction.

Whether or not he lived to realize his vindication, a boy who unwittingly found a fault line: the right in the wrong . . . the church in the mud . . . God in the sin:

I took [the letter] up, and held it in my hand. I was a trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:

“All right, then, I’ll go to hell”—and tore it up. (AHF, 314)

He didn’t, of course. Go to hell, I mean. I mean, it was a rocky start—there’s still controversy. But they made him a hero—some say our greatest novel. He’s not in the fire; he’s on the shelves of every bookstore in the country.

And I don’t know about you, but I’m holding out hope for these guys:

Things change. The world may want black and white, but life is necessarily confusing, broad, strange. The thing about the monster ballads era is that it was so—scandalous at the time, so over-the-top, so threatening, but now . . . it’s not. (You might say it looks a little silly, but be careful. A little surfing will demonstrate that those fans are still around, and they still believe. And I confess: that guitar still gets me.) Popular music didn’t give up on scandalous, though—it just moved on. Upon investigation the lyrics to those monster ballads are quite benign and quite human. Love wasn’t intimidated by those tough rockers; she left them as broken as the rest of us, and asking the age-old questions.

And society didn’t give up on slavery; it just found new ways to disguise the chains. One way to combat that is to get comfortable with confusion and difference and paradox in ourselves, in our society, in our relationships with one another. For the hardest men’s hearts can still bleed, and perhaps you have known or hope to someday know a still small voice to blaze. Perhaps not. But I believe that whatever we each ultimately choose to believe, we have to keep listening and paying attention to and caring about and claiming it all, or we’ll miss something. Like Kaplan’s higher level of exquisiteness.

And we have to be ready to change our minds. Anyone who can see how wrong we’ve been should be convinced of that.

Don’t push! I’m climbing down from the pulpit now.

Smiling just a little bit is my favorite line of Monster Ballads. For me, it’s the small rewards for keeping at a trying journey—the sharing of a wry joke with the universe in the midst of pain, the fleeting rush of euphoria when struggle dissipates and you’re seized with the confidence and conviction to keep going. The stirring sense of freedom one feels as the quest for absolute certainty is laid aside, and one finds she can hold two seemingly opposite things, or possibilities, even, in one head, or heart, or life. It could be the precious moments—for me, nanoseconds—when we sit back and look around and survey the mess and accept that this is it. The end is journey.

Or perhaps sometimes it’s the only recourse left when you feel you’ve been stretched too far—the fixing of narrowed eyes that peer over the desert with the faintest grin. Screw you, world. I’m not giving up. It’s the moment you know the world took notice.

Smiling just a little bit is Mark Twain, a couple tough years after Nevada, hiding out from the San Francisco police with a handful of friends in a rustic bachelor-pad cabin in the middle of nowhere, laughing to himself as he wrote by firelight—quiet and calm and free of the urge to join the others outside digging for silver—a funny story about a jumping frog that would introduce a border ruffian to readers on the East Coast. Later he’d be accepted into the literary elite. Did you know Twain published, amongst lots of other stuff, the beginning passages of Life on the Mississippi in The Atlantic? I like to think it would have made him smile to think of us looking for him on Jackass Hill.

It’s Josh Ritter . . . well, I like to think he smiled when he got this call.

And it’s a girl in a cafe with a familiar nod for the waitress and a blinking cursor for her mangled heart, dusting off an old dream.

The song’s called Monster Ballads, but that beautiful high far-off piano gets the last word. You can decide what that means, if anything. In fact, of course you know, you can decide what it all means. Certainly don’t take my word for it. I’m only really sure of one thing.

We should listen.

The Mississippi is well worth reading about.

—just in case you’re feeling a little queasy about the 414 pages and four Appendices. By the end of page one he’s proudly pronounced her the longest, crookedest, most expectation-defying river in the world. And so fertile! He dispatches the St. Lawrence, the Rhine, and the Thames with their inferior water discharge. And he starts in on perhaps his most beloved observation—for don’t we all love to find ourselves reflected back—the mighty stream’s great eccentricity. Doesn’t it narrow and deepen at its mouth when the other tired conformists do just the opposite?

And there begins page two.

If you’re standing on a riverbank south of Baton Rouge, Twain tells us, the mud deposit of the Mississippi likely created that land. And it can just as easy take it away by eroding its alluvial banks at will and charging off in any direction it pleases. It makes and breaks towns this way—lively port towns can become sleepy country ones when the river deserts—and can change your state of residence overnight. In this way it could have rendered a Missouri slave a free inhabitant of Illinois.

One begins to feel a little enthusiasm. And then Twain, reminding us that the first white man, De Soto, first glimpsed the stream in 1542, goes for broke:

Unquestionably the discovery of the Mississippi is a datable fact which considerably mellows and modifies the shiny newness of our country, and gives her a most respectable outside-aspect of rustiness and antiquity.

Take that, Europe! And then, like the cousin breathlessly contemplating how he can still be single, Twain takes aim at over a century’s worth of crap explorers who, though they were crawling, robbing, and enslaving all over the place, didn’t think the river was worth a look. He sniffs

In our day we don’t allow a hundred and thirty years to elapse between glimpses of a marvel. (LM, 43)

In a recent post I alluded to Life on the Mississippi as a love letter of sorts, and I must say that now as I approach page 414 I have a clearer vision of why that would be: the trajectory of Twain’s affection resembles my own for a handful of people and things I’ve known. He does longing so brilliantly, and to this I can relate. But it gets complicated, of course, for he gets a lot closer than sixteenth century musings and the stoic statistics of the river’s drainage basin. And longing rarely—in my experience too, Mr. Twain—survives possession, or mastery.

He gets right behind the wheel, actually, apprenticed to the renowned steamboat and famously cool-headed pilot Horace Ezra Bixby in his early twenties. Twain’s love of the river stemmed from a vivid childhood obsession—he played pilot and first mate like other generations played cops and robbers—and he’s in his glory to be living out a dream.

Here I must quickly give a rudimentary description of a rudimentary science: the piloting of steamboats down the Mississippi in the mid-nineteenth century. There was no GPS, no buoys, no charts, no lights save the “flickering, smoky, pitch-dripping, ineffectual torch-baskets.” (LM, 176) There was just huge, frightfully expensive boats, an ever-changing river, an engine powered by boilers producing steam under enormous pressure, and an economical (and testosterone-driven?) need to reach the destination as fast as possible without, well, blowing up. And many did blow up. Twain’s beloved younger brother Henry died of injuries sustained in the explosion of the Pennsylvania.

Sometimes they tossed in a cargo load of highly flammable cotton.

The pilots sat up high in the pilot house armed with a wheel, a speaking tube, some bells, a log book filled out by the previous watch, maybe a whistle. They rang the bells to signal the leadsmen down below to go to starboard or larboard (now called port) and take a sounding. This entailed lowering oneself half off the boat and dropping a lead line in the water to measure the depth, which was of vital interest since about 1,543,442 things (no exaggeration as Twain tells it) could conspire to change the depth or introduce a crisis and thus ground or sink the boat.

Leadsmen would report depth findings back by singing the mark—and they really did sing it. Mark One signaled six feet above the lead (lead-filled pipe attached to bottom of lead line), Mark Twain signaled twelve feet above the lead (Twain calls it two fathoms) and was a guarantee that the tub sat in safe water. The bells and speaking tube were used to communicate with the engine room and the engineers: they would reverse the wheel or alter the steam on command.

Regarding the origin of Sam Clemens’ pseudonym, it is a typical Twain mystery: he says he stole it upon the death of a grizzled old mariner from the ancient days of steamboat piloting, one Captain Isaiah Sellers, who wrote down purely practical information about the river and published it under the name Mark Twain. But, as footnote 50 in my Penguin Classic reports, there is “no absolute evidence” to prove or refute this claim, and the scholars are obviously nettled by this. The footnote sighs and shakes its head and sends us off to another text for the most in-depth exploration of “this whole difficult issue” (LM, 449).

Twain would object to my calling it a rudimentary science. He goes to great lengths in the first portion of the book to intimate just how exact a science it was: a science whose facts and principles and methods were lodged wholly in the prodigious brain—the memory—of the steamboat pilot. That organ had to house the Google Earth capture of the Mississippi before there was Google Earth. Twain is endlessly praising of it, and I can see why.

His own training in the river did not begin well. As I read the early chapters, of his arguments with Bixby, of the painful unfurling of the minute attentions the river would require, I was reminded . . . of a familiar cadence and sentiment from a beloved book from my own childhood. And since I’ve had mash-ups on the mind, I figured . . .

The below sticks quite close to the text, saving you, by my estimation, 23 5/8 pages of reading. You’re welcome or I’m sorry, I can’t really decide.

[Green indicates Horace Bixby speaking
Red indicates the leadsmen
Black is Samuel Clemens].

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Learning* a River Cub

You’ll learn this river
By heart, you’ll see!
You’ll know this river
Like A, B, C.

Must I learn it upstream and down?
Of course you dash-dash-dashed clown!

Must I learn all brands of night?
Pitch-black, gray mist, and yes, moonlight.

Must I learn it without buoy?
From New Orleans clear through St. Louis.

Each craggy stump and wet wood pile?
Only for the next twelve hundred miles.

Oh hellfire, blazes, and damnation!
I’ll chip a piece of that plantation!

You’ll get this river
By heart, you’ll see!
You’ll know this river
Like A, B, C.

But I can’t remember in the fog
buried wrecks or Hanging Dog.

I can’t remember all the marks
caving banks or in the dark.

I can’t remember Madrid’s Bend
Jacket Pattern or fickle wend.

I can’t remember in a raft
in a yawl or fore-and-aft.

I can’t remember shapeless shore
I can’t remember one thing—

Half Twain! Half Twain!
Half Twain! Half Twain!
Look out now—
You’ll bash her brains!

I quit! A roustabout I’ll be!
I’ll kill the cub who quits on me.

Bluff reefs and sand bars and to think
I can’t even recall the ways to sink!

Would you, could you, had you notes?
Start writing or you’ll kill the boat!
That there is Six Mile Point, so look
and use your Memorandum book.

Oh wait—what’s that I see?
A friendly sight, that cottonwood tree!
I know him from our last trip down
And hell—I recognize this town!

I did it! I’ve got this river now.
(And you said I couldn’t pilot a cow.)

But somehow nothing seems as fine.
The romance is gone, new burden mine.

The water now a telling yarn
I read to keep the boat from harm.

Say farewell to beauty and grace
And fix an eye on the shoalest place.

*As Twain puts it, “‘Teach’ is not in the river vocabulary.” (LM, 90)

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.
I quite like this passage about learning to read the water:

The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book—a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. . . . There never was so wonderful a book written by man; never one whose interest was so absorbing, so unflagging, so sparklingly renewed with ever re-perusal. The passenger who could not read it was charmed with a peculiar sort of faint dimple on its surface. . . but to the pilot that was an italicized passage . . . for it meant that a wreck or a rock was buried there that could tear the life out of the strongest vessel that ever floated. (LM, 94)

And reading the river did, in Twain’s estimation, rob it of romance:

Now when I had mastered the language of this water . . . I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river! (LM, 95)

But I said it gets complicated, and that’s because the book is an amalgam of diverse parts: there’s the river’s early history, then the text about his pilot days published years earlier in The Atlantic and called Old Times on the Mississippi, a segue in chapter 21 in which Twain explains away the intervening twenty-one years of his life (in half a page), and the last part captures his return to the river in April 1882 when he was forty-six years old. The last is by far the longest, and one senses that Twain has forgotten that romance exited the river when he was just twenty-three, for he drifts up and down its banks in his middlish age bidding it farewell all over again: lamenting loss and bygone days and change, and muttering doubt over the efficacy and wisdom of some of the endeavors that are meant to symbolize progress.

Mostly he misses his old friends:

Half a dozen sound-asleep steamboats where I used to see a solid mile of wide-awake ones! This was melancholy, this was woful. The absence of the pervading and jocund steamboatman from the billiard-saloon was explained. He was absent because he is no more. His occupation gone, his power has passed away, he is absorbed into the common herd, he grinds at the mill, a shorn Samson and inconspicuous. Half a dozen lifeless steamboats, a mile of empty wharves, a negro fatigued with whiskey stretched asleep, in a wide and soundless vacancy, where the serried hosts of commerce used to contend! Here was desolation, indeed. (LM, 172)

He’s really quite sweet about it, and is rather brave and fair about the myriad changes that have befallen the river and the river life. He’s nostalgic, but he draws an exacting line, for he is quite critical of people and places clinging to fraudulent principles—religious and aristocratic, for example—that hinder society’s progress. It’s lovely to be there with him on a personal journey so obviously close to his heart, even if Kaplan, our resident Twain biographer—telling us how Twain said he’d live his life over as a lifelong pilot—had to go and write this

[Twain's] fantasy was of a time and a Sam Clemens that had never existed. (SMT, 382)

Ah, but they existed for him. I suppose it is the biographer’s sober office to point out such truths, but I’ve nurtured my own self-fulfilling fantasies and mostly they’re harmless to others and bring joy to me. If one has to long—and I think artists do, if not all people—bygone days and repainted memories will take you a good part of the way. And anyway, Twain’s river lives and will endure in such treasures as Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer and the paper brick that is our subject now. So . . . score one for things that don’t exist.

But Life on the Mississippi is much more than a trip down Twain’s memory lane. Twain had a hell of a time writing it, and I’m only guessing that might have been down to the amount of things he was trying to do, or the amount of things he felt. He’d already written some straight travel books, but those were about places he’d never been and to which he had no emotional connection.

We know he did want it to be the indispensable guide to his beloved Mississippi from discovery through the present day, threaded through with the earliest and dearest memories he had. But once on the five thousand mile journey, the richness of the material must have staggered him a little: the singular river characters and their tall tales, the port towns in every state of boom and blight—some still wearing the wounds of the recent war, the new industries cropping up, famous feuding families, an opportunity for some commentating on the contrasts between north and south, slavery, and, of course, the utterly changed aspect of the “stupendous flood,” in which former islands had sidled up to the shore and new ones—called tow-heads—had formed.

And much more—and much of it very funny. He shares the narrative with a number of travel writers of the time, quoting from their reviews of the area and poking fun—one Captain Marryat, R.N. declares the river “the great common sewer of Western America”—and whole chapters are submerged in other people’s stories, told in their own voices. (LM, 201)

It can feel—like this post, I fear—a little like an all-but-the-kitchen-sink performance, but despite the structural oddities and dense content and avalanche of details, one emerges announcing the whole wild thing a success, feeling warmly toward the Mississippi and awarding her the pivotal place in American history and identity that Twain argues for from page one. And with the benefit of over a century’s worth of hindsight, one can fish out a lot of evidence that human nature is remarkably the same, even if your 1860 steamboat is a 2007 subway car.

Josh Ritter has said that his album The Animals Years was influenced by Life on the Mississippi. There’s no neat quote comparison between it and Twain’s literary carnival. But I think there are subtle parallels in theme, structure, and effect. There’s nostalgia in Idaho, present-day social commentary on religion (God himself in particular gets walloped), war, politics in Thin Blue Flame and Girl in the War. Tall tales and colorful characters in Lillian, Egypt and Best for the Best. Journey in Monster Ballads, which, like Life on the Mississippi, guest stars Huck Finn: he suddenly appears and narrates the third verse of the mysterious song—Twain sunk a whole chapter from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in the third chapter of his Mississippi book. And all against a rich backdrop of things that could be one man’s Mississippi river valley: America and her history, the American West, home, books . . . love.

And would it be blasphemy to compare those eleven tracks to . . . Twain’s “chocolate tide” itself? Is it the same album in the dark, in the rain. . . at the park . . . on the train? No. Does it boast a few . . . eccentricities? Yes. Does familiar scenery drift by? Leaky buckets, blowing boilers, sure. But play it forwards or backwards, set it to shuffle, lock it in repeat, get it by heart . . . unlike in Twain’s, in my experience you don’t lose a thing.

The effect, for me—if it isn’t clear—is enthusiasm, and inspiration. So even if that’s all that Josh intended to borrow from Life on the Mississippi—its winning passion, humor, tone, reach, power—well, in making my point perhaps Twain would lend one thing more:

The Animal Years is well worth listening to. . . .

Fast and fun seem to be the words. So, I’m following suit (in my small way), trying a few things—for better of worse—that feel different, and fun.

And then I’ll write that Monster Ballads post. (And there will, I suspect, be gravitas.) I just haven’t had time yet.

Meanwhile, with warm Congratulations, and Thanks . . . .
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On August 21st
.

Abe fought Steve for Illinois
And the Louvre misplaced the real McCoy
While the saints appeared in misty Knock
And on Jarvis Isle the first boat did dock

King Gustav crossed out “coup d’etat”
And the rebel slaves followed Nat
While Quantrill’s shots in Lawrence sounded
And Hobart, Tasmania was founded

Bill Basie born in nineteen oh four
Stalingrad began to turn the war
And the man who said, “Know when to run”
Got dealt his hand ‘neath the Texas sun

The Gregorian counts it two three three
But that don’t matter much to me
What’s hot is that a man I know
Will this day boldly, bravely go

into the great white unexplored
into battle with glinting sword
calling forth those old good chords
and singing still to be adored

And Where, you ask, will I be?
Well, buying a piece of history
In search of fair conquistador
and vanquished at the record store.

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He died at age seventy-four—quite lucky to have lived so long given his maniacal smoking habit, amongst other threats—as the sun set on April 21, 1910, and perhaps only hours after learning he would have a grandchild. The last, terse paragraph on page 655 ties up the sad fate of the Clemens clan: Twain’s one surviving daughter dies poor and married to a compulsive gambler, having to sell mementos from her famous father’s life to pay expenses. And that grandbaby present in utero at his death commits suicide just fifty-four years later, in 1964.

There are no heirs. There has been no one like him since. (SMT, 655)

And one sighs the Sigh of the Last Page of a Long, Illuminating Book Enjoyed. There’s that moment of denial, or proud accomplishment, when you might grasp a chunk of pages between thumb and forefinger and riffle them, their breath cool and reassuring, your eyes peeking in at the words flashing by before saying goodbye.

But what do we care about Mark Twain? Well.

Now, I know that Josh Ritter’s album The Animal Years is a work of art that stands completely on its own: it’s a mash-up, a labyrinth, a desert oasis, a Mad Lib manifesto (you fill in the blanks) of confusion and limit-pushing exploration. There’s no way to know where he and it and Mark Twain and Voltaire and frivolity and solemnity and whatever else begin or end. But I think Josh found a kindred spirit in Twain. And if you’ve read any of this blog you know that’s recommendation enough for me. So I’ve been reading, slightly bewildered that I consider literature a chief pastime and yet haven’t revisited Twain since college, when I confess Huck Finn didn’t make a deep impression. But no conclusions can be drawn from what I’m about to do. Lawyers might call it leading the witness. I call it personal vindication, for even back when I was singing without knowing the words, I knew this album would send me wondrous places. And I’d go—happily—even if I had no way of knowing I ever got anywhere.

So.

Samuel Clemens was born to a modest family in Florida, Missouri in 1835. He did most his growing up in the port city of Hannibal and lit out without warning to New York City when he was just seventeen, sending word of his whereabouts to his mother in a letter. He drifted about Philadelphia, Washington DC, and New York working in the printing trade, then landed in Keokuk, Iowa to work as a compositor for a bit before falling restless again. Having heard about cocoa farming in South America, he got it in his head to go, but found himself without any means.

He thought about indulging his childhood wish to become a Mississippi riverboat pilot, and visited some relatives in hope of sponsorship in the purchase of an apprenticeship, but no one volunteered. Then one windy day while out walking a $50 bill blew smack into the wall of a house in front of him, but instead of disappearing off to one of those far-flung places or occupations he’d been thinking about, he went to—wait for it—Cincinnati for five months. No one is sure why, but his life is riddled with such curious actions, and to confuse or delight matters even more (depending on your perspective), he was notoriously fast and loose with the truth.

He did finally part with some of the found money (or cobbled together some borrowed or made money, for the $50 windfall may have been invented or embellished, no one knows) and bought a ticket to New Orleans, expecting to go on to the Amazon and great fortune from there. On the way down he talked his way into the pilot house of the steamboat and was offered the wheel for a gentle stretch. When he got to New Orleans he found that no ship was going to the Amazon for a very long time, so he hightailed it back through town and cornered the pilot he’d met on the southbound journey.

He persuaded one reluctant Horace Bixby to train him to be a pilot for a handsome fee of $500. The seasoned boatsman believed the only way to learn was to “get this entire river by heart.” Admittedly not a details man (otherwise he might have checked the Amazon departures schedule and never ended up in New Orleans at all), Clemens readily agreed, his romantic view of river life looming large. In Life on the Mississippi—which Josh Ritter has said greatly influenced the album The Animal Years—you can read how he was hilariously disabused of his presumptions about the easy, glamorous life of the pilot. And yet despite all the appalled raging and railing—by the demanding Bixby and the demoralized Twain—you do sense that he indeed got the river by heart, because even when disguised, that book (as far as I’ve read) is a love letter of sorts. If roles were reversed and Twain was musician, one likes to think of him penning a sweet, if ironic, tune for his muse the mighty Mississippi.

Once graduated from cub pilot status he barely got to enjoy his generous wage because the Civil War broke out and rather than choose sides he did something he often did—fled. Orion, his extraordinarily feckless but coolly-named brother, had been appointed secretary of the Nevada Territory (also known as Washoe) and Clemens decided to accompany him on the journey there. Years later he wrote the book Roughing It to capture the experience. He got bored working for Orion in Carson City pretty quick and, forever preoccupied with getting rich, turned to the surrounding mining towns fueling men’s fantasies:

I confess, without shame, that I expected to find masses of silver lying all about the ground. I expected to see it glittering in the sun on the mountain summits . . . I crawled about on the ground, seizing and examining bits of stone.

from Roughing It by Mark Twain

It’s his time on the river, bouncing west by stagecoach, walking the miles and miles of desert between mining towns, and scratching for silver that evokes The Animals Years for me. Why? Because it leads up to his transformation from Sam Clemens to Mark Twain, to his seemingly incidental discovery of his calling as writer. Because of the sense of search, journey, solitude, and self-reliance. Because of the myriad contradictions he inhabited, and the mystery of how he coped with it all in his own head. Because of the wild forms that chance took in his rich life, because of the luck and levity and ballsy insouciance.

But mining all those pages produces some more overt and rather fun clues . . .

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To Twain’s fervent proposal during his first visit she gave an “unequivocal no” (SMT, 233). Consider the humbly beseeching speaker in Here at the Right Time, the broken bucket, the cascading water:

“I am desperately in love with the most beautiful girl. So beautiful. Unfortunately very rich. She is quite an invalid. I have proposed & been refused a dozen times. . . . I know I’m too rough—knocking around the world. . . . I never had wish or time to bother with women, & I can give that girl the purest, best love any man can ever give her. I can make her well and happy.” (MTBus, 101-2)

</Sigh>

She urged him, in a customary date-deflection tactic of the day, to think of her as a sister, and he soon addressed a letter to her as such, and began to win her over in carefully wrought correspondence in which they both planted secret signs, I think: He sent sweet, covert messages hinting his true feelings, testing the waters, and after refusing the marriage proposal, she sent a photograph, which seems the nineteenth century equivalent of . . . what do we have left? Anyway, it was significant: it meant Keep writing.

The best part of their love story, to my mind, is that Twain, whose charm and wit gave him prodigious powers of persuasion, had to tame and tweak his great talent in courting the very proper and devout heiress. He couldn’t have found a more ironic match to pursue. Kaplan tells us repeatedly that Livy lacked a sense of humor; she didn’t even get most his jokes. (!) So Twain was very careful, very thoughtful (and tortured) about what to say. Also, there was concern over his hard-living years in the west, his bad habits, and while, to their credit, her very wealthy parents didn’t seem to mind the stark class difference, it was obvious to all, perhaps most of all him. I think of

I’ll try my best to make a go
But I’m not sure what I don’t know

In writing to her, in having to negotiate all those obstacles while desperately, entreatingly making what seems like the case of his life, I wonder if his pen relished the challenge. This rather slays me, and sounds faintly familiar:

[Twain's] own courtship letters were brilliant performances, encompassing a full range of tones and tactics, from passionate joy to humble supplication, from self-deprecation to overwrought praise, from heartfelt moral and religious seriousness to chatty information and occasional jokes. Hers, to his initial surprise and then total acceptance were boringly serious mini-sermons without the semblance of a joke or a touch of literary talent.” (SMT, 242)

And we’re a little off topic here, but I can’t resist this:

She thinks about me all the time, & informs me of it with Miltonic ponderosity. . . . Ours is a funny correspondence. . . . My letters are an ocean of love in a storm—hers an ocean of love in a majestic repose of great calm. (L1, 1)

Ok—and remember this

Oh chariots, if you’re out there, please swing low

Twain, turns out, sang that a lot:

From childhood on he had adored the simple songs of his midwestern world, the music of religious community, especially its hymns, and would play on the piano and sing repeatedly such songs as ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.’ (SMT, 322-323)

Once Livy accepted his proposal, her father sought character references. Twain scrambled to provide some from his raucous days out west, and the results were mixed. “I would rather bury a daughter of mine than have her marry such a fellow,” wrote one well-wisher. (L3, 57) Twain took a preemptive approach, owning up to his dissipations while emphasizing his best quality: “They all like me, & they can’t help it.” (L2, 295)

I’m a good man for ya
I’m a good man

He managed—as ever—to squeak through the matrimonial sweepstakes, and they were married in 1870 and happily so for thirty-four years until Livy’s death left him despondent in 1904. They were ardent newlyweds and then steadfast and affectionate companions. They endured the death of two children. They traveled the world, lived many years abroad, and fought back from near bankruptcy brought on by Twain’s legendarily poor and overzealous investments. And all the while she read practically every word he wrote for publication as the pages piled up, her “respect and approval” being more important, Twain said, than that of the rest of the human race. (PA, 102-105)

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Waking, I move slowly; but in my dreams my unhampered spiritualized body flies to the ends of the earth in a millionth of a second. Seems to—& I believe, does. (NBK, 40)

I think of

And over hills and fields I flew
Wrapped up in a royal blue

Kaplan writes:

Dreams and their nature preoccupied [Twain], dreams as prophecy, warning, and self-revelation, the nature of dream time and the relationship between sleep and consciousness. (SMT, 540)

And I hear

I became a thin blue stream
The smoke between asleep and dreams

And perhaps my favorite new thought regarding Thin Blue Flame: an alternative take on that elixir of life and élan vital, and surely inspiration for a future post—the full house. As you may know, Twain occasionally (and usually reluctantly) drummed up needed income by touring on the lecture circuit. When he began, as he ironed out his act and got used to the stage, the prospect of unsold seats panicked him. The phrase “full house” would have been immediately recognizable to him as a very good thing:

Made a splendid hit last night & am the ‘lion’ to-day. Awful rainy, sloppy night, but there were 1,200 people present . . . house full. I captured them, if I do say it myself.” (L2, 280)

About a performance years later in Portland Twain reported “splendid house, full to the roof” in his notebook. (NBK, 35)

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Working in snow, mud, and sweltering heat, often in the same day, he dynamited, picked, shoveled, and cursed. (SMT, 98)

His money was dwindling, his promise to his family and himself to bring home a fortune nagged, his resolve to “never be [a slave] again” to work or location strong, his body aching from the physical labor. (L1, 132) Something had to give. Somehow he found time to send some writing to the newspaper in nearby Virginia City.

So how’d he sign those letters sent in from out on the desert?

Josh.

They’re lost now, the letters, never to be read in this world again. But they earned Clemens the offer of a position as full-time local reporter. He began work in September in a workplace where “his temperament and ambition found a nurturing home,” the editorial leadership gave him space to find his voice, and he had instant friends in his like-minded colleagues. (SMT, 104). It’d be years before he carved out the place all his own, but by early 1863 he was Mark Twain. He was on the path—and the rest, as they say, is history.
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Still, we have learned something from Twain—though it is unclear if Twain ever learned it himself: The gold isn’t the thing. The thing is the search for the gold. The search leads to adventure, and adventure leads to anecdotes, and anecdotes lead to stories. The pursuit of fortune is, like the pursuit of Twain, just an excuse to get around. And that excuse leads us smack into an impossibly lucky find a mile down the highway . . . (MTT, Entry 4)

Anecdotes lead to stories, and stories to songs, though given the time and length constraints sometimes it’s left to the listener to fill in or ferret out the narrative, and wisely, too, for in interpreting and embroidering we invest ourselves.

You know who’s good for songs that do that? I’ll leave you in suspense.

I like what Michael Lewis says about being satiated by journey, about the excuse to get around. We’ll be borrowing it to lead us smack into that cozy thicket of words and sound curiously absent from this post . . . Start your stagecoach, cue the music.

Next stop: Monster Ballads.
. .
. .
. .

I, of course, had a list, and I zigzagged from bedroom to backpack on the kitchen table to bathroom, unable to use one trip to accomplish more than one task, like a crappy waitress. He poured himself a drink and reached behind my sofa for the Czech guitar I have on loan until he has space enough for two guitars again. Plus, I’m meant to be learning to play.

“Where’s the pick?”

“In the case, I guess.”

I can’t understand,
She let go of my hand
And left me here facing the wall.
I’d sure like to know
Why she did go,
But I can’t get close to her at all.

The chords died in midair as I was surveying the cereal boxes in the cupboard. He walked over and said, “Oh yeah. I forgot: you should definitely go in with this.”

I caressed the cover, excitement welling up, and turned back in search of road trip food.

“You walk in with that clutched to your chest, he might invite you back.”

I spun round. “He invites people back?”

His eyes danced with knowing, and power. He smirked. “Maybe.”

“Give it to me.” I shoved it in the backpack.

“Their car better have air conditioning.”

We drank syrupy Irish Mist from juice glasses, eager to leave behind the abbreviated workday. He picked up the guitar again, and, our voices warm and smooth, we sang Love Minus Zero/No Limit. We exchanged looks and snarled the favorite line Bankers’ nieces seek perfection / expecting all the gifts that wise men bring. As usual we forgot and grasped for The wind howls like a hammer. I listened to my soaring voice buoyed by his—we sang it slow, drawing out the phrases—and watched his fingers seize the strings, cherishing the moment. He usually played songs I didn’t know. Whatever I requested, I seemed to get the same answer: “I need a capo.” I kept meaning to get one.

I knew this evening—this trip—was my way of saying goodbye. I sang and watched and said my first of many silent goodbyes, sunk it down deep beneath the notes.

We were singing so loud that when our ride called we missed it. I finally glimpsed my friend roaming confusedly up my street. He slipped the guitar back in its case.

We watched the city disappear and the highway loom up from the backseat. He lamented the heat. I rhapsodized about the promise of a smallish outdoor venue, a summer’s evening, about the latest album. I came prepared as only a good student could, with the set lists from the three previous nights tucked into a folder that also contained printouts of the lyrics to Modern Times. I had been reading them while listening on the train in the morning. We put in the CD.

My cruel weapons have been put on the shelf
Come sit down on my knee
You are dearer to me than myself
As you yourself can see
I can see for myself that the sun is sinking
How I wish you were here to see
Tell me now, am I wrong in thinking
That you have forgotten me?

When my brother Sam began his ten-year headstart on Dylan indoctrination, strumming his guitar in our Michigan basement, I was too busy with other things. One frigid morning Dylan issued forth from our minivan speakers en route to high school, and I—I cringe to even say this—I laughed. I laughed and laughed at the grotesque voice and its mockery of everything I thought made the art of singing beautiful. Sam didn’t even argue. I went back to Billy Joel and Garth Brooks and piano lessons and only years later turned back to Dylan, after my college graduation. And then a few years after that I fell down a well, and in the journey out I became utterly entranced by Bob Dylan. I watched the films, read and re-read the Robert Shelton book, printed out and pondered the lyrics in tiny empty moments of my day, and, slowed and sensitized by emotional healing, lingered indulgently in the 60s and 70s.

Sam regarded me with only slight exasperation, as if to say What took you so long? and not Didn’t expect you here. He could trump my enthusiasm—even any burgeoning expertise—at every turn, what with his three concerts attended to my none, his ability to play all the songs, the biographies lined up in his bookcase. But he inhabited his fandom with characteristic restraint; maybe his long association had worn off some of the sheen. I went headlong at mine with the exuberance of a new love affair. I think it embarrassed him a little, or he felt embarrassed for me. But I felt hope for me, so I kept listening, wide eyes following the words like a lantern’s beam down a wondrous road late into the night. Grateful.

A concert-going novice, I had a small run-in (another post) with the Internet pre-sale and ended up with four tickets, the more treasured two in the seventh row. I considered the matter at length and concluded I really wanted to go with none other than Sam. I gave the remaining tickets to a friend and her roommate in exchange for a ride. Sam had explained how Dylan changes the arrangements of the songs, how the real entertainment is to look round at the fans at the beginning and watch them puzzle out the song’s identity. To play a game with one’s companion to see who could recognize the most songs the fastest in one evening. He’d been underwhelmed by at least one Dylan concert in the past, and, despite his deep loyalty (or because of it), it seemed important to him to temper my expectations.

“Just don’t expect Dylan from 1965 to show up.”

And I said of course I didn’t. I knew there were many, many albums I was yet to discover—I had the late 70s and 80s and 90s—the eyeliner!—even Love and Theft to work through, but I didn’t feel too troubled by that. I felt like a kid purposefully leaving some presents unopened. But secretly I knew that all the anticipation leading up to June 26 was indeed fueled by my memory of that young man beetling about England sitting three to the backseat, clacking away on his typewriter, stone-faced and bouncy with brilliance, while Joan Baez mournfully—hauntingly—sang Percy’s Song. The one with warm and playful smile playing It’s All Over Baby Blue, and the tiny penetrating cut of the eyes after like a fire in the sun that made me yearn. The casual hotel suite song leader with utterly captivated audience—one face battling stunned admiration with raging envy in the very same expression. He who stood small but mighty on the stage of the Royal Albert Hall.

I knew that he left all that behind so long ago. But I couldn’t just yet, and well, whatever he now is or all the things he has been since, he’s still—well, he’s still him—perhaps a silly philosophical notion enthralling more than just me—and I was going to be seven rows away.
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We hurried through the field, unsure of our destination in the sizable Look Park. The silky grass tickled my urban feet in my flip-flops. We could hear Copland—of all things—coming from what looked like a theatre, but we weren’t sure it was the Dylan concert, and given our lateish arrival and the parking attendant’s (incorrect) declaration, “Bob’s already on stage,” I was coming unglued.

“Do you smell—pot?”

“We’re here.” Sam strode up to the shorts-and-T-shirt-clad security guard and ripped open the backpack.

I tripped after him through the chaotic lawn, glimpsing a tiny newborn baby curled compactly against his mother’s breast. I proudly displayed my Reserved Seating tickets to the ushers, and we walked up the aisle to the seventh row. And as I bent down to examine the label on the plastic chair, the crowd roared and I seized Sam’s forearm and looked up to see Bob Dylan standing amongst his band members, lingering in what would be the closest we’d get to a greeting or an introduction. None required.

Given my careful studies we were expecting Cat’s in the Well, but we got something else, and while we navigated the uneven ground—unsure of our bearings, all the familiar signposts gone—something down deep told me I’d been here before. The words were familiar, but the new arrangement was scrambling my receptors. It was like hearing a foreign language I’d spoken only in childhood.

I looked at Sam just as his face cleared. “Got it?” he asked.

I squinted. And then there it was . . . your brand new . . . Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat. I looked at Sam with triumph and then wonder: could that be right? That wasn’t on any of the set list printouts.

He raised his eyebrows, grinning, shrugging, shaking his head. That’s what he loves best about Dylan: you just never know.

With the next song—another departure—came the stirring sense that something special might be happening. I lifted my eyes up at the towering pine trees, their naked trunks straight and pitched like sailboats’ masts. I watched the sky drain of color and night fill it up again. Behind us, a seated sixtyish man rested both his hands on his cane and repeatedly yelled “Bobbbbbbby!” over the applause.

I gazed through my theatre binoculars, unable to shake the guilty sense that I looked like I was on safari, in search of some exotic reclusive animal. Was I? Was that fair? I drifted over the Mardi Gras beads hung on the drum set, the feather in his hat, the downward gaze of the lead guitarist. And I lingered over Dylan’s sacred hands, swollen and veined with age.

Someone tapped my shoulder. “Does Bob have a diamond ring on his left hand?” a bald man shouted over the music.

“You want to look?”

We handed round the binoculars. No diamond ring.

“Look at his hot pink sequined . . . what do you call it?” I inquired of Sam, touching his collarbone.

“Um, the strap?” He smiled. “That’s the technical term.”

The songs piled up on one another in a blur—so many favorites—and I can’t tell you about the intricacies of what was happening. I was branded on the spot, standing, then sitting, standing again. Dancing. The scars on my heart pulsed as he played an exquisite Shelter from the Storm. I sang, despite the unfamiliar melody, a strange sensation to have those well-worn words feel tentative and new in my mouth. When we escaped to the foreign country, to Some day I’ll make it mine, I raised my arms and cheered. There was that Hope. I could feel Sam grimace, but he let me be.

We gleefully spit out Des-oh-lay-shun Row! We marveled at just how hard Highway 61 Revisited can still rock. Our faces went shiny in the stifling heat, our senses thrummed in surroundings reminiscent of a deep woods Southern revival. We caught Dylan’s smiles like lightning bugs, happy to see him enjoying himself.

When he came out for the encore he punched his fists through his jacket sleeves and flared his fingers high over his keyboard. He lifted his hat off his head and dropped it back in place. Well there’s hot stuff here and it’s everywhere I go. I was looking through the binoculars when he joined his hands above his head and the place went dark. They moved to the front of the stage. And then they were gone.

The crowd cheered, the house lights stayed down just long enough to stoke our hope. But then they came up, and Sam grasped the backpack.

“It’s over? Sure?” I frowned.

“There he goes . . .” a man nearby answered, pointing over my shoulder. I turned and saw the high red taillights of the tour bus slithering through the pines.

Ten days later Sam moved off to New York City, a dream he’s had since around the time he found Dylan in our basement.

I know that every night is different—special—because that’s the point. But this one was mine, so I will tell you with innocent, fervent sincerity that this one was magic, supporting my case with the fact that he hadn’t opened with Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat in months, at least. And I will ask, What of that night in Florence? And how many hearts can one man mend?

And how many shows . . . before you call her a fan?

And the pink sequined strap?

Thank you, Bob Dylan, for dispelling and deepening the mystery. For freeing us—even when we fought you, begging for our chains—to find and ask our own questions. And to whisper them, right into the wind.
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Is this menagerie what is meant by The Animal Years?

Let’s hear from Josh:

“The title had been in my head for a while and I tried to convince myself it wasn’t the one I should use,” Ritter admits, “but for me it was perfect. I was thinking back on the period of my life leading up to this record and my experience up to that point was, you get up, you start to play music and you tour. It’s such a strange life style. In a lot of ways I felt like I became this thing, half-man, half-animal, out in the middle of the country, playing. It was so bizarre. Everyone else is living their lives and doing things that are a bit more normal. Man, after a year and a half on the road, 16 months of touring for Hello Starling, I became the proto-hunter-gatherer, going out wherever and doing stuff and trying to find a way to make sense in a human way. But, really, in the end, you’re just trying to get food in your mouth. I think back on that time and feel definitely, those were my animal years.” — from joshritter.com

Ah. So in that album live the spoils of a man in survival mode, a man out chasing his dream at the expense of all else. A man with one eye on normal, one eye on the audience and the road. It’s like the soundtrack to hunger, journey, doubt . . . and fear, maybe.

Yeah, I hear all that there. Do you?

Josh has also said it’s about being confused. Check.

One thing I find rather irresistible about Josh Ritter is his immense respect and nostalgia for the past. If you’ve read any of my previous posts, you know I tend to go forward looking back. Perhaps too much, I often worry. But striving for that balance between deference to and breaking with the past is a crucial undertaking for humankind. Everything’s moving so fast these days, and we’re obviously hard-wired to seek out newness. But there’s such wisdom and richness in our history: I love that Josh is making old things new, reaching back in time for inspiration and yet going so innovatively forward.

I will tell you that reading Mark Twain as a companion to The Animal Years is hugely revealing. I’ll write more about that. And I’ll try not to dwell, despite my excitement at the announcement of an upcoming new record, on the slight melancholy over the fact that the Animal Years songs that I’ve come to know—for they knew me—and treasure will relinquish their “new release” limelight and domination of the tour set list.

The album that grew up out of that proto-hunter-gatherer phase seems to have catapulted Josh quite far up the food chain. On August 21, 2007, if you live in America, you can go find out what Josh has been thinking about since making his own feast out of famine. The new album, titled The Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter, comes out in Ireland on September 7, and is available worldwide in October.

Here’s a rather sexy preview that appeared recently:

The title suggests we’ll get some more history. (Abe Lincoln, anyone?) But then there is also that Ritter affinity for double meanings, for extreme concision of expression. As a reminder, conquest is defined this way:

1. the act or state of conquering or the state of being conquered; vanquishment
2. the winning of favor, affection, love, etc
3. a person whose favor, affection, etc., has been won
4. anything acquired by conquering, as a nation, a territory, or spoils

It feels like the spirit of Josh’s previous albums—explorations of #2 are certainly well represented. But it’s a reincarnation, maybe: he’s a conquistador now, not starving animal. Well, we’ll see, and I can’t wait to hear . . . even if it sends me straight back to the library. I hope it does.

He’s back on tour again this summer, with French jazz vocalist Madeleine Peyroux. The photo above is from a recent show at the Beacon Theatre in NYC. According to the folks at Café Eclectica—they kindly let me use the picture—Josh said he was performing in a hand-me-down suit.

Yeah. That sounds about right.

Did you know Mark Twain once claimed a gorgeous, unsettled virgin forest on the shores of Lake Tahoe, and then promptly burnt up nearly every tree on it? He and a friend had to launch a boat into the lake to escape the accidental conflagration. You won’t believe the things that happened to Mark Twain, and the things he made happen. The life he lived. I’ve been reading a fine biography of Twain since I wrote about Best for the Best and had to admit ignorance about his life.

So, first a clarification. Regarding the riverboat scenes in Josh Ritter’s song Best for the Best, I wrote, I can see that riverboat, the captain’s propped-up boots, the hat pulled down over his eyes. It turns out this was not the preferred way to pilot a steamboat down the—albeit placid—Mississippi River in the mid-nineteenth century. It turns out it required rather constant attention, and Twain spent much of his time behind the wheel quite frightened that he would crash or run aground. In fact he had recurrent nightmares about it. But the river—his piloting years were interrupted by the Civil War and he never took it up again—was a great source of nostalgia throughout his life, and, as was often his way, once some years had intervened he remembered it slightly differently than he had lived it. When things got sticky he often spoke longingly about returning to the river, as if he’d be immune to troubles there.

In the final verse of the cryptic song Monster Ballads we hear from Twain via Huck Finn:

And I was thinking about my river days
Thinking about me and Jim
Passing Cairo on a getaway
With every steamboat like a hymn

There’s reflection here, and high adventure, fluent friendship, flight from the law, and yet the setting imbued with the solemn and sacred. The river as church. In light of what I’ve read about Twain and those four evocative lines, I’ve been thinking about the notion of river days. Those stolen seasons of our lives when we drop our bags and forget who we are or were supposed to be and run barefoot through the tall grass of life. When the experience becomes all.

Travel is usually required. Youth helps. I chose London: went for six months, came back with hardly more than my original suitcase four years later. I had the time of my life, or so my heart keeps telling me, when Parliament or Piccadilly rises up in my mind’s eye and mocks the routine that has worn down an easy path—or a rut—that I’ve begun to follow without having to watch where I’m going. That first year in London everything seemed injected with the novel. I went about buzzing with the heightened awareness of it all, as though outside myself. Even I was a novelty, and this new me observed the other in the huge glittering city and in interaction with new foreign friends, questioning all sorts of things never questioned—or even acknowledged—before, and tending a bumper crop of new insecurities. They were good, though. They made me grow. And they made me think quite a bit about America and her place in the world.

Wherever I’ve lived I’ve always been drawn to water, and some of my best thinking and feeling during my London days occurred while staring out at the muddy Thames. How to describe what happens when two human eyes linger over a body of water? Words don’t seem enough . . . soothing, I suppose. Monster Ballads just might prove that music can do better. You’ll also get the sound of journey, with the hypnotic, playful bass line and gentle, regular percussion. And so much more, or something else entirely: Monster Ballads is extraordinary in that it’s one of the most vibrant and vivid musical portraits I’ve ever heard, seen, touched, and yet it’s also . . . a pristine ivory canvas . . . being caressed by wind-rippled curtains on the windows . . . of a room of sunshine-scattered gold coins . . . in a mountainside cabin. Grab a brush, it says.

Of course the problem with having had some river days is that one can get a little impatient when the adventure dies down. One can find herself standing in her kitchen belting I don’t give a damn for just the in betweens. She might walk blocks and blocks out of her way to have a secret serenade by a foreign accent. The hard times abroad, marinated by memory, will soften.

And if one is honest she might find herself trying to replicate that frusterated river days sensation in compartments of her stateside life. She might sell all her furniture and move into a condo share across town, just to shake things up, to see if anything can seem new again. And she may, as the moving truck approaches the turning off the main road—the westward journey broken at just four miles—be tempted to turn to the driver and say, “Can we keep going?”

A run of Three Sisters and the flush of the land

It comes in that earthly-ethereal, Elysian final verse . . . and for months now I’ve been luxuriating in the imagery, thinking, “All that . . . and Chekhov too?” I suppose heaven is what we make it—surely one message in Thin Blue Flame—and I’d gone and pulled out a chair for that fine writer. Oh well, he can come anyway. Something tells me Josh won’t mind.* And, yes, I’m ignorant about Native American agricultural history. It won’t be the last thing I get wrong about these songs; they’re complicated and weird (high praise in my book), and that’s part of the reason we’re here.

So now I’m home and packing to move. On Saturday I had an impromptu meeting and shaking-of-hands with the gentleman and father of four who paid $3.2M for this gorgeous building that was home to around fourteen people and ten apartments. He was showing his shy, smiling parents the boiler room, speaking in Italian. I introduced myself and asked whether they’d like to step into my humble place (surely destined to become the wine cellar, the maid’s quarters, or the laundry room).

He was gracious and humble, with kind eyes, and despite my ambivalence about moving away I could muster no animosity. Instead I burbled about how my years here had been so special, how I had considered writing a letter to the new owner and leaving it in the Ernest Hemingway fold-down desk. It felt a bit silly to congratulate someone on the cash purchase of a $3.2M home in possibly the most beautiful part of the city, and certainly I did not calm any fears by giving my assurances of how much they would enjoy the neighborhood, but congratulate and assure I did. He seemed genuinely grateful, and, as I said, kind. He said goodbye, I shut the door behind him, and I gave the wall a little pat. Phew.

One inevitably thinks about the coming in the planning for the leaving, and I will be forever mindful that I arrived here with a broken—no, a mangled heart. And now I leave with a mended one, even if there are some scars. It took just shy of two years. This little place under the sidewalk was here waiting on the nights I felt so bereft and so betrayed by the still-turning world—so low—that my homeward footsteps slowed and I, feeling unequal to one more, considered lying down on the sidewalk’s cold concrete. This home and its fickle oven hosted last summer’s baking school, when Sunday afternoons were reserved for the playing of classical music and the mastering of quickbreads, muffins, pies, cobblers, cookies, and cakes.

It cooperated when learning to cook took over in the fall, and my father and I spent a weekend hunting studs in the wall—him, drill pulsing, cursing old buildings’ basements and the things that lurk in their walls—in order to mount a pot rack. Those same walls did not sigh when I repeatedly reconfigured the furniture and moved decorations, learning to listen to its space and successfully making it my home, and one—my first—that I loved. Its inlaid bookcases handsomely supported my acres of books.

It opened its hobbit-sized door to Grief and we sat and gazed at it together, turning it round, memorizing all sides, and I cried, and cried and cried into its silence, determined to put in my time, hoping each honest encounter would be the last. It welcomed me home late at night during the harried months when I socialized and volunteered like a hamster on a wheel, booking some engagement nearly every night so I’d fall into bed too tired to think. It stayed up while I learned about investing </yawn> so I could invest the money I’d saved and exile anxiety about financial independence. It was screening theatre to Scorsese’s No Direction Home, which I watched each time it aired last autumn, the sight of a young brilliant Bob Dylan staring blankly out making me weep for reasons that weren’t clear. Yet. It was concert hall for Dylan and Josh Ritter, whose music I played incessantly through the winter and spring. It was sounding board for those first strange, spontaneous laughs—at the TV, at Josh’s lyrics—and later, the hilarity that sometimes ensued when visiting with friends.

This “studio plus” didn’t judge when I scrawled the sad and bitterly triumphant last verse of Bob Dylan’s Idiot Wind on my whiteboard (changing letters to emails), even if my brother did, after beholding it with furrowed brow, laughingly suggest I take it down before inviting anyone else inside. It was reading room to numerous books that kept me company and led me back to warm wonder at the world. It witnessed the deepening of my most cherished friendships and put in motion a resolution to be a fine hostess, one whose home says Drop-Ins Welcome. It kept the light on and nudged me, like a mother bird, out the door when I ventured out on a first date that might as well have been the first ever.

It was a portal of prayer.

Lest I sleep too soundly its radiators clanged in the small hours of the winter nights. Its wonky windows swelled in the rain and even then couldn’t keep out the city’s dirt. The hot water failed on the mornings of some very important meetings, and the drains served up absolutely monstrous centipedes every once in awhile. And its charms shrunk away with the rest during some very lonesome times. But it gave me the space and the silence in which to write in a way I hadn’t before—and writing began teaching me all kinds of things that I hope will never stop.

There’s a line in Thin Blue Flame that goes

The future glass buildings and the past an address

There are, of course, numberless ways to talk about Thin Blue Flame, numerous things to explore. There are tiny phrases of precious gem that give way to panoramic themes. Lately I’ve been thinking about The past an address, thinking how much it says in how little, and how it captures a courageous approach to and respect for history—political and personal. (The politics in Thin Blue Flame can’t be denied: one gets the idea Josh will rejoice when 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is one folksy frat boy’s past address.)

The past an address says sometimes it’s time to pack the U-Haul and set out for new beginnings. It says, don’t worry, it will still be be there—no bull dozers, please—and you’re welcome to drop in when you need to, to sit in the garden and remember when, to wiggle your toes in the fountain, to tear up the floorboards for time capsules and corpses, to resurrect and reinterpret heroes and villains. To revisit and rethink or even revise.

The past an address says But we don’t live there anymore. It was splendid for awhile, but we never quite fixed the electrical problem; we didn’t think the new boiler was worth the expense. We made some lovely memories. We healed some wounds. We made some terrible mistakes. It was time, so we’ve gone down to the post office and arranged for the forwarding of mail. You’ll find us striking out somewhere new, somewhere with space enough for all our new ideas.

And for the future.

I look at the unfamiliar towns friends have moved off to, and I check in on my favorite literary characters. And so I turned to I and looked up Moscow, slightly surprised to find it practically on the border with Washington. Josh mentions his native Idaho at his concerts a lot—and there’s the song—and I’ve heard him on occasion invite the concert hall to his house. I’ve inquired ingenuously with friends how seriously I might take this invitation. I mean, honest, I didn’t think I was the sort to show up unannounced at a stranger’s house, but that’s the thing about Josh: he makes one feel it just might be okay, so one needs her friends around so she does not blunder.

Back to Snow is Gone, don’t you think? I told you what it meant to me, gave you my own personal context, which always means so much to the self, and can never be adequately replicated for others. (And yet we blog, and pen songs, trying, trying.) So let me try to strike a more general tone, because it’s too lovely a song to move on just now, and there’s that matter of the window.

(Just over Spokane now! The sun sets in a downy cloudbed awash in an indescribable mix of coral, pink, gold, violet and a hot yellow. The clouds have separated into swiftly moving wisps, that, if you squint, resemble red dust moving across the plains or the desert. It’s a beautiful Western scene. I look down at the cluster of tiny houses and can’t help smiling. Somewhere down there . . . )

In Snow is Gone the speaker starts addressing the birds dustying their wings upon the lawn in the morning sunshine. The speaker seems to want some attention, but they’re never looking ’round for me; they’re doing that darty-eyed bird thing, not having it. Oh well, he says, and casually drops that goosebumps line I’d rather be the one who loves than to be loved and never even know.

Next verse he’s addressing one bird in particular, one whose feathers he’s admired, one with confectionary airs. Confectionary! This one’s not having it either, even though the speaker is singing in exultation and pulling all the stops. And we think, uh oh, this is a girl. Bird, after all, is a term for girl in the UK (and perhaps elsewhere, I don’t know.) But oh well, he reasons, again, and offers an honest truth and a request: I’m singing for the love of it, have mercy on the man who sings to be adored.

In the third verse everything turns round: the birds are gone (to roost, and in the live version you can hear Josh smile on that line—did you know that, amongst his other talents, Josh Ritter gave smile a sound?), the speaker taking their place outside and underneath her window. He’s singing his heart out, unsure whether he sings for himself or her. But he’s flown a long way, honey, and he’s got something to say—a confession—and he demands a space to say it in, after which he promises to go. I’ve heard Josh shout the line THEN I’LL GO!, and my spirit just says A-men. As one who wants not for passion or ease (and overindulgence) of expression, I love this line for capturing that glorious and terrifying and exhausting moment when you’ve worked it through in your mind, and in your heart, and it’s burning you up, and maybe you rehearse, but you make that humblest request of another: Just listen to me; I’ll ask nothing else. In fact I’ll go. I think maybe it’s happened to me once. And rare is the man with the wherewithal and self-awareness and confidence (or maybe abandon?) to do it.

There are important Ritter themes here. Pay attention to that window, to that outside-looking-in motif; you’ll find him out there again and again. I love this song for the contradiction in the patented Ritter modesty, the aw-shucks-she-doesn’t-like-me-back sentiment, and the confession of why he loves to perform–because it makes him the center of attention. He sings to be adored, and if you’ve been to a concert, you know this is true. And yet mercy he gets. Mercy in spades.

And there’s the jubilant chorus, in which a seemingly deliriously happy speaker greets the birds with Be my darling! Gosh this song can make you happy. At the end the birds exchange last night’s feathers for new ones, and you wonder what did it. The telling? The performance? The girl who came down and opened the door?

Today, for me, this song is about being an artist in love with the waking world, with her art, with another, with herself-as-artist. It’s about being a romantic, starting anew, taking a stand. It’s about being honest with oneself–even in contradiction–and in turn being ready to be honest with another. It’s about facing rejection and stating your Truth in a respectful and timely fashion, but stating it nonetheless. It’s about dignity and hope.

But maybe you say it’s about the weather.

That’s the marvellous thing about music—about art—isn’t it? Some man in one of those tiny matchstick houses down there sat down and wrote a song, and it means this to me, and that to you. And then it gathers memories and meaning and changes for each of us over time, and it will always hold infinite promise for those who haven’t heard it yet. We give it life in this way, and in return, it does the same for us.

No wonder he sings for the love of it. I write for the same.