When the road fails to flow under me
When the road fails to flow under me
Road trips, memory lanes, and the music that fuels both
Hello, friends!
When our pandemic season began last year, I began to take occasional solo drives in my Jeep, for two reasons: 1) Now that everyone was home all the time, it was a safe way to get a little alone time when I needed it; 2) It’s never good to leave a vehicle parked for a long period of time.
But eventually, as the stay-home order wore on, I acclimated to being home all the time. The solo drives felt less necessary. I’d still start the Jeep once or twice each week, let it run, back it down the driveway and return it to its spot. Over time, though, I either forgot to keep doing this, or it just felt less important to keep doing it. Bad, bad move.
An escalating series of failures followed: A leak in a roof seal led to water in the interior, which led to mold growth on the carpets and seats. Not moving the vehicle led to mice nesting in the engine compartment, which led to my Jeep failing to start when I actually needed it.
My preference, once all these failures were revealed, was to set the Jeep on fire and shove it down the hill. Felicia proposed a more responsible approach. I called a tow truck, and waved goodbye to my Jeep. Secretly, I hoped the rodent damage was catastrophic. Maybe it would result in the vehicle being totaled by my insurance company (did you know rodent damage is covered?!), and I could wash my hands of the whole thing.
As it turns out, the mice just needed a place to sleep. The Jeep wouldn’t start because of a beyond-dead battery, not because the mice had shredded my electrical system. After three weeks in the shop, the Jeep came home, practically sparkling and driving better than it had in years.
I’m driving my Jeep again.
I’d forgotten how much a long drive meant to me. As a kid, it was a mark of real freedom. I’d borrow one of my parents’ vehicles and just wander, often all day, with no particular destination in mind. Gas was less than a buck a gallon back then, so I (a kid who mowed lawns or ran the leaf-blower around the church property once a week) could afford to keep their tanks full. Later, when we moved back to Alaska, just before my junior year of high school, Dad taught me how to drive in the snow. I remember several nights when, unable to sleep, I’d sneak out of the house at two a.m. and drive to Beluga Point, or to Eagle River and back, just because.
I kept a binder filled with CDs on the passenger seat. I learned to navigate the pages without looking. That binder’s contents evolved over time, of course, and then vanished altogether when technology evolved, too. But during those early Alaska years, the binder was filled with Christian rock: Bands like Plankeye, Jars of Clay, The Choir. My sister would sometimes join me on these drives; we’d sing along at the top of our lungs. The louder the song was, the better; we’d scream out loud sometimes just to gravel up our voices to better match the songs.
Recently on my drives I’ve engaged in a sort of musical tour of my past. Spotify has, more or less, everything I’ve ever listened to. Those middle-’90s years, particularly ‘94-‘96, conjured all sorts of church-related memories:
Driving my mother’s Subaru, filled with youth group kids (and their skis and snowboards), to Hilltop for a day of skiing. Introducing the same kids to “the really fringe stuff”—Christian music by DC Talk or Audio Adrenaline (which is just about as mainstream as Christian rock music got back then). In ‘96 I saw every movie that came through Anchorage, no matter its quality: From Fargo and A Time to Kill to Barb Wire and Mars Attacks. (It’s worth mentioning here, for the unfamiliar, that my sister and I grew up Pentecostal, and movies were generally not permitted. We’d tell our folks we were “going bowling,” then catch a double feature.)
I couldn’t spend much time down this particular rabbit hole, though. Pretty much all of the Christian music I listened to then just makes me cringe now.
My later ’90s were more formative. I spent a semester at a Bible college in Texas; in retrospect, that’s where my belief system really began to teeter. I moved the Christian CDs to the back of the binder, and gave prime real estate to new music: Pearl Jam, Counting Crows, Ben Folds Five, Third Eye Blind, Foo Fighters, Smashing Pumpkins, Our Lady Peace, Radiohead… (Or at least I did until a Bible college girlfriend, determined to set my feet on the right path again, stole the binder and broke each and every one of the secular CDs into pieces.) In those days, the solo drives were a way to escape an extremely restrictive college campus. Any time I hear “Semi-Charmed Life” or “Mr. Jones” these days, I still remember sailing down the Houston freeways. I eventually moved off-campus, which broke the college’s rules. Freshmen had to live in the dorms. So I dropped out.
In the 2000s, things shifted again. At the beginning of the decade, I was married, still heavily involved in church; I played the drums as a part of the music team, I was on the official record as a trustee, or a deacon, or something, I occasionally taught Sunday School classes. But I’d changed, and music stuck with me while everything else fell away. I went through a bluegrass and alt-country phase then. Alison Krauss and Nickel Creek carried me through a collapsing marriage and my departure from the church; Patty Griffin and Kathleen Edwards ushered me into a season of self-discovery and independence. Later in the decade, George Strait and Dwight Yoakam soundtracked Thursday nights—“country night” at a local college hangout, where I’d go dancing with Felicia. At the same time, Death Cab for Cutie fused with my design career; even today I still loop their material when I need to focus and get my best work done.
These days, I’m more or less stuck in the same musical ruts I’ve been in for years. They’re comfortable ruts, so I don’t mind so much. But they make these trips down memory lane more interesting.
Almost all of the music from my past resurrects some long-forgotten memory—some of them intact, some in fragments. It’s easy to forget how many lives you’ve lived before until just the right song takes you back to them. You see your past self through two lenses: The familiar one, which is the one you saw through back then; and the new one, which is how you look at yourself now, with more mileage on you.
During all of those years, I was writing. In high school, I did a piece or two for the school paper, and freelanced a bit for the Anchorage Daily News. I’d started stockpiling short fiction. I started writing novels not long after graduation in ‘96. I started my very first blog in 1998, and continued it for the next ten or twelve years. I keep an offline archive of most of those old posts, so it’s interesting to cross-reference it with these musical memories and see what turns up. (The results are almost always a little disappointing. I have fond memories of hacking away at my blog over the years, for example, but oh so many regrets about some of the things I wrote there.)
From a September, 2006, blog post:
I have put eight years of my life into this site, and at least half of it has survived multiple hard drive crashes over the years. Will I still post here when I’m thirty-five? Will there be a few hundred thousand first-generation bloggers still clicking the ‘publish’ button in their sixties?
What if writing for this web site is the only lasting writing I ever do? What if none of my book ideas ever pan out? What if Eleanor is a pipe dream? What if I never sell another short story? Would that be so bad?
I would’ve been twenty-eight when I wrote that post. (I’m forty-two now.) In retrospect, it feels like my life hadn’t even really started yet. I hadn’t yet met Felicia, or become Squish’s father. I was five years into Eleanor, and had no idea I’d work on it for nearly another ten. I had just begun the design job that would bring my career into focus. I was only a few years into the process of figuring out who I was. I’ve always felt like I got a late start, but time’s relative. The important thing is that I’m still figuring myself out. Hopefully I always will be.
I don’t blog anymore, though. My old site is permanently retired; the blog on jasongurley.com is still there, if you go hunting for it, but it’s inactive. I used it for very different purposes. This newsletter is the closest thing I’ve got to a blog. No—that’s not true. I keep a physical journal, too, usually filling about 12-15 notebooks each year.
As I write this today, I’m listening to “Couches in Alleys” on loop. It’s the only song I’ve ever listened to by a group called Styrofoam; the vocals are by Ben Gibbard, of Death Cab. (Here’s a live version that Gibbard and Jay Farrar, of Son Volt, perform together; I like this version quite a lot, but it definitely has a different vibe.)
This song conjures a very specific memory: Falling ill while on an immovable deadline, and forcing myself to work through the sickness to deliver a project for a big client. But it’s not the physical feeling I remember most when I hear this song; it’s the determination I summoned that day. Ever since, it’s become a montage song for me. And I’m listening to it today because, while I usually write this newsletter at least a few days in advance, this week I didn’t. So I’m crunching a bit before it goes out in the morning. (Admittedly, my newsletter deadline is self-imposed and very movable, but I prefer not to miss it anyway.)
I’d love to hear what music mattered to you at different stages of your own life. Hit ‘reply’ and tell me about a song or two!
✏️Until next time,
Jg
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