I haven’t heard John Denver’s song in multiple decades (until today) and yet… It comes to mind for whatever reasons such things come to mind when I started to think about my impending road trip beginning about midweek. It doesn’t even fit with the theme in which the song was thought to be written for, which is generally how these things work. I’m not going off war, nor standing outside the door of a young beau looking for a last kiss before I leave, and I plan to be back home by the end of next week (so I know when I’ll be back again).
Part of me wishes that Arlo Guthrie had written his song as “Coming into Anchorage” instead of “Los Angeles”, but I’m not sure a drug run would have been all that profitable back in the 60s anyway. Nor am I making a drug run. So, it doesn’t fit very well either — but at least I’d be able to segue into the tale of the pickle and my motorcycle (“I don’t want a pickle/I’d rather ride my motorsickle…”).
The late-80s hippie in me would get a chuckle out of it. Small chuckle, but a chuckle nonetheless. And I suppose I should get over my disdain for John Denver and be more 60s hippie — after all, he was a fantastic songwriter and my issue is more with the family members who crammed his music down my throat for most of my pre-teen life than it is with John. You know the type: the kind that don’t care if you’d really rather listen to something else on the three-hour weekly trip to the cabin for the weekend, and then another three-hour trip back home at the end of the weekend that was all John Denver, all the time. They were horrified when I slipped in REM’s “Fables” into the cassette player on a lark. I was forced to press eject and put John back in before “Driver 8” had even gotten to the second verse.
But, as I said, for whatever reason John Denver came to mind as I sat down to write about my coming trip from south of Anchorage to Iowa. Maybe it is the crossing of the Rockies (“Rocky Mountain Hiiiiiigh”… great, another drug reference. Really… I’m not all that into drugs. I mean it. Seriously. Really.), or maybe I’m regressing due to undiagnosed early Alzheimer’s. Before you know it I’ll be “sweet sixteen and never been kissed” (okay, it was more like fourteen that I saw my first kiss, but you get the idea).
So maybe I’m just mentally going back to that time period where long, continental drives were a regular thing in my life. We drove from Minnesota to Key West by way of Nashville and the Great Smoky Mountains, around the panhandle and skirted New Orleans (“We are NOT going into that cesspool Michael”), and drove up the Mississippi one year. In about two weeks, including a stop at Disney World. A few years later, we drove down to Arkansas and back before taking a week’s rest and then heading to Seattle and back, with stops in Montana. I am no stranger to long drives, is what I’m saying. For that, my mother insisted on Anne Murray the whole trip. Thank god for mono cassette players so I could listen to Joy Division and the Replacements, huddled in the back of a Chrysler Champ hatchback (without AC), the Panasonic deck held to my ear so my mother wouldn’t hear “Gary’s Got a Boner”, and a finger in my other ear to block out Anne Murray.
This upcoming is a long trip of about 3500 miles and, as I’ve said previously, there is a good chance this site might go quiet during that period, either because I am too busy doing the things that need to get done when I’m not driving, or I will not have the connectivity to post even if I wanted to (there is several long stretches of road that are likely internet and telecom dead zones).
I had considered scheduling some old material to fill in the spaces, but I don’t much care for repeat posts on other sites so I decided not to inflict it on readers of my own. Instead, I might just lean towards silence and catch up with y’all when I get home. Or keep it sparse like the roads I am about to travel.
At least I’ll have downloaded a variety of music to entertain me while I am driving. I might even toss in John Denver for the shits and giggles of it all.
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