Musical Connections – On the Road

No doubt like most people, I have vivid associations between certain pieces of music and some particular place, associations that sometimes go way back. It’s often a totally random thing. For some reason, a tune that I might have heard hundreds of times before simply resonates with the place or situation when I happen to hear again, often when traveling somewhere.

One such connection that sticks in my mind is from my high-school days when I had gone out to see a movie with some buddies. Where I grew up, that meant leaving the county, since my hometown had no cinema of its own. The closest place to watch a film was the drive-in theater in a neighboring town, 16 miles (26 kilometers) away. The closest indoor theater, where you didn’t have to hang a clunky speaker inside your car’s window, lay in another town just a bit further in the opposite direction.

It was from that theater that four or five of us were returning late one night in my friend’s Chevrolet or Buick or whatever it was. In any case, it was one of those big pre-Oil Shock creations of Detroit. Like lot of roomy automobiles of the day, my friend’s car had a long, sloping back window, almost like a skylight for those passengers in the backseat, where I was sitting.

As we sped up the road, probably feeling pretty good, being young and free of our parents, I remember laying my head back, under the rear window, looking straight up at a sky full of stars. That’s when this song came on the radio – seemingly perfect for the combination of teenage freedom and spectacular sky.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9muzyOd4Lh8

Myself, I would have never associated Nights in White Satin with Paris in broad daylight, but we all have our different experiences with music.

Another night drive is linked, in my mind, to an equally evocative and classic piece of rock music (maybe the best) by my hands-down favorite singer-songwriter.

This time, it was after my junior year of college, and my parents were along for the ride. Our family had made a long-anticipated trip to the American West, my first time beyond the Mississippi, in a marathon drive to the Yellowstone country of Wyoming (almost 2000 miles in just over two days). After a couple of days in Yellowstone itself, we were staying in the Great Tetons National Park, and had driven down to the cowboy town of Jackson for a steak dinner.

On the way back up the two-lane highway to the Tetons, our headlights slicing through the darkened sagebrush prairie of the sprawling Jackson Hole valley, I remember we were listening to this song on the eight-track player.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pzeYdkSr8s

To me, the song released a powerful nocturnal energy that perfectly matched the feeling of cruising through the vast emptiness of Jackson Hole at night. Hearing it still takes me back to Wyoming, even today.

(On that long drive we also listened repeatedly to Jackson Browne’s album, “Running on Empty”, which is almost custom-made for endless road trips.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoBACfnp0RI

Another Neil Young song evokes for me a general feeling of “western” nights spent under the stars and among the sagebrush, especially the steel guitar solo.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_ZXM5aaPLk

I seem to associate this with a chilly summer night in a KOA campground, probably in Panguitch, Utah, where a friend and I stayed on our way back from Las Vegas in 1980. I can’t hear this without thinking of nights in the high desert.

One very different song makes me think of a high bridge. I was 19, and we were again traveling with my parents, this time to the more familiar environs of Jekyll, one of Georgia’s barrier islands on the Atlantic Coast. We were returning from the nearest bigger town, Brunswick, where we’d gone for a seafood dinner (there seems to be a pattern here). As we were crossing the main bridge heading south out of town, this song came on the radio.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gpNqB4dnT4

Again, the song seemed to resonate with the beach-holiday mood and the inky blackness of the night, and forever planted that bridge crossing in my memory. Why I remember the bridge as soaring high above the tidewater of the Brunswick River, I can’t say, since after checking photos of it on the Internet, I realize the bridge barely rose above the level of the water.

Maybe I’ve conflated it with actual tall bridge I crossed with friends one night coming out of Jacksonville, Florida, where we’d eaten at a Polynesian restaurant. (Again with the dining out, but no song associated with that crossing.)

Or maybe I just got carried away with Heart’s newly release hit – after all, at the time I probably had a major crush on one or both of the Wilson sisters, temporarily eclipsing my long-standing infatuation with Linda Ronstadt.

I guess making those kinds of overblown musical connections is easier when you’re young, romantically minded, and maybe a tad bit impressionable.  

Road Trips

I’ve been back in Finland from our holiday in America for well over a month already and am only now getting around to posting anything about it.

At some point on the trip, along Colorado Highway 13, I think, among the empty (and I do mean empty) red-and-green landscape of Rio Blanco County, I had a pang of homesickness for Helsinki.

What I was feeling had more to do with family than any real longing for the cool, leafy corner of the Finnish capital that I call home. My wife, daughter and I were rolling at 65 miles an hour toward a rare family reunion later that day, and the only thing missing were my two sons back in Finland.

Still, we had been away from home for a while. It was Day Nine of our trip to America, and it was starting to feel like a long one. Maybe it’s a sign of aging that my desire for traveling begins to have a shelf life. (Who knew?)

It wasn’t always so. When I was about to set out on my first "buddy" road trip out west back in 1980, I recall my father advising me that I would find out that a week or so of that kind of traveling is more than enough. Beyond that, it’s no fun to be so far from home.

He might have been drawing on his experience from a hunting trip he made in 1963. For my father, this was no ordinary hunting trip. He and a few friends had driven along two-lane highways across the Great Plains to hunt elk in the Rocky Mountains of southern Colorado. I was too young to remember the details, but it feels like he was away a couple of weeks, though it might have been only one.

The most lasting impressions of my father’s trip came from the elk-head trophy that later towered over our living room and the grainy 8-milimeter home-movie footage he brought home from the trip. I even recall the night that the film was shown at the little community center near our home. It felt like a big deal, and for the time, it was.

I’m sure that the trip to Pagosa Springs had been a worthwhile adventure for my father and a great success, though tinged with some sadness (on the trip, a companion was stricken with the first signs of an illness that would come to kill him). With three young children back in Georgia, though, my father probably felt more than enough homesickness to put him off straying so far from home again without us. He didn’t go out West again until the road trip the whole family took to Wyoming thirteen years later.

In 1980, I was 23 and single with really nothing, or nobody, to miss back in Georgia. At least, not for a couple of weeks. So, I didn’t heed my father’s warning about over-extending my first own cross-country road trip, and in fact, homesickness wasn’t a problem.

My friend and I drove some 1600 miles (2500 km) to visit our college roommate in Grants, New Mexico, and then continued on to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon and finally Las Vegas before turning back toward Georgia. I don’t recall feeling homesick even once.

It was the same, two years later, when I made a similar trip, this time for three weeks, though by then there would have been some cause for homesickness, or at least bittersweetness, if I had thought about it.

I called this my “Goodbye America” trip, because I was soon moving to Helsinki and was unsure how long it would be before I returned. I also wanted to show my Finnish girlfriend something of the American West. My battered Toyota station wagon carried us from Georgia across the southern tier of the US to Los Angeles and San Diego (and, for a couple of ill-considered and nerve-racking hours, even Tijuana).

We followed the coast up to San Francisco before hitting a series of national parks (Yosemite, Death Valley, Zion, Grand Canyon) on our way back East. We slept in the car in the hills above LA, took refuge in a Las Vegas casino after crossing Death Valley without air conditioning, and stopped to check out Aspen (where my future wife bought a Moomintroll book for me, as a kind of early introduction to Finnish culture).

In some ways, the trip we made this summer relived some moments from those epic road trips of my youth. We drove to the South Rim for the first time since 1980. On our first visit to LA since the “Goodbye America” trip, we toured some of the most memorable spots from before and tried to recognize others we only half-remember. We stayed at the same ski resort in Utah (and hiked to the same 11,068-foot peak) as we did on another epic road trip we took with the family almost a decade ago. And we met relatives and friends we haven't seen in far too long. There were certainly some nostalgic moments. 

We also broke some new ground and stumbled upon some unexpected finds, like dinosaur bones exposed in a wall of a naked stone, a street-side painting in a Utah ski town left by guerrilla artist Banksy, and an archeological dig, once frequented by the legendary Louis Leakey, now almost forgotten. 

Even the routes and spots we did retrace and revisit all look new again after so many years, so it didn't feel as if we were simply rehashing the past. Not the whole time, anyway.

I hope to eventually post more about parts of the trip. But if my writing output since returning to Helsinki is any indication, it might have to wait until the next big Southwest road trip, hopefully this time in something less than 30 years. ¶

Photo: Taiga Korpelainen