Road-Seen

[Image: “Little Red Riding Hood,” copyright Amanda Gray; all rights reserved. See original at her blog, what now]

From whiskey river:

Cutting Loose

for James Dickey

Sometimes from sorrow, for no reason,
you sing. For no reason, you accept
the way of being lost, cutting loose
from all else and electing a world
where you go where you want to.

Arbitrary, a sound comes, a reminder
that a steady center is holding
all else. If you listen, that sound
will tell you where it is and you
can slide your way past trouble.

Certain twisted monsters
always bar the path — but that’s when
you get going best, glad to be lost,
learning how real it is
here on earth, again and again.

(William Stafford [source])

…and:

The Next Time
(excerpt)

Perfection is out of the question for people like us,
so why plug away at the same old self when the landscape

has opened its arms and given us marvelous shrines
to flock towards? The great motels to the west are waiting,

in somebody’s yard a pristine dog is hoping that we’ll drive by,
and on the rubber surface of a lake people bobbing up
and down

will wave. The highway comes right to the door, so let’s
take off before the world out there burns up. Life should
be more

than the body’s weight working itself from room to room.
A turn through the forest will do us good, so will a spin

among the farms. Just think of the chickens strutting,
the cows swinging their udders, and flicking their tails at flies.

And one can imagine prisms of summer light breaking against
the silent, haze-filled sleep of the farmer and his wife.

(Mark Strand [source])

Not from whiskey river:

More than a month ago, when I was leaving London for a holiday, a friend walked into my flat in Battersea and found me surrounded with half-packed luggage.

“You seem to be off on your travels,” he said. “Where are you going?”

With a strap between my teeth I replied, “To Battersea.”

“The wit of your remark,” he said, “wholly escapes me.”

“I am going to Battersea,” I repeated, “to Battersea via Paris, Belfort, Heidelberg, and Frankfort. My remark contained no wit. It contained simply the truth. I am going to wander over the whole world until once more I find Battersea…

“…I cannot see any Battersea here; I cannot see any London or any England. I cannot see that door. I cannot see that chair: because a cloud of sleep and custom has come across my eyes. The only way to get back to them is to go somewhere else; and that is the real object of travel and the real pleasure of holidays. Do you suppose that I go to France in order to see France? Do you suppose that I go to Germany in order to see Germany? I shall enjoy them both; but it is not them that I am seeking. I am seeking Battersea. The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land… It is not my fault, it is the truth, that the only way to go to England is to go away from it.”

(G.K. Chesterton, from “The Riddle of the Ivy” [source])

…and:

Vacation

I love the hour before takeoff,
that stretch of no time, no home
but the gray vinyl seats linked like
unfolding paper dolls. Soon we shall
be summoned to the gate, soon enough
there’ll be the clumsy procedure of row numbers
and perforated stubs — but for now
I can look at these ragtag nuclear families
with their cooing and bickering
or the heeled bachelorette trying
to ignore a baby’s wail and the baby’s
exhausted mother waiting to be called up early
while the athlete, one monstrous hand
asleep on his duffel bag, listens,
perched like a seal trained for the plunge.
Even the lone executive
who has wandered this far into summer
with his lasered itinerary, briefcase
knocking his knees — even he
has worked for the pleasure of bearing
no more than a scrap of himself
into this hall. He’ll dine out, she’ll sleep late,
they’ll let the sun burn them happy all morning
— a little hope, a little whimsy
before the loudspeaker blurts
and we leap up to become
Flight 828, now boarding at Gate 17.

(Rita Dove [source])

The biggest hit by the classic hippie-era boogie-blues band Canned Heat was a little three-minute number, “Going Up the Country,” which seemed to come out of nowhere in 1969 — sounding like almost no other song in the Top 40. Wikipedia calls it “the unofficial theme of the Woodstock Festival.” I don’t know about that, but it sure does come to my mind whenever I start getting summertime itchin’-to-travel feet.

Lyrics:

Going Up the Country
(Alan Wilson; performance by Canned Heat)

I’m going up the country, babe don’t you wanna go
I’m going up the country, babe don’t you wanna go
I’m going to some place where I’ve never been before
I’m going, I’m going where the water tastes like wine
Well I’m going where the water tastes like wine
We can jump in the water, stay drunk all the time
I’m gonna leave this city, got to get away
I’m gonna leave this city, got to get away
All this fussing and fighting, man, you know I sure can’t stay
Now baby, pack your leaving trunk,
you know we’ve got to leave today
Just exactly where we’re going I cannot say,
but we might even leave the USA
‘Cause there’s a brand new game that I want to play
No use of you running, or screaming and crying
‘Cause you’ve got a home as long as I’ve got mine

As an aside, the Canned Heat song has different lyrics but is otherwise pretty much a note-for-note “borrowing” of a much older song, “Bull Doze Blues,” by one Henry Thomas (not to be confused with the E.T. kid). In the original, the flute solos — which pretty much everyone remembers from “Going Up the Country” — were played by something called the quills: a sort of Pan pipe originally popular among Afro-American slaves in the 19th century.

Here’s Thomas’s “Bull Doze Blues”: