5/29/2020 — Acton, Massachusetts
Lonesome Road Blues repeats a prayer-like chorus that’s more witness than supplication. It’s a story about being solitary and in motion, an atom decoupled from its molecule as it floats in a vast universe. It’s man against nature, to use dated terms. It’s a person alone in the world, to wield sharper language, pushed and tossed by a greater force it can only sense and observe, not understand.
The refrain expresses the dark keening in my heart these past weeks.
“Goin’ down the road, feeling bad.”
You may know the song from the Grateful Dead, often titled after the chorus. American musicians have been passing it along since the early 1900s. It’s popularity grew with the likes of Woody Guthrie, the Foggy Bottom Boys and Lightnin’ Hopkins.
No one wrote it. Everyone wrote it. Countless musicians played it since it’s true.
Last Friday I walked down Spring Hill Road in Acton, Massachusetts with dread in my heart. Tall maples thick with green blocked the sky, a living wall of timber. As I groped forward the old song came to me. I stopped to press and swipe my phone and put on earbuds. A 1971 bootleg of the Dead in San Diego shined into me.
Going down the road feeling bad
Going down the road feeling bad
Going down the road feeling bad, hey hey hey, yeah
Don’t wanna be treated this a way
Earlier that day I had left my barn den in Carlisle to move to another short term rental. After leaving New York City, for those first few months of shelter, I couldn’t tell if I was on the run or settling in. I wanted to be lulled by the latter.
Now I got the message.
Back in March, when I had moved to Carlisle, it was a cold, wet spring that felt like winter. Down jacket, wool hat, layers of shirts and hoodies that felt too thin. Snow squalls blew through town like cold and lonely ticker tape parades. News whirled cyclonic, changing for the worse minute-by-minute.
I had made a deal with the barn landlord to go week by week for cash upfront. But soon the world adjusted and started counting time month by month, now it’s season by season, eventually we will mark it Covid year by Covid year.
Someday we will reminisce. “Remember the 2020s? How crazy that all was? How boring and sad and perplexing that all was.”
What I want to know, what everyone wants to know, is when, exactly, will we sit in a summer backyard with friends and parents and listen to children play and mull these memories like a vintage that’s not claret but blue?
In April the barn landlord told me — or reminded me, depends whom you ask — that my time in the studio would soon be milk on the counter. She had a tenant booked for late May and I would need to go. I had decided to give up my West Village apartment because I couldn’t afford to pay for two places, especially without a reduction in rent for a lease agreed to in sunnier times. I was stateless, a hobo with a BMW. (A used base-model BMW bought in a fatter year with synthetic leather and no navigation. Don’t get all crazy on me.)
The next morning I scouted Airbnb, VRBO, Zillow, Next Door, Google Maps. Temporary housing is a scanty harvest in the Merrimack Valley in the spring of 2020. You click the few thumbnails of rooms or houses and ask: Can I do this? Will it fit me? Can I afford it? Do I spend thousands now, or wait?
I sat at my laptop in the barn with coffee and then food and then sauvignon blanc as the sun burned its way from my eastern door to the shingled roof until pale reds and purples echoed off clouds by the back window.
It’s lonely work that alternates between fantastic and phantasmagoric until settling on bleak. All you can do is click and imagine. Click and imagine. Click and imagine.
I spied something half decent. OK. Quarter decent.
I neared the end of Spring Hill Road. It was a warm May in Massachusetts, hot even. I wore jeans and a t-shirt.
The road ended in a cul-de-sac marked by a Japanese maple with pinot noir leaves, and beyond it, a path led into the woods.
Lonesome Road Blues chimed through my earbuds.
Going where the climate suits my clothes
I’m going where the climate suits my clothes
Going where the climate suits my clothes
Don’t wanna be treated this a way
I head deeper into the woods. If I paused to look at the trees, mosquitos floated towards me like airborne vampires. I stepped up my pace. I checked an AllTrails app to see if I was going the right way, though any path would do.
Nature signage posted at junctions described Native American praying villages and ceremonial piles of rocks aligned to constellations. The road had shifted from contemporary to colonial to prehistoric. Felt good to be gone.
After that long day at my laptop in the barn I had found a 25% decent apartment, built on one side of a woman’s ranch. In Acton. A few miles southwest of Carlisle. Close by, but far enough to be very different. What had been home in a barn that’s a short walk to the country store, greenhouses and main farm, and near acres of forest trails, would become sylvan suburbs. Alienating and verdant, if you like that sort of thing.
The heavy wheel of agriculture turned day by day, the farm went from seeding and potting to spading and transplanting and then to spring harvests of scallions. Soon that milk on the counter was ready to toss.
“Do you want to borrow the pickup truck to move all your stuff? Just let me know,” Andrew asked on the phone.
“Thanks, but if I can’t fit it all in my car, I’m doing it wrong,” I said.
The next morning, Friday, May 22nd, I woke early and packed.
Didn’t take long. Drove to the farm at 11am, stashed perishables in the walk-in refrigerator and worked the fields until 3pm. Drove to Acton.
The new place has a bedroom with an actually flat bed, yet only full-size. There’s a kitchenette with stove and oven, yet they date from my Bar Mitzvah c. 1986. There’s a living room, yet it’s chock full of massive leather recliners, sofas and loveseats, as if we’re all about to watch The Game with The Family, yet there’s no office chair or desk to sit and eat and work.
Photos of the landlord’s family ride a wall and sideboard. A picture of a gigantic church hangs in the bedroom, which seems like an odd view when making love, but sex so sounds divine right around now. And always. I guess it adds up.
I settled in, which for me is inherently unsettling, I like to be hefted to home, not tossed into space. I’m sensitive to I-don’t-give-a-fuck-here-are-my-leftovers-but-pay-me-thousands-of-dollars interior design. And it’s never design, it’s habitat. I’m annoyed when there are more gestures of exploitation than kindness, as if you can’t do both.
I needed food, in May the farm’s bounty is still to come. I burned fuel along Route 2A searching for the right strip mall with the right grocery store the new landlord mentioned. Gray slabs lined both sides of the road. Jane Jacobs winced in heaven. I thought, you and me both.
I unloaded a few groceries and felt so miserable and lost I had to walk. That’s when Lonesome Road Blues spun in my head like a record for one.
I listened on my phone and realized that what I had thought was the refrain, the repeated prayer, isn’t actually “Going down the road feeling bad.” That’s the opening. The chorus lies at the end of each verse.
Here is the last of the song’s three stanzas:
Going where the water tastes like wine
Well I’m going where the water tastes like wine
Going where the water tastes like wine
I don’t wanna be treated this a way
Don’t treat me this way.
In other words, no one deserves this.
Got that right.
Tomorrow I will pack my car for one or two or three nights, I haven’t decided how long I’ll be gone for. I’ll ride the Sapphire Dragon east to pick up Route 3 then head north and west for a few hours until I reach Moretown, Vermont; which I hope is really Lesstown. I’m told it’s a rural village in the Mad River Valley with a Jewish co-housing community built around a farm. Bo neeray, as they say in Hebrew. Come and we will see.
“Goin’ down the road, feeling bad.”
It’s true I’ve been beat down and blue. So have you. So has your neighbor, and their neighbor, and theirs, until you span the world. There’s comfort in lament. If others hear you and there’s still road to follow, then you’re witnessed and moving. You haven’t disappeared. You’re not stuck.
Keep goin’ down the road, even if feeling bad. Those, I think, are lyrics to sing.