There was always something out there, between all the shows and the lights and the people. A big empty. It's a feeling as much as a place, and one that I remember well from the old days in the van.
Not a Lynchian lost highway covered in dust and jazz and the strange. Nor the rural sleepiness of the all-American Mayberry. Rather, a romantic blankness of modern human settlement emptied of its humans.
It's a feeling hard to describe in English, and perhaps something like "saudade" or "sehnsucht" might do it more justice. These are, and were, places that have always evoked a strange sentimentalism for me, a tie to deep core memories of empty white highways and the sound cold tires make on wet snow. And being in them makes me both happy and sad.
I often drive next door to Ohio to hang out with my kid in the Champaign County burg where he currently lives. It's a familiar place, centered around the beating heart of a roundabout with six blocks of historic old houses and granny mansions in all directions. A big-box dystopia further out. There are a thousand towns like it here in the heartland, all snack shops and gas stations and plaques proclaiming high school championship teams.
On the way back, I take the state highways as the sun goes down. Highway 36 runs on long sloping roads that run between fields and barns and houses with banners that read FUCK BIDEN across the front. Salt of the earth. I don’t know why, but club scene bands like Afghan Whigs and Low have always paired well with this scenery. Maybe there's a certain vibration that only us smallfolk read in the melodies and the ache of long Midwestern winters when the season turns.
In Piqua, the sun comes down to eye level, blinding me in the intersection and making it hard to tell if the light's turned. A pizza sign hangs above a shuttered storefront, probably closed since COVID. Or maybe because a few dozen hungry households wasn't quite enough to sustain it in perpetuity. Kids play in the street, bouncing from house to house, and I know what they smell like on the inside - dripping AC, tumbling laundry and Stove Top dinner.
Highway 36 continues on and curves around a place where an ancient farmhouse seems to preside over a small main street in a blip called Gettysburg. Boarded up buildings in the intersection suggest it was once a place people lived and worked and fed the war machine. But now not so much.
Empty.
Gettysbury leads to bears Mill, which leads to Greenville. Greenville goes to Palestine, and then to Lynn across the state line in Indiana, obliterated by a tornado once in '86. I remember seeing it on the news. Maybe that's why there are a hundred wind turbines here, to catch the next one and give us free power for a decade.
In Indiana, Lynn leads to Modoc, to Mount Summit and then New Castle with its formerly derelict downtown on the up-and-up, now full of coffee shops and restaurants with "Thing & Thing" names, and a main retail strip with Applebee's and an army of dentists and chiropractors. I used to deliver auto parts out here, and New Castle is ironically the place where I picked up my first Sonic Youth CD from a pawn shop.
Outside the thrum of the city, the big empty is everywhere. I found it in Australia's backroad towns like Jericho, New Zealand's Reefton (The Town of Light, as it were) and in Appalachian Quebec. In the nothing, a something. A pull, a formless form that I feel like I could wrap my hands around if I tried hard enough. In the nothing, there was a something that lived in the emptiness of parent dropoffs at Speedway gas stations. Solo Taco Bell dinners on the offramp, and the sprawling distribution centers in fields like cathedrals to consumerism.
I wonder what it would be like to go on another small tour one day. One without playing shows, isolating the driving and the search for the thing that lives in the miles, the road hypnosis and streetlights in a snow halo. Looking for the ache with no planned route, just chasing the emptiness to poke it like a river snapping turtle. The black dog, out here howling from boarded up cross streets and houses that look abandoned, save the single light burning in a back room that suggests someone still gets the mail and takes care of cats inside.
Rest stop on I-70 near Greenfield. Deep purple sunset over sleeping tractor trailers. Vending machine glow and state maps with the spot where I am rubbed through from years of pointing fingers and wayfinding. A kid in a swimsuit does a quiet cartwheel and then gets in the family van to disappear into the flow of nighttime traffic.
I start the car and start the music again. Throwing Muses, then the Walkabouts and the Afghan Whigs song I play again and again so it pokes the turtle in just the right way. I drive until I see the lights of Indianapolis pop through the darkness and I wonder why the Pogues and the Lockerbies chose this swamp to build a city.
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What I’m reading: Daily Rituals: How Artists Work (Mason Curry)
What I'm listening to: The Great Destroyer (Low)
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