I started about midmorning, driving from the cabin in the woods through Bloomington, Indiana. I stopped at the Post Office to dispatch some bridges, passed the Book Nook (where Hoagy Carmichael wrote "Stardust"), and local legend John Mellencamp's new art gallery.
I caught an airport Shuttle to Indy, where the airport is just a short ride in an open-wheeler from the fabled Indianapolis Motor Speedway, and where not much further downtown Duesenberg had its offices, and Leroy Carr and Scrapper Blackwell used to ply their urban hokum guitar-n-piano blues.
Indy's airport is clean, light, modern, and not overstuffed with teeming humanity. Stylized wing/feather shapes of aluminum mesh hang in profusion from the soaring skylight of the main lobby.Clean white steel supporting pillars angle from the floor upward to the canopy, shaped a lot like biplane struts.
A pleasant place to wait - and wait - for a one-hour flight to Atlanta.
Between Indianapolis and Atlanta lay Kentucky and Tennessee, the rolling rural fields where the music was conceived and born, and the urban center where it had its coming-out party. Crossed over The Everlys' Muhlenberg County, and the old Kentucky homes of Merle Travis, Bill Monroe, and our own Paul Yandell. Passed over Fort Campbell, where one James Marshall Hendrix jumped out of a few helicopters during paratrooper training, and from whence he left for Nashville and the chitlin circuit to the south.
Our wings made a brief shadow over Nashville which gathered the music in – Music Row, the Ryman – and on across southern Tennessee and the fields of Georgia. I could almost hear the music rising from the Piedmont.
Atlanta claims to have the busiest airport in the world; I can attest that it teems with humanity. Another layover, enough time for a chili dog, and airborne again, wending west.
West across Tupelo, humble birthplace of a king. North Mississippi: Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County and the myth of southern gothic, Billy Joe's Tallahatchie bridge, Parchman Farm, Dockery Plantation, and somewhere down there the crossroads where the deal was done and the Delta blues conjured forth.
Crossed the Mississippi somewhere south of Memphis (take a moment to register all the musical echoes that cues) but north of Clarksdale, where McKinley Morganfield took the train for Chicago.
West across Arkansas, Little Rock and its traumatically desegrated schools, then Oklahoma the long way, strains of Bob Wills, the jazz of Oklahoma City's Blue Devils, JJ Cale, and Leon Russell.
Since the 1930s, you can't go west without driving Rt 66, at least in the mind. In this case, our flight path (which I followed on the touchscreen built into the back of the seat in front of me) followed The Mother Road across the Texas panhandle: Pampa, where Woody Guthrie grew up; Amarillo's Cadillac Ranch (an American Stonehenge); cowboy plains to the west.
Somewhere along the way I played (and won!) several rounds of in-flight seat-back-video trivia with 15 or so other passengers. One of the questions asked who was famous for a "big twangy guitar sound." I got that one right. Between Biscotti and Pringles (washed down by ice tea), buried in the blingy Jet set pages of Sky magazine, I got a shock of the familiar: a lime green Gretsch Hot Rod planted there like a secret sign, accompanying a blurb about The Stray Cats' upcoming gig in Minneapolis.
(And for the Good Grooming section, I learned from Tim Gunn that the vest was introduced in England on October 7, 1666 by King Charles II – a bit of contrived home-grown fashion to undermine the popularity of French couture in Merry Olde.)
Still westward...across Buddy Holly's Gallup, NM, and then well north of Phoenix, where the twanger got his start. Still following Rt 66, we crossed Flagstaff and the Grand Canyon, ever westward - chasing the sun into the evening.
After the flurry of getting ready to go, and making it to the church on time, it's a challenge to shut down mentally and emotionally for a long journey by air. When you do, it can seem a passage not just between one place and another, but one state of mind and another.
Good travel changes the traveler, and going for the meditative zen of such a shutdown makes room and opportunity for the change. After flipping through some free TV channels, and between watching the onscreen plane crawl across the map of the belly of the continent, I drowsed to the drone of the engines – with the echoes of all that music - all that music rising in my mind, wind beneath my ...
OK, I won't go there. But you know what I mean. The music seemed to gather itself up. It seemed to intertwine in unexpected but inevitable ways. It seemed to be going somewhere, and taking me with it...
Somewhere west of Laramie (but considerably south), the plane began its long glide over the last hills and into the desert. Every journey has its end, and every destination is a new adventure...
