I don't know but for some reason when Summer comes even if it's not quite here yet but Summer meaning I can open windows in the evenings cos the day was warm enough I always put on music I listened to years ago. It's not even Summer yet here by date and certainly not by weather still tucked away under heavy cloudy skies if the mercury tips seventy it's a good day. But it's warm elsewhere and I'm pretty sure it's warm where I used to listen to this music. I used to drive out these deserted country roads I can't remember now their names without cracking open a map which would seem to ruin the nostalgia. Highway C I think. Or K. Some letter definitely an old two-lane letter highway through cornfields past barns and old farm houses. I once had this crap but perfect first apartment down near the river. The Missouri River. Brown and muddy and wide and slow-moving like a wise old man dirty from a day in the fields but all-knowing and charming in his own way not anything like the crystalline clear waters from blue glaciers here flowing to the ocean. But I still remember the golds. Of the fields. Of the sun hanging low as I'd pass corn stalks golden a haze hanging above them this visual cacophony of insects fluttering catching the light squinting to see them individually not just a blur. Windows down on my little red Toyota or better yet no windows the breeze warm in my face on an old just-about-broken-down Murray ten speed on which I'd racked up a couple thousand miles over the few years I owned it before leaving it behind as I left it all behind the corn fields the golden-orange warm Midwest sunsets and cicadas and roads for the mountains and glaciers of the Pacific Northwest.
But there was this barn I found once deserted and quite literally falling apart. A truck was parked underneath an overhang that looked as if it would be crushed at any moment. I'd stash my bike somewhere out of view or park my car off the highway in the corn fields so as not to bring any suspicion my old inherited Pentax S3 a single-lens relic my Dad had gotten in Korea and bestowed to me that I used to teach myself exposure and aperture and how to judge the light slung over my shoulder and would crawl into the barn to find a battered staircase leading up to a second story open from decrepitation the roof having long ago caved in. Before getting there on headphones or amped-up late teenage adrenalin-inducing car stereo I'd have Michael Stipe stuck in my head climbing up that staircase 'Let Me In' or 'Country Feedback' or anything from the Out of Time album or Midnight Oil's Earth and Sun and Moon or a bit later in the summer yeah anything from R.E.M.'s New Adventures In Hi-Fi record. 'E-Bow The Letter.' 'Electrolyte.' I don't know for some reason his voice just fit with Midwest summer dusks. Low key. Unstrained. Delicate but totally. This was before landing somewhere in the midst of dark Brit Pop the likes of Suede and Radiohead in LA and after settling in Seattle. I wasn't even twenty yet. So I'd crawl up to the hole in the roof in that barn and just sit there listening to the country quiet down. Every once in a while an old beatup pickup or some station wagon would drive by. Only once did anyone ever notice me up there and I wondered what the old farmer thought some kid sitting in the hole of a deserted barn roof up to no good probably but he paid no mind and I kept listening to the cicadas and watching the shadows grow longer before scrambling back down to hop back onto bike and haul it back or maybe just amble around some more til well past dark. It was the country afterall and these lettered highways were deserted.
So now in my little house half a world away over a few mountain ranges and a continental divide I sit on my porch after a run windows open listening to Stipe sing 'You' delayed guitars fed through a classic Leslie amp cycling around and around. It's cloudy. It's not the same. I should grab a down sweater as it dips below sixty though it's not yet dark. It's not muggy like it was all those years ago Missouri country summers. I've moved on from deserted letter highways cutting through cornfields to glaciers and craggy peaks and alpine heavens but still look back can't help it when the calendar winds up in these Summer months and the windows get opened in the evenings. And the music hasn't changed. Not one bit. So I can put some on the living room stereo and let it echo through the house through open windows floating out on the breeze. It's not a decrepit barn falling in hole in the roof but I can still picture it. I can still picture it.
