Remember Two Songs

Driving through Wyoming, glorious mountains to my west; Lake Yellowstone to my east, straddling the Continental Divide, tuning into this station and that, some country here, some soft rock there, my sleeping passengers oblivious to it all. I first heard Chris Stills “When the Pain Dies Down,” a beautiful opus by a relatively unknown soulster, when the windows were down and I was winding through the Grand Tetons National Park headed towards Jackson Hole. The landscape was all blue and green, tremendously breathtaking and titanically overwhelming. I think about the formation of these monstrous creatures and how man is absorbed by their shadows. We are but a tiny sapling sprouting from the dirt floor, shaded from the towering edifices in the distance that were there way before our seeds had ever been thought about being planted.

Freshman year, walking through the Stonehenge campus at Albany--if cement could personify dying, it would happen on this campus--listening to “Float On,” the first song I had ever heard from Modest Mouse, I was not worried. I knew that things would get better and I would leave that place that constricted me, and like a balloon being held down by an anchor, one day the anchor would be released from the balloon’s string and “we’d all float on.” Alright?