"Get out of the door, light out and look all around…"
– Truckin’, The Grateful Dead (Music by J. Garcia, P. Lesh, B. Weir. Lyrics: R. Hunter)
That line, from the Grateful Dead song Truckin’ perfectly captures the excitement and possibility of life on the road. From Mark Twain’s Huck Finn to Jack Kerouac’s Dean Moriarty, from Horace Greeley to Woody Guthrie, Ken Kesey, Neil Cassidy and the Dead themselves, the notion of "lighting out for the territory ahead" - as Huck put it at the end of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer - has long been an alluring and illuminating ideal within the American spirit.
Travel has often been described as a classroom for the soul, one through which an ever-changing parade of new places and faces tests us in ways just not possible amid the routine and familiar experiences of home. Among the many benefits: a means of snapping out of predictable thoughts and familiar patterns.
Remember all those novels from southern authors like Eudora Welty, Thomas Wolfe and William Faulkner where characters afflicted with one social maladjustment or another would "disappear" for six months, a year or longer? Before the age of mainstream psychotherapy and anti-depressant pharmacology, travel was a trusted and widely prescribed therapy for those requiring all measure of social or spiritual remedy.
And so it was I came to note several "lessons" from the road learned during a trip to Colorado the week before last. The purpose of the trip was to catch up with some old friends and attend a concert by...yes...and fittingly...The Dead, on tour for the first time in five years after having spent most of the previous 40 crisscrossing the country dispensing their own particularly potent prescription for escaping the bonds of the ordinary: music. Played in the moment. With endless variations and unpredictable progressions and intonations - unbeknownst beforehand to even the band members themselves.
Lesson one: A question of patience
"The wheel is turning and you can’t slow down,
You can’t let go and you can’t hold on,
Every time that wheel turns ‘round
Bound to cover just a little more ground ...."
– The Wheel, Jerry Garcia (Music by J. Garcia, B. Kreutzman, Lyrics by R. Hunter)
On the trip out, there was a young guy boarding the Denver bound plane with us in Tampa carrying a backpack the size of Pittsburgh and two nylon wrapped bicycle wheels.
No one said anything, but you could sense an undercurrent of annoyance rippling through the nearby passengers - myself included - as he struggled to stow everything away prior to takeoff.
Back home last week I read in the paper about a young man named Bobby Sweeting, a former Sarasota High student and current Florida Gator, who had traveled to Fort Collins, Colorado to compete in the USA Road Cycling Collegiate National Championships. From the picture and description, I’m all but certain it was Sweeting on our plane with all the cycling equipment.
Turns out he won ... in a competition against 160 other cyclists from 18 other schools.
Perhaps if his wheels had been thrown into the cargo hold they might have come out slightly misaligned; and perhaps the race results would have been different. I’m glad no one called him on the minor inconvenience his equipment caused. I’m glad he had a good flight and acclimated well to the altitude in Colorado. And I’m glad he rode a good race.
Funny how even just a little more information can help you see things in an altogether different way...
Lesson two: Judge not ....
"Once in a while you get shown the light,
In the strangest of places if you look at it right."
– Scarlet Begonias, The Grateful Dead (Music by J. Garcia. Lyrics by R. Hunter)
On the flight to Denver I was seated next to a young girl I first judged to be in her upper teens. She was plugged into a combination mp3 player/gaming device like so many of her generation. She remained blissfully conjoined to the gadget for the first hour or two of the four-hour flight. Meanwhile, I read every word of a newspaper I had brought along. Different generations, different diversions. I wondered to myself if anyone under the age of 30 even knows what a newspaper is these days (a sobering thought for someone who has depended on them for employment for almost 30 years).
The paper devoured, I pulled out a book to read. A few minutes later my fellow traveler did the same. I was impressed. "She reads," I thought, with the smug sarcasm one recoils from in others but fails to recognize in oneself.
I couldn’t see the title, but in a glance while getting a snack from the flight attendant I did catch a chapter title with the word "dialog" and something about "conversation" in it. I figured the book was about writing, a subject in which I have more than a passing interest. Now I was intrigued.
"She writes?" I thought. Again, that wonderfully attractive smugness...
Finally, I couldn’t resist.
"Do you mind my asking what you’re reading?"
"No, not at all," she replied. And with the self-assured delivery of just those four words I realized I had misjudged her age (she was at least in her mid-twenties I now surmised). And it began to dawn on me that I had likely misjudged a whole lot more.
"It’s ‘Crucial Conversations’" she said with a matter-of-factness that told me she assumed I was familiar with the title.
I wasn’t.
"Is it about writing?" I asked.
"No, it’s more about expressing yourself in ways that are effective in helping you get your point across."
"Oh, like in a business setting ...." I said.
"Well, yes, at work. But in other places too. Personal relationships, friendships. Wherever communication is important."
I later discovered that the book, co-authored by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan and Al Switzler, is a bestseller that everyone on the planet is likely familiar with, save me. It is subtitled "Tools for talking when stakes are high."
Finally, my smugness was vanquished. And thankfully, there was none from the young passenger who clearly possessed a depth and maturity I had assumed was lacking.
Her name: Alexis, age, 25. She works full time for a Fortune-500 company in Tampa while simultaneously pursuing a postgraduate degree at USF.
I don’t know whether she was just being polite, or simply putting into practice some of her book’s principles about effective communication. But she made quite an impression.
And the irony was not lost on me that one of those principles no doubt concerned the self-defeating impact of prejudging those around you.
Lesson noted.
We had a pleasant, easy conversation for the remainder of the flight. Mostly about books and work, Florida and Colorado, where she grew up.
I don’t get to talk with many of her generation. So I was grateful for the opportunity. And I deplaned with a reassurance about the values of hard work and self-improvement that have long been among this country’s most valuable natural resources. If Alexis is any example, those values are alive and well.
Added to my carry-on baggage as I walked toward the 737’s exit was a newfound sense of humility as to the lunacy of judging any book through the filter of one’s own preconceptions.
Crucial conversations indeed.
Lesson Three: Turning points ....
"Take up your china doll. It’s only fractured –
Just a little nervous from the fall..."
– China Doll, The Grateful Dead (Music by J. Garcia. Lyrics by R. Hunter)
I’ve known my friend Perrin since our college days. He was my roommate sophomore year. He was the best man at my wedding. Outwardly, we are not much alike. I am tall. He is short. He is athletic. I am...tall. He is something of an extrovert. I am something of a recluse. Still, we became friends and to my great satisfaction we’ve stayed in touch throughout the years; it helps that our wives - mine Kathy, his Estelle – also get along. Still, it had been almost eight years since we last got together before reconnecting in Colorado for the recent Dead show.
Much has changed in that time, especially for Perrin and his family. Four years ago, he and Estelle decided to add to their family that also includes a son, then a teenager, now 20. They decided they would adopt.
After several disappointments here and abroad, they learned through a local agency near their Colorado home of an opportunity in Russia. So they flew to Vladivostok, Russia thinking they were going to meet one girl available for adoption. But by the time they arrived, the opportunity had somehow morphed into two children, sisters Juliette, 6 and Veronica, 7. In my friend’s words, they decided to "accept the challenge."
But even after agreeing to adopt both girls, they faced grueling lessons in dealing with the rigors of Russian bureaucracy. There were many unexpected complications along the way. And, of course, these complications would have to be dealt with on unfamiliar ground, thousands of miles from home. It was a trying experience, to say the least.
But the biggest complication was not with the Russian bureaucracy. Rather, it came with the discovery that young Juliette and Veronica also had a half sister... Tanya 13.
The dilemma was excruciating. How, they thought, could they take two sisters and leave a third behind?
In the end, the answer was obvious. They couldn’t. And so, instead of returning home with one daughter as they planned, they flew back to Colorado with three.
There were difficult days early on. Adjustments had to be made by parents and children alike. But now, four years later, their home in the foothills of the Rockies is filled with the typical sounds of laughter, dissent and sibling ‘rivalry’ you’d expect to find in any American household inhabited by teens, tweens and pre-teens.
How much more difficult would the transition have been if they had cut the deck differently and not kept the three sisters together? How much would have been lost, not just for Tanya, but for the younger girls as well?
Knowing this couple as I do, I don’t think that deal ever had a chance of going down.
Lesson four: Beyond the museum
"They’re a band beyond description
Like Jehovah’s favorite choir
People joinin’ hand in hand
While the music plays the band
Lord they’re settin’ us on fire."
– The Music Never Stopped. The Grateful Dead (Music by B. Weir. Lyrics: J. Barlow)
The afternoon of the Dead show at the Pepsi Center in downtown Denver, we all headed into town early to catch an exhibit at the Denver Art Museum. It was titled "The Psychedelic Experience: Rock Posters from the San Francisco Bay Area, 1965-1971. Our thanks to Cleve Posey, the Pelican’s Production Manager for "turning us on" to this show.
It was fun to take a step back in time and recall an era so different from our own. Back then, before MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and the now ubiquitous cell phone, handbills and posters were the preferred means of getting a message out in a hurry.
Having both worked in the graphic arts field, my wife and I were amused to learn of Promoter Bill Graham’s complaints about the lettering of many of the posters commissioned for his events. Graham was considerably older than the majority of hippies and flower children flocking to the shows he promoted in San Francisco in the late ‘60s, most notably at his Fillmore West.
Every time one of the artists would bring him a new poster with the billowing psychedelic lettering that was so much in vogue back then he would complain through his heavy New York accent: "Geez! I can’t read the damn thing!. What good is a poster if you can’t read it?"
Stanley Mouse and the other artists would constantly have to reassure the crusty middle-aged expatriate New Yorker that the kids would most certainly get the message loud and clear.
While the museum exhibit was fun, it brought with it the realization that this period in America history was really quite fleeting. The ideas of unlimited personal freedom and self expression that ignited the summer of love in 1967 were soon smothered under the weight of too much freedom, too many drugs and too much personal destruction (along with too many folks just trying to make a quick buck).
Whenever I think of those days, I recall a quote, the author of which now escapes me,
"There can be rules without meaning, but there can be no meaning without rules."
Like a true and meaningful religious vision that becomes corrupted by the church built up around it, by the end of the ‘60s the true hippie movement had all but vanished, morphing into the solipsism of the ‘70s "me" generation.
Except ....
Except for a few surviving originals who escaped the Haight-Ashbury scene with their cognitive and artistic faculties intact, carrying with them the original ideals that for so fleeting a moment had made the Summer of Love so unique. Many of those survivors would infuse those ideals with a hard edge of realism and practicality gleaned in the often bleak seasons that later followed the bright dawn of the summer of 1967, applying those reworked ideals to their life’s work.
And much to our pleasure, a few blocks to the south, several of the best known of these survivors, members of a band that was probably listed on more of the faded and frayed posters at the Denver Art Museum exhibit than any other, would be appearing live, in real time before 15,000 faithful followers just an hour or two hence. Many in the audience could be counted as survivors too, but many more were likely to be more recent converts to the carnival of sight and sound, drawn "like a moth before a flame" to the continuing odyssey of discovery the Dead have faithfully followed since their earliest days.
The show, we knew, would be the very antithesis of a museum display.
And it would be equally far removed from a nostalgic romp down memory lane where audience members dutifully follow every note performed exactly as it had been recorded on the original 45 rpm record released way back when.
No, tonight, the audience would know the songs, but as mentioned earlier, they would not know them as they were, but rather as they are…performed this night, at this moment in time.
I have seen the Dead perform on as many as four consecutive nights without hearing the same song twice. And by the fifth, or sixth night of a tour, if a song is repeated, well, it is somehow or other changed. By the crowd. By the vibe of the town or part of the country the band has moved on to. By the temperament of the band. By the weather. By any number of factors that have intervened since the last time the number was performed.
The audience both knows and expects this.
A Dead show for me is a validation of history, not a tribute to it. The songs are not signposts to some long forgotten principal or ideal kept under lock and key somewhere in a museum. But rather they are living, breathing examples of those ideals. They stand or fall each night anew in the hearts of the audience members assembled to hear them. Will the magic still be there? Will their vision still light the way? Will the music play the band?
At the end of the Denver show, amidst a thundering ovation, guitarist Bob Weir acknowledged this special alchemy.
With a sweep of his arm across the full length and width of the Pepsi Center, he congratulated the crowd: "You are the reason all of this is possible," he said.
History alive.
Lesson five: Minor turbulence
"God damn well I declare,
Have you seen the like?
Their walls are built of cannon balls,
Their motto is don’t tread on me..."
– Uncle John’s Band. The Grateful Dead (Music by J. Garcia. Lyrics by R. Hunter)
Moving through the metal detector in the security area of Denver International Airport last Sunday on the way home, I managed to set off the alarm. So the stern faced Homeland Security Agent with the shaved head that lent him a vague resemblance to Telly Savalas waved me back through the machine with the terse admonition: "take off the shirt please..."
Now before you judge this an unreasonable request, It should be noted that the "shirt" in question was actually more of a jacket shirt than a shirt in the conventional sense – a nod to the 55 degree temperature in Denver that morning that felt positively frigid to this Floridian.
No problem for me, but very much of one for the more conventionally attired woman in front of me who thought the "remove shirt" order was directed at her. The result was a most ferocious glare of righteous indignation shot Telly’s way, on a par with the look Hillary likely gave Bill after he first broke the Monica Lewinsky news all those years ago.
"Excuuuse me?" she snarled.
If looks could kill, well, Telly might have been headed for his great reward...again.
Thankfully, a nod in my direction where the offended woman saw me disrobing put the matter to rest. But not before another of life’s lessons – this one on the endless potential for misapprehension – had been offered. Especially relevant I thought given the circumstances that necessitated all this beefed up airport security in the first place.
Lesson six: Heading home
"Going home, going home
By the water side I will rest my bones..."
– Brokedown Palace, The Grateful Dead (Music by J. Garcia. Lyrics by R. Hunter)
I love Colorado, but passing over Apalachicola Bay on the flight home - as I picked out St. George and Dog Islands set like jewels against the azure waters of the gulf - I instantly felt that special magic of being home.
Yes, the summers can be rough. But at my buddy’s house up in the hills, there was snow on the ground on Mothers Day when we awoke. Earlier in the week there were wind gusts up to 60 mph as we hiked around a portion of his property that extends up to 8500 feet in elevation. Nothing unusual, Perrin told me. The wind comes with the territory.
We’ve got alligators. They’ve got mountain lions. We’ve got heat. They’ve got cold. Did I mention they have mountain lions?
But after 30 years, Florida is in my DNA. From the politics to the weather to the variety of landscapes and shores, east to west, north to south...there’s always something here to keep one entertained.
And there’s still so much to see.
I’ve never been to Dog Island. It sure looks pretty. And who knows what we’ll find there?
Exactly.
Be sure to visit Robert's blog for more...
May 21st 2009 - 9:12AM