Monday, August 26th, 2024
Monday, August 12th, 2024: Arts, Music & Dance, Nature, Outdoor Life, Stories, Trouble.
Challenges
Three weeks with no hiking Dispatches! I hope that’s given some of you a chance to catch up?
The big news is that I’m writing songs. The last time I had a sustained burst of songwriting was thirty years ago – that’s why this is big news for me. Life got in the way, but I can already tell it was worth the wait. More on that in the next Dispatch.
A lot still stands in the way. I have more pain than ever, it’s out of control, disrupting my sleep, requiring too many meds. After working indoors all week, my body and soul need wilderness hikes on the weekend, but those are no longer possible due to a knee problem – with a two-month waiting list for treatment. Not only does my body require more maintenance than ever, but also my fire-damaged house, my overgrown yard, my dilapidated vehicles – especially in monsoon season with weeds exploding, animal pests invading, heat that requires hands-on management throughout the day due to a lack of effective insulation and cooling. And alongside all that I’m constantly managing my family situation back in Indiana, solving daily and weekly crises remotely, forced to make decisions for all of us, usually alone.
As painful as it may be for me, the inability to hike or do creative work is a first-world problem. What we call “the arts” have roots in traditional, indigenous ways of life, but our versions of these arts are so far removed, so decadent, that most of them have no place in a healthy, sustainable culture. A subsistence culture has no use for oil paintings, literary fiction, violin concertos, opera, or ballet. Songwriting, painting, and literary storytelling are things I do because I’ve been compelled to do them since childhood, and doing them is the most rewarding thing I know.
Maps and Burritos
Unable to hike on Sundays, I drive to somewhere even more remote than my hometown where I can spend time outdoors and get a midday meal. Since discovering a wooden relief map in this visitor center years ago, I’ve been wanting to return and photograph it. Unfortunately the plexiglass cover results in excessive glare.
I spent a few hours reading beside this creek.
No matter what else is on the menu – seafood, steak, burgers, Thai, sushi – if there’s a half decent burrito I’ll always order that. But it feels bizarre to be eating it at midday instead of after a long hike.
Storms are forming and rain is falling, but not enough. Still, our skies are as spectacular as ever.
Monday, August 19th, 2024: 2024 Trips, Hikes, Mogollon Rim, Regions, Road Trips, Southeast Arizona, Whites.
Now that I’ve embarked on a new, hopefully temporary Sunday routine of one-day road trips, I’m starting to get more analytical and organized – another aspect of my lifelong struggle between left and right brains. But the problem with remote destinations in this remote region – even after decades of internet, web, GPS, smart phones, apps, and social media – is that reliable information is often lacking. And when no one answers the phone or nothing shows up on Google Maps, you have to actually drive a couple of hours to find out if something exists or is open. I find that refreshing and hope it’s never completely “fixed” by the techno-utopians.
I’d been suffering through so much heat at home that I wanted to escape to the Arizona alpine plateau, which would be 15 degrees cooler – in the 70s. Driving north past the big ranches west of town, I approached a pair of bikers weaving constantly back and forth in opposition to each other. They pulled over and stopped as I got close. Their bikes were new and futuristic, stark black and white, as were their outfits – they reminded me of the Apple or Elon Musk aesthetic. But a little farther up the road I saw them in my rearview and they passed me, and began weaving their bikes theatrically back and forth in opposition again. And then, a few miles farther, I passed them again, stopped on the shoulder, gesticulating at each other. More weird city people invading our rural refuge.
The route crosses a series of intermediate passes, and approaching the highest, at 8,000 feet, I remembered there was a forest road heading north along a long ridge that overlooked the canyons and basin to the east. For once, I wasn’t on a schedule and decided to check it out.
It was pretty well graded and led through mature ponderosa pine forest dappled with sunlight and shade. I wasn’t planning to go very far, and I hadn’t seen anything interesting yet, when after a little more than a mile I saw sky through the trees to my right, and wondered if that was the rim of the ridge. Shortly after that I came to a dirt track leading off in that direction.
Winding beneath the big trees, it took me to a campsite on the edge of a rock cliff overlooking a broad thousand-foot-deep canyon toward the distant skyline of our 11,000 foot mountains thirty miles away. It was the most spectacular campsite/picnic spot I’d ever found in my home region. It was litter-free and someone had left a little stack of firewood. I even found a young Arizona cypress growing on the rim, a tree I’d never seen in this area.
From there I drove to the Arizona hamlet at 8,000 feet, a two-hour drive from home, where I was hoping to get lunch. But the grill was closed – once again, no definitive info online – so I decided to drive higher onto the volcanic plateau, another half hour of driving across one of my favorite wild, uninhabited landscapes, to an isolated lodge that I knew was open daily.
The drive winds through burn scars and intact spruce-fir forest, climbing over ridges and into and out of side canyons, passing the broad grassy meadows that line much of this plateau. At an elevation of over 9,000 feet, I came upon the lodge suddenly and pulled off. There were two motorcycles parked in front.
I found the restaurant door unlocked and went in. Two retired-looking biker couples stood examining a map on my left, and a sign said to seat yourself, so I took a seat at the counter until one of the men came over and told me the restaurant didn’t open until noon. I went outside to wait at a table, and the bikers rode off.
I needed to pee, and hadn’t seen restrooms in the restaurant, so I entered the main door of the lodge. The reception counter was unoccupied, but a very old man slumped on a sofa opposite, staring at something in his lap – probably a phone. I peered into the office and up the stairs, then turned and asked the man if there was anyone working today. I was standing less than six feet away, but he ignored me.
“Excuse me, sir,” I said. Then he slowly looked up with an angry glare. Even more slowly, he took a tiny device out of his ear and shook his head in apparent disgust.
“Did you say something?” he snapped.
“Sorry to bother you,” I replied. “It’s nothing.” He put the device back in and looked back down without another word.
I went back outside and tried the restaurant door. It had been locked.
At my table on the front deck, a constant swarm of hummingbirds surrounded a feeder behind my left shoulder. It’s an incredibly beautiful spot, and the weather was perfect. I watched a thunderhead develop across the highway, behind the spruce forest, far to the east. A four-door Jeep arrived with two more retired couples. After I told them about opening time, they wandered off to examine the property. A half hour later an older couple arrived, and likewise wandered off.
This place is known in both the Phoenix and Tucson metro areas. It’s a long, arduous drive, but that’s what bikers seem to crave, and summer in those urban hellholes makes people desperate for relief. And this is paradise compared to the crowds and traffic of closer getaways like Sedona and Flagstaff.
Nearing noon the two couples returned and asked me what I knew about this place – I’d spent the night here once and had dinner. Then the restaurant door was unlocked and our small group filed in.
I had a burger that appeared to be nothing special but tasted unusually good. I overheard the couples telling the waiter they were from Yuma but were spending the summer in Show Low – an interesting life plan. I wondered if they were staying in personal RVs or vacation homes. Yuma houses a legendary prison and is notorious for being the hottest town in the U.S., with an average summer high of 115. I’ve heard it called the armpit of the Southwest. I wondered how anyone would choose Yuma as a retirement destination. But if they did, why would they need to choose a summer home in the same state? Tax reasons?
And then consider the options – towns that would offer a summer refuge. My first choice would be the casual resort village across the plateau at 8,400 feet, but it’s very expensive. Show Low is basically a bustling redneck town, only slightly higher in elevation than my hometown, center of a big ranching district – no way would I consider it a pleasant summer retreat. These folks intrigued me.
We finished at roughly the same time and exchanged a few words at the door. I mentioned I’d overheard they were from Yuma, and said I knew it by reputation, having only passed through. One of the women said “We live there, we’re not from there! We’re from New York state.” Apparently I’d touched a raw nerve, and the mystery deepened.
Driving off, I made it only a few miles down the road when I approached a trailhead and decided to check it out. I’m not hiking, but I really wanted to immerse myself in this beautiful forest with its crystal-clear, high-elevation air.
Unsurprisingly, only a few yards up the trail my legs took over, and I realized my body was desperate to walk. I simply couldn’t avoid exploring farther. A storm had come over and raindrops were falling so I grabbed my shell out of the pickup.
The trail climbed steadily, 300 feet in elevation to the top of the ridge, and unfortunately this patch of forest had been touched by the massive 2011 fire – not at high intensity, but enough to thin it out, creating a maze of deadfall and near-continuous thickets of locust regrowth. One treat was the strawberries – I’d never seen so many, although they were small, and most were not ripe yet.
Light rain fell on and off. I was hoping to get across the ridge with a view into the big river valley to the east, but this turned out to be part of a broad network of ridges and canyons. After three quarters of a mile I turned back – my first, very short, hike in almost a month!
On the way back, I was reviewing my interactions with the folks at the lodge – I’d also had a brief conversation with the other couple. Apart from the occasional angry old man, most interactions with strangers in isolated, lonely places like this are much friendlier than you’d have in crowds or in town. People tend to be excited to meet strangers and discover secrets of their lives. As a result, you briefly get a more optimistic and tolerant view of humanity, which is paradoxical for someone like me who values solitude and is generally considered a cynic. But like all pleasures, it’s fleeting.
The Agony and Ecstasy of Songwriting
Friday, August 23rd, 2024: Arts, Music & Dance.
Afro-Goth Fusion
This Dispatch is going to be a deep dive into the creative process. I know most of you are music lovers and hope you find it interesting – raw and unfiltered from the horse’s mouth instead of highly processed in movies like Once or the upcoming A Complete Unknown.
The last time I wrote new songs was over a decade ago – and those were just experiments, nothing memorable. After that, I became concerned about the hundreds of hours of archival recordings I’d accumulated with bands and friends, and began editing and releasing some of those. Meanwhile I was writing my epic novel and starting on a big painting. It wasn’t until early 2020 that I got the itch to write new songs. Maybe reviewing those archival tapes had reminded me of the era in which I matured as a musician – the post-punk years of 1978-1980 – because it finally hit me that although that’s what got me started, I’d only written a few true post-punk songs, instead plunging straight into primarily instrumental experimentation with my band, Terra Incognita.
I felt that the purest form of that original post-punk sound had been achieved by New Order immediately after Ian Curtis’s suicide, in their 1981 recordings of “Ceremony” and “Dreams Never End”. But rather than developing it further, they abandoned it in favor of club dance music.
I had always assumed that my mature guitar style was an adaptation of Appalachian bluegrass flatpicking to the call-and-response guitar riffs in Nigerian juju bands. But looking back, I realized that the classic post-punk sound – marching-band drums, clean guitar and bass tones fattened with the chorus effect, melodic bass, and droning or purely rhythmic guitar riffs – was not only one of my main inspirations. It freed every alt-rock and indie-rock band after that from the blues-rock cliches of the Sixties, and that classic post-punk sound is now renewed by every new generation of rock bands.
I wanted to acknowledge and honor that pillar of my legacy, and in early 2020 I recorded some instrumental tracks to my favorite post-punk beats and did some vocal improv over them. Then the pandemic took over, my house caught fire, and the next two years were spent trying to recover. During that hiatus, I discovered that the goth subculture, inspired by Joy Division and The Cure, had faithfully rescued that early sound and perpetuated it worldwide in a series of obscure bands that continue to this day.
Through pain, illness, trauma, and the stressful work of helping my family, I kept getting ideas and making notes about the new songs I wanted to write. In my heart, I really just wanted to write classic post-punk songs, but I’d spent decades studying and experimenting with African genres – especially my favorite, Nigerian Yoruba apala music. And as I reviewed and analyzed my work since 1980, I realized that my forté as a songwriter and composer is to invent new sounds by fusing distant, unrelated traditions – like I did with Nigerian juju and Appalachian in the Eighties, and apala and Native American in the Nineties.
I actually learned that kind of trans-oceanic fusion from the Africans. From the Fifties to the Seventies, record companies had dumped their overstock in Africa, and African musicians began adapting American country and funk instrumental styles to their tribal traditions. If Nigerians could use country-western pedal steel and the funk wah-wah pedal in juju, why couldn’t I fuse apala with post-punk or goth?
From the Heart
Occupied with family duties, I literally didn’t have time for music until I was forced to make time in April of this year, setting Katie’s songs to music for her ceremony. That, and the ceremonial handover of African drums from a colleague, a few months later, have provided the impetus for my new songwriting effort.
Turning Katie’s lyrics into songs proved to be easy, and I began wondering if the pain and trauma would end up making me a better songwriter and singer – that’s the old cliche. Singing lyrics that poor lost Katie had addressed directly to me definitely got my heart into my voice. Here’s the latest, a true story from the beginning of our relationship:
After finishing a series of Katie’s songs, I sat down and organized my notes, which included dozens of potential themes or ideas for songs. But of all those songwriting notes I’d accumulated since 2020, the most urgent was to “write from your heart”. In the past, the work of inventing new genres had allowed my brain to dominate. I’d written songs about things that inspired me in nature and prehistory, but by the time I finished the songs I’d ironed most of my feelings out of them.
More recently, when I wrote lyrics and tried singing them over instrumental tracks, they always came out as either too cerebral or as plaintive, mystical garbage, which is a rut I used to get in when smoking pot.
Making it even harder, in addition to evoking strong feelings in my songs, I was still determined to work outside existing genres, making everything up as I go along, combining instruments, rhythms, melodies, and harmonies from exotic and obscure traditions, while showing my love of nature and indigenous cultures and embodying the questions I’ve pursued and the lessons I’ve learned from an adventurous life. I always need a challenge.
Clear Creek Canyon Girl
Fortunately, there was one subject that was still fresh in my heart – an encounter with the past in Indian country, in which I fell in love with someone who was about as inaccessible as you could get. I decided to start with that.
I started out by writing the story of my impossible love in the form of rhythmic lines, but when I tried various ways of setting those lines to music – with African drums, drum kit sounds, a bass line, or guitar chords – by the end of the day I was back in the same old boring rut.
So I studied my music library for inspirations – beats or structures I could adapt. I don’t normally use other people’s music for inspiration, but this was a special case. Maybe I could use other peoples’ songs as disruptors to prevent me from falling into past ruts.
I started with PJ Harvey’s “The Wheel”. I spent another day using that as a touchstone – and I do love the song – but it turned out to be totally the wrong feel for my story.
So on the third day I turned to New Order’s “Love Vigilantes”. I like the song, and I love the power and simplicity of New Order’s rhythm tracks, but mainly I had the idea that the story resonated with mine in some nonintuitive way. To make things easier on myself, I settled on drum kit sounds as a placeholder, hoping to work the African drums in later. The “Love Vigilantes” approach worked, but you’d be hard-pressed to recognize the inspiration in the final result!
Each time I started over, I deleted six or eight hours of previous hard work, which takes motivation and discipline. On all three days, I was in pain and taking meds, and the meds pushed the pain into the background enough for me to work. I had to get my heart and mind to work together somehow – fiendishly tricky.
I finished it on that third day, and the result literally had me in tears. Maybe it wasn’t just the tragic love story – maybe those years of pain and trauma had something to do with it. In any event, the joy I feel after an accomplishment like this is better than anything else in life.
And the song was long – almost six minutes! Afterward, I happened to hear Gordon Lightfoot’s “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” on the radio. A six-minute tragic folk ballad, it reached the top of the pop music charts in 1976. Can you imagine something like that competing with Taylor Swift today?
I can’t share my new song with you until it’s ready for legal distribution – weeks of further work – but here’s a snippet of “Clear Creek Canyon Girl”:
Stranger to the World
After that success, I was really stoked, but it still wasn’t Afro-Goth. I didn’t know what it was, it seemed a one-off like many of my compositions. So for the next song I went for broke and took New Order’s “Dreams Never End” as my inspiration – a track that’s sacred to me. The subject would be my childhood pastor, who set me on a life path as a seeker. I wanted to honor him while showing how hard a path it is.
I started writing lines based on the phrasing of “Dreams Never End”, but as I might’ve expected, I soon lost control of the subject. What was it about? My long-lost pastor, or my entire life story? How could I narrow it down and turn it into something that might engage an unfamiliar listener?
I recorded a rhythm track roughly inspired by DNE, using software drum kit sounds, and tried singing some of the lines I’d written over it, finding a key that seemed to work with my voice, and a chord progression I could alternate repeatedly. But the lines I’d written were woefully incomplete, so I spent the next two weeks trying to outline the song and focus the theme, in between doing rehab exercises and struggling with the side effects – insomnia, hot flashes, splitting headaches – from a shot of prednisone a doctor had given me for pain. This, after finishing the first song in three days! This is my kind of art, moments of ecstasy separated by days of agony.
But after seven or eight drafts I finally got something that was enigmatic but heartfelt, triggering tears again by the time I reached the end. I’d recorded an acoustic guitar track to sing over, and now I added bass and electric guitar, still trying for that post-punk sound.
But now, it had so many echoes of the New Order song, I realized I had to make big changes to avoid a copyright issue. I slowed the tempo way down, and that actually allowed me to put more feeling into my vocals. Then I realized the tempo was similar to one of my favorite apala songs, so I recorded syncopated talking drum tracks using big and little drums. In the past I’ve used banjo to take the place of lamellophone (mbira, thumb piano) in apala, so I tried a banjo track. But that made it sound way too folky, so I tried the same part on bass, and the song really began to work.
I muted the original drum kit tracks – the song seemed to be working with just talking drums, electric bass, and electric guitar. But now that I was closing in on it, I discovered I didn’t really have an ending – I just had a series of verses, all with the same phrasing. The last set of lines could be used as an ending, but I wanted them to have a different chord progression and melody, something climactic. I remembered a brief passage in a song that’s been playing on an LA radio station I listen to daily, a song by an obscure indie-pop band from the early Nineties. An achingly beautiful melody with a seven-chord progression that occurs once in the middle of the song.
I fit that to the existing key of my song and recorded a track with the guitar chords at the end. Singing over them in that melody took my voice a little too high for comfort, and totally changed the character of the song, but I decided to keep it for now. Now, the song seemed too powerful for just the talking drums, so I tried adding the kit drum sounds back in, and voila! Afro-Goth!
After listening to it from the beginning, I realized the main melody was just too close to New Order’s. I mean, the beat was now completely different, none of the instrumental parts were similar, but I’d succeeded in singing too much like Peter Hook. So I experimented to see if I could “apalafy” the vocal melody, using melismatic singing. That actually worked, in that I ended up loosening and putting soul into what had previously been a bleak, metronomic performance.
But the ending still bothered me, and my heart sank when I listened to the full song on my big speakers, and the new ending melody suddenly reminded me of a famous, sappy old pop song, probably by Barry Manilow.
What could I possibly do after investing this much time and work? The answer turned out to be simple. I ignored the high-pitched melody from the indie-pop song and sang my final lines in a lower register over the same chord progression, to a melody I just made up. At first I sounded a little like Elvis doing a gospel standard, but that inspired me to put even more soul into it. It ended up subtly evoking early rhythm & blues.
That inspired me to go back and let my lyrics take the phrasing and melody even farther from the New Order song, so that no one would recognize a connection now.
Here’s a snippet of “Stranger to the World”. Can you hear the talking drums?
Monday, August 26th, 2024: Hikes, Mineral, Mogollon Mountains, Southwest New Mexico.
Our weather had cooled off – town was only forecast to reach 84. I still wanted to get away to someplace cooler, but now had more options nearer home than where I’d gone last Sunday. The county seat north of us was only forecast to reach 78, and there’s a fairly level hike on the way there that should be easy on my knee, and a couple of cafes for lunch afterward.
This is a canyon hike that was recommended within the first couple of months after I moved here, but for various reasons I’d never explored it. The trail begins at the end of a long gravel road with multiple creek crossings, and before I got my 4wd Sidekick, I was paranoid about my truck getting stuck. Then when I started doing long day hikes, I saw that being a canyon hike, this trail offered very little elevation gain, so it didn’t interest me.
But I’d been told the canyon was spectacular, and I’d seen photos to confirm it. So knee pain now gave me an excuse to hike it.
The trail goes up the floodplain about 300 yards before entering the narrows. First thing I saw was a big rattlesnake – almost four feet long. It just moved off the trail without rattling.
The sky was partly cloudy, with a lot of deep shadows in the narrow canyon, so I had a struggle taking photos. It was beautiful, as expected, but muggy, and more than 400 feet lower than home. I’d gotten a late start and it was hot there.
Eventually I emerged from the canopy onto a dramatic stretch of exposed bedrock. Trying to protect my knee, and worried about the cafes closing at 2pm, I stopped where the canyon widened out. It’d taken me 45 minutes, but with a lot of stops figured I’d gone less than a mile.
On the way back, I spotted a school of trout, up to a foot long, in a pool below a cascade. It’s definitely a beautiful place, and there’s supposed to be another “narrows” further up, but it’s not really a hiking trail – it’s more for people who like to walk a short distance, without much effort, and hang out enjoying scenery.
By the time I got to the town with the cafes, it was after 2, and the better one was closed. Fortunately the other, a “greasy spoon”, was open, and I got a decent burger with the worst fries I’ve ever seen. A big storm was gathering and I decided to grab provisions at the market and check into the motel.
I’d passed the modest county fairgrounds on the way in, and in the motel office saw a poster for the fair – which was ending today. This is the biggest county in the state but has a population less than 3,600, with only 289 in the town. It’s the national center of the rural pro-Trump, anti-government movement, but I’ve always found the people friendly, I’ve never felt threatened or even uncomfortable here, and the surrounding habitat is wilder and better protected than most places I know in California. There are a lot of trails nearby that intrigue me so I keep feeling drawn to this area.
After I was settled into my room, I glanced out the window and saw a teenage girl feeding her horse outside the office. This is that kind of place. An hour later it was raining. My knee was sore again and despite getting a shot week before last, I still had residual pain from my right shoulder.
Early next morning, I woke up refreshed and hit the road south. A half hour later I found myself stuck behind an interesting outfit – a tall box truck with side windows in the box, towing what appeared to be a fairly large hand-made wooden boat. I patiently waited a few miles for a long enough straight stretch to pass.
