Our (American) Town

China, Afghanistan, England, Tanzania, Germany, Japan, Mali, France, Austria, Turkey... just some of the countries that members of the OaKs have visited. Later this week I will add Russia and then Romania. I love to travel oversees, especially when it's for work and I get to participate in the culture not as a tourist, but as someone with a job to do with coworkers in the country. You really get a better perspective on daily life there.

But as much as I enjoy that, I also love traveling in the U.S.. So far I've been to 45 states. I just returned from 3 weeks on the road and nearly 3,500 miles of driving. Very few were on the interstate. I'm a route 66 kind of guy. I especially love meandering through the old south: Smithville, Georgia; Mt. Airy, North Carolina. Or the coal towns of West Virginia. I like the small bays and inlets of Maine and Maryland. The Pacific Northwest is beautiful but the rural places there are different and don't have the same kind of nostalgia for me.

When you get on the rural routes you see people on their porches, old shops barely holding on. You don't see many cars. And every 20 minutes you have to slow down to 35 and take a breather as you coast into another town and maybe stop at the one streetlight. You arrive a bit later but you're relaxed and you have the feeling you've been somewhere, taken a journey. As Tennessee gave way to Georgia and there wasn't a car ahead or behind I stretched out in the driver's seat and thought it felt a bit like flying first class, you just feel you have room, no cars and trucks pressing in at all sides.

When I was little I remember a commercial by Kodak on TV . I must have been 9 or 10 and I remember the images of a guy on a motorcycle traveling through a small town on a misty morning, kids waiting for the school bus, golden leaves in the fall, and the lyrics beginning, "setting off to find America..." And I felt somehow that I wanted to do that, even at 10, to find America.

I like the right soundtrack too when I'm on the road. Not country, but real Americana. The one track that captures it perfectly for me is Mary Chapin Carpenter's "I Am A Town".


I'm the pines behind the graveyard, and the cool beneath their shade, where the boys have left their beer cans
I am weeds between the graves.

My porches sag and lean with old black men and children
Their sleep is filled with dreams, I never can fulfill them
I am a town.

I am a church beside the highway where the ditches never drain
I'm a Baptist like my daddy, and Jesus knows my name
I am memory and stillness, I am lonely in old age; I am not your destination
I am clinging to my ways
I am a town.

This live version is slowed down somewhat from an already slow tune, but the playing and the arrangement are beautiful, just like the places they evoke.



- Tim