Broad Sound

When my mother asks, in her ask-as-a-demand kind of way, for me to get my guitar, I already know what will happen next. Around our backyard fire pit, kids roast marshmallows and squeeze them between graham crackers and chocolate while their parents talk loudly and drink from long-neck Kokanee bottles. The sun has set behind Mount Spokane, the sign of the long summer day coming to an end, and I am to be the entertainment that will send them all stumbling back home through the darkness.

I get up from the stump we use as a chair and notice how the campfire has settled in my clothes. Despite having tried to move out of its way when the wind blew it near me, my sweatshirt has soaked up all the smoke the Douglas fir branches and ponderosa pine needles could offer, and now it follows me back to the house. I grab the three-quarters-size acoustic guitar from its stand in my bedroom and step lightly through the dark gap between where the house lights end and the fire light begins, careful not to trip.

From across the fire, Mom tells me to play “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” and I roll my eyes and let out a heavy sigh. I have only been taking lessons for a few months, and so it takes me a while to get my hesitant fingers into the shape for the G chord. I play the opening notes and stumble between chord changes, leaving pauses so pregnant that no one can tell what I’m trying to play.

I let out the first words like a guiding light, almost heaven,and the whole neighborhood joins in, their voices swelling and rising up with the smoke. I back off the picking, my too-long pauses being something that would just slow them down, and let my voice sputter out around the second chorus. I strum the basic chords and groan, but I can see Mom’s smile, wide and true, light up against the dark that surrounds her.

—

I first heard “Take Me Home, Country Roads” by playing it. My guitar teacher, a stay-at-home Mormon mother of four who lived two houses down from me, taught me mostly 19th- and early-20th-century folk music photocopied from an old lesson book, and so it was something like a treat to play at first, something close to something I might actually enjoy.

After playing it dozens of times, trying to get good enough at root strumming to avoid the judgmental glances shot at me over her music stand, the lyrics started to become decipherable to my nine-year-old brain, and in turn, I began to distrust them. Denver’s country roads seemed elegant and majestic, and as a kid growing up in rural northern Idaho, in the wooded stretch between two small towns, they felt as alien as Star Wars, as unreal as photos in Sunset Magazine.

Country roads are bumpy, stricken wildly with potholes, and they give you a bruised ass if you take them too fast. They stretch on for miles past where the local government decides they are worth maintaining, twisting and turning up and around hillsides. It’s easy to get lost among the often inaccurate signposts, riddled occasionally with rusted holes from old shotgun blasts, ripping and warping the metal.

In the pull-offs and dead-end driveways, laundry machines and old tires pile up and wait their million-year wait to decompose. Broken glass bottles and condom wrappers scatter themselves next to ashy fire pits and the carcasses of half-burnt logs. In the summers, we would enjoy the few weeks after the county poured out used motor oil to keep the dust down.

A sensitive, perceptive child, picking up on the looks and whispers of the adults around the campfire, I was sure we were nowhere near heaven, and as a boy starting to look a little longer at the boys across the fire from him, I was sure that all the country roads in the world would not take me any closer to it.

—

The sun bakes the barren hillside as we skirt along the ridge of Logan Pass. We’re in Glacier National Park, hiking along the continental divide, and have reached the part of the hike where, tired and out of breath, our grasp on the day starts to slide off our backs. We make stupid jokes at each other and watch the old-fashioned red buses crawl up Going-to-the-Sun Road underneath us.

My partner and I have only been dating a few months, but have known each other for years, so we find an unusual comfort in each other’s presence. Birds dart in and out of their homes, etched into the rocky face, and I wipe the sweat pooling at my hairline.

Over the crunching sound of my shoes, I hear my partner’s voice start to sing, something about coming home to a new place, then something else about getting high off the warmth of the sun on your shoulders. Passers-by join in for brief choruses and exchange pleasant smiles back as the overhead sun continues its westward moves.

The day is beautiful, and so are we, so when I hear my partner let out those first words that I knew were coming, almost heaven, I decide to quiet the nine-year-old scoffing and groaning somewhere in me. By the second line, I join in and our voices twist around each other and roll down the hillside.

My partner turns back as the song finishes and smiles. I smile back, wide and true, and hold the moment, warm and beating, against me.

—

As a teenager, I started to see “Take Me Home, Country Roads” everywhere. If not the song itself, then its essence, bleeding out through art, literature, television, and movies. The myth it becomes, or the myth it comes from, one of those that haunts decades of American culture.

The trope is: the man or the family, usually white, is tired of the big city. New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco. They say it is full of bad things, bad people. That the city is so stressful, that it turns them into the worst versions of themselves. If only they could get away from it all. If it is a comedy, someone will be mad that the movers broke their expensive espresso machine. If it is a drama, someone will make long calls to the friends and family they left behind, promising to come back to visit, knowing they never will.

Regardless of the setup, the characters, or the plot points, the stories end the same way. Rural living, and the ways it forces a person to live, saves them. They find the most decent, salt-of-the-earth people, the kind they never would’ve found in the city, and it fixes whatever problems brought them there in the first place. The country, then, becomes a great filter for everything ugly, a great healer for everything broken.

I hated the trope more each time I saw it and hated the song more each time I heard it. I hated it not only because it was a lie, but because everyone around me seemed to believe it. When I read Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People” for the first time in a textbook, I wanted to make a thousand copies, leave them under wipers in church parking lots, tie laminated copies to stop signs, send birds carrying her truth to the masses.

But my hunger for the truths I saw on the shores of every beautiful lake, on top of every mesmerizing mountain top, and down every country road, wasn’t satiated. I wanted a song about the friend who took his own life. Movies about the men who beat their families over and over again and were allowed to continue doing so, with everyone continuing to look in the other direction. Books about how anywhere you were not loved had never been home in the first place.

I wanted to tell every singer on the country radio stations that echoed through my childhood that country roads hid and showed in equal measure, how the worst and best people you’d ever meet lived down them. I wanted to scream that country roads would, indeed, take some of us home, but would also take some of us to the last place on earth we wanted to be.

—

I grab the vegan loaf from the oven and throw in the brown-and-serve rolls. A sense of gloom hangs over the kitchen as the sun has hidden behind the thick clouds that clog the sky. It is Thanksgiving 2020, and my partner and I aren’t sure what to do with it.

I pull the pumpkin pie and the whipped cream can out of the fridge as the timer for the rolls goes off. My partner, finishing up a row of stitches on a sweater in the living room, sets the wooden needles down and comes to check on the stuffing they have made for themselves.

They ask how I’m doing, if I need anything, and I shake my head. They set the table and grab a few beeswax candles—a gesture at the kind of elegance that feels hard to come by in a year such as this—and light a match. The cat watches over the sloping yard from the windowsill and the dogs lay over the blankets piled up on the couch.

As I start to portion and cut the food, I hear my partner put a record on, the hissing drag of the needle across the centimeter of empty space, then the familiar strum pattern on the G chord echo out across the living room. It has been five years since our hike along Logan Pass, but as I hear the first words bubble out under their breath, almost heaven, I am awash in the same warmth, as if no time has passed at all.

As a president makes clear he will not concede an election, as a virus that people pretend to forget about takes our loved ones from us, I wonder about the value of promise, of hope for a better time, a better place. I wonder about the place of songs as rituals for that hope, of a kind of promise that doesn’t divorce itself from its shotgun-blasted, pothole-ridden truth.

By the time the second chorus starts, I have joined in, still feeling some part of me scoffing and rolling his eyes, but ignoring it anyway. I eat my slices of the vegan loaf, take bites of a brown-and-serve roll, letting out the lyrics as movements towards something like a prayer.

—

John Denver is, of course, not from Denver. Nor is he from West Virginia, and while I can’t ever know, I will always wonder if he ever drove a country road—perhaps listening to the rattle of old truck bolts slowly loosening after the range of all but the AM talk-show waves have gone to static, perhaps half-lost and frustrated at the lack of accurate signs and maps—and had second thoughts about what he’d been singing for decades.

Denver also didn’t originate the idea for the song, being listed as the third writer on the track, and he recorded it in a studio in New York. The first and second writers, the couple of Taffy Nivert and Bill Danoff, came up with it as they drove through Maryland and reflected on Danoff’s childhood in New England, with references to the landscape of West Virginia coming from a map. The song, then, is a piecework of half-remembered events, spoken of an unknown place, and recorded in the largest city in the nation.

Denver’s country roads still feel unreal to me, but hope often does, too, and so I make an uneasy truce. When I hear “Take Me Home, Country Roads” now, I hold it not to forget what hides behind the trees and mountains of rural places, but to hold hope for a time without it. The song, then, becomes a prayer for a future without kids who die by their own hands, without men who beat their families, with homes that love all of us back, and with roads that take us exactly where we belong.