Come Through the Music

Tunes, travel and time to reflect.

Illustration by Sarah Lammer

Geography might be a postcard, the measured altitude of a mountain range, but place is feeling, two feet tucked up against a beaten-up dashboard, cigarette ash gingerly falling towards tarmac, ricocheting back towards mangled hair and a whispy sigh.

This twelve-year-old geriatric Toyota Corolla is shooting away from the Eastern Sierras on Interstate 395 towards Carson City. From the vantage point of its vista, among the craggy fixtures of the abutting Rockies playing tag with God, the automobile snakes like an infinitesimally tiny molecular fluff, puffing and plowing in a realm strictly geological. The speakers are shuddering from orgasmic delight and chronic malfunction the songs of the Grateful Dead.

I lit up from Reno I was trailed by twenty hounds Didn’t get to sleep that night Till the morning came around

Pulling away from the deafening wind, the quiet assuredness of the snow-capped sharp geometry, I turn towards Nico, driving. I see his mouth rounded, mo…