I guess I’ve gone and am going to a lot of places on this tour, though I wonder, for all the time spent at shows, how much of them I really get to see. Still, I’ve been thinking about places a whole lot.
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On one of the days where I got to do something that I wanted, or rather, got to do something that, in retrospect, I came to realize was what I had wanted, some friends took me along to Portland where we walked along the rocky shoreline and sat on the rocks and looked out at the lighthouse and the barges passing by in the night. There’s something mesmerizing about the darkness of water at night and how only the tops of the ripples are illuminated by the light from the moon, or the lighthouse, or the scattered houses. The niceness of the water at night is the same for water flowing from the Atlantic as it is for the waters of Lake Griffey back in Bloomington where I jumped off rope swings on two nights the week before I left for tour. The jump was all the more perilous for not seeing the wet landing below, but once immersed in the cool blackness, the whole world seemed quiet and beautiful.
In Portland, Shon and I waded a few yards out to some rocks and carefully climbed the slippery and seaweed covered surface until we were sitting just above the lapping waves. Shon told me that, growing up in New England, he had come to love the Ocean and though there was always the allure of living in other places, he wasn’t sure if, or for how long, he could stay away.
I understand this, a little at least, because I’ve seen the Rockies and the Alps in all their foreign majesty and they surely tower above the Appalachians that enclose the valley where I grew up, which aren’t even real mountains anyway. Still, even when hiking through these hills and stopping and looking over the valley, and seeing what once were farm fields or forests become subdevelopments, or looking at the hills above me, their faces bald and grey from the clear-cut and strip mines, I still think its a beautiful place. Driving around with my folks on the country roads, as farm fields turn to towns, we pass newly constructed strip malls and super-stores, the neighboring structures built while I still lived in the area and once filled with shoppers and adorned with banners, now sit empty and lifeless. Still, I feel a sense of comfort when returning to central Pennsylvania. I think that a lot of people feel this way about the places that they’re from.
Some don’t though, and in them I find an intense appreciation for distant places, for new places. My mom grew up in Flint, Michigan – a sad place by her own admission, despite her fonder memories of philanthropically financed libraries, symphonies, and youth programs. We rarely go back to visit my parents’ home town, and I don’t blame them. Even as a child, I found sadness in that post-industrial ghost town. Maybe that’s why my mom loved every nature hike in northeast Ohio when we lived there, or every family vacation to the shore, or every walk on the rocky Pennsylvania portion of the Appalachian Trail. She has a fascination with the fauna or the calls of some strange bird and this is a fascination that makes here walk slow through the woods while I careen obliviously on ahead. I love this about her, and wish I could entirely share her fascination with places instead of just admiring hers.
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We were sitting outside the show in DC and someone on tour was talking about how he is not fond of the city of Tampa (though I believe the show on this tour has raised his opinion at least a little, and I’ve always had fun there and thought people were real nice). I told him that when we played in Tampa, he shouldn’t be too persuasive about the reasons he dislikes the town lest Tampa residents become convinced that their town sucks and move to Bloomington like so many of us have. Not that I can really say much about this seeming mass migration since I’m a fairly recent immigrant to Bloomington. Who wouldn’t want to live in Bloomington, especially if you come from a place that’s not so hot? Of course someone would be excited about streets with trees where you can walk and see your friends out on their porches, hiking trails, rope swings, quarries, bike projects, hiking trails, rope swings, quarries, farmers markets, and radical bookstores. And, of course, the merits of a place have to do with more things than those most obvious assets, but coming from a place without those things, they seem really nice. Since I thought about this though, I had a conversation with Greg Wells about how the punks in Richmond are more of a blight to traditionally working-class neighborhoods than the yuppies, and I recall our own pretty trashed (relative to our neighbors) house in the near west side of Bloomington with more than a little shame. I had a phone conversation with another friend who talked about how people from the suburbs are fascinated or enamored with certain cities or towns, but how this excitement is so far from having roots in those places. Being on tour so much these days, I wonder if I’ll ever have those roots, or if I even want them. Its like my mom loving natural places in such a fundamental way – roots are something that I admire, but aren’t really part of my life right now.
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I know strip mines from seeing them in central PA, but if that seems like a blight, a mining technique called mountain top removal (MTR) seems even more devastating. Some folks from Mountain Justice Summer were tabling at the show in Asheville and they had some photos and information about MTR. Besides just destroying the beauty of the mountains and problems with erosion and contamination from mining by-products, someone told me a story that really drove home, for me, how extreme an environmental impact MTR can have. One Appalachian town suffered their first tornado after the mountains that had traditionally shielded the town had been lowered due to MTR. Mountain Justice Summer is mobilizing to connect with communities impacted by MTR, halt MTR in places where its happening, and to stop it from being employed in places where it isn’t yet a practice. Some actions have already happened, and they’re gearing up for broader actions later in the summer. The website for Mountain Justice Summer is mountainjusticesummer.org .