Featured Music:
[Music]
In August of 2019, my brother Sam got married.
When he called me and asked me to be his best man the year before, I remember joking with him that I would use my speech as an opportunity to talk about this rash I’ve been having, or to go on a rant about how I thought 9/11 was an inside job--which I don’t, by the way. It was a joke; that was the point. But I remember Sam getting real quiet on the phone, and saying, [pause music] “Will, you’d better not do that. Please don’t make me regret this.”
[Resume music]
Sam seemed to think that I might not be kidding, that I might actually use my platform as his best man on one of the most important days of his life to humiliate and embarrass him. And I think that highlights a key difference about us: Sam is super serious. And I’m not. Not at all. In fact, I consider myself a real goofball. And that might surprise some people, especially because there is a lot about us that is the same. After all, we’re twins. Identical twins.
So on the day of my brother’s wedding, I didn’t humiliate him--or at least not intentionally. But I did open with a joke. And before I play this for you, I just want to mention one key bit of information for you about my brother’s wedding: my brother’s bride, Jimil, who is now my brother’s wife and my sister-in-law, is also a twin. An identical twin.
[Play audio from 5.31]
[V/O] My brother paid a videographer to document his wedding, which is the only reason I have audio of this. In addition to asking me to be his best man, my brother also asked me to be the MC, so I had to introduce the speakers, make announcements, that sort of thing. I started off by making a few announcements--that folks should be mindful of the wind, to hold onto their champagne until the last toast, to thank Jimil’s dad for raising, slaughtering, and preparing the lamb we were enjoying, for example. I also reminded everyone to tip their bartenders, which I’m really glad I did, because it scored me some free drinks for the remainder of the evening. Anyway, I gave my toast after Yila, Jimil’s twin sister.
The wedding was at a mountain resort called Bogus Basin in Boise, Idaho, where Jimil and Yila grew up. If it sounds like I’m out of breath, it’s partly because we were something like 2 miles above sea level. Picture a warm August afternoon in a giant tent set up on a concrete, which, during other parts of the year, are tennis courts. Also, if it sounds like I’m nervous, it’s because I was.
[Play audio to 8:12 - “Nothin weird about this…”]
The toast goes on. By the way, I should really credit my pal Pete Smith for help with that joke. And why did I ask my friends for help writing this speech? Remember the part where I said that Sam wasn’t able to be the best man at my wedding? [replay clip] Well, that’s because my wife and I decided to elope. It’s kind of a long story, but the punchline is that we got married in 2013 and didn’t tell either one of my brothers or my parents--who were actually out of the country at the time--until after the fact. Oh, and then we did it again in LA for New Year’s a few months later. That’s right; we got married--twice--and somehow I neglected--or forgot--to invite my family both times. We had always said we were going to elope, then do a West coast wedding, and then at some point, an East coast wedding--and we did steps 1 and 2, but we never got around to step three. Needless to say, this was a deep affront for my brother. He felt betrayed. How could I get married and not tell him? I’m still not sure I know the answer. The point is, I asked for help writing this toast because I saw it as a chance to redeem myself--to once and for all make up for the fact that I had neglected to bestow this honor upon my brother--my twin brother. I felt I was under an enormous amount of pressure. So I reached out.
The truth is, I was devastated that my brother felt like I had excluded him from my own marriage ceremony. Aren’t twins supposed to tell each other everything? Aren’t they supposed to know what’s going on with one another without even needing to say it? What about twin language? Did we learn nothing from all those Cheech and Chong movies? So why didn’t I tell him? Or maybe the question is: why couldn’t I tell he would get so upset?
Another thing I mentioned in my toast is that I wanted to dispel some myths about twins--and I do. If you’re a twin, you are probably tired of explaining to people that no, when my twin gets hurt, I can’t feel it. And no, we don’t have some secret language that only we can understand. (My parents like to tell a story about how one time, when my brother and I were still too young to walk, they put us to bed one night in separate cribs on opposite sides of the room, only to find us in the morning in the same crib. I think this could be due to any number of things that my parents probably should have been more concerned about than a cute and inexplicable story--something like a potential break-in or an attempted kidnapping.) Finally, no, we don’t function as stand-ins when we can’t be two places at once. I don’t fill in at the important business meeting so that my brother can still be at his anniversary dinner without letting on to either his wife or his boss that he accidentally overbooked himself. This isn’t a sitcom, and we’re not clones.
Here are a few cold hard facts about twins. Identical twin pregnancies occur about 0.45 percent of the time. 1 in every 250 births is an identical twin (or maybe it’s more accurate to say about 2 out of every 500 births are twins). Identical twins occur when the egg splits after it is fertilized. Identical twins sometimes have the same genetics, but not always. (I’ve often wondered if my brother could frame me for grand theft auto by leaving a drop of his blood inside of a stolen car. When my daughter was born, I found out I’m a carrier for cystic fibrosis. I assume this means he is too, but I can’t be sure unless he gets genetic testing). Identical twins never have the same fingerprints (which means I can’t unlock his iphone and I’ll have to figure out another way to frame him for grand larceny. I’m kidding. [pause music] My brother doesn’t have an iphone.) Apparently, about 40% of twins actually do develop some kind of autonomous language--so I guess I lied earlier.
You might know about the Mowry twins (child stars of Sister Sister), the Olsen twins (child stars of Full House), the Bush sisters, the Winklevoss twins, but did you know that Jon Heder (aka Napoleon Dynamite) also has an identical twin brother? Elvis had a twin brother who died at birth. Apparently, it haunted him.
Fraternal twins are dyzigotic, (which means they are less interesting). But really, dyzigotic meaning they occur when two separate eggs are fertilized. Sometimes this is because more than one egg has been released, which is common in women who have hyperovulation, which can be genetic. So like diarrhea, twins can run in your genes.
Vin Diesel, Alanis Morrissette, Isabella Rossellini, Ashton Kutcher, Kiefer Sutherland, Scarlett Johannsen all have fraternal twin siblings.
But still, isn’t there still something kind of weird about twins? [play clip from game of thrones] Jamie and Circe Lannister from Game of Thrones certainly haven’t helped make twins seem less weird in popular culture (hashtag twincest). When I was 10, my family moved to a house in the suburbs of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. I spent my fifth grade year in a very small elementary school of about 200 students. In my fifth grade class alone, there were five sets of twins. One of them--let’s call them the Williams brothers--were identical twins who still wore the same thing to school every day. They had the same backpacks, the same bikes, the same shoes, and the same outfit, every day. They even had the same initials: Mark and Matt. I know that the parents are likely at fault when something like that happens. I have seen old photos of my brother and me dressed in the same outfit. But in fifth grade?
At my brother’s wedding, I wanted to joke about how twins are weird. And some twins are weird. The chance of giving birth to identical twins might be 2 in 500, but what are the chances of two identical twins marrying one another? And what are the chances of those twins having twins? I don’t know, but I’m sure they’re astronomical.
Nevertheless, it happens.
In August of 1998, Craig and Mark Sanders attended the annual Twins Day Festival held every summer in Twinsburg Ohio. I love how the article by Scott Stump from 2013 puts this: “Mark Sanders had just experienced love at first sight at a twins convention in Twinsburg, Ohio, when his first thought was that he better go find his identical twin brother.” When people say that twins are weird, I think they are talking about this kind of co-dependence. Mark met and fell in love with Darlene Nettemeier, and then introduced his brother Craig to her sister, Diane Nettemeier. The brothers proposed on the same day, and married the Nettemeier twins the following year. Then, in 2001, Diane gave birth to identical twin boys, Colby and Brady.
In the months leading up to their wedding, I sent my soon-to-be sister-in-law articles about the Sanders twins and the Twins Day Festival. I would remind her to keep the weekend of the Twins Day Festival open, because we were going. “Tell Yila,” her sister, I said. Of course, I was not serious. Again, I’m the goofball here, the joker. To clarify, I don’t think my brother’s relationship with Jimil is “weird” or too co-dependent; I actually don’t think the fact that they are twins has anything to do with their relationship. They didn’t meet in Twinsburg Ohio, and I didn’t introduce them. I don’t think of either one of them as co-dependent people. But I also can’t help wondering if that is part of what brought them together. Were they drawn to one another because in some way, they thought, here’s a twin who can stand in for, supplement, or maybe replace my relationship with my twin sibling?
By the way, this is also a question I could be asking of myself as well. While I didn’t marry a twin, my first “girlfriend,” who was also maybe my first kiss, in middle school was a fraternal twin. At the time, I didn’t think twice about whether or not that was strange or was symptomatic of co-dependence. But now it has me wondering.
Today, I’m also less sure that I’m kidding when I say that I want to go to the Twins Day Festival in Twinsburg Ohio. Apparently, twins meeting their twin spouses is not an uncommon occurrence. In August, 2017, identical twins Brittany and Briana Deane met identical twins Josh and Jeremy Salyers (a lot of alliteration with these names, you’ll notice) at the Twins Day Festival. A year later, the two couples married one another at the same event where they met.
So why does this happen? Are twins more co-dependent than other pairs of siblings? Was twinship a factor of any consequence in my brother’s courtship with his wife?
These are all interesting questions, and I would like to get to the bottom of them. But answering these questions is not really my goal with this podcast. Instead, I want to tell you a story that isn’t really mine to tell. It’s a story about my brother that I know my brother could do a better job telling. In fact, it’s a story he’s already told, and has been telling for years now. The trouble is that you haven’t been listening. This is a story about the one moment in my life when I found myself unable to handle being a twin. It’s a moment I’m still reeling from, and a moment I know he is haunted by. But it’s also the moment where I think my twin brother and I finally set off on different paths to become our own people--me, a goofball father who has trouble taking anything too seriously, and him, a serious artist. It’s the story of how my brother and I came to be different people to the point where one of us wants to visit Twinsburg Ohio in August, and the other doesn’t.
My name is Will Steffen. Welcome to Someone Else’s Blues, a podcast about twins, twinship, and the best singer-songwriter you’ve never heard of.
Steven Wright - Wicker Chairs and Gravity 5/7 - 1:00 mark
One of my favorite stand-up comedians, Steven Wright, has this joke:
[audio]“When I have a kid, I want to put him in one of those strollers for twins, then run around the mall looking frantic.” ~Steven Wright
It’s great deadpan humor, classic Steven Wright. But it’s also funny to me because it simulates a loss I don’t think I’m quite capable of imagining.
My brother Sam and I were never really separated until he went off to college. In our junior year of high school, our dad took us to look at some colleges in New England. I was not particularly excited about going to college; I had read a few too many George Orwell novels which had romanticized a working-class lifestyle it turns out I really knew nothing about, so I was more excited to get a job after high school than to try to get into college. But my dad wanted to show us some “alternative” kinds of schools, so he drove us up the New York Thruway to visit Bard College in Annandale on Hudson. From there, we jumped onto the Mass Pike to visit Hampshire College in Amherst.
To make a long story short, Sam got into Bard on an early admission decision, and I got into Hampshire, but decided to defer for a year so that I could get a job to see what the real world was like for a while--or at least what it was like from my cozy room in my parents’ house, who didn’t charge me rent. I actually applied to Bard as well, but I like to think the fact that Sam had already decided to go there influenced my decision to go and do something else for once. (Or maybe it was the fact that our tour of Hampshire just happened to coincide with Danny DeVito and Rhea Pearlman’s visit with their son. That definitely made my decision easier).
[Henry the VIII plays]
I first met Bill Cranshaw when I went to pick my brother up to bring him home from his first year of college in May of 2007. I would get to know him much better when, in April of 2008, Sam and Bill, along with their friends Paul and Anneka rode their bikes from Bard across the Berkshires to come visit me at Hampshire. To be more precise, I should say that Sam was visiting me, but Bill was visiting his brother, whose name was also Sam, and who also attended Hampshire. To recap, I, Will, was attending Hampshire with Bill’s brother Sam, while my brother Sam was attending Bard with Sam’s brother Bill, which is close enough to Will. Sam and Bill were not twins; Sam Cranshaw was a few years older than Bill and Sam and me--and he was a really interesting person. He was an avid skateboarder, and had figured out a way to make skateboarding part of his senior project. Sam and Bill’s parents, Sue and Whitney Cranshaw, had also attended Hampshire back when it was founded. I think they were part of the first class of the early 1970s; Sue told me she worked in the bookstore with Ken Burns. I think Sam Cranshaw claimed to be the first second-generation Hampshire student whose parents had both attended, but I’m not sure how he could have verified that.
I’m not trying to say that this happened deliberately, but in hindsight, does it not seem strange that my brother Sam would gravitate towards, and eventually become the closest of friends with, a kid named Bill, or Will if you will, whose brother Sam attended the same school as his twin brother, Will? I know this isn’t the same thing as marrying a twin, but is this co-dependence losing its training wheels?
That bike trip from Bard to Hampshire was the first of many trips among my brother’s group of friends. After graduating from Bard, my brother actually came to Amherst and lived near me for a while. He got a job working at a warehouse. We went out to breakfast a lot during those months, the way we used to when we had paper routes back in Bethlehem, and spent most of our earnings in diners on Friday and Wednesday mornings. Sam found the time to run the Hartford Marathon one weekend, even though he didn’t really find the time to train for it. (He told me the most he did to train for it was to go on a 7-mile run one Saturday when he wasn’t working). But Sam was just biding his time. He was working and saving his money.
In the spring of 2011, Sam moved his stuff back to Bethlehem with our parents. Then he flew out to Orange County, California, to meet up with his friends Paul, Bill, and Hanna to embark on a cross-country bike trip. They made it as far as Circe, Arkansas.
I should probably mention that the other thing Sam started doing around the time he graduated from college was writing music. He sent me a tape during my last semester of college, and I was rather impressed with his songwriting. That was the first time I heard the song, “Someone Else’s Blues,” which is a song about being a twin.
[play verse]I remember being extremely impressed and maybe even a little bit jealous at what I was hearing. I think I always thought that writing music shouldn’t be that hard, especially if I knew how to play an instrument, which I did--the piano. But not well. [can you still play piano with an old worn out guitar]. But I never took the time to learn how to play the guitar--at least not until after my daughter was born. And at some point, I think anxiety set in, the way I imagine it sometimes can with siblings, and probably always does with twins. At a certain point I was crippled by the anxiety of influence, so I just stopped trying. Writing--and writing music--was Sam’s thing. I would have to figure something else out.
>Woody Allen: Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach. Those who can’t teach, teach gym.
I actually would eventually become a teacher. But I feel like most of what I have learned, I have learned from Sam.
[return to audio of toast - stop at : fall apart]A few days before I graduated from college, I was eating with some friends at a burger place in Northampton, Massachusetts, when I got a call from my mom. Normally, I wouldn’t answer the phone if I was out, but I had missed a call from her earlier, so I picked it up. She told me she had gotten some sad news from Sam on the bike trip. I walked outside with my phone, and she told me that Bill had been hit by a car. “He didn’t make it,” she said. Those were the same words Sam said to me when I called him later that night, trying to find out what had happened, and how he was doing. “He didn’t make it."
I knew Sam was going to miss my college graduation, but now it wasn’t going to be because he was seeing the country, it was going to be because he was busy planning a memorial service. So, as soon as I was finished graduating from college, I drove with my parents the hundred miles to Bard to attend the memorial service for Bill Cranshaw, to be held on the following day.
I remember that I didn’t see my brother until later in the evening the night I arrived. He was standing in his friend’s apartment, surrounded by friends who were all drinking beer and making paper cranes. Some were laughing, some were crying. After I hugged my brother, someone put a beer in my hand, and someone else shoved some paper into my other, and insisted I start folding into the shape of an animal.
I remember spending that night with my brother in a gigantic chicken coop on a property belonging to someone he knew in Tivoli, which had been converted into a kind of apartment with a few beds. I remember him telling me that he hadn’t gotten much sleep in the last week since the accident, and that he was so tired of crying that he just couldn’t cry anymore. He also told me that Bill’s parents and brother were going to arrive the following morning from Colorado.
When we woke up the next morning, Sam had to run off on an errand to get ready for the service later that day. He told me I should walk into Tivoli and try to grab a donut from the bakery, and that we would meet up later.
Tivoli, New York, is very tiny. It has a fancy hotel restaurant, a bakery, a pizza shop, a laundromat, and that’s about it. As I was leaving the bakery, I saw Bill’s mom, dad, and brother walking down the street towards me. They had just arrived from the airport. I recognized them immediately. I had only met Bill’s parents once before at Sam’s graduation the year before, but I remember that I had pressed them for stories of what Hampshire was like in the early days.
Twins get used to being mistaken for one another. You also get used to having people embarrass themselves the first time they meet the other sibling, and can finally make a comparison up close. Our own mother calls us by the wrong name every now and then. In my toast at my brother’s wedding, I wasn’t kidding when I said that people had been coming up to me all weekend and congratulating me. There were a lot of plus-ones at the wedding who had neve met Sam, and who just assumed I was him. I remember letting one guy get pretty confused before I corrected him--he saw me playing with my two-year old son and started asking me questions about whether this was my second marriage already. No, friend. I’m the groom’s twin brother. If you’re a twin, you get used to this sort of thing.
But I don’t think I was ready for the way Bill’s mom greeted me. When I got close enough to her on that vacant Tivoli sidewalk on that foggy, cool May morning, Sue, Bill’s mom, opened her arms and grabbed me. “Oh, Sam!” she whimpered. As I held her, I could feel her body get heavier with each sob. And I slowly realized the weight I was bearing. Normally, when people mistake me for my brother, I’m pretty quick to correct them and laugh it off. But I couldn’t move. Sue had identified me. “Oh Sam.”
This is the moment that has haunted me. It’s when I realized, wow, I’m really not my brother. It’s when I realized I don’t think I can handle the responsibility of being my brother. Because this was a tremendous weight. I remember thinking that Sam’s reunion with Sue and Whitney had to be special. I don’t know who had called them to tell them that their son was dead, but I think Sam had spoken with them at some point to tell them his version of what had happened. And now, I had interrupted the sanctity of that reunion, simply by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I felt like I had deceived Bill’s mom by wearing my brother’s face, posture, and gait on the morning of her son’s funeral. I remember thinking that Sue deserved to hug my brother, who had been there with her son when he died, who had shared in her loss for the way he had been unable to do anything to save him.
In the time I have had to reflect on that moment, it has also occurred to me that maybe Sue hadn’t mistaken me at all, but that maybe she couldn’t bring herself to call me by my name--because I bore the name of her dead son. Or maybe she had been busy consoling her other son over the past several days, and had just gotten used to saying, “Oh, Sam!” It’s not her fault that she named her sons Bill and Sam.
I didn’t know what it was like to be too tired to cry. And I couldn’t stop crying as my brother read his eulogy for Bill later that afternoon. I remember thinking that my twin brother had suddenly grown old, become in an instant decades my senior. I remember thinking that we weren’t twins anymore, that something had happened here that was irreparable. I also remember thinking that it just as easily could have been Sam who had been killed.
Did you catch that?
“Like you, I only wanted someone that I could save. So that if I am nothing but a coward now, and you may not believe this, and you do not have to, it is only because I was once much too brave.”
As I mentioned in my toast, I try to go and hear my brother play music whenever I can. It’s not often; I live and work in Western Massachusetts, and my brother lives and works in Philadelphia. And even if I don’t always get to sit up front, I do think there is something about hearing him live that doesn’t always translate well on recording. I wasn’t able to make it to the show where Sam first performed this song, which might be somewhat pretentiously titled, “A Brief Reflection Upon My Life to Date.” For all I know, this is the only time he ever performed this song. (And that’s the thing about being a prolific songwriter; Sam is always writing new music, so I often don’t get to see him perform some of my favorite songs more than once, because he’s always got new songs ready to go.) The song feels a bit like a journal entry. There is no catchy refrain, no sparkling melody; it’s just the same three cords strummed over and over again against a desultory reflection. But this is one of my favorite songs by my brother because of that line. Once, I was much too brave. You expect a brag--you may not believe this, and you do not have to--and then he punches you in the gut with that. Once, I was much too brave.
Stop music [He was a friend of mine]In the months following Bill’s memorial service, Sam moved back home to Bethlehem for a while, then he moved to Nashville--no, not to make it big as a musician, though I don’t think the move hurt him any in that department--but to attend a graduate program at Vanderbilt Divinity School. I spent the rest of the summer in Western Mass, and then started a graduate program of my own at Umass Amherst. But during those months, every now and then my brother would send me a handwritten letter and a burned CD of some of his songs. The recordings were often pretty crude--laden with white noise. I couldn’t tell if that was deliberate on his part--maybe trying to imitate the hastily-made recordings of Woody Guthrie. Or maybe he was just using some primitive equipment. In a lot of my brother’s songs from that period, I don’t get the sense that he really wanted his audience to think of him as a good singer. Sometimes, I felt like I was his audience--that his music wouldn’t make sense to anyone else but me or those who were there at Bill’s funeral.
I don’t know what it’s like to be much too brave. I don’t know what it’s like to watch your best friend--who wasn’t doing anything wrong, by the way, who was in the shoulder, wearing his helmet, minding the traffic, watching his speed--suddenly get hit by a car. I don’t know what it’s like to try to find the courage to attempt CPR without really knowing how it’s done. I don’t even know what it’s like to have to wait for an ambulance, or to have to read the faces of the EMTs who can tell when someone is revivable, and when they’re not. I don’t know what it’s like to lose a brother, a son, or even a best friend.
But I felt like a lot of the songs my brother sent me during that period were an attempt to convey what it was like. Some of them may have even told me that the Sam I had said goodbye to had left with Bill and had never come back.
Take, for instance, Right Where We Left Off, a song that breaks my heart every time I listen to it. Sam made a cleaner recording of this song, but the original recording he sent me, which sounds like it was recorded on a disintegrating tape. For a long time, I couldn’t listen to this song without crying. It’s the only song of my brother’s that seems to address Bill directly. But it also reminds me that my brother and I were once able to pick up right where we left off, something it has become increasingly difficult to do.
Bill figures prominently in some of Sam’s songs. Like “Say When,” a song whose title always reminds me of how my dad used to pour milk on my cereal when I was too young to do it myself, and would ask us to “Say when.” Instead of saying “stop,” we always just said, “When.” And in a way, that is what it’s about; say when once you’ve had enough. And even though he keeps saying when, he doesn’t get to control his trauma or decide when his grief is through with him.
[he was my friend]Bill definitely seems like one of the geese in “Two Geese,” whose only purpose is to remind the narrator of an unnamed “you.” [Intro to song] Something ‘bout the way those two geese flew, reminded me of you. [perhaps it was the way they stayed in stride] or [I got to my legs...]
And then at other times, Bill makes a much more subtle appearance in Sam’s music. Take, In No Hurry Now, a song about taking it easy when things seem like they’re getting out of hand. [I had a best friends he had a crash].
[Shakespeare toast?]At Sam’s wedding, Jimil’s half-brother West came up to me after my toast and asked me what I was talking about when I referenced May 2011 in my speech. (Sue, Whitney, and Sam were there for my toast; they had made it to the wedding. Whitney, who’s an entomologist, actually caused a traffic jam on his way up the one narrow road that climbs the mountain to the Bogus Basin resort. He pulled over--thought apparently not far enough for traffic to pass--to get a look at a rare beetle. This is considered normal behavior for Whitney, even for a wedding.) And as I explained everything to West, I found myself wondering how other people listen to Sam’s music who don’t know his story.
Part of me feels like I’m breaking a rule by sharing this with you--that I’m talking over the music, shouting its meaning at you instead of letting the artist speak for himself, or the artwork speak for itself. I get that it sounds like I’m committing a cardinal sin for an English professor, who’s supposed to know that the author is dead and all that. But I’m also trying to explain what it is like to be a twin, and to watch your twin experience something traumatic that you can’t, for once, share. Sam has communicated his trauma to me and to others through his music. I, on the other hand, have not been good at reciprocating or communicating my sympathy and my empathy to my brother over the years. In graduate school, my habit of writing to my brother fell to the wayside, and getting married without telling him didn’t really help to make things any better. I have, however, made use of other aspects of our supposed twin language. As I explained in my toast, I have had a habit of imitating Sam over the years; I think this is something twins do. They find their individuality, their independence, their solitude in one another.
Two years after Sam started his graduate program in Nashville, he received his MA from Vanderbilt Divinity School. Our entire family went to his graduation ceremony, and Sam received an MTS--a Master’s in Theological Studies, a degree only slightly less useless than a Master’s in English. When my family and girlfriend (who would eventually become my wife) attended his graduation, we got to meet a lot of his friends and see how his music had only been nourished by his time in Nashville. And then, two days after I got back to Western Mass from Nashville, I found myself imitating my brother again. No, I didn’t start writing music. Instead, I loaded up my bike with my friend Bob, and set out on a bike trip half-way across the country. When I was in Nashville, I knew I had to be home in time for our departure date, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell my brother. I couldn’t bring myself to tell my family. I just didn’t want them to worry or to give me some speech about how I didn’t know what could happen out there. I knew what could happen. That was the point. So without saying a word to my brother, I hopped on my bike and started riding.
So what happened on my bike trip?
Next time, on Someone Else’s Blues.
Someone Else’s Blues is a podcast written, produced, and edited by Will Steffen. Music, of course, by Sam Steffen.
By the way, if you like the music you have been hearing on this podcast, you can hear more at samsteffen.bandcamp.com. That’s SAMSTEFFEN.bandcamp.com.
Featured Music:
[Music]
SOMEONE ELSE’S BLUES: A PODCAST by Will Steffen EPISODE 2: “Death Was Out Riding His Horse In The Desert…” (Click here ——> xxxxx To Listen) Featured Music: “Makin’ It Up” “The Restless Wanderer’s Lullaby” - Album: Sam Steffen “Someone Else’s Blues” - Album: Someone Else’s Blues“ I Ain’t Even Had My Coffee Yet” - Album: Words, Words, Words “Hell of a Day I’m Havin’” Album: Since You Been Gone “Only Human” - Album: Only Human “The Ballad of William Tell” “Stuck” - Album: Wet Match “Since You Left (Ain’t Nothin’ Been the Same)” - Album: Since You Been Gone Episode 2: Death was out riding his horse in the desert On the last episode of Someone Else’s Blues, I introduced you to my twin brother Sam. I told you about Bill Crenshaw, Sam’s best friend from college, who died tragically while riding his bike across the country with my brother and their friends. I told you about how Bill’s mom briefly and accidentally mistook me for my brother at her son’s memorial service, and how it forever changed the way I would see my brother and think about our relationship. I also told you about how Sam started writing music to heal from his loss, and to remember his friend. I told you about how I hurt my brother (without meaning to), and then how I tried to redeem myself at his wedding, where he married another identical twin. And I told you how, almost exactly two years after Bill was killed, I started out on a cross country bike journey of my own. [Music stops] Whenever I hear people say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, I always want to tell them how Webster’s dictionary defines cliche. I don’t like to think of myself as a copycat, but I also think that being a twin has turned my entire identity into a gimmick: just do what Sam does. But don’t do it in front of Sam. Do it in front of other people. Do it in front of people who don’t know Sam, or who don’t know you’re a twin. When I was in college, I started writing letters in longhand to some of my friends because this was something I noticed Sam doing with his friends, and something Sam and I had been doing for a while. It was a difficult habit to maintain, and I never felt like I was really saying what I wanted to say--which was maybe that I was pretending to be interested in something that I wasn’t, or that I was trying to appear like a disciplined and tortured intellectual, who was so tormented by the technological innovations of the modern world that he could hardly bear to drive in a car or to own fewer than three manual typewriters. Today, I think of that torment as “privilege,” and I usually just call these people hipsters. More times than not, my writing of letters to friends actually got me in a good bit of trouble and may have even cost me a friend or two. I think in longhand, intimacy is easy to mistake for, well, intimacy, when a brief hello is all that was ever due. My mistake was thinking that I could talk to other people the way I could talk to my brother. There were a number of things I imitated about my brother in high school. (Mind you, there were some things I wasn’t brave enough to do, either). [Bong sound effect?] I jumped off a bridge into the Lehigh river one time, but only because Sam did it first. I started swimming in the Monacacy creek too, following Sam’s example. The Monacacy is a sad, shallow, and probably carcinogenic body of water that runs through downtown Bethlehem. I started running cross country. Sometimes, instead of going for an eight-mile run, we would just run a half-mile down the Monacacy and jump in. Or have a snowball fight if it was cold. One time, we jumped into the Monocacy in January, and then spent the afternoon running around like wild people trying to get ourselves warm until our mom came and picked us up, looking disappointed and embarrassed. I eventually quit cross country--but only because Sam did first. I started getting interested in poetry and fiction, largely because Sam did. I also remember that I started reading Shakespeare--outside of class, mind you--because my brother took a lead role in the Shakespeare club. By the way, in September of 2018, I earned my doctorate. My dissertation was called, “Globalizing Nature on the Shakespearean Stage.” So yeah, I kept reading Shakespeare. As a twin, I’m not sure if you’re ever really free from the curse of imitation. I like to think I did these things that my brother did not because my brother did them, but because I wanted to do them, because I was interested in them. But then again, I like riding my bike because I grew up doing that with my brother. I enjoyed running a lot more when I was younger, before I had this sick dad-bod--but maybe it’s because I was running through a construction site or across a private golf course with my brother, trying to make trouble as quickly as I could avoid it. I like to think I wanted to ride my bike across the country just because I wanted to, but I can’t let go of the idea that I needed to do it because Sam did it first... Or tried to. [1. What did we have with us?; gear, journaling, raingear: Start w/ Will: “Do you remember a list of things we had with us?...Start w/ Bob: “I felt like I did a lot of thinking and planning, but then when it came time to leave, I just threw some stuff together…”; “I remember you were always writing in that journal, which I appreciate, because that journal is phenomenal to read…”] I did keep a journal of our journey together, but again, I think it was only because I had heard a rumor that my brother had documented his travels first, even though I had not read his journal at that point. But while he was on the road, I remember imagining him sleeplessly documenting the lightest breeze, or perhaps the briefest encounter with a stranger, while his companions slept, recharging their batteries. In looking back over my journal documenting the adventure I had during the summer of 2013 with my friend Bob, I think it is clear that I had one central question in mind on our trip: why are we doing this? On Wednesday, May 15, 2013, my pal Bob Gruber and I set out on our bikes from our apartment on Cherry Street in Northampton, Massachusetts. On Saturday, June 1, 2013, we arrived at our destination in Appleton, Wisconsin, the place Bob called home, a distance of more than 1,100 miles. From there, I would fly off to LA to live with my girlfriend, Anna--who is now my wife--for the remainder of the summer. And in a few weeks, Bob would fly right back to Western Massachusetts, where he had a summer job waiting for him. So why did we do it? Why do this, knowing what could go wrong? Knowing that almost everything was at stake? [Intro music] My name is Will Steffen. Welcome to Someone Else’s Blues, a podcast about twins, twinship, and the best singer-songwriter you’ve never heard of. Part 2: Death Was Out Riding His Horse In The Desert Imitation is one answer to the question, why go on a long-distance bike trip?--it’s a simple answer. A convenient answer. But another answer is that it really gave me a chance to get to know my travelling companion, Bob Gruber. Bob and I had been roommates for about a year when we set off, but I learned things about Bob on the road that I never would have learned simply sharing a bathroom and a kitchen with him. I first met Bob at a UMass Graduate Student Mixer at a bar in Amherst Massachusetts. The whole point was that you were supposed to meet other graduate students in other programs. It was our first week as grad students, and we were both feeling pretty intimidated. But I don’t think I have ever made such a good friend so fast. Bob was getting started on his PhD coursework in Philosophy; I was studying English (with a concentration on the early modern stage). [play audio - it was kind of like a first date; I laughed when I heard your name was Bob. Start with Bob: “Yeah I don’t remember going anywhere afterwards…” play to end of clip] [Intro music/ Bob’s Theme: I ain’t even had my coffee yet/ Hell of a Day I’m Having] On our bike trip, I tried to keep track of all the weird things I was discovering about this person that I thought I already knew. On the third day of our trip, Bob was asking Jeff--our warmshowers host in Schenectady, New York--what it was like to be an engineer. Bob said, “Engineering, huh? You know, I took a couple of engineering courses in college. And then I thought, ‘This is way too practical for me. I think I’m gonna stick with philosophy.’” At the time, I found this funny because I thought that bicycling across the country was perhaps one of the least practical things I could think of doing. “I am still struggling to articulate just why it is I am out here,” I wrote in my journal. “Tonight, in Ilion, New York. I think love has something to do with it—for Bob, for Anna, for my brothers, and even for my parents. But what the hell is practical about love? There is a thing full of design flaws. When Bob and I reached Ilion, New York, we stayed with his aunt Mary-Alice and uncle Bill. Mary-Alice used to teach elementary school, and she is the one who told me about something called “the Gruber curse,” where members of the Gruber family cannot let something be if it is just a little to the side, or a little off the mark. As Bob’s dad David would later explain it to me, “There are only two ways to do something. There’s the wrong way, and then there’s the Gruber way.” “I guess I haven’t noticed this curse being manifested in Bob,” I wrote that night in Ilion, “but I also didn’t know such a curse existed.” The next day, outside of a place called Rome, New York, I learned what Mary-Alice was talking about. Here’s what I wrote the following night: We got two flats today. Well, four. Well, Bob got two, which means that he is averaging—or we are averaging?—one a day. The first was on our way into Rome, where all roads lead. A piece of glass had lodged itself in Bob’s tire, and punctured the tube. Bob’s tires, it seems, are a regular vacuum for glass shards. My tires are bald. I’m not sure any of our tires will last the trip. Anyway, Bob patched the tube while I removed glass from his tire. Then he pumped it up with his handy hand pump. “That’s full. That’ll do,” I told Bob. “I don’t want it to just do. I want it to be a good tire.” He pumped the tire a few more times. “That feels pretty rigid.” “One more ought to do it,” he said. With one more pump, Bob ripped the pump nozzle off, and tore the pin clean out of the valve, losing all of the air, and rendering the tube useless. So he wasted a patch, and used his last spare tube. [Play first verse of “Ain’t even had my coffee yet”] In Erie, Pennsylvania, I remember admiring Bob for burning a map that our host in Buffalo New York had given to us: We stopped at a grocery store for Gatorade and poptarts, I wrote. We then found the Blasco Memorial Library right on the lakefront in Erie, where we used the facilities, checked googlemaps, and even glanced at what maps were available to us there. We were without a map. Last night, in his effort to start what turned out to be a very comforting fire, Bob burned the map of New York that Cliff had given to us. I admire him greatly for being able to distance himself from what he has only had to pass through to get where he is now—to do away with the tools which have gotten him where he is. Wouldn’t these pages do just as well in the fire as they would keeping my ink dry for me? [Pause] One of my favorite versions of Bob came out on day 12. We were in Fremont, Indiana. It was Sunday, May 26, 2013, the day before Memorial Day; we were trying to secure a campground on the eve of Memorial day, when everybody and their mother was out camping. As we hunted for a place to spend the night, a version of Bob reared its head which I’m not sure I had ever seen before, or since. It was Bob frustrated. Bob, interrupted. But it was also charming because of how agreeable he is, even when miffed: Camp Pokagan was full, I wrote. We biked six or seven miles out of Angola to a campsite that was full. The woman at the office gave us some alternatives. We each called a few. Bob told a woman at a site eight or nine miles back in Angola that we would be there by 8pm. Bob also wanted to go camp on the sly in the state park. I wanted to rest, but I did not want to backtrack either. I called a few places too, and found one a few more miles down the road. After beer and pizza, I certainly didn’t want to do any more biking, but the farther we went tonight, the less we would have to travel tomorrow, and I have a century planned for tomorrow. Eventually, Bob agreed to accompany me to a Jellystone resort three or four miles down the road. It took a lot of convincing, though. Bob is quite principled when it comes to camping. “My dad always says, ‘Never camp for more than thirty dollars. And don’t ever go to one of those Jellystone places.’ How much is it, anyway?” The woman on the phone had told me $49 for the night. “Fifty? No. No way. That’s like a new videogame. That’s Rollercoaster Tycoon Deluxe 3-D. Fifty bucks? That’s like a leatherbound copy of The Tempest with annotations from William Shakespeare himself!” As we biked to Jellystone, we kept our eyes open for a good free spot, but none presented itself. We even glanced longingly at the roof of a mini-mall, which was an idea I had proposed only half in jest. I know that Bob prefers to do what is legal over what is free, but he did seem brokenhearted about promising that woman at another campsite back in Angola that he and I were on our way to her. He called her back once we got to Jellystone; from the tone of his voice, I gathered that they would only ever be just friends, but even that did not seem likely anymore. Bob is making a fire now. He could have flirted with the girl at the registration counter a bit more, who seemed to swoon when he told her how far we had come. But he was too upset to notice, I think. Maybe it was how much we were paying. Maybe it was the phonecall. He barely noticed that she gave us a 10% discount for just travelling through; I am skeptical about whether such a discount actually exists. “I don’t care what the park is called,” Bob pouted, as we selected our campsite from the few left at the far end of the property, beyond the sea of Winnebegos and family campers, near the chain-link fence that was only a few feet from the highway. “I’m calling it Jellyville. It’s camping for the weak.” [audio of “BOb’s anxiety, Will’s anxiety, dangerous rides, Bill, Casey”; Start with: “I think you know this about me that I’m generally an optimist…”; “I was scared on that day…” “It’s so nice to know that you can bike through New York… (Insert New York reflections here!) “I never really worried for my safety, or that night I described with that tree” “I don’t know if you knew how anxious I was for a lot of that trip...I don’t even know if you told me about Bill… Will invited himself” END: “I didn’t want to do it alone.”] When we finished the trip I spent a few days in Appleton with Bob. I still don’t think I made the best impression on Bob’s parents, who are two of the nicest people I have ever met. I remember Bob’s dad handing me a beer in the driveway after we arrived. The next day, Bob’s mom invited us to come in and speak to her elementary school class about our trip, which they had been tracking on this map that they had hung up in their room. She had somehow attached a photo of us on our bikes to a popsicle stick, and she moved it Westward along the map each day that she was updated on our whereabouts. I remember feeling like a superhero walking into that classroom. Bob and I dressed in our bike shorts and wore our helmets to give us some credibility, and then we gave a little presentation on how to practice bike safety. We also fielded some hilarious questions from the students. One girl raised her hand and asked, “Were there any awkward silences?” Bob and I just laughed at her. Another student asked, “Where was the strangest place you brushed your teeth?” I had my answer prepared. “Movie theater drinking fountain.” Bob and I were pretty exhausted when we arrived in Appleton, and we were eager to relax. Somehow, I convinced Bob that we needed to rent all 5 of the Fast and the Furious movies from his video store and watch them all in quick succession. (I know right? There were still video stores in Appleton in 2013!) We had just seen the sixth one a few days before when we stayed with my friends Joe and Emma in New Buffalo, Michigan, but Bob didn’t understand how the Rock could have been the adversary in the last film if he was working with Dom and Brian in the sixth one. He didn’t understand the formula--that you have to be against the family before you can be part of the family; and he didn’t share my hope that, if Letty could come back, then maybe Han could too… But it’s true that Bob probably wasn’t aware of how anxious I was during our trip. On our first day, we rode 51 miles from Northampton MA to New Lebanon, just over the border in New York. It was a relatively brief day of riding, but riding in the Berkshires with all of our gear proved pretty exhausting. But I also had time to generate a more substantial journal entry during the first night. Here’s what I wrote: Today is Bob’s birthday. May 15. Tomorrow marks the two-year anniversary of the death of my friend Bill Cranshaw. On May 16, 2011, Bill was struck by a car and killed while riding his bike through Arkansas during a cross-country bike trip that he had begun forty-five days earlier in Irvine, CA, with three of his best friends from college, including my twin brother. Bill has been on my mind a great deal lately, as this day has been approaching. I have been reluctant to tell people of my plan to bike part of the way across the country with my roommate, Bob, for precisely this reason—that I am deeply suspicious of what lies waiting for each of us in the road. I have yet to tell my family that I have already hit the road because I am afraid of what their reaction will be—though I have every intention of emailing them before the day is through and confessing everything. I anticipate nothing but objections from my father, a reluctant support from my mother, and hilarious advice from my elder brother. From Sam, who is today in Santa Fe at a reunion with several of his friends from Bard who shared Bill’s friendship and its loss, I can imagine a warm, “Be careful,” as easily as I can imagine him advising me defiantly to turn around and go back. But I left this morning with a deep breath and an exhale that fostered the understanding that Death lies waiting for me in the road, though I do not know upon which turn or upon which day it shall be my misfortune to meet him. I left this morning knowing that Bill did not do a damn thing wrong—that he died on a beautiful day under a willow tree in a ditch on the side of the road somewhere in Arkansas. There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough hew them how we will. ...Tonight, we are staying with someone called Eli in a place named New Lebanon, New York. We found Eli through warmshowers.org, a wonderful online biking network which we shall be relying on heavily for the duration of our trip. Before unfolding the details of our journey today—which I am happy to say we have completed safely by midafternoon—I should like to attempt to compose a brief statement of purpose for why I am keeping such a detailed record of my travel with Bob, especially when my attempts to describe these events in my rude vernacular should perhaps prove meaningless to anyone who does not plan to take up a similar journey, following a similar route by the similar means of bicycling. And I should like to clarify that my purpose is multifold. Anna-Claire, my beloved girlfriend, is perhaps the primary reason for my putting down here what might otherwise pass as all things must. (I go on to explain how I planned to give my journal to Anna to make up for the many times I neglected to call her, either because of bad reception, or else because I simply didn’t want to talk on the phone).... Perhaps too, it is my intention to forge a closer relationship with my brother with this document. Sam does not write to me as often as he used to. There is no doubt in my mind that he departed on his cross-country bike trip one person, and came back another—just as there is no doubt in my mind that I left Northampton this morning one person, but shall return another. The degree to which I alter shall be determined in the road… [Music starts] One of my favorite songs by my brother, the eponymous track on his album, Only Human, starts with a verse about two men out riding in a desert when they are met suddenly by Death. [play first verse of Only Human] I’m not sure when Sam wrote this song--I only heard it for the first time a few years ago--but I feel like this verse captures the sentiment of what I was feeling out there in the road. The whole Oedipus-met-his-fate-on-the-path-he-took-to-avoid-it speech that I give to my students every semester when I teach Western World Literature. Every day that I woke up, I would ask myself, “Is this the day I’m gonna eat it? Or, Is this the day that I’m gonna have to call Bob’s parents?” When I saw the map that Bob’s mom had created for her kindergarten students, I remember thinking, “Thank God she didn’t have to tell these kids that one of us was dead.” And I remember realizing then that not everyone was thinking about this trip in the same way that I was. I mean, how could they? [audio- Jeff; Warmshowers hospitality, engagement is off; he was a phenomenal host; they were all excellent… Start: Bob: But perhaps most notable about this guy was his collection of empty hotsauce bottles… They were all excellent...] I made this recording with Bob on April 2, 2020 while I was visiting my parents in Bethlehem Pennsylvania. I was actually helping my dad out, who had just broken his hip a few days before. I figured a phone call was appropriate, since I couldn’t be sure when I would actually get to see Bob in person next. Starting a podcast is a great way to kill time in quarantine during the coronavirus. I asked Bob a few questions about our trip--about his favorite days of riding, his favorite hosts. Bob and I keep referring to our “hosts” because we took advantage of a wonderful online tool in the biking community--something I had learned about from my brother and his trip--called “warmshowers.” It’s basically a version of couch-surfer.com for cyclists who are touring. All of our warmshowers hosts--Eli in New Lebanon, Jeff in Schenectady, Jenny and Olin in Syracuse, Cliff in Buffalo, Dave and Mary in Wakeman, Ohio were active in the biking community. They had stories of their own to tell us about their tours, and food to give us, perhaps in remembrance of when they had dismounted, hungry and tired, at the hovel of a stranger who offered them something similar. Even Jack, our host in Perrysburg Ohio, who we never met, but who let us pitch a tent in his backyard anyway, was extremely hospitable in his absence. I don’t remember anyone telling us a story as tragic as the one that I carried with me of my brother’s ill-fated trip, and I don’t remember sharing it with anyone. But I remember being introduced, slowly, gradually, to a version of reality where a bike tour didn’t have to end in ruin. Jeff was our host in Schenectady, New York, on our second night of the trip. Here’s what I wrote about him: I should really give you a description of Jeff’s bike before introducing the man himself. He has a GT with a fancy speedometer on it. The most striking feature of his bike is the action figure he has tied to his brakelines at the helm of his ship. He told me it is a character from a sci-fi show—Galaxy Voyager? I can’t remember what the show was called, actually—whose epithet in the show is “the best travelling companion in the universe.” Right before we left the train station, Jeff found a Coke bottle cap on the ground with some sort of code written on the inside, which I guess can still be redeemed for points and prizes online. Anyway, Jeff picked it up and brushed it off. “Sweet,” he muttered, putting it into his pocket. Jeff is a civil engineer. I enjoyed listening to his narrative of the bikeway as we biked it; he is actually on of the bikeway patrollers—one of the people responsible for the bikeway, or at least the part that stretches through Schenectady. What a treat to hear all of the ins and outs of the bikeway’s ten-mile stretch from the train station to Jeff’s third story apartment in downtown Schenectady. He pointed out spelling errors—the “yeild” sign. He commented on every misplaced or pointless stop sign, the design flaw where you actually have to ride over the curb to cross the street because of a misplaced water grate. The ill-fashioned steep gravel hill with the sharp turns was the most helpful to learn about before experiencing. He also told us of where improvement was badly needed; he gave us the narrative of a crosswalk where someone was hit by a car and “eventually killed” a few years back because traffic speeds around a dangerous curve without warning of the impending bike crossing. “They eventually took him off life support. They definitely need some lights or something here.” At one point, we came to a downed tree limb. Jeff stopped and pulled out his pocket knife. He used his miniature saw to trim the branches. Eventually, we pulled it down and off to the side of the path. Jeff has hosted about sixteen people on warmshowers this year, including a pair last night bound for Niagra. To him, Bob and I are masochists, or westward-bound—riding into the headwind. To us, he is a godsend. Jeff’s apartment is perhaps what one would expect from a civil engineer—but what does that even mean? Star Trek and Simpsons DVD boxsets surround the livingroom. He offered Bob and me the futon, with sheets on it that had been used and not changed since the guests had stayed the night before. I think I will take a bed over a floor anytime. He also has a shelf dedicated to nothing but empty jars of salsa and hot sauce. I am afraid to ask him about it, and perhaps prefer the mystery. I would like to think his answer might be, “What? You don’t have a shelf of empty salsa and hot sauce jars? Pathetic.” On the following day, I continued: Last night for dinner, Jeff took us to Bombers, a burrito bar down the street from his apartment. Before we left, he grabbed a hot sauce bottle from one of his shelves. This one had hot sauce in it. “The secret to hot sauce,” he told us, “is that it ages. It ages well.” Jeff doesn’t open his hot sauces until a year after he buys them. After dinner, Jeff took us on a walking tour of the historic district of Schenectady; he carried that bottle of hot sauce with him the whole time. Jeff is extremely frustrated with a lot of the engineering of Schenectady; he pointed out several more design flaws to us—the superfluous traffic light facing the wrong way down a one-way street; the grate that fails to drain water properly on account of it is on the top of a hill. The thing I appreciated most about Jeff was that he was able to show us the world through his eyes. A tour of historical Schenectady for him is more about why the city requires more signs, or why a pedestrian walk button is no longer pushable. Although he did point some funny things out to us—like a plaque on the side of a building that read, “On this spot in 1896, nothing happened,” and the sandwich shop where Jeff gets a week’s supply of meat by ordering a single sandwich—by the end of the tour, I became worried about whether or not Jeff was actually happy with his life as an engineer in Schenectady. But I quickly realized that biking is his way of dealing with his frustrations. It seems he bikes away from Schenectady as often as possible. When we got back to his apartment—which I learned was also an office building—Jeff waxed poetical about each of his four bicycles. He has a folding bike, an English antique that he takes very good care of, a road bike, and his efficient machine that he met us on. He told us of being “Subarued” by a woman pulling into a Stewart’s Shop, who cut him off and then stopped, throwing him off of his bike directly onto his helmet, which broke in just about every place it was supposed to. He showed it to us. He also showed us a trainhorn from an Amtrak train. At first, I thought it was some sort of art project. I thought it was what a devil’s penis might look like. It was five-pronged and made of steel. Jeff loves Amtrak trains. We thought he was kidding when, after Bob and I had each showered and were ready to get a bite to eat, Jeff told us he wanted to wait until 7:35 so that he could hear the train go by. But he wasn’t. That train is music to his ears. He transitioned from showing us his bikes to showing us his trains without missing a beat. Bob and I let his monologue go on, too tired to interrupt or remind him of how late it was getting. The vanity plate on his Saab says “AMTK207,” and I was not surprised to see this morning that his email address—which he left at the end of a very thoughtful letter for us, which explained how to navigate the canalway trail through the cities we would be encountering today—included the alias, “Amtrak207.” I wonder if disgruntled passengers ever contact him with questions about their luggage by mistake. Nonetheless, I was reassured about Jeff’s disposition in Schenectady when he assured both me and Bob that, “You have to do what makes you happy. As long as you do that, I don’t have a problem.” It was clear to me this morning that Jeff had shared with us a great deal of what brings him joy. He met us at one train station on the Erie Canal bikeway and brought us to another—the Amtrak station that is right across the street from his apartment. After discovering his letter to us this morning, which he had stayed up long into the night typing out for us, I was confident that Jeff genuinely cares about the biking community and has a deep investment in the safety of his fellow cyclists. He took sixteen warmshowers travellers into his home last year because he knows they will be safe with him. His letter to us was very helpful, and somewhat hilarious at some instances. He gave us a brief history lesson on a few sites we would be passing where historical tragedies had taken place—each one due to engineering design flaws. In his last paragraph, he warned us to watch out for both snakes and something called “canalligators.” Bob and I spent a good while this morning trying to figure out what such a creature might look like. I guessed it might have been a turtle, or perhaps a highwayman. At one point, we passed an octopus-like design on a paved section of the trail, where the roots of a nearby tree buckled the pavement and merited some brightly-colored caution paint; this could have been the animal he meant. Now, I am confident Jeff meant it as a metaphor, though I’m not yet sure what for. It has been almost seven years since Bob and I set out on our adventure. A lot has happened in that time. Bob got engaged, and has plans to get married this summer--but I guess that depends on where things are with the coronavirus by then. I got married in November of 2013, the same year we took that trip. My daughter Calliope was born in May of 2014, and Oscar came along in October of 2017. Bob and I both defended our dissertations, and somehow both managed to land faculty positions in Springfield, MA--though at different colleges. (He’s at Springfield College; I’m at AIC; Go Yellow Jackets!) And perhaps it is because my faculty position invites me to teach Homer to the students in my Western World Literature course, but I can’t help but think about my bike trip--and especially the part through New York--in a slightly different light now. For example, when one travels West through New York along the Erie Canal trail on bicycle, one gets the impression that they are heading home from something epic, or maybe that they are naieve about just how far they will have to travel in order to make it home again. No, we didn’t pass through Ithaca, New York; we blew past it, on to other shores and isles. Appleton was our destination, but it doesn’t hurt to think of Bob at the time as an Odysseus without a Penelope. In a way, it might help to explain what we were doing out there. There were days, I’m sure of it, we were channelling Tennyson: [Battle cry sound effect] It may be that the gulfs will wash us down: It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, And see the great Achilles, whom we knew. Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho' We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are; One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. Or maybe that’s all just a bag of wind. If I remember correctly, we yielded at every stop sign, bent with every raindrop. Still, it’s fitting, in a way, that so many towns and cities in New York are named after places in ancient Greece. (We actually passed through a town called Greece on our seventh day of the trip.) After all, wasn’t I sailing through some paved Aegean, eating the wind, inhaling the Lotus in the breeze, deaf to the wailing of sirens urging us to stop, to turn back, to remember this trip could end in some monster’s maw as easily as in the back of some ambulance? Wasn’t I pushing onward with wax in my ears? After our second day, it wasn’t even a lie to say that we had come from Troy--Troy, New York, of course--where we had probably stopped to poop at a gas station--and so maybe it wasn’t a lie either to say that we had left Troy burning and in ruins. We spent our third night of the trip in a place called Ilion, and the fourth in Syracuse. When I teach The Odyssey to students in my Western World Literature course, I like to focus on Books 9 and 10, where Odysseus encounters the Cyclops, the Lotus eaters, Aeolus, the Leastrygonians, and Circe. These are all tales of how he narrowly escaped his doom, used his cunning to outwit his enemies, saved his men from certain death--until too many of them died for him really to have been much of a savior at all. In a way, Odysseus reaffirms his Greek identity against the obstacles that would keep his men from returning to their homes--the drug of the Lotus, the cannibal Laestrygonians. What is civil defines itself against what is barbaric. But I also like to use these encounters to teach my students about the ancient Greek concept of xenia, meaning “guest-friendship.” It is the idea of being hospitable, and being hospitable for its own sake. To the ancient Greeks, any human could potentially be a God, and you didn’t really want to find this out the hard way. The relationship is built upon an exchange of gifts. It is the reason Odysseus brings wine with him into Polyphemus’s myopic and swallowing cave--to present it to his host as a gift. In exchange for the wine, the Cyclops mocks this custom of offering a guest-gift in return by simply promising to eat Odysseus last. I think Warmshowers is a modern form of xenia. The only difference is, instead of repaying your host with a gift in return for the hospitality they have shown you, you are expected to simply be a good host to someone else in the future--to open your home to some weary traveller depending on the kindness of strangers. [audio: Syracuse, ws hospitality, more biking; Start at beginning of clipstop after “It was dark by the time we got there…” or “Then I’ll send them to Cliff; they can go do Teen Trekks or whatever…”] Cliff was another one of our favorite hosts. [Audio - Cliff, Teen Trekks, NAvigation - Entire clip] Cliff let us pitch our tent in his backyard--which was covered in dog shit, by the way. He also had an outdoor shower that we used, which was really nothing more than a hose with a showerhead on it. My favorite thing about Cliff was the way he talked. Once we were showered, Cliff tried to point us in the direction of food. He was going to have dinner ready for us, but we had arrived later than expected—around 8pm. In his words, he “gave up on” us. We asked him where we might get some authentic Buffalo wings; we figured we might as well do something historic in Buffalo, even if there was only about fifteen minutes of daylight left. Cliff, who talks pretty fast and who drops his R’s at the end of words, said, “Oh, Angobaw. You wanna go down to Angobaw. Walk down Porta past the traffic circle till you get to Main Street. Angobaw. Can’t miss it.” He convinced us to walk when he realized we didn’t have a U-lock. He seemed confident Buffalo would swallow our bikes if we tried to take them out, which didn’t make me feel any better about sleeping in a tent in his back yard. He walked us part of the way down Porter to his mother’s house, pointing out the architecture of the music hall and some of the houses. He told us Buffalo is shrinking in size, and that it felt weird to be living in a city that is actually getting smaller. Cliff studied architecture; he has a master’s from the University of Buffalo. He also has a son at SUNY Purchase who was at the time doing a 700-mile tour down the coast of California. Bob and I ordered 20 authentic Buffalo wings from the Anchor Bar at the corner of Porta and Main. They were great, though I suppose they were nothing to write home about either. They tasted like Buffalo wings. The menu has the whole story on it, which I didn’t finish reading, but which essentially boils down to a woman in 1964 frying up some chicken instead of putting them in soup. When we were halfway through our meal, Cliff showed up and sat down with us. He ordered a Guinness, and told us he drove so that we wouldn’t have to walk back. Cliff, I think I can safely say, was a lot like Jeff in that he was very concerned for our safety and general well-being—which I sincerely appreciate. In the morning, we met Carol, Cliff’s wife, who made us a huge breakfast of eggs and lots of toast, tea, coffee, and orange juice. The food was passed from the kitchen through the window onto the porch where we dined. Bob and I were suspicious about why they wanted us to stay out of their house at all cost, but we were content with our arrangement. Cliff gave us a map of New York, and encouraged us to think about working for him at Teen Trekkers this summer. He pointed us in the right direction and wished us well. He also promised he would write us a favorable recommendation on our warmshowers accounts, so that other hosts would be more inclined to welcoming us; his words were, “People should know you guys aren’t a bunch of wife-killers.” We didn’t encounter any Cyclops on our trip. No one tried to imprison us, eat us, or turn us into pigs. But like Odysseus, I tried to be on guard about our hosts and other hazards--to watch out for potholes yawning like Charybdis. Nor do I think that my caution was unwarranted. After all, Bill had died in a place called Searcy. And while the town is named after a prominent nineteenth century legislator Richard Searcy--who spells his name SEARCY--as opposed to the bewitching queen of Aeaea, CIRCE--the homophone is enough to give me pause. Only one of Odysseus’s crew dies on Circe’s island, and his death is accidental. After a heavy night of drinking Elpenor falls asleep on the roof of Circe’s house, and when he wakes up, he accidentally stumbles to his doom. [What a hell of a day I’m having…] On the next episode of Someone Else’s Blues, Bob and I finish recounting our journey, I finally get in touch with my brother, and he sends me all 491 pages of his bike journal. And Sam revisits the theme of twins in another song about two brothers.
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SOMEONE ELSE’S BLUES: A PODCAST by Will Steffen: EPISODE 3: Am I My Brother’s Keeper? (Click Here —-> xxxxx To Listen) Featured Music “Keepin’ Busy” - Album: Since You Been Gone “Stuck” - Album: Wet Match “The Restless Wanderer’s Lullaby” - Album: Sam Steffen “Words, Words, Words (Or: Lies My Leaders Told Me)” - Album: Words, Words, Words“ Only Human” - Album: Only Human“ “Hell of a Day I’m Havin’” - Album: Since You Been Gone “Makin’ It Up” “Since You Left (Ain’t Nothin’ Been the Same)” - Album: Since You Been Gone “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” - Album: Only Human “If They Could Only See Us Now” - Album: Failed Novels “Someone Else’s Blues” - Album: Someone Else’s Blues On the last episode of Someone Else’s Blues, I told you about the bike trip that my roommate Bob and I embarked upon in the spring of 2013 from Northampton Massachusetts to Appleton Wisconsin. We travelled some 1100 miles over the course of two and half weeks. For me, the trip was partly an opportunity to bond with Bob, partly an opportunity to see the country, and partly a way to see if I could do it. But mostly, I saw the trip as an homage to my brother, a thing undertaken in the shadow of my twin, who had attempted a cross-country bike trip two years earlier, which had been cut short when one of his companions, Bill Cranshaw, was struck by a car and killed. I also introduced you to some of our warmshowers hosts, and tried to confess to Bob how anxious I was every moment of our trip, because I could only really see our undertaking through my twin brother’s eyes. Welcome to Someone Else’s Blues… Part 3: Am I My Brother’s Keeper? One of the things Bob and I started doing on the first day of our trip was counting graveyards that we passed. Each time we passed one, one of us would turn to the other and shout out a number. On the day we arrived in Appleton, I wrote about stopping in a graveyard to put on some sunscreen on our last day. “This was graveyard number 52,” I wrote. “It turns out you can measure the distance from Northampton to Appleton in graveyards. It is a 57-graveyard trip. It is also a trip that takes one dead porcupine, two turtles in the road (alive), two foxes (alive), one dead skunk, one dead snake, two ghost bikes, and eight flat tires. In the graveyard, I watched a truck pull up on the other side. An old man got out and slowly made his way over to a stonehead and stopped. I realize it is kind of a morbid game to count graveyards. Indeed, we have probably been downright inappropriate about it. It became our habit to shout out a number as soon as we passed one, and whoever spoke first was echoed by the other. At thirty-six or thirty-seven, several heads in the graveyard turned to see two obnoxious bikers shouting excitedly into a graveyard. “Thirty-six! Woo!” But I think a game like this is a good way of reminding oneself of one’s mortality, which is something I have not stopped contemplating since setting out more that two weeks ago. I honestly did not know if we would make it. Part of me still does not believe that we have. [Someone Else’s Blues?] On our eleventh day on the road, I finally got in touch with my brother, Sam. Here is how I wrote about it: We stayed at Miller’s most of the afternoon yesterday. When she noticed we weren’t leaving, the owner brought us some brownies on the house. We decided to order a pizza too, since they were having a deal—ten bucks for a three topping large pizza. It tasted microwavable, like something you might eat at a bowling alley. But it was delicious. We left an enormous tip. I also finally got in touch with my brother while we were at Miller’s. After telling him a bit about the last few days, I was surprised to hear him say that he was envious of what I was doing. He made me wish that he was with us. “Do you think you’ll ever do something like this again?” I asked him. “After what happened to Bill?” His answer surprised me. “To be honest,” he said, “part of me really wants to finish that trip.” There is a lot about his trip I still don’t know about. I have yet to read his account of it, though I see the hulking mass of his bike journal sitting on his desk in a hard copy every time I visit him, and I have even thumbed my way through it once or twice. He made me feel good about the time we were making; he said there were days of his trip where they only biked about fifteen miles. I understand there were several where they didn’t bike at all. They kept getting distracted, hung up. But I think distraction is a good synonym for travelling by bicycle. It is a travel through digression and deferral; arrival is merely the decision to stop wandering. Sam wished me a safe and careful trip before finally hanging up—which means a lot, coming from him. [Interlude from Only Human…] Sometime around 1594, Shakespeare wrote a play called The Comedy of Errors. The play opens in a place called Ephesus, where a law has been established that says the Ephesians will “admit no traffic to our adverse towns.” Aegeon is from Syracuse--no, not Syracuse New York--the other one, the original Syracuse. So he begins the play being sentenced to death. Duke Solinus justifies his ruling according to the law of the land: ...if any Syracusian born Come to the bay of Ephesus, he dies, His goods confiscate to the duke's dispose, Unless a thousand marks be levied, To quit the penalty and to ransom him. Thy substance, valued at the highest rate, Cannot amount unto a hundred marks; Therefore by law thou art condemned to die. But before he sends Aegeon away to be executed, the Duke of Ephesus wants to know why Aegeon left his native Syracuse, knowing that he was risking his life. Aegeon tells the Duke he was born in Syracuse. He got married there. But, he says, due to some unfortunate circumstances, my wife and I got hung up in Epidamnum, where she gave birth to our twin boys, “the one so like the other,/ As could not be distinguish'd but by names.” Even more strange, in the same inn on the same evening that his twins were born, a “meaner woman” also gave birth to twins which, get this, “I bought and brought up to attend my sons”! On our return voyage from Epidamnum, not three miles from shore, a squall rose up which scared the sailors on board so much, that they jumped ship and left me and my wife and our two sets of twins to fend for ourselves! My wife tied one pair of twins--an incomplete set, or one twin from each set--to the mast, while I held on to the other two boys, and just as we were about to be rescued, our ship hit a rock, causing me and my incomplete set of twins to be separated from my wife and her set of twins. I and my twins were rescued by a ship bound for Syracuse, while my wife and her incomplete set of twins were were rescued by a ship bound for Corinth. To make a long story short, when my son turned eighteen, he started asking questions about his long-lost twin brother, and wanted to set out with his twin (but not his twin) servant attending him to find his brother. I also wanted to find my wife, so for the past five years, we have been roaming around Asia looking for them. And Ephesus was our last stop, and here we are, and here is where my life must end! The Duke of Ephesus is so enchanted by this story that he lets Aegeon have until the end of the day to try to come up with the hundred marks to spare his life. If you’ve never read or seen Comedy of Errors, you can rest assured that hilarity ensues. It’s a play whose staging usually relies on twinship being recognizable to an audience not because of actors who necessarily look alike, but because of identical costumes. The play is based on a play by the Roman playwright Plautus called, Menaechmi or The Brothers Menaechmus. The original play is about a set of twins who have been separated at birth running around confusing the people of Epidamnus because of how similar they look. Shakespeare thought it would be funny to have a second set of twins running around Ephesus spreading all kinds of madness and confusion, a gimmick that works better--though perhaps less believably--if each twin has the same name as his brother--Antipholus and Dromio. I wasn’t necessarily thinking about The Comedy of Errors or the Brothers Menaechmus as we rode through Syracuse, New York. But it is more than likely I was thinking of Shakespeare. And more often than not, I was contemplating death in one form or another. On our seventh day, we rode west through Albion New York and were greeted by a sign that said, “Albion: A Great Place to Live.” But this sign was literally in a graveyard. Every day, I felt as if Bob and I had been granted some reprieve, not unlike the one Duke Solinus grants to Aegeon in Shakespeare’s play, where we had until sundown to come up with not a hundred marks, but a hundred miles, or it would mean our death. Each day, I remember thinking that we really only had until sundown if we were gonna get to see tomorrow. And each time we spoke with a host about some amazing bike trip that they had been on where nothing at all had gone wrong--where the worst thing that had happened had been an inopportune flat tire--I remember feeling like there was something I wanted to tell them. I remember feeling a bit like Antipholus of Syracuse when he first mistakes his brother’s servant (Dromio of Ephesus) for his servant, Dromio of Syracuse; Antipholus of Syracuse is thrown into an existential crisis; he grows immediately suspicious of his surroundings, and feels the need to keep moving, to get the hell out of Dodge: They say this town is full of cozenage, As, nimble jugglers that deceive the eye, Dark-working sorcerers that change the mind, Soul-killing witches that deform the body, Disguised cheaters, prating mountebanks, And many such-like liberties of sin: If it prove so, I will be gone the sooner. I heard my fair share of stories that didn’t end the way my brother’s had; even when Jeff got Subaru’d his helmet had broken in all the right places and saved his life. Now, almost seven years later, Bob even has a few more stories under his belt, now that he has done a few more tours. [audio from Jeff, warmshowers, engagement is off: “Dude I don’t know if I ever told you this story…” to end of clip] [audio of 2 bikers ideal; Bob’s trips; audio of Bob being called by a warmshowers host who had just broken up with his fiance? Crashing in GA with strangers?] I don’t remember telling anyone that we met on our trip about Bill. Maybe it’s because I didn’t want to sour the mood. Maybe it’s because I just didn’t want to talk about it. Or maybe it’s because it’s the only thing I wanted to talk about, but I didn’t think I would want to be heard, or didn’t know if I would be believed. [Verse about Jesus from Only Human] “Two fellas out walking on their way to Emmaus encountered him and said there were more to retrieve. He said look man, even if you manage to get their attention you’ll have to die to make them believe.” I’m not comparing myself to Jesus, here. Relax. I wasn’t born in Bethlehem; I just grew up there. But I do think this song, Only Human, is another song of my brother’s which--much like “A Brief Reflection Upon My Life to Date” which I discussed in the last episode--bears a message about wanting to refuse what the speaker has been burdened with. If I am nothing but a coward now, it is only because, once, I was much too brave. I keep telling them I’m only a man. Maybe I didn’t tell people about Bill because I didn’t feel like I could. Maybe I didn’t feel like it was my story to tell. On our fourth day, not long after leaving Ilion, New York, we met with our first disgruntled driver of the trip in Utica, who, while passing us, announced out the window that we should use the sidewalk. (This wasn’t as bad as the carfull of white twenty-something dudes who called us “Faggots” outside of Ashtabula, Ohio as they sped past us on a road with barely any shoulder, without yielding or slowing down, but it was still alarming.) In Utica, Bob remarked farther down the road, “It’s not the energy that bothers me—I think that’s great. It’s the ignorance. When that woman goes biking, she probably uses the sidewalk and doesn’t even know that that’s the wrong thing to do.” People like that woman make this trip a terrifying experience, I wrote, later that evening. I realized today that my will alone will not let me survive this trip. Rather, it is the will of others that I am forced to depend on. Motorists. I must put my faith not in God, nor even in myself, but in motorists. I am well aware that this is a futile exercise, since they have already let me down, and since it only takes one sleepy trucker or one medicated zombie with or without a driver’s license to ruin a biker’s life and the lives surrounding it. That is a faith I am struggling with on this trip, even if I am finding for the most part that people who are not in cars and who are not extensions of their vehicles can actually be quite friendly and amazing. So why do it? On day ten we were outside of Elyria Ohio, when I saw a bird get hit by a car. It seemed to be not much more than a push, a gentle nudge by an SUV passing us as two birds—robins, perhaps—dove in front of it. The first bird made it. His companion was not so lucky. It was knocked to the side of the road. It rolled a few times in the dirt, flapped its wings once, and was still. We rode on, and the world kept turning. At the time, I couldn’t help wondering if that bird might have made it if that SUV had not had to move over into the opposing lane in order to make room for me. On our seventh day, the day we ended up at Cliff’s in Buffalo, we paused outside of Medina, New York. Bob commented on the fact that our pace seemed ridiculous. Except what he said was: “Dude, I’m loving this pace.” This was the extent of Bob’s complaining. He was a wonderful travelling companion for exactly this reason. He also said, “I am not sure what your agenda is, but I am not trying to kill myself or anything here.” That night, I thought about that, and in the moment, it seemed like I did have an agenda after all. I am trying to get to Anna as quick as I can, I wrote. I do not envy those bikers who are taking their time to get to Washington; I have been reluctant to dismount from my bicycle, no matter how stunning the view or how significant the detour. I have even learned how to pee while balancing my bicycle between my legs, without missing the ground. Perhaps Bob is missing out on an adventure or two by having me as his travelling companion instead of someone else. I have begun to miss Anna something awful, and somehow, this is driving me now. But if one answer was to simply get it over and done with so that I could get on with my life, get back to the woman I loved, another answer to the question, why do it? might simply have been, why not? On our tenth day, we woke up in soft comfortable beds belonging to Bob’s aunt Carol and Uncle Jon. In the morning, Bob’s Uncle Jon, who was definitely in the top five most interesting people I met on the trip, told us one last time to take the bus instead, before wishing us well and departing for work. Rather than saying goodbye when he left, he shook each of our hands and said, “You’re crazy.” He also asked Bob what he was doing this for. “Why are you doing this?” I was curious to know Bob’s answer as well. Bob told him we were already halfway done, so the reason didn’t matter anymore. A few days before, he had confessed to me that bragging rights had something to do with it. And so did rebellion. Or maybe it was freedom? I don’t know what I would have said had he asked me, but I think the fact that I had been wanting to do this for a long time might have colored my answer. It seems as though there are as many things to leave behind as there are yet to be seen or yet to be arrived at. But, I would later write, I also think I am doing it so Bob doesn’t have to do it alone. In 1601, Shakespeare wrote another play about a set of twins--fraternal, this time. Twelfth Night is set in Ilyria. Not Elyria, Ohio, which we rode through on day ten of our trip. Ilyria. Much like in The Comedy of Errors, the twins Viola and Sebastian in Twelfth Night are separated by a shipwreck at sea in the beginning, only to be reunited in the end. And while Twelfth Night only stage-manages the confusions caused by a single set of twins this time, things still get confusing when Viola decides to wear the clothes of a man, and thus appears indistinguishable from her brother Sebastian, who believes she has drowned in the shipwreck. But there is also something different about the twins being reunited in this second play, something missing. The Comedy of Errors ends with a nuclear family that has been separated for the better part of eighteen years being reunited. Aegeon finds his Aemeila, and the brothers Antipholi are finally on stage at the same time. And so are the brothers Dromio. The play actually ends with the Dromio twins debating which of them should exit first. Eventually, Dromio of Ephesus decides, “We came into the world like brother and brother;/ And now let's go hand in hand, not one before another.” But Twelfth Night ends with a reunion in a different tenor. The twins Sebastian and Viola can only confirm the identity of the other by remembering that their family can never actually be reunited because their father, who is also named Sebastian, by the way, “died that day when Viola from her birth/ Had number’d thirteen years.” Sebastian confirms: O, that record is lively in my soul! He finished indeed his mortal act That day that made my sister thirteen years. Triskaidekaphobia aside, the reunion between Viola and Sebastian is marked by their shared loss of their father. Furthermore, rather than ending the play like the brothers Dromio, skipping happily offstage, hand-in-hand, Viola and Sebastian each run off to marry their respective partners. Sebastian has actually already married Olivia (without letting his twin sister know, by the way). When Olivia mistakes Sebastian for Cesario, Viola’s male alter ego, and hurries him into a chapel, Sebastian just goes with it. And Duke Orsino is willing to wed Viola, but only if she changes her clothes first. The focus of the comic resolution is on the marriages, not the reunion of the twins. And if you look at it from the perspective of Malvolio or even Antonio, the end of the play isn’t very funny at all. Thus the reunion of these twins only produces a further and more permanent separation. It is a reunion tinted with the reminder of the impossibility of a real family reunion, full of the promise of further fracture. So why revive the twin plot? And why downplay the reunion of the twins in the second twin play? Well, one answer might be that Shakespeare had a different take on twins in 1601 than he did the first time around. Shakespeare himself was the father of twins. Before Shakespeare moved from stratford to London, before he became an actor and a playwright, he became a father. His daughter Susanna was born in 1583, a mere six months after he married Anne Hathaway (you do the math). [shot gun click] Two years later, in 1585, his twins were born--Judith and Hamnet. But in the time between Shakespeare writing The Comedy of Errors in 1594 and Twelfth Night in 1601--in the summer of 1596, to be precise, when the twins were each 11--Hamnet died unexpectedly. His cause of death is unknown to historians and scholars, but Shakespeare lost his only son, and Judith, her twin brother. I remember my reunion with Sam at the sudden end of his trip being a bit more like the reunion and further separation of Sebastian and Viola in Twelfth Night. Our play’s one comic scene, where Bill’s mom mistook me for Sam on the morning of her son’s memorial service, had been played out, and now the only way for us to recognize one another was to confirm that we would always remember how old we were on the day that Bill died. But then again, maybe my decision to take a bike trip of my own, a decision I thought would surely drive a wedge further between me and my brother, helped to bring us back together, if only for a little while. I had travelled fewer miles than he, seen less of America than he had seen, produced a fragment of the documentation that he had generated on his trip. But I also feel like I had a sense of what it was like out there on the road now. I knew what it was like to be a shipwracked twin at sea, to be adrift after a storm has cleft your bark in twain. [The Boy Who Cried Wolf] On the last episode, I introduced you to a song of my brother’s called “Someone Else’s Blues,” a song about being a twin, the song whose title I stole for this podcast. On one level, it’s a song about how you don’t really need to explain your suffering to your twin: “If I were not me, and you were not you, and we did not both know what we’ve both been through, I guess then I wouldn’t be here trying to choose, now between mine and someone else’s blues.” Sam wrote this song before he went on his bike trip, when we were still corresponding with one another through letters in longhand on a regular basis. And it occurs to me that like Shakespeare, my brother also returned to the theme of twins--or at the very least, brothers--in the wake of losing someone. There’s a song he wrote called “The Boy Who Cried Wolf,” that tells the story of, well, the boy who cried wolf. It’s a song that literally begins with the line: “Once upon a time, in a faraway place, there lived two young boys with their father.” [play first verse] On the one hand, this is a powerful folk song, written in the folk tradition. It takes a story that everybody knows and tells it in a way so that it becomes less of a fable whose moral is simply “don’t lie, or else no one will believe you when you are telling the truth.” Instead, it becomes a kind of reflection on the paradoxical nature of engaging in political action, of rallying behind political leaders who promise to bring change, and then who just let you down once they step into the driver’s seat. Maybe it’s a song about the ambiguity of radicalism under capitalism, or the futility of having a voice in a democracy fraught with corruption. Maybe it’s a song about how we are the sheep, and that we are the problem because we keep listening to and electing liars. The sentiment is certainly real: “Wolf, there’s a wolf, won’t somebody help? The boy says. Somebody, please, I ain’t lyin. Get up from your beds! You’ve been sleeping too long! Can’t anyone hear me crying?” And then everyone wakes up, only to find the boy dying of laughter. But on the other hand, it’s a song about two brothers. “One boy was in charge of keeping the sheep. In charge of everything else was his brother.” In Aesop’s fable, the false alarm raised by the boy results in him eventually losing some of his sheep to the wolf. In later English versions of the tale, the wolf also ends up eating the boy. I had never actually heard a version of this story that involves the boy having a brother. Like Shakespeare, who took a play by Plautus and added a set of twins to make it more complicated, my brother took a fable about a mischievious boy and added a brother in order to turn it into something else. So it’s hard for me to hear this song and not think that I’m supposed to be one of the brothers--either the responsible one, who does what he’s told, and who is in charge of “everything else,” everything that is important, or else the shepherd, who likes to take jokes a little too far sometimes out of boredom, and who can’t handle being in charge of the easiest thing, watching sheep, without generating a problem. (I can’t help but think I’m the latter). And this is all the more alarming to me because in my brother’s song, the boy who cried wolf doesn’t lose a sheep to the wolf, or even his own life. No. Here’s what happens in Sam’s version: [audio: chases the wolf into the house of his brother]. If it’s been a while since you’ve read the Old Testament, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” is how Cain, also a shepherd, answers the Lord when God asks him where his brother is. This, too, is a lie. Cain knows exactly where his brother is, because Cain killed his brother Abel after God accepted Abel’s sacrifice, and rejected Cain’s--for whatever reason. So in my brother’s song, the good brother is punished--dies, actually--because of the disappointing brother’s jest. And the disappointing brother lives, and just keeps lying, keeps deferring responsibility for what he has done. If you’re noticing that a lot of my brother’s songs seem to be informed by the Bible, let me remind you that he earned a degree from Vanderbilt Divinity School in Theological Studies. I’d say he’s putting his degree to good use. I should clarify too that I don’t think of my brother as a Christian musician. I think he’s a folk musician--working in the same tradition as Pete Seeger, whose “Turn! Turn! Turn!” just put Chapter 3 of Ecclisiastes to music, or Bob Dylan, who proposed that Judas Iscariot might have had “God on his side.” Hashtag Kazantzakis. (I mean, was Jesus supposed to betray himself?) In fact, my brother’s album Only Human, which has The Boy Who Cried Wolf as the fourth track, also has a two-part epic song about the story of Absalom that seems more or less taken directly from the King James Bible, and another one called “The Gospel According to Judas Iscariot.” I feel like The Boy Who Cried Wolf might be a cautionary tale about me--a revision of “Someone Else’s Blues” that imagines twins as irreconcilably different instead of impossibly similar, so that one cannot help but harm the other, so that one cannot help but compare himself to the other, and act out in response to being asked, “Why can’t you be more like your brother?” I remember first hearing this song shortly after I got married without telling my brother, so I can’t help but feel there is some bitterness in this song directed toward me. Or, maybe the song is another song about losing Bill. An expression of guilt, perhaps. Maybe Sam imagines himself as the irresponsible brother, who asks, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” not to be defensive, but because he expects an answer from the Lord: “Well? Am I? Or not?” At the same time, I can’t help but think there is a certain amount of contempt in Cain’s angsty question to the God who arbitrarily decided to accept Abel’s offering, but not Cain’s. Cain might as well give God the middle finger, or else pose a question of his own: Why favor him and not me? Why create a scenario where I have to go on living without my brother, my friend? How is this my doing, if all I wanted to have was a good time? And then again, maybe it’s just a cautionary tale about making sure you keep watch over your sheep as well as your brethren. And if that’s the case, then I’m glad I didn’t let Bob go on that trip by himself. And I’m glad Bob was with me. When I finished my trip with Bob, I hung out with him in Appleton for a few days. We powered through the Fast and the Furious franchise, ate Dairy Queen, and drank beer. I put my bike in a box and shipped it back to Massachusetts. Then Bob drove me to the airport and I flew off to meet up with Anna in LA for the summer. I spent my first few days in LA typing up my bike journal, converting it into something legible that others could read, and then I sent it off to people who were curious about how the trip had gone. I sent it to my parents, to my brothers, to Bob, of course. A few days later, my brother sent me an email that read: Dear Will, Thank you very much for sharing your journal with me. I've enjoyed reading it slowly over the past couple of days. It sounds like you and Bob had a really great experience, overall, and I'm glad to hear that you made it. Reading your thoughts about things, I was surprised by how many of your own thoughts and experiences resonated with me and mine, and reminded me what it was like being on the road on a bike, when I was. I'm hoping to send you a letter pretty soon here, but part of your journal mentioned that I still hadn't shared my own journal with you, which I guess I've just forgotten to do, as time has gotten on. So I'm emailing you now to remedy that. I'm sorry for the delay. I haven't actually worked on this thing in quite some time, and really don't feel like it will ever be finished. But I'd say its about 85% done, or 85% as done as it will be. At some point I think I would like to write a kind of conclusion for the ending, but the more time goes on, the more I wonder of the possibility of a conclusion. Anyway. All of this is to say, I'm attaching my journal from my bike trip from two years ago (all 491 pages of it), in the hopes that, with your trip so freshly behind you, reading about mine may seem more real and present somehow. I would have printed it out for you and sent it to you as a book (it's laid out to work that way, and if you can find a way to afford it, I'd recommend printing it) but you've got to pay a nickel a page here, and I don't have that kind of money right now. I would love to hear your thoughts on any of it, but am glad to have heard your thoughts already about bicycling and experiencing the world and the country. It means a lot to me to be able to read some of your more intimate expressions, and I'm glad that you've got such great friends in your life. I'm also going to attach bill's journal from the trip, which I just finished transcribing from his terribly sloppy handwriting. Hopefully, if my journal gives you a case of the howling fantods for just going into way too much detail of things, you can cross-compare it with Bill's experience of things, which offers a far, far more condensed account of the same trip. I hope reading his account of things does not feel to you like a transgression of some private boundary. I'm discovering more and more that the written words of the departed are more sacred to some people than to others, that some people feel that they ought not to be read at all, ever, while others feel like they are a good thing to keep around to remember somebody by. I don't know where I fall. I think there's respect and then there's respect, and it may be a little unfair to be reading my dead friend's private journal without his explicit consent. But I also feel like Bill was a good writer, and a great companion to be with on the road, and I feel like we discussed sharing our journals at some length when we returned. And he's gone now and it's something that we have to remember him by. I'm hopeful that they may give as much weight to the experience as my own journal does, and I hope I am not overstepping a boundary in sharing these pages with you. (Understand, his words are not really mine to share). Sorry again to have kept this from you for so long. I hope your summer is going well so far, and that you and Anna are living it up in LA. Also: do you have a mailing address out there yet? I've still got some chili powder I'd like to send you. Let me know. [Pause] Don’t worry, I’m not going to share Bill’s journal with you; I agree with my brother that that document is not for me to share. Needless to say, I figured out a way to print out the 491 page word document my brother sent to me, and I got started on reading it. And when I finished it, I had pretty much made up my mind that I was ready to have a baby, and that I didn’t have a moment to lose getting on with living my life, even if it meant getting hurt, waylaid, sidetracked, or even killed in the process. So what happened on Sam’s trip? Next time, on Someone Else’s Blues. Someone Else’s Blues is a podcast written, produced, and edited by Will Steffen. Music, of course, by Sam Steffen. By the way, if you like the music you have been hearing on this podcast, you can hear more at samsteffen.bandcamp.com. That’s SAMSTEFFEN.bandcamp.com.
Featured Music:
[Music]
SOMEONE ELSE’S BLUES: A PODCAST By Will Steffen: EPISODE 4: Better sandy than in love with someone who doesn’t love you back (Click Here —--> xxxxx To Listen) Featured Music “A Series of Failed Attempts at Getting Over Loving You” - Album: Someone Else’s Blues “I Think I’m Coming Down with Something Serious” - Album: Wet Match “Someone Else’s Blues” - Album: Someone Else’s Blues “Do You Have Me Now” - Album: At Least There Will Be Love “There’s A First Time For Everything” - Album: Ain’t It A Pity? “It’s Raining Now” “The Midas Touch (The Grand Scheme)” “Lord Have Mercy” - Album: Only Human [Live version of A series of failed attempts from live show in Saratoga springs, June 2019?][Verse from “Maybe” about Lance Armstron?] [Start with “Plan for episode, journal as processing tool”: Sam:“I feel like what that journal was for me was…” to end of clip] On the last episode of Someone Else’s Blues, I told you about how I completed a bike trip from Northampton Massachusetts to Appleton Wisconsin in the spring of 2013. I told you about how my twin brother Sam finally sent me a copy of the journal he kept while he embarked upon a similar cross-country bike trip two years before, a trip that ended tragically when one of his travelling companions, Bill Cranshaw, was struck and killed by a car outside of Searcy, Arkansas. I told you about how Bill’s mother mistook me for my twin brother on the morning of her son’s memorial service, and how Sam started writing music as a way of managing his grief and his trauma. And while many of my brother’s songs have carried a particular weight for me because I have always been able to listen to them with some orientation about their source, I don’t think the real weight of that trauma hit me until I read Sam’s journal--the document I am about to share with you. Welcome to Someone Else’s Blues, a podcast about twins, twinship, and the best singer-songwriter you’ve never heard of. Part 4: Better Sandy Than In Love With Someone Who Doesn’t Love You Back [highway sounds] Can you tell me what happened out there? I don’t know. Just what happened? I just need you to say what you saw. I don’t know. I mean, you were there, weren’t you? Didn’t you see any of it? You don’t need me to tell it to you. My friend— But how it happened. I need you to say it to me the way you saw it so I can write the report. You say you were coming down the road— Yeah. We were coming down the road. And where were you heading? I don’t know. I mean which direction? I don’t know. East, I guess. Do you know that for sure? I don’t know. I think it was East. Okay. East. And where were you coming from? I don’t know. We were in a driveway. Okay. Listen. I know this is hard for you. I know that. But I need you to tell me what you saw out there, because of everyone who we’ve spoken to so far, you’re the closest thing we’ve got to an eye-witness. And what I put down here from you is going to be important for whatever happens to that woman. What woman? The woman who was driving that car. It was a woman? Now you say you were coming down the road. I’d just like to know where you were coming from. California. No—I mean today. I don’t know. We were on a Lake this morning. I can’t remember the name of it. Okay. And where were you trying to get to? I don’t know. Alright. Just take a minute. Just take a deep breath and take a minute. Sorry. That’s alright. Just take it easy. Now back up a minute there. Did you just say you came here all the way from California? Yeah. And all of you were just on your bikes? Yeah. Holy shit. This is how my brother Sam introduces his journal entry for Thursday, March 31, 2011, two days before he would set off on a cross-country bike trip from Irvine, California with three of his friends from college--Paul Cavanaugh, Hannah Liddy, and Bill Cranshaw. As I mentioned on the last episode, my brother Sam sent me all 491 pages of his bike journal only after I had sent him a copy of a journal I had kept during a bike trip I completed with my friend Bob Gruber from Northampton Massachusetts to Appleton Wisconsin in May of 2013. My brother’s trip lasted forty-five days, and ended prematurely when Bill was struck by a car and killed in Searcy, Arkansas on Monday, May 16, 2011. On the first episode, I told you about how Sam started writing music to deal with his grief, to share his trauma with an audience. He also prepared his journal to share his trauma with an audience, but as he explained to me, he does not expect any stranger to just sit down and read this. (Audio: Podcast/ending with Twinfest) But maybe the burden of what my brother has been unloading through his music is only clear to me now, as I stand at this precipice, preparing to abridge this mammoth document for you into an hour (or two) of digestible audio. How the hell does he do this? How does he cram so much into the verse or the chorus of a song? I think I am beginning to understand why my brother has written so many songs. Or maybe I am beginning to wonder why he hasn’t written a few hundred more. It turns out that my brother and I shared a lot of the same thoughts and sentiments on our respective bike trips. For one, while I found myself trying to imagine how Sam had experienced the country while I was on the road, Sam was also being prompted by stories of cross-country bike trips he had heard before his departure. Steve Schmidtt, who worked with Sam at the Bethlehem Bike Co-Op, told Sam of how he rode his bike across the country and did not carry anything; of how, when he came to a bar, he would ask to have his waterbottle filled with beer and sometimes they would just let him have it for free; of how he was frequently surprised by the kindness of strangers and was once given a meal and a place to sleep merely because he had stopped to ask for directions. Al Worth, a close friend of our parents, who had never undertaken a cross-country trip himself, told Sam that he knew people who had done a cross-country trip, and knew that they had fought fiercely with one another while they had done it. “Yeah, two of the guys I remember hearing from didn’t speak to each other for two thousand miles, and by the time they made it to the coast, they parted ways and never saw each other again. But they did it. But I don’t think that’ll happen to you.” John Smith, another family friend who had pedaled across the country, told me once about using his jacket to mount a sail to his bike somewhere in the midwest where the roads are flat and the winds are strong. And then there were Sam’s friends, Liza Birnbaum and Anneka Olson, who, he wrote, came to visit me in Bethlehem a week before we left, who had, the previous fall, made a trip from Seattle to Santa Fe, from Anneka’s home to Liza’s. Whose advice was about pride and tears (“Don’t be too proud. If you have to go to a hotel, just do it. Nobody is going to care. And you should probably just get ready to hate everybody you’re traveling with. Because Liza and I got into some pretty serious fights. And get ready to cry. Because you’re probably definitely going to cry a little bit. And that’s alright, too”). And who told us to eat ice cream everyday if at all possible. I should mention here that reading Sam’s journal is a bit like reading a professor’s annotations on a young and naive student’s first draft. There are two voices at work in the journal, two Sams. One is writing in the present tense, and doesn’t know how his trip will end. The other is much older, a wise sage whose italicized interjections penetrate and punctuate in a way that often leaves the reader bleeding and crippled. This second voice lives in the past tense, relishes the conditional, avoids the future, and often leaves you holding the truth like rocks in your pockets with the tide coming in. It’s the second voice, the italicized one, that remembers Anneka saying that. Because you’re probably definitely going to cry a little bit. I cannot tell you everything. If I had to, I might boil it all down to the story behind a lost feather, a dead butterfly, and a scorned prayer. But that would fall short of what this story deserves. By the way, for this episode, I contacted Hannah Liddy and Paul Cavanaugh and was able to record our phone conversations. Hannah spoke with me from her parents’ house in Rome New York, a place I rode through on my bike trip without knowing it was Hannah’s hometown. Until recently, Hannah was a postdoc at Columbia, working as the executive officer of the global research project AIMES, which stands for Analysis, Integration and Modeling of the Earth System. Dr. Liddy earned her PhD in earth science with a focus in paleoclimate and isotope geochemistry at USC. I spoke with Paul from his home in Tacoma Washington, where he works as a high school teacher. [Hannah: The one thing that really stands out to me... On Sunday, April 3, the second day of the trip, the four travelled from Lake Perris and ended the day in a hotel in Palm Springs, California. I doubt there will be many days like today, Sam wrote, unitalicized. Awake early. Make coffee at Lake Perris. Paul, Bill, Hannah and I eat, talk about the day. We decide we ought to walk down to the lake first. Walk to the lake. A strange beetle crawls obscurely upon the earth. Count the million birds. Identify. We see vultures at the lake, and gulls, and finches. On the beach three men are fishing. It is eight o’clock. On the walk back from the lake, Paul says: “Man, when I think about how many times in my life I’ve probably walked under a tree that must’ve had an owl in it that I didn’t see because I wasn’t looking, I get seriously bummed out.” Later that day, on the road, on their way into Palm Springs, this happens: After about a mile we come to a paved section. Now we are near the place where the turbines turn. As soon as we get on our bikes, we begin to zoom. This is because there is a 35 mph tailwind at our backs, and it blows us almost as fast without our having to do much of anything. We sit and ride that way for almost twenty miles, watching the enormous turbines spread out like enormous white trees at the foot of the mountains. And I remember that road was rough and full of cracks and that often you would be going too fast to feel safe about it even though it was not downhill. It was merely rough, with whole portions of the road completely gone, though where or how it was impossible to say, and in some places gaps that looked as though the road had simply been broken by earthquake or jackhammer and left apart by a space no more than a foot wide. And I remember Paul pulling at his handlebars and leaping such gaps and Bill and I thinking every moment our tires no matter how well we avoided what there was to avoid, would, before the end of this road, be completely flat We arrive then at an overpass leading back over the highway, and we cross it. In the town of west Palm Springs we are met by two police officers. Here the wind is so bad there is no place for the ravens to land. They spread their wings looking very much like crows except that they are much bigger. There is nothing in this town but gated off, empty houses and an abandoned gas station. And dust. The dust swirls furiously in the wind. It is an important conversation we have with the policemen. We ask them first if there is a way we might take this road being the one we are on, on the northside of the highway which appears to lead from West Palm Springs to a destination unknown to Rt. 62 or if we ought to take the Interstate. We ask the officers this latter question, strictly to know the legality of it. (We already know it is illegal, but we pretend to ignorance for the benefit of our circumstance). Our destination is Desert Hot Springs. “Are we allowed to take Rt. I-10?” They think about it in a collective way, flipping through the pages of a county map with the roads drawn upon it which are not down upon ours, exchanging glances and befuddlements before responding in a voice which, overtop of the wind and the dust blowing furiously, sounds almost too loud for what it is asking: “Do you want to die?” We say nothing. We stand in the wind wrestling with the sheriff’s map a while longer considering our options. Eventually they persuade us that our best option is to try Rt. 111, which, to get to, we must ride the interstate to the next exit. We agree to do this (telling the officers we will walk with our bikes) but struggle amongst ourselves to decide whether, once we are on the interstate it would not be better to simply ride it ten miles all the way to Rt. 62, our ultimate destination. We agree: whoever leads shall be the leader. When he or she arrives at the exit, he or she will make the call, and the rest shall follow after. But by whatever fate or circumstance, when we arrive at the on-ramp, I am leading. And we enter the interstate along the shoulder, and have an easy time riding (the wind remains at our backs, blowing us on quickly, giving me to think, should we determine to try to go on to Rt. 62, it would be a quick ten miles, and we have a considerably wide shoulder, nearly the size of a traffic lane, not to mention the comfort of a lane almost no one uses to our immediate left, so that as we approach the off-ramp mere minutes later, it has taken almost no time at all and I am thinking that we should go on, keep going, and am even resolved to do it, to keep going, but ...I am compelled to exit the road). And how the wind carries us! We turn onto Rt. 111 and make our way towards Palm Springs. I do not think I pedal on this road the whole time we are on it. Rt 111. It is a highway, the speedlimit of which is fiftyfive miles per hour. It is a nice road, all things considered, with two lanes of traffic running each direction, separated by a wide median of earth and rock and plants. We are literally sailing until—by what mysterious force—when we are still a mile outside of Palm Springs—we come around a bend in the road beside which an enormous rocky bluff looms tall. As Bill and I ride past this (we are out in front, with Paul and Hannah trailing not far behind) a gust of wind surges and blows us nearly into traffic. Bill and I both throw the whole of our weight over and dismount, still well within the space of the shoulder. We wait a moment, and then we ride on. [Paul: That was just really scary…; Hannah: Maybe I’ll just tell you, I’m gonna tell you how I remember it] [When Hannah begins describing the “geology”] I should probably mention that Hannah Liddy is an expert on paleoclimate. Paul: A car in order to not hit her ran off the road onto the median Hannah: I just had this awful feeling because of the way the car had slowed and stopped... [SKIP?]A moment later Hannah rounds the same bend, and when she does comes on a stronger gust, surging, and blows her fully out into the first lane of traffic, then again, across the first, on into the next. I can imagine her screaming, shrieking, her heart stopping inside of her as she wonders what force this is thinking perhaps in that moment it is the way that Death comes This I watch in perfect horror, as a car encroaches closely in upon her, going at least sixty miles per hour. Hannah continues to swerve while the car nears her, until, at what seems like the last possible moment, the car swerves too, further to the left than Hannah herself is already tending, passing her without touching her, but flying at great speed into the median strip of sand and rock dividing the highway. A dust cloud rises. A profound stillness of heart and wind. And I remember saying to Bill “O my God O my God!” and he turning to what my eyes already saw saying, “What?” and myself telling the whole of it to him with her name: “Hannah! It’s Hannah! Oh my God Bill Hannah!” And when I see her again, through the rising cloud of dust, she is already running, the figure of her, running, on her feet, having lost her bicycle somewhere, running, towards the vehicle which has come to a halt. She is fine. The woman driving is also fine, though her car looks rather beat up. Pick up here? Hannah is crying hysterically, hugging the woman, and hugging her. Bill and I leave our things on the roadside, cross the highway to the median, and run back to them. We arrive in time to hear the woman saying to her, “My God—you know what, though?—if I had hit you, I would feel so much shittier than I do right now. I’m just glad you’re okay.” It is one of the scariest things I have ever seen. My life with Hannah comes in this moment very near to me. I think of her only this morning, shrieking while she packed her panier bags, at a bug that crawled onto her hand, then apologizing profusely, saying: “Sorry, guys. I can’t help it. Sometimes I just have to shriek.” I am glad she is okay, too, but I am so afraid for her now. We put up with a firetruck and three firemen, then a taxi service, then a police officer. There is a story that they tell to us, about a car being picked up by the wind and blown right through a billboard. There are white crosses in the median lanes. The firemen tell us there are at least twenty accidents on this road a year around this time, all on account of the wind. They tell us we really should not be riding bikes on it. We tell them it is what the police told us to do. They do not seem concerned. Hannah tries to get her insurance information from her mother, but cannot speak to her without bursting into tears and hanging up the phone. It is a very tense situation. There is something about it that not only makes me afraid for, but actually makes me afraid of Hannah. Something that is in her that wants her to be something other (not better, not even different, but other) than what she is. It is as though she must prove to herself by proving to others that she is able to be fearless and unafraid. Does she not know how afraid I am? How afraid we all are? Not only of this, but of everything? Not only for ourselves, but for one another? Do we even know it ourselves, I wonder? Even now? Or now? She is better than she knows for being who and what she is than she believes. I only wish there was some way to tell her how my heart withered to feel for the shadow of a moment that it did, the possibility of her absence—how my own life flashed before my eyes to see hers endangered, if in fact it ever was. The same, perhaps, as I wish there was some way to know myself what there even is to do with such bitter and unwanted knowledge. Paul: And it was like so scary, and the police and fire-trucks came Hannah: I think I made everyone walk their bikes Paul: We were like so scared, and not very far from town... Paul will tell us later, when we are gathered about a tablecloth with chilled beers and much wanted food coming, of how, when he was talking to the firemen, he farted a fart that was so powerful it was not only heard but could actually be smelled in spite of the sixty mile an hour winds within which we stood. And that he had tried very hard not to laugh when he smelled it and had tried to pretend to listen to what the firemen were saying. We will laugh to hear that then. It will already be funny. But in the billows, between the crosses, with the traffic slowed and the vehicles stopped, and the emergency men in their uniforms looking serious, asking their questions and explaining themselves, and Hannah crying and Bill standing there, not saying much, I remember Paul saying to me, while we stood by and watched: I don’t think I’m going to tell my parents about this. And after the wind had blown heavy again: I mean, ever. We walk a mile into Palm Springs. And all the while Hannah is saying: Guys, I think we should get back on and ride, now. It’s fine. I’m telling you it’s fine. Really. But we do not, because it isn’t. We are in a hotel, now, having eaten across the road at a spaghetteria. We each tell our rose and our bud. The thorn is unanimous, and we do not speak it. I remember we mentioned briefly the possibility of discontinuing the trip, though I do not remember how exactly the matter was dispensed with. Perhaps Hannah merely said, “No. Tomorrow we will go on. Nothing happened today. Everything was fine, and will be,” and that was that. Perhaps it was not so many words. But I do remember believing that: that in the grand infinity of the possible, something like this had been forever bound to happen, even as early on in the trip as it actually had. There was almost a kind of sense it made, that on the second day we should be given our greatest incentive not to go on, to turn back. As though this day itself had been a threshold, as perhaps each day only is, and there was time now to turn back before there would be no way to anymore. Except that now the thing had happened: it was done with, and because it had, so early on, it was impossible that we should continue without far greater vigilance and awareness of what it should be possible to encounter out here in the naked world. I think there was the feeling unanimous in us, just as there was silence about what impossible thing had just taken place, that there would be no more lapses in attention, now, no more misplayed moves from here on out. We would be more conscious of ourselves in relation to our mobile environment, and safety, no matter what, would come first. But only in light of and after the presumed stipulation out of which that rule could be derived: that we would ride on, even if for no other reason than to discover what for. Our hotel is awful. It has no toilet paper, a toilet that flushes perpetually, dirty towels, cockroaches. Hannah: We stayed in the very first hotel that we came to Paul: There were cockroaches in the bathroom Hannah: After being in LA, I went through that area quite a bitPaul: I guess it just sort of drives home the point that we knew what could happen...I recall Bill lifting the mattresses and opening the drawers in the desk and lifting the pictures slightly away from the wall, saying, “Sorry guys, but I gotta check for bedbugs.” And other things, too, apparently. It was something he did in every hotel room we went to: in Laughlin, Nevada; in Dalhart, Texas. Lifting a mattress for bedbugs. “How do you know if it has bedbugs?” we asked him. “Aren’t they too small to see?” “Bloodspots,” he says. “If there’s bloodspots, we’re all sleeping on the floor.” The hotel is $50.00 a night. I am sad and afraid, but happy, too. That we are all alive. That it is sometimes only in relation to the possibility of no longer being so, to the chance of its having been revoked from you that one’s privilege is realized as such. Hannah says, “Today really was like a ‘Stand by Me’ movie. All of it.” Everyone is asleep now. Paul and Hannah are in a bed. Bill is snoring. Like moving furniture. It is 300 AM in Bethlehem right now. I will be asleep by then. Hannah: The wind was just a magic beanPaul: You know it’s very very plain what the possible outcomes can be…Hannah: I think a fire fighter had come outPaul: There were other times on the trip when it was really windy and we just got off and walkedHannah: Was there a followup with that woman in the car The wind generated another problem for the group in Garitas Creek on April 28. In the afternoon the wind turns on us. Riding becomes almost unbearably difficult—but we ride on. Through the cattle lands. Then we decide to stop. We try calling a telephone number that is written on a board outside of a ranch to ask about camping somewhere on their property. But no one answers. In the end we decide the best place to camp would be under a small overpass of the dried up Garita Creek, about fifteen miles outside of Gonchas, NM. I think of Frank and Holly. They slept on the roadside lastnight. Even we have not had to do that yet. I wonder where they are sleeping tonight. It is a windy, dusty, desperate affair. Under the concrete coping, all along the bridge, are rows of swallow’s nests, running all the way from one side of the bridge to the other. Swallows (according to Bill’s bird book) are one of the only birds that build colonies. Their nests are very interesting little structures, made out of a dense, red material that resembles clay. How they are formed I haven’t the slightest idea. It is windy under the bridge—and getting our bikes down is some process. We have to dismantle them and carry them down, making several trips over the rocks. Almost no cars pass over us, but we wish to be out of sight on the off-chance that someone should see us and accuse us of trespassing. We are all very tired. We pitch our tents very poorly on a concrete slab that is covered over by a foot of loose and broken earth. Our tentstakes will not take to the ground. We bring rocks into our tent with us, to keep them from blowing away altogether. For dinner we make polenta and couscous, and do our best to save our water. In the night it grows very windy, and it is by far the worst night of sleep yet. Most of the night the four of us are breathing into our lungs the fine red dust of the Garita cattlefields, listening to the noisy affair of our tents flapping. Paul says he tried to sleep with his ears plugged and his handkerchief over his mouth. “I was breathing it into my lungs!” From my tent I could hear them conversing. “Oh my God, Bill—look at how much sand is in here! This is insane.” “What are you talking about—it’s fine. We’re fine. That’s not sand.” “There’s so much sand in here! How do you not feel like you’re suffocating?” “Better to be sandy than dead.” “God, it’s in my fucking sleepingbag! I don’t even understand how it’s possible, but there’s actually sand inside my sleepingbag.” “Better sandy than in love with someone who doesn’t love you back.” “Yeah, that’s true. Oh my God, I have to shake this out. Get up. We have to start over.” We awake the next morning feeling that we have slept not at all. We are all rather grumpy and annoyed. We do not even have enough food for breakfast. Hannah: It’s moments of the trip... On May 10, with just six days to go, in Keystone Lake State Park, Oklahoma: This is the morning we all speak to Anneka. Hannah calls her because she has called one of us—maybe Bill—to say that whenever we get to Tennessee, she would be glad to come up and join us for part of that ride. Hannah calls her. This is also the morning that Bill upon returning from the bathroom, explains his theory of pooping. “So tell me something: does this ever happen to you guys? Whenever you guys have to poop, do you feel like you have any time to spare once you finally make it to the bathroom? I mean, I guess that sounds like kind of a crazy question, but I keep having this thing where every time I go to the bathroom it’s like I get there at the last possible second. And this is not the first time this has happened. I swear it’s like as soon as I say out loud to anybody that I have to poop, it’s like it starts this timer in my stomach that gives me something like three minutes exactly to get myself to a toilet. Like just now, when I was going to the bathroom, I said, you remember, I said I was going to poop, and then I started walking over there—wasn’t too worried about it—you know, I had plenty of time, right? So I’m walking, walking. But then as I’m going it starts to get more and more urgent, and it’s like I can feel it getting heavier and heavier. It’s like my body overheard me say I was going to take it to let it have a dump and it just starts trying to break free or something. It was crazy! I mean, I just barely made it to the bathroom in time! Seriously the second I sat down there was poop. There was no waiting. If anybody—I mean anybody—had gotten in my way, or if I had left one second after I did, or if there had been somebody in the bathroom when I got in there, I definitely would have just shit my pants. And this isn’t just now this has happened. This is like every time I go to use the bathroom, now. It’s like I always end up congratulating myself for not making a total fool of myself by leaving to use the bathroom after it’s already too late and shitting my pants. That’s crazy, isn’t it? I mean, isn’t it? Does that ever happen to you guys? C’mon. Paul?” “Oh yeah sure. All the time, man. All the time.” “Sam?” “I guess so. I mean, it’s not like I try to make myself poop when I don’t have to. Maybe you’ve been drinking too much coffee.” “Hannah? Come on. Tell me—am I crazy?” “You guys are disgusting.” Hannah: The other thing was that there was another day when it was my turn to have the flat tires [Dust Devils/ White Out] Hannah: This one night when we were biking across the Navajo reservation… [ skip?] On the next episode of Someone Else’s Blues, the four give an inspirational speech to a group of students in Fort Defiance, Arizona, and Bill has a midnight encounter with an insistent stranger. Next time, on Someone Else’s Blues. End credits.
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SOMEONE ELSE’S BLUES: A PODCAST By Will Steffen EPISODE 5: “The Lost Feather” Click Here —-> xxxxx To Listen) Featured Music: “A Series of Failed Attempts at Getting Over Loving You” - Album: Someone Else’s Blues “Someone Else’s Blues” - Album: Someone Else’s Blues “Never Too Late to Learn” - Album: Only Human “Rip Van Winkle’s Blues (I’m Tired)” - Album: Failed Novels “The Heart and the Head” - Album: Nothin’ to Write Home About “You Puttem All to Shame” - Album: Words, Words, Words “Do You Have Me Now?” - Album: At Least There Will Be Love “Maybe” “Doin’ Nothin’” - Album: Nothin’ to Write Home About “All the Thanks You Get” [Open with verse about Constellations] On the last episode of Someone Else’s Blues, I spoke with Hannah and Paul about the roses, buds, and thorns of their cross-country bike trip, and I shared some passages from Sam’s bike journal. We recounted Hannah’s mishap on the second day, when the wind blew her into traffic outside of Palm Springs, California. We also recounted Bill’s sense of humor. This episode will pick up where the last left off. Welcome to Someone Else’s Blues, a podcast about twins, twinship, and the best singer-songwriter you’ve never heard of. Part 5: The Lost Feather In a previous episode, I recount how Bob’s mom invited me and Bob into her elementary school classroom once we reached Appleton to speak with the students about our trip and about bike safety. I wouldn’t learn until reading Sam’s journal that Sam had done something similar when he stayed with his hosts Robbie and David on a Navajo reservation in Fort Defiance, Arizona. Hannah: There was another night when we were at a gas station for a long time… Paul: I think he directed us where to go…Hannah: That was a warm showers situation, actually Today, Wednesday, April 20, attend morning gathering at the hospital with David’s kids. Give an unexpected inspirational talk. One of the most rewarding experiences of the trip so far. We sit and drink coffee as David explains the procedure of the Morning Prayer. “There will be present everybody in the program along with the supervisors. There will be a fire burning in the stove at the center of the ho-gon, and somebody will remove some of the coals from the fire and spread them onto the floor. The coals, you are to treat as your grandmother, while the burning fire, you treat with the respect you show for your grandfather. We will be in the ho-gon—which is supposed to represent the protection of the womb. It is a primal space intended to connect you with your origins. They will sing a song to the four sacred mountains, then everyone will go around and introduce themselves by saying ‘ya-ah-teh’ which is the Navajo word for hello. But unlike the English greeting, ya ah teh is a way of saying ‘I acknowledge the goodness in you, and I am here to respond to it.’ It is a very spiritual thing to say, as are all the things in Navajo culture. And it is not a religion. They will tell you that. It is merely spiritual. They believe there is life in everything, and that everything ought to be treated with respect.” [Skip] The ceremony goes pretty much exactly as he said it would. I have forgotten the numbers now. There were something like seven boys and four girls. We stood outside of the ho-gon until the others entered, then we followed in. The kids all look to be about middle-school age. None of them look at us. The girls all sit along the right wall, Hannah with them, the boys on the left. Paul, Bill and I sit together in a clump. Bill’s legs sprawl out before him. David told us that the only part of the ceremony for which we would be expected to speak is the introduction. We agree to this. “When the Navajo introduce themselves,” David says, “they say in their native language their full first and last name and the name of their ancestral lineage, which means the name of the clan of your mother and the name of the clan of your father. This is a good thing for them to practice so that they can reconnect with their heritage. Some of them give fuller accounts than others, but you’ll see how it works.” It would probably be good practice if we white people could do this for ourselves. It occurs to me that I don’t know my family lineage, beyond the time of my grandparents. When I get back, I tell myself, I shall ask for it. And do: And it is here, reading Sam’s journal, that I learn the complete story of how my parents met and where they each came from in more detail than ever before. It is also where I learn details about my grandparents that I never knew before, not only their names, but also this hilarious and devastating anecdote about my father visiting his mother’s one-armed father on his deathbed. Rudolph Rode, before he lost his wife, lost his arm in an accident he had suffered on his property with a blasting cap. It was sawed from him on the family kitchen table, by a country doctor whom they had called in to perform the amputation. The whole family was at home when this happened. Once, when he had been a child of about ten years, at the conclusion of a visit with his one-armed grandfather, Lloyd had been given his grandfather’s pocketwatch as a keepsake. “Don’t lose it,” he had been told. “That will help you remember me when I’m gone.” And to this day, he says, I can remember him saying it to me, and wouldn’t you know it—I lost it before we even got home. * Following the morning prayer, the four of us, along with David are invited into the classroom to give what we are told will be a motivational speech. We are all very nervous, even though we know that there is nothing to be nervous about, that once we are talking we will all probably think of something to say and find some stories to tell. “Alright—” Errol says. “I want everybody to put your pencils down. Pencils down. I want everyone to put your pencils down, I said. I don’t want you to be writing anything. I want you to be listening. It’s rude to write while other people are talking.” —and I remember thinking: but how else will they remember it? Thinking: perhaps they will not need to. Perhaps it will all come out like nothing. We begin by giving meager introductions of ourselves. I believe one of us wrote all of our names on the board, though I cannot remember in whose handwriting the names are scrawled upon the blackboard of my mind, or in whose voice it was simply begun—the whole tale. But that it was, and these things were. For a time we bumbled around, speaking very generally about the experience of moving all day, and trying to get somewhere you had never been, and traveling for reasons you are not even sure of. “But we sort of take it one piece at a time,” Paul says. “And it really all depends on what kind of scale you’re using to measure your progress in. Like if you’re going to look at a map of the whole United States and try to see how far you’ve come in a single day, it’s like that much, it’s a pinch, I mean nothing. But then you take out a map of a single state and you start to notice that you’re covering some ground and it’s a little bit more, like maybe this much. Then you print out a street map and you find you’re doing whole pages in a matter of minutes. So that’s something, I’d say. To take it in small bites.” We are vaguely aware that we are telling a story to a classroom of kids who are not trying to cross the country on their bicycles, who are only trying to make it through the day without getting into some sort of fight with their superiors or their peers, with their siblings or their parents, with their friends or the authorities. And maybe we are not even aware of the fact that we are doing it, but somehow, it is as though what we are talking about begins to sound like something they might actually like to hear, as though we were talking about much more than ourselves or the trip—as though we suddenly began to speak of a thing in common in a common language. “Yeah,” Bill says. “And if you can just find the right thing to compare it to, you can make the most of it. I mean, there’s times when we’re riding and it just seems so incredibly boring, you know. But if you’re paying attention to what’s new in all of it, it can become really interesting.” We agree with him. “This might sound really lame to all of you but I’m just going to say it anyway. Yesterday, when we were riding into Ft. Defiance, we saw a Golden Eagle in a field right out here in front of the hospital. And we’ve been sort of paying attention to the birds we’ve been seeing the whole time we’ve been riding, but seeing that Golden Eagle really made me feel like we had come somewhere special. I think when I saw it I just thought it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, and I remembered, O yeah, this is why we’re doing this. For stuff like this.” There is a teacher’s assistant in the back who chimes in at this point. “What is your name again—Bill?” “Yes,” Bill says. “Bill.” “Bill—you have no idea how right you are to feel such a thing in such a place. In the Navajo tradition it is considered a sign of good luck to see an Eagle like that. You don’t need to feel foolish about saying that here. If there was ever a place not to feel foolish, this is it.” They eye us is silence. —And when we did not know what to say, or how to proceed, Errol would prompt us with a question from the back of the classroom. “So how far do you guys go in a day, on average?”; “And tell me, at what point in the day do you decide you can no longer go on?”; “And how do you decide how far you’ll go? Is it all planned out beforehand, or do you just do it day by day?”; “And show us how your bikes are set up.”; “And what do you do when you get a flat tire?”; “Have you required much help yet from other people?” And we are made to tell about what we should all like to do when we get home. “I don’t know,” Paul says. “I think I’m going to figure that out when I get there.” “And what about Bill?” says Errol. “I’m going to graduate school in the fall,” he says. “At the University of Rochester.” “What are you going to study?” “Literature,” he says. “And what will you do with that?” Bill thinks for a moment. “I don’t know. I think I will become a professor, probably. Teach.” “I think you would make a great professor, Bill.” “Yeah?” “Yeah.” “Maybe,” says Bill. “I wish I knew for sure.” “I think you will, for sure. There’s something professorial about you,” Errol says. And when he says this, it is as though it becomes immediately true. All the future is altered for Bill in the course of this sentence—as though the words had made visible a thing that was of course always present but was forever uncertain, and offered a glimpse not only into the possibility of the dream’s being realized, but into the reality of the future that was to come. For there was something about the way he presented himself in the classroom that day, with his hair parted in its usual place, with his large spectacles, and a pen behind his ear, standing so calmly in front of a group of strangers, with a piece of chalk in hand, as though he were ready to draw a diagram on the board, or a picture of the route we had taken so far, which caused me to realize in a kind of startling way that all was just as Errol said it would be. I could not explain how or why, but it was as though I realized suddenly that that was exactly what would happen—the only thing that could. He would be a teacher, would teach—as he had already taught all of us who were close to him so much, had already been doing it his entire life. Like this, he would stand before classrooms of strange faces in states he had never been to, at universities he had never heard of and speak to those visages and audiences and learn from them and teach them, and this would be his living and his mainstay, his title, his path, his career, the purpose to which the majority of his life would lean, as the majority of it had already been inclined. To the noble task of thinking, and rethinking, to revising and revisioning. And I was glad to see it, if only once, just as it might have been, if only it had been to be. “Well—thank you,” says Bill. “And Hannah?” says Errol. “I’m going to a graduate program at USC to study paleoclimate.” “To study what?” “Ah—ancient climate patterns. Science, I mean.” “Wow. Are you excited?” “Yeah. We have to finish this bike trip by June seventh so I can fly back to California.” “And how long is that program?” “It’s a seven year program.” “Wow. That’s a long time.” “I know.” “But that sounds really cool. You’re going to solve the global warming problem, I’m sure.” “Well—I’ll sure try.” “And Sam?” “I don’t know. I’ve applied to graduate programs. I might go to divinity school in Tennessee.” “I think you should do that. That sounds great.” “Yeah?” “Oh yeah.” “We’ll see.” —And it is not until we have spoken for close to an hour that any of the kids feel comfortable enough to ask any questions of us themselves. Before they do it is hard to know whether they have even been listening, or whether we have been saying anything that is worth listening to. “Oh! I have a question for Hannah.” “Shoot.” “What’s it like being the only girl?” Hannah begins to blush, and thinks for a minute about how to answer. “Well, these guys are pretty disgusting. Most of the time they’re just sitting around farting.” The class laughs, and makes disgusted faces all at once. “Eww!” “Gross!” We talk about why we are doing this, and how. Paul says: a day at a time. Bill says: Paying attention to what is around you—stopping to smell the flowers. Hannah says: it is a challenge to yourself. We talk for almost an hour, telling our stories. [Skip] “So where will you go next?” Errol says. “Well,” says Bill. “Santa Fe’s going to be the next big stop. We’re going to try to make it there by Easter, whenever that is.” “You going to go through Oklahoma at all?” “We haven’t decided yet. I mean, I would sure like to. We’re still undecided about how we’ll get across the Midwest and middle America.” “I once experienced some of that hospitality you guys were talking about a minute ago, right in the panhandle of Oklahoma.” “Really?” “Back in the day I had this huge motorcycle, and I was like you guys, man. I wanted to see everything. I just wanted to ride. So I got all my gear together, and I got on my bike—”(he says the name and year of the motorcycle, which my mind has not retained) “and, oh, she was a great bike! I rode that thing all over the place! But this one time I was riding it down to Dallas, and I swung into Oklahoma out of the North. And wouldn’t you know it, I start chugging and chugging and chugging, and I’m looking around for a gas station because I know what’s coming and can’t find one, can’t find one, and thwap! Just like that I’m out of gas. And it’s getting dark. I mean, I’m out there in the middle of nowhere and I’m thinkin, oh great. And there’s nothing to be done. Cause back then we didn’t have cell phones or text messages or what have you. When you got stranded somewhere in the middle of nowhere, you were really stuck! So I’m just sitting there, no gas, side of the road, middle of nowhere, and the sun’s going down. All of a sudden, just when I’m about ready to give it up, along comes this pack of motorcyclists. And I’m thinking oh, great. I’m going to get beat up out here for having this motorcycle and no gas. I was thinking these were the angels of darkness descending upon me. But no—they were very friendly. They asked me what I was doing way out here, I told them I’d never made a trip this long before, and didn’t know there’d be no gas stations way out here. And one of the guys just had the extra gas with him, so he fueled me up, and they rode off, and then I rode off, and it was all fine. But it was one of the most amazing things. So if you go to Oklahoma, you keep that panhandle in mind. I don’t know that you’ll meet with the same kind of folks there, but I have fond memories of that place because of what strangers did for me without cause.” We depart after a long lunch. Robbie gives each of us a feather from a red-shafted flicker, which she says the Navajo keep for protection. Bill will lose his crossing the border out of Texas into Oklahoma. [Skip] On Wednesday April 27, the four travelled from Sante Fe to Las Vegas. On our way back to the campsite, we witness a rare and majestical thing. Out of the scrubgrass, which grows in thorny patches all about this place, which we are carefully stepping over and avoiding as we make our return, a lone killdeer cries. We all stop on a beat and watch it beating its wings madly into the east. It is such a cry! Immediately after this object launches itself from the ground, out of nowhere emerges behind it a much larger bird. It is a falcon. The falcon swoops up beneath the still-climbing killdeer and the shape of it simply absorbs the other, and both descend as one to the ground. The falcon dips its head once then raises it to see us where we are all halted, watching it in disbelief. In a kind of row, as an army might make its advance, the four of us step cautiously forward towards the outnumbered bird. He flies off, without his kill. None of us, I believe, had any intention of saving the victim carrion—could we have only communicated with the falcon we should have been satisfied to let him know that we only wished to advance a little to observe him eat whatever it was with our own eyes. (“It’s a sandpiper!” Bill cries—“No,” Paul says. “It isn’t.”) We do not know immediately that the killed bird is a killdeer, but as soon as the falcon leaves, we rush upon it. The first thing we notice is that it is not dead. Its wing is bent to an impossible angle over its head, and it is lying sprawled on its side in horrible mimicry of a broken toy. Its beak opens and closes in the subtle act of its dying respiration, and its leg—one of them—rises in horizontal correlation with his ragged intakes of breath. From its wide red eye, there is expressed a most horrible and horrifying look, not of recognition, but of absolute terror, a kind of unconquerable fear, as if, even dying, the small creature, impoverished of its flight, were yet somehow still suspended, in a state of elevated and permanent surprise. I shall never forget that look: as though its thoughts in that moment were not “I am dead, now, I am dead,” but rather: “My God! I am still alive!” It is a sad, unpleasant thing to witness, and because it is still alive, still suffering, we do not know if it is our responsibility to put it out of its misery. Or if it is misery that one is even put out of when one dies. “Come on,” Paul says, finally. “Let’s let the falcon have it.” And we tear ourselves away, with the heart still going in its breast, and the leg still rising, and the horrible wide red lidless eye still staring in horrible surprise up at the vacant sky, perhaps noticing for the first time in all of its bird career, the visible stars emerging. From a great distance we continue to watch the spot where we know the bird must be. But we know, also, it is dying there—and it is almost worse to know that nothing claims it than it is to know it shall have soon expired. We cannot stop looking at the spot, cannot stop thinking “It was abandoned because of us,” cannot stop wondering who among us has the courage, or the pity, to put the thing out of its misery. [Sam: Was it you who woke up, or was it Bill?]Hannah: Right before we got on the phone I had just gotten to that partSam: And then the next morning, Bill got up, and was like, You guys remember that trucker On May 2, the four spent the night in Stinnett Texas. We make it to Stinnett, TX, a small town with a school, two gas stations, a park, a courthouse, a church, and several houses. It is a low, flat, spread out town. We go to the gas station to inquire about camping and use the bathroom. While we are there, we meet a trucker (whose name we neither ask for nor are given) who is very friendly, but also very sad and scary at the same time. He wears a trucker’s cap—sunglasses—drinks from a Big-gulp soda cup—and has very brown teeth. “So where ya’ll from?” he says. We hesitate at the question. “All over. I’m from Colorado,” Bill says. “California,” says Paul. “Pennsylvania,” says I. “Man, I’m sorry for ya!” he says. He points at Hannah. “And you?” “Central New York,” she says. “Oh man, I’m really sorry for you!” The man has driving stories to tell from everywhere. He strikes me as a man who doesn’t particularly like what he does, but who can’t help but take a lot of pride in it. Paul asks him if there is anywhere to camp in Stinnett. “Let’s go ask the sheriff!” he says. Paul and the trucker walk over to the police station, which is a very small building, located immediately behind the gas station, between it and the park. When they arrive at the door to the sheriff’s office, the man, rather than knock, performs a rather strange gymnastic in front of Paul, of punching very violently at the door. The sheriff admits them and tells Paul to just camp in the park. Which we do. But the man clings to us, and seems, for some reason, very concerned for our safety because, as he says, “I heard there’s gonna be a bit of frost tonight!” We assure him from the gas station parking lot that we will be fine in the park—but he is rather reluctant to leave us. It is almost like we are trying to get his permission to leave, or like he wants us to stay. When we are about to go, he begins to tell us about a rare spinal condition which, at various times in his life, has proved paralyzing to him. The doctors told him he would never walk again. “Doctors!” he exclaims. “What won’t they tell you?” Hannah seems most eager to end the conversation. “Well—I’m going to set up the tent,” she says. “Where’d you say you were from,” the man asks. “Boy—you really do talk like one of them damn Yankees, don’t you?” He drools when he says it. There is something more than his physical appearance which I find unsettling. He says he grew up nearby, just outside of Stinnett. We make camp in the park beneath several powerful streetlamps, surrounded by a copse of juniper trees in which several grackles have made their home. We eat a late dinner, play cards. In the park, on the other side of the treeline, several high-school boys are engaged in playing something called “field ball” which, from the looks of it, doesn’t seem to require any sort of ball at all—only golf clubs. The precise moment we are going to bed, they emerge from their side of the park (there are five of them, altogether). They ask: “Y’all are going to camp right here in the park?” We are already in our tents, but we emerge again. “What’s that?” “Y’all’re just gonna camp here like this?” We tell them yes. We are tired from biking, and as there is nowhere else to stay—this will do. It is getting cold. We are dressed in all our clothes—the youths wear only t-shirts, and all have shorts on. They seem powerfully curious about us, not only about who we are and what we are doing, but about the fact that we have decided even to talk with them at all. Or perhaps it is only us who are curious about them. They ask us biking questions. (How far have you come? How many miles a day? You two share a tent?) We mention a few details and return the questions, and ask them to tell us of their own adventures. “Today, we caught a mouse in a field and crushed it.” “Yup. They did that,” one of them says. “I didn’t do that, but they did.” “We were trying to burn it so we could get its ashes.” “Why did you want its ashes?” we ask them. “I don’t know,” they say. “Cause we’re bored. Nothing else to do.” “You guys are really just going to sleep out here in the park like this?” “Yeah. Why?” “You do that a lot?” “Sure. Why? What’s wrong with that?” “Don’t you get scared?” “Scared,” we say. “What’s there to be scared of?” “Scary things! You guys just come into town and camp wherever—and you’re telling me you’ve never been in a fight, or robbed, or killed yet? Aint any of you scared of that?” “Not really,” Paul says. “Actually, people have been pretty great to us the whole way. So far, anyway.” It is a good point the teenagers have, though. I don’t suppose there’s much I’m not afraid of at first sight—people especially. The man at the gas station today scared me. But I suppose being scared isn’t the same as being afraid, that the difference isn’t even in the judgment you make of another person before you’ve gotten to know very well who they are, so much as it is in the way you act based on that judgment. I should have responded differently. No—there’s plenty I’m afraid of. I’m even afraid of you, kiddo. “Like, in Borger, right, there’s a murderer on the loose.” “Yeah—it’s this mentally challenged guy so they let him off for this murder he did, but he’s out there in Borger right now, just wandering around. It’s probably like that in every town in the country.” “What?—Naw.” “Yeah. No, that’s true, what he’s saying. There really is a murderer on the loose in Borger!” “Well—at least we’re not in Borger.” “Yeah,” one says. “Say, but where you headed next?” “Wheeler,” we say. “Wheeler!” they say. “You guys know anything about wheeler?” we ask them. “There’s nothing in Wheeler,” they say. “Nothing?” we say. “I mean—there’s girls.” “Girls?” Paul says. “Yeah. But they’re our age.” “Yeah, that’s the only thing good about Wheeler is the girls there.” I wonder how old we must look to these kids. I wonder how old they are. I wonder how old I am myself, for that matter. It is not the same any more as the age I feel. We talk for a little while, but it is quite dark now. Part of me is afraid that we have made a mistake in telling these kids all about ourselves, acting so kind to them. What if they vandalize us in the night? What if they terrorize us? I suppose it is better to trust them, than not to trust them. But I am too tired to do either. We bid them goodnight. “You guys are going to bed?” “Yeah.” “Man, but it’s early! It’s not even nine o’clock.” “But it’s dark out.” “So?” “So? I’m tired.” “Yeah, these guys are tired,” one of them says. “You must’ve been riding all day, huh?” “Yeah.” “How far did you ride today?” “Oh, I don’t know. Seventy miles or so.” “Dang! That’s far! I didn’t even know you could ride that far.” “Holy—” “No way.” “Yeah. You can do it.” “Yeah. Of course you can.” “And you’re goin all the way to New York?” “That’s the plan.” “Man—that’s far.” “Man, I’ve never even left Stinnett.” “I’d be scared to do that.” We continue making preparations for bed, until they decide to acknowledge our desire to sleep. We bid them goodnight. A moment later, after we have climbed into our sleepingbags, a voice returns. “Hey guys!” the voice calls. There is a moment of silence for which we wonder whether we will not be terrorized now. “Yeah?” says Paul, after a minute. “I got another question for you—I was going to ask you before, but I was too scared.” “Yeah?” says Paul, spokesman of the group. “Do any of you guys—” “Yeah?” “—smoke weed?” There is a long pause. It is as though he were trying to decide how honest to be. Then Paul says: “Yeah. I do—sometimes—occasionally.” I can hear Bill laughing. “You don’t want to get blazed, do you?” The silence following this is too long. As though he were really considering it. Finally Paul says: “No, no. You know, I think I’m good tonight. Thanks, though.” “You sure?” the kid says. “Yup. I’m going to bed.” “Okay,” the kid says. He laughs. “No masturbating in those tents now, you hear!” And then they are gone, scrambling, giggling like children. We sleep profoundly. Except Bill. The following morning Bill will tell us the scariest story of the trip so far. “So you guys know that guy came back lastnight—the guy from the gas-station. He came back. I swear to God. At like twelve thirty in the morning or something—he came back.” Hannah claims she heard him, too. “He was just standing outside of our tents. I woke up because I think I had to pee or something and as soon as I realized I was awake I realized there was somebody out there. And he was just talking to himself, saying over and over again ‘Hello, hello, hello!’ I mean, he wasn’t shouting it or anything, but he was definitely trying to wake us up. I can’t believe you didn’t hear him, Paul. God he was right there! So I unzipped the tent and was seriously just on my knees still in my sleepingbag squinting at this guy—those lights were so bright—and all I could see was his silhouette, and I was looking at him trying to figure out who he was, even. He was just sitting there. And I said, ‘Yeah?’ and he said ‘It’s a pretty chilly night out here tonight, and I hear there’s gonna be a frost. My wife won’t tolerate any sleep in her bed knowing there’s a bunch of kids out here freezing to death. So she sent me down here to tell you all there’s room for you at our place. Y’all come on now and you can sleep in my front room.’ And it was so weird because it was like all of a sudden he was just telling me what to do, and making up this whole thing about what his wife had said. I mean, if any of that was true, why the fuck did you wait until midnight to come and tell us, jerk! So I said ‘Ah, buddy, look, no—I think we’re okay. I mean, we’re asleep. I appreciate your concern and everything, but really, we’re already set up here. We’ll be fine.’ And after I said that I got really scared because he just didn’t say anything. For seriously the longest time he just sat there looking at me. Like a whole minute passed or something. And that’s when I got scared. I was like ‘Holy shit this guy only showed up here so he could kill us,’ and after I thought that, he still hadn’t moved or said anything and I didn’t know what to do—whether to run or scream or shit my bag or what. He was just sitting there at the picnic table, looking at me. I couldn’t even see his face. And then finally, after I had just about had a heart attack, he was just like, ‘okay.’ And he got up and left. Goddamn it, Paul—I can’t believe you didn’t hear any of that. You and your goddamn earplugs. And you too, Sam. What the hell’s the matter with all of you? And Hannah—if you were just lying in there listening to all of that why in the hell didn’t you come out?” I want to tell you about another near brush with death they had before being greeted by their host Charles Warren Moseley in Weatherford Oklahoma, but I won’t. I won’t tell you about him, a PhD in computer science who had helped to engineer the emergency oxygen tanks that were commissioned for the Apollo 13 mission, how he was planning a bicycle trip to Canada. I won’t tell you about the advice he gave the four in the event they should encounter a tornado, or the story he shared of being hit by a car himself. I won’t tell you about the punk house they stayed in, or Rider Spahr. I won’t tell you about Chris and Denise in Hulbert, Oklahoma, who did a 500-mile tour on a tandem bicycle, and passed on a story of someone who toured on a tandem by himself so that he could pick up hitch-hikers. I won’t tell you of their time in the desert. I can’t. There just isn’t time. But maybe there is time for Katherine, the 19-year-old who they encountered near Flagstaff, but first heard about days before, who was walking across the country, pushing a Sears shopping cart in front of her. Hannah: One of my outstanding memories about the fallout afterwards… Paul: Maybe your brother told you about CatherineHannah: And so we were talking about it a lotPaul: She was someone we just imagined for daysHanna: It was Sam who recognized herPaul: And we were just out on the roadHannah: But then the follow-up to the bike trip is that we got an email from Katherine There is this moment, from May 6, somewhere in Oklahoma: “How you doin today Hannah?” “Oh. I’m good. Just fine. How are you?” “Fine, fine.” “Yeah?” “Yeah.” “Wait Sam I have a question.” “Yeah? What’s your question?” “Do you feel like you’ve been changing very much out here?” “Changing? How do you mean?” “Well, you know, I’ve been thinking a lot about this trip as an experience of growth and character development, and all of that, and I just don’t know that I feel that I’m any different today and now than I was before we started this trip.” “Really?” “No. I mean—do you feel like you’ve changed much?” “I mean, yeah—I do. I think I do.” “Like how?” “I don’t know. I mean, I guess just because of all the things that we’ve done so far. We’ve had so many experiences out here—you know? We’ve been through the desert; the Indian reservation; we’ve stayed with strangers. We’ve seen all kinds of wildlife. Think of the things you know now that you didn’t know before, just from your own experience. We’ve had people help us for no reason. We’ve been to towns we’ve never heard of. We’ve—” “Yeah, but do you feel like you’re becoming a different person? Like you’re developing any somehow?” “I mean, yeah—I think so. I think I’m always changing a little. Every day I’m a little bit different than I was yesterday. I don’t know that that’s always for the best, but it’s definitely true.” “See I just don’t feel like that. I’ve been thinking that when I get back from this trip I’m just going to be the same person that I always was. I will have crossed the country, but it will not have changed me any.” “Really? I think it will have.” “But how?” “I don’t know. Maybe it’s the kind of thing that you have to wait a while to understand, after you’ve sort of gotten away from it. Sort of like how it’s hard to remember now where we were two days ago. Maybe this whole trip will feel like that when we get home, and people will recognize it in you, even if you do not know it about yourself.” “Maybe. I don’t know.” “Me neither. I don’t know either.” [1st verse of How Long I’m Gonna Love you For - People change lord knows I do] Hannah: Will: Who were your favorite hosts… [ Trey and Mallory, Guthrie OK]Paul: I think some of the things that stand out had a lot to do with who we stayed with…Hannah: They lived on their grandparents’ land [Verse of “Maybe” - about Lance Armstrong?] Hannah: Like, within the first week, we had just crossed over into Nevada, I think… [hot tub heroes] Paul: One really funny weird night… [camp cody]Hannah: That was another situation where we didn’t have anywhere to stayPaul: So we just set up our tents in their front yardHannah: And then they came out and asked us if anyone wanted to take a showerPaul:Doris came out and asked us if we wanted to join them for dinnerHannah: The reason why the camp was called camp cody On the next episode of Someone Else’s Blues, Sam and Paul offer their thoughts on Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, the book that Bill was reading when he died. Next time, on Someone Else’s Blues. End Credits
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SOMEONE ELSE’S BLUES: A PODCAST By Will Steffen EPISODE 6: Coming Down with Something Serious (Click here —-> xxxxx To Listen) Featured Music: “A Series of Failed Attempts at Getting Over Loving You” - Album: Someone Else’s Blues “Someone Else’s Blues” - Album: Someone Else’s Blues “You Can’t Get Any Poorer Than Dead” - Album: Ain’t It A Pity? “Tom Joad’s Promise” - Album: Sam Steffen “Words, Words, Words (Or: Lies My Leaders Told Me)” - Album: Words, Words, Words “I Think I’m Coming Down With Something Serious” - Album: Wet Match “Storm Beyond the Calm” - Album: Wet Match “The Heart and the Head” - Album: Nothin’ to Write Home About “Lord Have Mercy” - Album: Only Human “Welcome to the World” On the last episode of Someone Else’s Blues, Sam, Hannah, and Paul recounted some of the highlights of their bike trip across the country with Bill Cranshaw on the Navajo Reservation, in Guthrie OKlahoma, and in the Ozark Mountains. This episode picks up where the last one left off. Welcome to Someone Else’s Blues, a podcast about twins, twinship, and the best singer-songwriter you’ve never heard of. Part 6: Madame Shoo-Koh The Dead ButterflyComing Down With Something Serious [Verse of Series of Failed attempts about Literature] In the previous episodes, I mentioned how a lot of my brother’s music has been influenced by his study of the Bible. He has a masters in Theological Studies, after all. But it might be more accurate to say that his songs are influenced by his love and interest in literature. There’s “You Can’t Get Any Poorer Than Dead,” a song whose title he stole from a Flannery O’Connor short story and novel. [Audio: Thanks, Flannery. I owe you one.] There’s “Tom Joad’s Promise,” a folk rendition of the iconic speech delivered by Steinbeck’s protagonist at the end of The Grapes of Wrath, who decides to leave his family and to run from the law, who are pursuing him for the murder of Jim Casy’s killer. There’s also “Words, Words, Words,” which echoes Hamlet’s answer to Polonius when he is asked, “What do you read, my lord?” The song seems more like it was inspired by a reading of Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States than anything by Shakespeare, since it is basically a laundry list of lies told by a handful of US Presidents. And then there’s “I Think I’m Coming Down With Something Serious,” a perfect anthem for quarantine living in 2020, and a song which I can only guess was inspired by Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. I’m sorry to admit that I have never read The Magic Mountain. But it is a book that I know means a great deal to my brother--and to Paul. It was the book that Bill was reading when he died, a book about which he conversed at length with Paul, and a book my brother spent quite some time studying in detail in the months after the bike trip.Sam: Paul had started reading it and Bill had started reading it when we got to CASam: Will: You read Magic Mountain once you finished the trip Paul: Just before we talked I was reading through some parts of my journal…[Inter-cut first verse of Coming Down with Something Serious when Paul introduces Hans Castorp] In some passages, like this one, from May 6, still somewhere in Oklahoma, you get a sense for why Sam may have felt enticed to read Mann’s novel. I have no doubt that Bill would have made an excellent professor: With Bill, we talk of our regrets and our most shameful times. And of our favorite negative emotions. “What is your favorite negative emotion?” Bill prompts us. “My what? What do you mean? I mean, can you even have a favorite negative emotion?” “Of course you can!” Bill says. There is a long pause. “I don’t know. You seem to have an idea of one: what’s yours?” “Alright, I’ll go first: mine’s resentment. I love resentment because it’s not as simple as it seems. You can’t really resent anybody without secretly admiring them at the same time, you know? I like it because to my mind it’s a mixture of hatred and admiration—a feeling of wanting to hate and kill somebody but also wanting to be them at the same time, and to be friends with them, like you are recognizing in some person you will not allow yourself to love something in them that you already do, and cannot make yourself stop loving. It’s so confusing! But that’d be mine.” “I don’t know. I mean, that’s a good one. I don’t know if there are too many other negative emotions that work like that. That actually sounds about as positive as it is negative.” “Aw, come on—sure there are. Shame works like that, too.” “Yeah. Shame. Maybe shame would be mine. It’s the easiest emotion to access. It’s like the thing that when you think of what in your life has been shameful, the feeling comes back as strongly as it did when you first felt it. I don’t know if I like feeling it, necessarily, but there’s something to be said for it, certainly. It’s the feeling that memory has the easiest access to.” “Yeah. I sort of love hearing stories about shame.” “Yeah. You’ve got some good ones, Bill.” “What are they?” Hannah says. “I wanna hear them.” And he tells them. Of crying so badly for the toy he wanted as a child which his parents finally gave him and which he could not enjoy at all. Of the time his brother fell on a ropeswing and was lying unconscious, was maybe even dying, and he ran home and somehow could not bring himself to interrupt his mother who was talking just then on the telephone. And I have mine, too. I think of Liza, and feel myself thrown out of my joyful spirits. A foul humor taunts and touches my heart there. And with what increasing frequency have I gone to bed and awakened thinking of her, of what she must be doing. “The thing about this trip, though,” says Bill “is—well, I guess I should just explain it before I say it. So there’s this character in The Magic Mountain—whose name is Madame…actually I’m not completely clear on how you pronounce it…Paul, do you call her Shoo—” “Cho-chat? Maybe? I don’t know.” “Shoo—Cho? Is that it? Cho-chat? For some reason I’ve been thinking the way to pronounce the name is Shoo-koh. Anyway. In The Magic Mountain, Hans Castorp is totally enamored of this Madame Shoo-koh. He has sort of this insane relationship with her where every time he sees her it becomes this huge thing where either one of their eyes are looking. I mean it starts out sort of innocently, but then he starts talking with this other woman, who’s much older, who sits at his table for all the meals and who sort of figures out before he does that he’s totally infatuated with this girl, and so she starts going on and on and telling him all about her, and then sometimes not telling him about her, just to piss him off. And so very slowly Hans Castorp sort of falls in love with this Madame Shoo-koh—even though the narrator tells us that love at the Sanatorium doesn’t really exist, or that it’s not really possible, or that it’s not the same thing, anyway, that it is for the people who live ‘down below.’ But it’s love—I mean, that’s what it is. Or it’s one half of love anyway. It’s actually kind of insane because for a significant portion of this book you’ve been learning all about how in love with this girl Hans is, but he’s seriously never even spoken with her! All they do is make eyes at each other. Thomas Mann writes like twelve scenes where the only thing you have to pay attention to is when they’re looking at one another, and how it makes Hans feel. There’s actually this great scene—” “Yeah—wait, Bill. Did you get to the part where Hans is waiting to get his x-ray taken, and him and Jo—Joa—how do you say his cousin’s name—” “Wait—Yes. That scene’s amazing!” “Yeah! It’s so crazy! They—” “Yeah, so they’re—Oh.” “Go ahead.” “No, you say it.” “No, man. It’s all you.” “Well—I’ll just say. There’s this amazing scene where Hans and his cousin both have to get their x-rays taken, because they’re in the sanatorium, you know. And so, all that stuff’s going on with Madame Shoo-koh I’ve just been saying and they go into this waiting room to wait to get their x-rays, and there’s been a delay in the appointments, and they’re running a half-an-hour behind. So they’re just sitting in this room that’s no bigger than a closet and suddenly Madame Shoo-koh comes in. And—God, it’s so crazy—” “And Hans Castorp doesn’t even talk to her!” “Yeah. And it’s so intense because not only do you know that Madame Shoo-koh definitely knows that there’s something going on between her and Hans Castorp, but Hans’s cousin also knows it, and doesn’t want to get in the middle of it. But there he is, and they’re all just stuck in this little room together. And you already understand at this point that Hans is in this position where he actually can’t talk to this girl, because he knows that if he ever talks to her, it would just ruin this perfect untouched thing they have going between them in their eyes all the time. And I forget what happens exactly, but somehow Jo—ah, ah—achim? Is that how you say it? “Jo-kim?” “Choke him?” “I don’t know.” “—Han’s cousin—gets to talk with Madame Shoo-koh, and you get to read this inner monologue of Hans’s while he’s sitting there watching his cousin talk to this girl he’s totally in love with, and how resentful he starts to feel of his cousin and how stupid everything his cousin is saying sounds to him, and how much better it would be if only he were the one who was talking—except he isn’t the one whose talking. He’s the one who’s just sitting there, like a child, embarrassed that he can’t, or won’t say anything because he’s too afraid to talk to this girl he doesn’t actually know very much about.” “It’s so good!” “It’s so good. And—” “Is that—oh, were you—?” “What?” “Go ahead. Sorry.” “Well, I was just going to say—and then I’ll be done. My entire life, I feel like, from the time I was in first grade—I’ve always had a Madame Shoo-koh. I mean, I could seriously give you the whole history of my life just by listing all the girls I’ve loved who never knew it and who I could simply never bear to tell. I mean, it’s sort of crazy how well I can remember events from my childhood and the order that things have happened to me in, but I think it’s only because I can actually do that—because I’ve got that catalogue well-memorized. I know all their names, and what grade I was in when I loved them, because, to be completely honest, I’ve never not been in love with someone in that way. Except now, on this trip. I mean it: this is the first time in my life I’ve not had a Madame Shoo-koh. And that’s crazy to me. I mean, I don’t know what that means that I’m not spending every moment of my day thinking about someone I want to be with, or someone I wish I could say ‘I love you’ to—but I don’t—I mean, I’m not. And that’s not a bad thing. It’s just weird. I mean, it’s amazing, actually. And I know that that must have something to do with being out here on the road, and with what it means to feel like you are living in an entirely present tense. Because that’s what it is. I’m completely present here because I’m not trying to love someone who doesn’t or might not love me back. I just don’t care about that, here. And I sort of wonder if that’s something that will come back as soon as we’re not moving again, or if maybe that’s a more permanent change, like maybe that’s just who I am becoming now, and that it’s going to just stay that way, just fine, the way it is. Paul says he has had dreams on this trip where he cheats on Leora—and feels horrible—and then he wakes up and realizes it has all been a bad dream. I feel that anguish, too. And it will come to be that when I am startled from that sleep, for which I still shall seldom dream, as I seldom have before, that my anguish will begin anew, not in the dream but in the world. Because not two weeks from today we shall have lost the peace that it is only possible to know when you have not yet learned the way it will be lost. That peace will go and go, irrevocably and forever, so that not even in the empty waiting void of unremembered dreams will it ever more come back. Sam had not yet read Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain when he took that trip, but I can remember him spending a long time reading it when he got back. I think I could tell he didn’t really want to finish it, because of what finishing it would mean. I myself have never read it. But the coincidences in this story are not lost on me. Perhaps one reason I am committed to remembering Bill right now, the reason it took me almost ten years to realize I had a part of this story to tell, has less to do with the fact that our brothers share the same name, and the same twinned collegiate pedigree, and more to do with the fact that Bill was planning to attend a graduate program in literature, and speculated in front of a classroom of kids as part of a “motivational speech” about becoming a professor. It is hard to suppress the thoughts of what Bill might be doing today, where he might be living, what he might be reading, researching, or teaching. Would he have pursued the postmodern novelists, as he had started to at Bard? Or would his hobby of entomology, a virtue instilled in him by his father, have gotten the best of him, and made him change horses midstream? [Words, Words, Words] I remember taking Columbus’s The Four Voyages with me on my trip, not out of admiration or respect for the author, or even for the pleasure of reading, but because I was studying early modern travel writing, and was interested in doing a project about colonial encounters and the spectres of cannibals on the early modern stage. I remember persuading Bob to buy a copy of Cyrano de Bergerac at a second-hand bookstore half-way through our trip, so that he would have something to read other than a map. [Words Words Words 1st verse] If he had been at Rochester in May of 2013, I have even wondered whether he would have put us up for the night when Bob and I made our way through on our trip--assuming I still would have been interested in undertaking such a journey. And this is something I think Sam has the habit of doing as well, especially in italics, trying to remember how Bill and Paul had discussed the trip before embarking upon it: And they must have spoken there also of the trip, too, though at first perhaps only in passing, as only a thing that might be, with Bill explaining it as a thing his father had done and as a thing he had always meant to do, and had even thought of doing the summer before he came to Bard, but had not, and with Paul listening to it the same way perhaps that he listened to Bill talk about how he would raise his children, in the unimaginable event that he should ever have them, thinking to himself: you realize of course you will need to become a boyfriend to someone before you can become a father—but letting so much alone as a thought until Bill had finished explaining once more, as he had already said thousands of times, every time a child, or even the memory of one, passed before him: Saying: “Here’s what I don’t understand: how parents can let their kids do anything by themselves.” Saying: “Today I saw a kid waddling up at the nursery school. He walked like every step he took was too much, and then for some reason I can’t explain he would just fall over, right on the sidewalk, and cry. God it was the worst thing I’ve ever seen. The whole time I was looking at him I could just tell it was going to happen, too. It was like he just figured out he had legs or something, it was, I don’t know. I swear I’m going to be a terrible parent. If I ever have kids I’m never going to let them do anything. I’m going to carry them around until they’re seventeen. I mean I’m just going to have to watch them all the time so they don’t do anything dangerous or stupid when they’re alone and curious. Seriously. I mean, how do people sleep knowing they have these little curious people in the next room where there might be all kinds of things they could cut themselves with or choke on or climb up and fall off of? Just think of how many things could go wrong with a baby. No—in fact, don’t trouble yourself. It’s too much. It would be crazy even to try…” Listening, as to a thing that was so far off in time it need not be entertained seriously, with ears that did not trample of the other’s words with questions and askings but with the patience that waited for what was humorous in it, as though to him tell of a time that already had passed, that had happened long ago, now, in the place of a world where Paul himself had ever existed, where Bill had already lived his whole life out into old age with the best experiences and results of all possible, where it was merely for Paul to imagine it to the extent that the other could speak it. Paul: I think I’ve talked with Sam about this…Hannah: Will: What has your relationship with biking been since the trip? From Thursday, May 12. It’s mostly italics now. “Man,” Paul says, stopping. “What?” “I hit a butterfly.” “What?” “Man!” And I remember that we turn back here to commune again, to gather ourselves this time about a glorious black butterfly, which is not dead, though seriously injured, somehow still for the most part in tact. With the knowledge that it will not survive long now. Its wings flap delicate, softly hitting the concrete as in some kind of mute protest. There is nothing hard about it at all: it does not even make a noise. It looks like a leaf which the wind blew here and is trying to blow on, except that there is no wind now to blow it. It is dying. “What kind of butterfly is that?” “I think it’s a swallowtail of somekind,” Paul says. He picks it up gently with his fingers, grabbing it by the tips of its beautiful wings. It struggles. “I don’t know. Bill? You know what kind of butterfly this is?” “Lemme see. I don’t know. It’s pretty cool lookin. I think you’re right that it’s a swallowtail.” And do not forget this. How he took it into his hand, then, as he did every insect and beetle and butterfly which we ever saw or came upon on our trip, morphing his fingers to the shape of it. And how whatever it was he took up would give in immediately, become docile, let itself be taken by that hand (those long rubbery fingers) that held it firmly but would not, it seemed to know, crush the life from it. How he let it sit on his palm, or the ends of his digits just so, for the benefit of himself, so that he could look at it, hold it down and look down on it, hold it up and look up at it, almost as though he were reluctant to say anything about it before he had actually touched it and made his own hand the whole background and world upon which to view it. His large hands, the fingers of which I saw him countless times clean in some way with his mouth and tongue whenever he ate anything that fell apart in them or did not require the use of silverware. And sometimes even the things that did. That knew the gentleness of taking up the lives of insects and holding them close before returning them to their broken mother earth unharmed. That gentleness of hand which personified the gentleness of his heart to me. “Is it a monarch?” “Nope. It’s definitely not a monarch.” “What are the characteristics of a monarch?” “I’m not entirely sure. But I think a monarch tends not to be all black. And I think you can tell by body shape, antennae length. I don’t know though. Something to ask my dad.” “You think it would be alright if I ripped its wings off?” Paul says. “Ripped its wings off?” “Yeah. I mean, it’s going to die now right? Don’t get me wrong, I feel horrible about it. But I’d really like to have a swallowtail to press in my notebook.” “Jesus Christ, Paul,” says Bill, laughing. “What the fuck’s the matter with you?” “What? Should we just—I mean. Fuck. I don’t know what to do. Haven’t you guys ever killed anything so you could keep it?” I am reminded of the collected beetles of California-Arizona. “Bill did. Bill’s killed like thirty bugs on this trip so far. They weren’t worth the trouble.” “Oh, yeah. Don’t even remind me. Yeah. I did that. And I felt pretty awful about it. I still do.” “I just don’t want it to be—fuck. I mean look at it. It’s just suffering.” Suffering what. To be the pariah of its race now. Its wings to cease soon. To flutter aimless and dejected through the rest of life which now would not be long, which now was never long. But how long is a butterfly’s life, anyhow? A stupid question in many ways. The length of a lifetime, I suppose. Not a thing that should be measured, anyway, at least not by the human mind. Nor the length of a world too big to know, nor day too long to live through. Nor wind too strong to fly against, nor sun too bright by which to read. Nor night too cold to sleep. How did you ever survive here? Unless you never knew your beauty. Unless you never knew that you were separate from the universe, even while from within it. Unless you never knew how this could happen. That is how one gets on here. By not knowing for a great deal of time what not even experience has to teach you. That it took you so much time to hatch and cocoon yourself and develop and mature and change to become what magnificence an instant may destroy. “What should I do? Fuck!” “C’mon, guys. Let’s keep going.” “Fuck.” We rode on. What stays with me are the lost feather, the dead butterfly, and the scorned prayer. Sam: Will: And I can’t tell if people are going to have questions about who was driving… I did look it up. I found the police report, which is disappointing for how sparse it is: Fatal # 199. Accident #177. Deceased: 1. Injured: 0. Date of Crash: 5/16/2011Time of Crash: 2:38Location: Highway 16County: WhiteDeceased: William Cranshaw, born 2/28/1988, city of residence Annandale on Hudson, Male, Pedestrian Vehicle: Dosge (Dodge?) 2003Direction: South, Highway 16 Initial Narrative: Initial Narrative PEDESTRIAN WAS TRAVELING HWY 16 SOUTH ON A BICYCLE. V1 TRAVELING HWY 16 SOUTH STRUCK THE BICYCLE AND PESDETRIAN. NOT INJURED: CRYSTAL KENWORTHY (F) 3/30/1982 300 E MAIN ST LETONA AR SHE WAS WEARING HER SEATBELT. Weather Condition: Clear; Road condition: dry Body Held at White County Medical Center, Searcy, AK (Just in case) On the next episode of Someone Else’s Blues: Next time, on Someone else’s blues.
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SOMEONE ELSE’S BLUES: A PODCAST BY Will Steffen EPISODE 7: ”Much Too Brave” (Click here —-> xxxxx To Listen) Featured Music: “All I Want (Is To Sing the Blues)” - Album: Someone Else’s Blues“Someone Else’s Blues” - Album: Someone Else’s Blues “In No Hurry Now” - Album: Someone Else’s Blues“He Was A Friend of Mine” (Traditional)“Right Where We Left Off” - Album: Failed Novels“A Brief Reflection Upon My Life to Date” - Album: Nothin’ To Write Home About“Easier Said Than Done”“Lord Have Mercy” - Album: Only Human“Grow Long Thy Hair, Samson” - Album: Only Human This episode contains graphic descriptions that some listeners may find disturbing or triggering. Please listen with discretion. On the last episode of someone else’s blues, Sam and Paul recounted the significance of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain for each of them. (Audio: asking Sam for permission to read the description of Bill’s death) Part 7: Much Too BraveThe Scorned PrayerA Scorned Prayer Monday 16 May 2011 Tumbling Shoals, Arkansas—Searcy, Arkansas ——————————— The water Life will have to start over today. At the divergence of what happens with what might have, the divorce between what occurred and what before it had could not have possibly. It will be months before you will find yourself no longer thinking of him, and even then, you will wonder if you were actually not thinking of him or if by that point you had only immersed your gaze so irrevocably in his that you could no longer tell where his ended and yours began…. But even if he could come back, what would even he be able to tell me that would console me? (I am fine, Sam. Really. Fine. Finer than I ever was. I didn’t even know what happened. I didn’t feel a thing. It was like reading a book and having someone come along to tear out the page you were working on. Right in the middle of a sentence. It was annoying, yeah, a little distracting—but from what? It brings you back. You return to the place and the kind of being from which life earns for itself all its beauty and finity and value. One moment you are reading, then you look up, look to see the hand that tore out your page, and the moment you do that you find that you are in a different place, and suddenly you do not remember any of it. You do not remember why you looked up, or even that you looked up from anything. You do not recognize any of your surroundings. You do not even have surroundings. You do not even see things in the sensory way we are used to talking about it. You are not even you anymore, in the sense of having a body and a sense of time with which to age it. You do not remember what you were doing a moment ago (reading the book of your life), nor any of the characters in it, nor what page you were on. And it is fine. It is, really. It did not even hurt. You don’t even feel it. And the best part of it is that you do not miss it, do not know how to miss it, nor remember any of the people who were there with you, in it, because you were never doing it. What you become when you are dead is not really you in any recognizable sense. The handful of water from which you have drawn in your life is poured back into the ocean from which life is incessantly being drawn. And all the parts of you become scattered, they go and recombine themselves into the massiveness of everything. You have no basis for comparison anymore. You simply go back. Not to life, and not to death. Just back to where you were before you were anything, before anything was. Don’t think of it as a place. It’s not anywhere. It’s not in time. It’s not into your mother and father. Not into the children you did not have. But into what there was before. You have to realize that what you are in life is the end result of a history that has had no beginning. When you die, Sam, everything you know about the world and yourself dies with you. There is no world anymore. The whole world ends every time an individual dies. And that is not bad. Remember: there is no good and bad—there are only stories. You don’t even want to go back. You don’t want anything. Because you don’t remember anything when you’re dead. That’s not how it works. But you, Sam. You do. You remember it. And the whole goddam bunch of you who knew me, who I loved. You all knew it, in your own ways. So you remember it. I did all I could, and maybe there is part of me that wishes I had done more. Because that is what you ought to do when you are living. You ought to try to help each other realize that you’re all here to try to keep from hurting one another, even while knowing full well that you can’t draw in your breath without it taking away something from someone else. That’s just how it works. That’s the whole reason your heart can break so bad, because it knows how to love; and that’s actually the only reason it can love, too—because it can break. But the heart takes its own brokenness into account. That’s why it can go on beating when it can’t possibly. That’s how it can stop beating, when it can’t possibly. Because it’s just a thing to measure time with. And you can keep my time for me as well as I could, because we were close and our hearts beat together for a while, and yours is still beating and that means mine is too. My rhythms could not stray from yours even if you wanted them to. Because I’m not even saying all of this to you anyway. You’re saying it. And I’m just agreeing with all of it because you are)... Bill’s call to the cattle: Hyaa! Hyaa! On your feet! Which was miraculous in Arizona, the day we rode onto the reservation. Bill Thomson telling me: We could have you back here in two hours time, not realizing then that Bill Cranshaw had at that time only a little more than two hours yet to live. Not knowing that that would get me back just in time to see him one more time, to let him ask me how the ride was, and not to say more than a word about it. The ride in the car with Bill Thomson is the first thing that happens to me that Bill never gets to hear about. At the roadside, the materialization of people. The willowtree. How fragile we are. Wondering where his helmet was. His face. His arms. His legs. His shoes off. His throat cut. His teeth bleeding. I pulled open his eyelids and his eyes did not see me. Being asked if I would like to pray. Shaking the woman’s hand free of me. The police officer who apprehended me physically and told me I needed to calm down. The words “He was my friend!” being the only thing I could say to try to make people understand. The bomb. The proceedings in the hospital. Paul having to call someone else before he could get Sue’s phone number, then having to call Sue who was in New York City at the time. Hannah saying it is going to be okay. How did it happen? I don’t know. Where do you want me to begin? He was my friend. I first met Bill— No. Today. Today? The accident. I need you to tell me exactly how it happened. I need you just to say what you saw. I didn’t see much. I mean— Just take a minute. I know. I was just pulling back out onto the road and I heard this sound like a bomb going off and I raised my head— Wait. Pulling out from where? From the driveway. Where? Where we were. I don’t know where it was. On Rt. 16, just outside of wherever it is we are now. Searcy. What? You’re in Searcy, Arkansas. Now what driveway? Here. Write it. I don’t know. There was a driveway we were in. We were there taking a break and we were just pulling back out onto the road. And Paul went out first. Or maybe it was Hannah. I can’t remember. One of them went— You can’t remember? Wait—stop. Don’t write that. Just tell me first what you’re going to write, before you write it. You need to be pretty precise with these statements, cause they’re gonna be used probably when this thing comes to trial. So you want to use as few words as possible so you can fit it all in there, you don’t have all the room in the world, as you can see, and you don’t want to fill it up with things that just aren’t important. So just say it to me first. Paul and Hannah went out first. And I was looking at Bill. And. We were waiting. While they left? Yeah. But we were going, too. Right behind them. And he was holding the map. And? Then what? No. Don’t write anything yet. And then he gave it back to me. And what time was this? I don’t know. Afternoon. I think around one, or two, maybe. It was right before we were supposed to eat lunch. But you don’t know what time? No. Okay. So they went—Paul and the other one? Hannah. And then you both went? Then Bill went. He was in front of you? Yeah. I was putting the map away. Bill had it because he wanted to see how far the next town was and he looked at it. And then he gave it back to me and I was tucking it back into my front bag and he must’ve already been gone by then. You mean gone? Got back onto the road, I mean, while I was still stopped in the driveway. And then I must’ve put it away and then I must’ve looked both ways before I pulled back out onto the road because I pulled out onto the road, too, then, and then— Don’t write must’ve. What? Don’t write must’ve. Either you did or you didn’t. Did you look? Do you remember looking? I can’t remember. You can’t remember. No. Maybe I did. I probably did. But I was on the road when it happened. Okay, wait. So is that when it happened? No. I mean yeah. So I pulled out onto the road and I was riding in the shoulder and I must’ve looked up at him riding up ahead of me— But you don’t remember? No. I don’t remember. And was he in the shoulder? Yeah. I think. I mean, I wasn’t looking. It’s important. I don’t know if he was in the shoulder or not. I don’t know why he wouldn’tve been, though. And that’s when it happened? No. I mean, that’s when we were going again. And we were only on the road a couple seconds before I heard a noise that was like a bomb went off. And I mean it was loud. And I remember I am looking down when I hear it because when I raise my head there is already a car stopped in the road and smoke going everywhere like someone’s started a carfire. I do not remember the color of the car. I just know it was a car. My memory has preserved the colorless shape of a car. And then I thought a car must’ve hit a telephone pole. Because that was more what it sounded like. And that was actually what it looked like too because I looked up and there was car in front of me with smoke coming up from it and there was a dust cloud that was rising up and everything looked sort of frozen. And I remember I thought that, I was thinking that, sort of saying that to myself, “Gee, a car must’ve hit a telephone pole,” even when I could see him spinning through the air. And it’s the second I lift up my head there’s all this smoke and there’s this yellow and red jersey spinning through the air doing somersaults high, high up, and spinning very fast like it was something somebody shot out of a cannon. Spinning and spinning going around faster than you could even make out any of the features except the yellow and the red of his jersey. And even then that’s all I could think that it was, just a jersey spinning really fast with the heavy weight of a body within it to keep it going and going much faster than a body could possibly go. And I was still thinking that about the telephone pole even though I’d already seen it by then, or would see it soon enough, that there weren’t any telephone poles that close to the road that a car could’ve hit, and even after I’d already seen it was him I couldn’t know it yet because I was still thinking about how if it wasn’t a telephone pole then it must’ve been two cars that slammed into each other going head on. But I wasn’t looking at the cars. They were all stopped anyway. And I wasn’t too far behind all of this, and I just kept pedaling, because that’s what I had been doing anyways the moment I heard it, and so I got up to it and now I can’t breathe anymore. I can’t really cry either, but I can’t breathe at all anymore and it’s like everything’s underwater all of a sudden and I’m not able to move fast enough to do what I have to do because I’m underwater and it’s very hard to know that you have to move very fast to do something but you have to hold your breath at the same time and move underwater to do it because the only thing I know that I have to do is call an ambulance because I can see his jersey just lying there in the grass with his body still in it, just resting kind of peacefully but every part of it wrong because he hasn’t got either one of his shoes on, or his glasses or his watch or his helmet and he’s just sort of curled up on his back like he might’ve scooted himself there very awkwardly but it doesn’t really look like Bill at all and part of me knows already that it isn’t even him and that he doesn’t look like he’s alive. And then I can remember the way he was flipping through the air, and how high up he was and how fast, but I still couldn’t know it was him. And I could see he was bleeding pretty bad and he had a cut on his neck and his arms both looked broken and his hands looked limp. And I’m getting my phone out even before I can go to him and my hands are shaking and I can’t breathe and I’m holding my hands over my ears for some reason because it’s like that sound is still coming into them, or is finally getting there, even though its gone quiet now except for me who am making a noise I can’t even control the pitch or the squeal of. And everything is happening much too slowly for it to be right. I can’t get the phone to turn on and there’s all these cars that’ve stopped and people are getting out but nobody’s going to Bill and I can’t even tell them to do something because everything’s underwater and I can’t breathe and there’s something that’s trying to get into my head and I have to keep my hand over my ear, at least one of them because my heart is trying to die in me, is doing those flips he was doing. And finally somebody picks up and I’m already just screaming about how we need an ambulance because my friend just got hit by a car and I think he’s dead, and the man on the line just keeps saying, “Ma’am. Ma’am. I’m gonna need you to calm down. Now can you tell me what happened? Where are you? Ma’am.” And I can’t even remember what I told them or what they said but I remember knowing that nothing was happening like it should have been happening because I couldn’t find any words for anything and they didn’t seem to be listening to me anyway. And I had a vague sense that other people might’ve been calling an ambulance, and I think I went over to the road where all these cars had stopped and shouted, “Does anybody have a cell phone for Chrissake? Or know where we are? Can you please call an ambulance? Someone? My friend is hurt!” It was such a long time. And it wasn’t until then that I went back to him. And it felt like it had been too long. And Paul and Hannah were there then. I remember them turning around very suddenly and Paul coming to see and then Hannah. And they screamed when they saw him. And they were both crying and hugging each other and I don’t know what happened while I was trying to make the phone call from the bottom of the sea. And then I went to him, this was after, or maybe it was before I said anything to anybody who was there on the roadside, and I stood over him, and at some point I realized that there were a lot of other people standing around and there was nobody talking at all and there was a police officer and a man who stood outside of the little ditch where Bill was lying who said “He’s dead,” just in the way someone might’ve said it if they had been looking at an animal. And there was a kind of pathetic looking willow tree there, too, with some of its branches sawed off and some of its branches hanging long and low, and he was just lying under it sort of curled up. And it was like the tree had been witness. And I don’t know when it happened, but I think it was the man who had said he was dead who had taken Bill’s coat which was just lying on the roadside now and brought it over to him and just threw it overtop of him while all these people started getting out of their cars and traffic stopped and nobody was even honking. And nobody tried to remove it. And I remember feeling angry that that man had done that. But I didn’t see him do it, so I don’t know. But I remember looking at Bill, and making the phone call, and then going back to him and seeing the coat over him like a death-shawl and nobody moving. And at some point we all went to him, Paul and Hannah and I and we pulled the coat off and I remember looking at all of those people we didn’t know, at all of these strangers and asking them: “Does anybody know CPR? Can someone please help us?” And I remember nobody made even a sound. But there was one woman who wanted to pray. And somebody was saying “I’m so so sorry. Oh my God, I’m so sorry!” And I got down and Paul got down and Hannah got down and Paul held the back of Bill’s head and we looked at him closely our friend and we called his name at him, all of us, in turn, just like he was right there and just like he would wake up if we called him hard enough and we just waited for someone to tell us what to do, but nobody said anything except one woman who came forward and asked us if we’d like to say a prayer, and we told her no, and that made me angry too, that she would have asked us that—whether we wanted to pray when it was obvious that what was needed was immediate human action, obvious that all of what could be tried had not been done yet, by any means, that, in fact, nobody who was there had actually done anything except given up hope and offered that we do the same in suggesting that we pray over him. “No!” does not quite convey the severity with which I felt myself refuse this request, but it was all I could manage at the time. And none of this is right. Because even now it is taking too long to say it. It didn’t happen as long or as slow as it takes for the language to say how it was. It all happened very fast, and at the same time it seemed to be taking forever. Because that noise of the bomb going off was still coming in to me, and I could still see him spinning and then we were all around him. And I touched his hands and straightened his arms and even though it had been probably five minutes since he had had any air, I opened his mouth and saw blood on his teeth and we pulled up his eyelids and we were calling his name, just like he was pretending and would wake up any second, and I pinched his nose and put my mouth on his mouth and just breathed into him the breath I didn’t have anyway. And I gave him two breaths and I put my ear to his mouth and listened and then I pressed on his chest and I remember asking Paul who was yelling Bill’s name in a kind of exhausted way, “How many compressions is it? Fourteen?” And I remember how it didn’t sound right to be saying anything, especially that. I wanted Paul to do it because for some reason I wanted so badly to believe right then that he had been a lifeguard at some point in his past, even though part of me knew that he hadn’t, and part of me wanted to believe that he had done this before at some point when he had been a swimmer. And I believed that right then, but I couldn’t ask him. And then I did it again. I gave him fourteen compressions, but I didn’t feel like I was doing it right, and I wanted someone to come and take over for me and to do it with more sureness. And nobody said anything, except Paul and Hannah, who were calling to him. And then two more big breaths. And when I gave him the compressions, I could see the air coming out of his mouth, and I realized that that’s all breathing really is, isn’t it, it’s just air going in and out of you and you don’t even need to be alive to do it. And as I was leaning into him, “C’mon, Bill, Goddammit! Don’t die!” I think I realized that’s all that a heart is, too, just a thing that beats on you from the inside like I’m doing now on the outside to keep your blood moving, and your lungs going and to hold back the tears sometimes, and maybe you don’t even need to be alive to have one, and it occurred to me later that maybe there are a great many of us who are already dead in this world and don’t know it because we have heartbeats and medical definitions for life by which we may know. And there was a hole in his neck where blood was coming out and there was blood on his mouth and there must have been blood on my mouth too because I could taste it. And I can still taste it sometimes, a little like copper, like a penny, and sometimes I will put a penny in my mouth even though they say they are very dirty and that you shouldn’t do that and it will remind me of him and that day in a way that my memory wont let me remember on its own. But we did that a few times and kept waiting for Bill to take it back over. And somebody from the crowd, when I started sobbing again and when it seemed like nothing was working and felt that we should stop, somebody said, “No, once you start that, you can’t stop it. You’re his breath now.” And he was mine too. And so we did that until the ambulance came with Paul holding his head and Hannah calling him and me breathing into him and punching his chest with my one hand over the other in a fist, leaning into his chest with my arms, just to see the wind come back out and the blood frothing in little bubbles around his mouth and not even checking for a pulse because there hadn’t been one before and so why should there be one now. And when the ambulance got there we asked them what to do and nobody would say anything to us. And I hated them all so much for that, that the only things we had been offered so far were prayers and silence, which are the most useless things when Death is making away with his spoils. And they wouldn’t put their mouths on him, these medical professionals, and they wouldn’t look at us, either. As though we had all been hit ourselves. But they brought out a stretcher at least and they took out all of this plastic and they took so long to put on their rubber gloves so they didn’t get any blood on themselves and finally they got down in the grass and they set him carefully onto this stretcher with two of them carrying it and the nurse standing beside him squeezing this little plastic box with a plastic muzzle they put over his nose and mouth so that they wouldn’t have to get his blood on them. And she squeezed it with one hand like it was a waterbottle, and then she gave him a little one-armed compression after every squeeze. And I wanted to tell her that she was doing it wrong, that it was doing no good what she was doing, she might as well open his mouth and whistle into it if she was going to do that. But what did I know after all? And what do any of us know really about what to do, except what we can with what we have and are able? And now it seemed like there were even more people standing around, even though it was impossible to know where they had all come from, or for what purpose. And I remember a man with a big white beard said that he would take us to the hospital, and that he had a wife and that she had said earlier that she had called an ambulance. And I don’t know how I knew it, whether I remembered it later or if it became clear to me then, but she smoked a lot of cigarettes. Maybe that was something she told us in the car, or maybe it was something she did. But not yet. Because I remember following the medics up the little ditch when they picked up his body on the stretcher and were putting him into the ambulance and I asked the woman in the white medical garb who had said nothing to me when I asked her to help me, if I could please ride in the ambulance. And she said nothing to me. So I said nothing too and just followed her up onto the road and then when we had got up close to the ambulance which was parked on the road facing the wrong way, the way it had arrived, not the way it would go, and everyone was standing around it I asked her again if I could ride in the ambulance and she said “Look—your friend is in critical condition. We need to work on him. It’d be better if you weren’t in there, just so we can have some more room. We’re taking him to the hospital in town. You can meet us there.” But it was like she was trying not to cry, and it didn’t sound human for her to say a thing like that to me when all I wanted to do was to ride in the ambulance with him. And I think that’s when I knew he was dead. Or was one of the times I knew it, anyway. Even though I had heard the noise and had seen him flipping through the air and had seen the way he looked on the ground so still and lifeless and someone had already said it the way they might have said it over an animal and someone else had asked us if we wanted to pray and Bill and Hannah had been crying together like they knew it too and I had even said it was possible myself on the phone to the dispatch officer and someone had put a coat over him to try to say it to everyone who was there—I had maybe even known it in every one of these instances, but I think that every single thing I did when his body was still there to look at and touch and hold onto was done in an effort to let myself forget it, the way I would deliberately let myself forget it immediately after this moment had passed too and we rode to the hospital just so we could be told it again. I let myself forget that that was something that could happen, and if there must be a reason that I did, say it was because one is only able to do that at first. Because you cannot simply learn that your best friend is dead by anything you have seen or experienced any more than you can believe that he has died by anything you have been told. And by having to say to his mother over the phone that her son was killed today in an accident, you cannot learn it yourself any better than you can by having to say to your own father over the phone that you yourself were not. And I can remember Hannah asking them if he was still alive and not hearing the response but hearing Hannah say, “It’s going to be okay. They have him, now. We don’t know anything. We can’t say anything for sure. It’s going to be okay.” And then sobbing. And I can remember telling myself right as the first medic climbed onto the ambulance’s rear bumper, holding the end of the stretcher upon which Bill’s feet were laid flat, when the man behind him had raised his end, and he was carried in flat upon the white board with his arms at his sides and his face obscured by the breathing apparatus and his yellow and red jersey untucked from his black shorts over his strong cyclist’s legs: Do not forget this, Sam. No matter what fogs of time and lapses of memory befall you between now and whenever you are able to put words to it, no matter what incoherence of age or reflection shall wear down upon your ability to recall, no matter what obligation of day, or patience of time, or strength of heart, or humility of life it takes you to remember, you shall not forget this, how he looks now, or how he looked always before, big-smiled and tall, asleep in libraries or with food in his hands, the dandruff in his hair and his unibrow, the physical body of your friend, Bill Ballou Cranshaw, just as he was, at twenty-three years, the greatest of companions and the kindest of men. You shall not forget him. The way you have so far neglected forget of the names of places and people and trees of this country from the ocean to here, and their stories. It is all you can do to promise so much, right before they shut him away. * * * And then began all the things that happened without Bill. The first of which was becoming suddenly very conscious of the fact that I was standing very close to a police officer’s belly. The instant the doors to the ambulance were shut and the sirens came on a woman put her hands on me again and said “Did you want to say a prayer, son?” And the sound was still coming into my ears, and wouldn’t stop, and there was his blood in my mouth and at her touch I recoiled so violently and said “No!” with such anger that the officer whose belly I might’ve hit slightly in my reaction seized me too hard and told me to just calm down. And how strange. That in the presence of a dead body everyone will bear witness but no one will speak, but as soon as it is gone they will touch you to see how you are and when they find that you are wild they will hold you still until you are limp. And I sobbed in his clutch-from-behind and apologized because I did not want to get arrested, though I realize it would not have mattered if I had been. I suppose there must be things for which violent displays even an officer of the law can have no qualms. And then we were gathering our things from the roadside. And I can’t remember if there were traffic cops already out to direct traffic, or if it had simply stopped altogether. One had to assume that with the amount of people standing there, someone else would be paying attention to details. The officer was telling us that he was going to need all of us to fill out reports about what happened, but we did not want to talk to him, and there was a man with a white beard who said he would be glad to take us to the hospital, to follow the ambulance, and so we threw our bikes quickly into the back of his truck. But not Bill’s. The officer told us to leave that where it was, broken, mangled beyond repair as it was, as it was going to be evidence now. So we left it. And I had the fleetful thought that this was something I would tell Bill about, after we made it to the hospital and were informed that he would be okay, after maybe a week or two had passed in which he would no doubt lie unconscious and comatose, but not dead, he could not be dead, I would say to him, “Jesus Christ, Bill, you should have seen your bike! It was a wreck! It looked like it had been chewed up and spit back out by I don’t know what!” And I imagined him smiling at that, perhaps still too weak to speak, maybe with strength enough only to breathe, but to smile, at least, with that big smile that he had. And I told myself: You will tell him. But Paul had one of the caps from Bill’s waterbottle, which had been ripped from its bottle in the collision, and was holding one of his shoes, which he had found in the grass, and looked perplexed holding onto these items, like he knew they were evidence, but could not let go of them somehow. And was still holding them when we got into the truck. And even though we left his bike, and were piling again into a stranger’s car with all of our gear, as we had done so many times before, there was a small feeling of hope that was already gathering again within us that maybe by the time we got to the hospital he would already be hooked up to a machine, and he would be fine. Because how many times had our fortune changed already on this trip so far? The events of today alone had so far been a testament to the outrageous nature of fortune. We had awakened and started off again and my wheel had exploded and it seemed the trip would be over. But we had been helped. I had been taken to Little Rock and brought back, and all so that we could keep going. And for a hundred yards we had kept going. For five thousand years we have kept going. But we were stopped again now. It was hard to think that the wheel of fortune which we had pinned between a front-fork and ridden for twenty-three hundred miles so far would not turn over, just once more, and put us out back on top, with Bill injured, but fine, the trip done, and a few close calls to speak of. We climbed into the back of the truck and the truck pulled away and already it was better. As though simply because we were moving, it meant that things could still happen. Because it was staying still that was hard. We had not had to stay still anywhere in forty-five days, not really. We had stopped, certainly. We had caught rest and even relaxed a little from time to time, but we were never still like we had just been, never so unable to move from one place. This is the furthest I have ever been from home. End with sam: “When Bill died, I hadn’t written in my journal for over a week….” or “THere are entire days of that trip that I have no ability to recall…” Paul: It’s a weird conundrum… [ Paul remembers Bill] Hannah: Being on the bike trip... Next time, on Someone Else’s Blues. Someone Else’s Blues is a podcast written, produced, and edited by Will Steffen. Music, of course, by Sam Steffen. By the way, if you like the music you have been hearing on this podcast, you can hear more at samsteffen.bandcamp.com. That’s SAMSTEFFEN.bandcamp.com.