Scent is supposed to be the most evocative sense. Certainly, some smells call to mind a certain place or time, but never anything very specific. Rain on the desert takes me back to just that, the scent of creosote and sage wafting on a wet wind. When I smell that heady aroma, I am taken back to any number of good soakers I have ridden out, never a definitive storm.
For a Proustian bout of recall, nothing works for me like sound. A song will always take me a surprising number of places. Music never fails to remind me of a specific moment and the feelings I felt then. A half dozen pop hits from the 90’s can have me smelling my high-school’s gym or hearing the rumble of a friend’s car.
The only other thing that can recall so many emotions is a drive. Certain roads can bring a flood of sense memories rushing through me. Growing up in rural West Texas, you had to drive a long way to do almost anything, so I have a large bank of road-related memories. So much of our daily lives were spent speeding down one highway or another.
I probably inherited most of this tendency from my father, who would famously take the long way around almost any day, if time permitted. To this day, heedless of the thirty year gap between us, he’ll still ask me if I want to go for a drive, and my answer is still and always yes. My own days, especially those not consumed with school or work, are usually spent blowing up and down the highways of Southern New Mexico and West Texas. Driving is a meditative process, a curative exercise, and a way for me to explore the place I live.
It would follow, then, that I would find a way to combine these two triggers. I spend a lot of my time (especially beautiful fall afternoons) going from record store to record store, usually starting in El Paso and working my way back to Las Cruces. It’s something that satisfies so many urges for me, the urge to travel, and the compulsion to find music I haven’t heard before. I get the quiet solitude of driving and the comfort of song, and sometimes, the two combine into an experience that etches itself so deeply, I lose the words to explain it.
A few weekends ago, I was on one of my jaunts. My hands were blackened from digging through stacks of vinyl, but I found nothing that I just had to have. Winding up in Las Cruces empty handed, I stopped to take a cursory glance at the local entertainment superstore. They were having one of their periodic CD blowout sales, and I grabbed a fair number. One in particular struck me. It was a Rodney Crowell best-of.
I was a kid in the 80’s, when you could hear Rodney Crowell, Emmylou Harris, or Dwight Yoakum on the radio. The Neo-Traditionalist heyday was short, but I could never forget those songs, even if the radio did soon enough. I probably hadn’t heard “Many A Long & Lonesome Highway” since I was 9 years old. Hearing the first line took me right back to sitting in my Dad’s truck, hearing this sad, wise sounding voice come out of the speakers. All the places we went back then were down long and lonesome highways. (If you don’t believe me, take Hwy 62/180 from El Paso up to the New Mexico line, and you’ll start to understand the sort of vistas that informed my childhood.) I remember feeling strange, the words and melody of the song were evoking all these emotions that I, as a child in a happy family, would have no way of knowing. It was powerful magic to my 9 year old self.
21 years later, I pop the CD in my truck’s player and head out of Las Cruces, out of sweltering heat into the storm that is threading itself on the teeth of the Organ Mountains. The smell of desert rain was so thick, it filled my truck’s cab. Big, ice cold rain drops were exploding all over windshield. A blue mist shrouded the mountains and the sands turned red with moisture. A few songs into the disc “Many A Long & Lonesome Highway” twangs out of the speakers. I’m listening to the words now as a man, and not all of them, but one verse in particular hits me. I knew exactly what the song was saying. I understand the song now as an adult I completely understand the feelings of freedom, hard-won knowledge, and the slight sadness that the song made me feel as a kid. I’m on a long and lonesome highway, in a beautiful rain storm, listening to a song that suddenly means a lot to me for two different reasons, decades apart.
When I smell rain on the desert now, all the oils from the plants turning to vapor in the moist air, I might not remember that particular drive, but when I hear Rodney Crowell sing knowingly about the road and lessons he’s learned running down it, I will always remember that drive, they way the song could and still does make me feel. I’ll think about the power of words and music to make a child feel things beyond his ken, and they power they have to sing a man’s life back to him. I’ll think of records and roads, two of my favorite things in life.
