For nearly
four years I lived in one of the loneliest outposts in the western United
States…the Needles Country of Canyonlands in southeastern Utah. Only a few of us lived there year-round,
caretakers of some of the most spectacular scenery on the planet. This was in the mid-70s and cyberspace had
not yet been tapped in rural San Juan County, or anywhere else for that matter. So we lived without telephones, televisions,
daily mail or even radio, unless you count the Blanding station that
transmitted in Navajo for most of the day.
As a young man at the time, I took these deprivations in stride. But for
a boy raised in the San Francisco Bay area, the one thing I really missed was
current music.
Oh, I had
my collection of vinyl records all neatly sorted between bricks and boards on
the floor of my government mobile home.
And a box full of mix tapes for the car cassette player. But that was stuff I’d brought with me. I could order records through the mail and
eventually pick them up in Moab. Or I
could drive the 200 miles to Grand Junction, Colorado where I could patronize a
real record store. But to keep really
current on the music scene, I relied on friends far away to send me tape
recordings…usually from records but occasionally just chunks of local radio
broadcasts. This infusion of contemporary music was always most welcome…an
audio tether to my urban roots.
This
became most apparent when my friend Phil sent me a jazz mix tape sometime in
late 1977. By then I was living by
myself (my longtime lady friend had fled the prior winter), and I was feeling
the loneliness and the weight of the surrounding wilderness. Fortunately, my Moab mailbox was often
checked by fellow rangers while on supply runs and such was the case on this
particular occasion. The padded envelope
was brought to my door and I eagerly opened it, finding a nice selection of
Herbie Mann, Grover Washington Jr and John Handy. Urban jazz invading the heart of slickrock
country.
I played
the tape a couple of times at home but its impact wasn’t truly felt until my “weekend”
came around and I elected to hit the road.
It was late afternoon in late November and the shadows along Indian
Creek were long and cold. I drove up the
dugway into open sagebrush country and reached highway 191 to Moab as the last
light of dusk was fading away. Northward
past the Lisbon Valley turnoff. Past Wilson Arch, Past the little outpost of La
Sal Junction. At Kane Springs, I popped in the jazz tape and
heard those first quite bass lines to Grover Washington’s rendition of A Secret Place…a fine bit of funk as I crested the hill to Spanish Valley and saw the first
lights of civilization.
At that
moment it didn’t matter that I was driving into a town of less than 5,000
residents, with not one decent restaurant, music or book store, and no real
bars (just a state liquor store). When
Grover’s sax started playing, I felt like I was heading into an oasis of energy….the
hustle and bustle, the neon, the human connection. I was seeing downtown Moab but I was feeling
the Bay Area and remembering those nights in the clubs and dance halls of the
City. And bittersweet though it was, I
knew that I would get a motel room for the night and spend hours on the
telephone, and watch whatever was on the telly, and buy my groceries the
following day, and head back into the canyon country I loved so much with a
renewed sense of who I was, and where I was from, and where I was going. Something in that sweet music had set me up,
and satiated a need in me so that I could better appreciate the truly
remarkable setting where my life was playing out.
To this
day, when I play A Secret Place, I remember that long drive through
darkness and that first glimpse of the lights, like stars fallen from the sky
and ready for the taking. The sweet music of youth.
