On Wednesday, I drove back to Vermont so I could drive my mother to a medical appointment. She is generally in good health, and certainly capable of driving herself, but she has been having some mobility issues over the past couple of years. This has occasionally necessitated medical appointments from which she is not supposed to drive herself home, such as the one this past Thursday. She is an old-school New Englander who does not like to ask for help, so I jump at the chance when she does.
My mother grew up in New Hampshire, the “Granite State,” and if I am not mistaken her (our) family history in the state goes back centuries. I often tell people — and have mentioned before in this newsletter — that, although I grew up in Kansas, I was raised as a “New Englander in exile.” Like my mother, I do not like to ask for help.
The White Mountains of New Hampshire are made mostly of, you guessed it, granite, and they are pretty old. They were formed between 124 and 100 million years ago, in the middle of the Cretaceous Period — during the age of the dinosaurs, whose dying marked the end of the period. Granite is an igneous rock, formed as molten rock (magma) from the interior of the earth is pushed up and then cools.
In contrast, most of Kansas is made up of softer sedimentary rocks like sandstone, compressed from sand deposited when the state was covered by the Western Interior Seaway at the end of the Cretaceous, approximately 66 million years ago. The sandstone exposed at Kanopolis State Park, in the center of the state, is soft enough to carve your name in.
New Hampshire is older than Kansas, but Vermont has them both beat, by a long shot. The Green Mountains were formed some 400 million years ago, and the Taconic Mountains which run up the state’s western edge are 50 million years older than that. Both of them can trace their origins back to the Grenville Orogeny1 1.4 billion years ago. By way of comparison, the oldest known fossil of multicellular animal life is only 609 million years old.
Yesterday I went for a trail run in Red Rocks Park, just south of Burlington on the northeast lip of Shelburne Bay. The park is named for the distinctive red rock found on much of the eastern shoreline of Lake Champlain, the “Monkton Quartzite,” which was formed 500 million years ago and thrust to the west at the beginning of the Taconic Orogeny.
When the hard red quartzite erodes, it develops long, thin cracks, which sometimes become filled with green lichen, a symbiotic plant-like creature composed of algae and fungi. Unlike the designs carved in Kansas sandstone, these curious runes memorialize not the work of human hands but wind and water and life itself, daemonic forces whose names are unknowable and unspeakable in human tongues.
Red Rocks Park covers an area of about a hundred acres, with two and a half miles of formal, well-maintained trails and a number of less-formal, scruffier ones. There is a pebble beach in its southeast corner, cliffs with views out over the bay and the lake on its southwest and western edges, and a decent-sized hill in the middle.
The park is mostly forested, full of oaks, pines, beeches and hemlocks, which give way to hardier junipers and red cedars on the rockier eastern slopes of the big hill. Like most forest in Vermont, it is relatively new growth; the land was cleared for pasture in the 18th or 19th century. But one massive pine tree in the middle of the park’s lowlands was spared the axe.
Most pines grow straight and tall, but with no competition for sunlight, the “Wolf Pine,” as it is known, grew wide, with branches stretching out in all directions. Its trunk is over four feet in diameter, and it is believed to be well over 200 years old.
During the pandemic lockdown, I would occasionally visit the Wolf Pine on the long, solo walks I often took then. It is still surrounded by its own natural clearing, the needles it drops making the soil acidic and keeping anything else of substance from growing in its immediate perimeter. The natural alcove it made in the forest became for me a place of calm and reflection during that strange interlude in the fleeting history of our species. I would stand right up against the ancient tree and do my best to let its age put my troubles, our troubles, in perspective.
Some time in the last few years, the South Burlington parks department has erected a sign warning visitors to keep their distance from the Wolf Pine, as it “is at the end of its life and may begin to lose branches as it continues to decay.”
Geologists refer to Kansas sandstones as “young” rocks because they were formed less than 70 million years ago, but the sand they were formed from consisted of innumerable tiny fragments of much older rocks, weathered down from great mountains into tiny granules by eons of wind and rain and tectonic motion.
And the Monkton quartzite that has seen virtually the whole of evolution? It is metamorphic rock, formed when the heat and pressure of the great migrations of the earth’s crust compressed and forged soft sandstone into something harder, yet in the end no less subject to the cycle of breaking down and reforming that defines geologic history.
One of New Hampshire’s iconic views is, or at least used to be, the “Old Man of the Mountain.” This was a group of granite ledges on a mountain at the Franconia Notch, where Interstate 93 passes through the White Mountains. When viewed from the north, it looked like the profile of an old man’s craggy face. Its silhouette adorns license plates, state highway signs, and the Granite State’s statehood quarter. It was 40 feet tall and 25 feet wide.
In May of 2003, the Old Man collapsed in the middle of the night. There were proposals to replace it with an artificial replica, but the people of New Hampshire, being good, practical New Englanders, apparently recognized that when an old rock’s time has come, there is nothing to be done but let it lie where it fell and do our best to keep it in our memory as we live our brief lives, making our marks where we can.
The official lyric video for the new Cure single, “Alone,” features a spinning rock. Guardian rock critic Alexis Petridis describes the song, which is about mortality, as “majestically wreathed in misery and despair,” and he’s not wrong. As Petridis notes, the lengthy instrumental opening of the song is reminiscent of “Plainsong,” the first track on their 1989 album Disintegration. While, like everyone else, I am a sucker for the bubblegum appeal of 1992’s “Friday I’m in Love,” Disintegration is by far my favorite Cure album, with its slow tempos, extended song forms, and perfect evocation of sadness both romantic and existential.
“Alone” is the first new music from the Cure in 16 years, and is the teaser single for a new album which is expected to be released later this fall. According to Petridis, Cure singer and songwriter Robert Smith has “talked about how losing both his parents and his older brother during the lengthy process of making Songs for a Lost World shaped the material, and we’ll clearly find out just how much in the fullness of time.”
The singer and songwriter Kris Kristofferson died a week ago Saturday.
I first learned his name as a teenager, because he wrote the song “Me and Bobby McGee,” which Janis Joplin covered on her album Pearl. I purchased a copy of Pearl at some point in my teenage years. I was fascinated by the Bay Area music scene from the 1960s, and, being a songwriting nerd, I was also fascinated by, and paid close attention to, writing credits.
But I probably didn’t really have any idea who he was, beyond the writer of that one song, until my “gap year” in my hometown in Kansas when I checked a CD of his debut album, Kristofferson, out of the Lawrence Public Library. (It had so many amazing songs on it, it wasn’t until fairly recently that I realized it was his debut album, not a greatest-hits album.)
It was a country album, and not (at least musically) the kind of hard-edged “country” that was, at the time, leading other punk-rock kids to invent the “No Depression” sound, what would later become known as “alt-country” or “Americana.” The production was very much late-60s/early-70s Nashville, with pedal steel and electric pianos and an overall sound that can be described, more than anything, as “soft” — no hard edges, whether from twangy electric guitars or pounding or syncopated drums or honky-tonk piano or even aggressively picked or strummed acoustic guitars. So, you know … not cool.
But the songs, man. “Blame It on the Stones.” “The Law Is for Protection of the People.” No quarter given to the conservative country music establishment.
Much as the lyrics of the most edgy songs reflected my teenage political commitments, though, the song that resonated with me most strongly was “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down.” Not because I was frequently hungover on Sunday mornings (I was only 17-18 that year, so only had only sporadic access to booze), but because it spoke to my late-teenage angst, my melodramatic perception that we are all just lonely wanderers in an unforgiving world, grasping desperately at balms such as alcohol — a perception that has never completely left me, of which I have never been fully disabused.
It being the early 90s, I naturally recorded the CD onto a cassette tape, which I took with me when, in the fall of 1991, I ventured out to what one might now call an “elite” college on the East Coast. I was there for two years (before transferring to another “elite” college back in the Midwest), and there were some ups and downs, but during the downs, one of the things that kept my spirits up was listening to “Just the Other Side of Nowhere” and imagining that my headlights were “shining on that old white line between my heart and home.”
Now that I am, I guess, a “labor journalist,” the song of Kristofferson’s that speaks to me most is “To Beat the Devil.” In that song, Kristofferson encounters the devil in a bar. The devil borrows his guitar and sings him a song, which in my low moments these days hits pretty hard:
“If you waste your time a-talkin’
To the people who don't listen
To the things that you are sayin’
Who do you think’s gonna hear?
And if you should die explainin’ how the things that they complain about are things they could be changin’, who do you think's gonna care?”
There were other lonely singers in a world turned deaf and blind who were crucified for what they tried to show
And their voices have been scattered by the swirlin’ winds of time, ’cause the truth remains that no one wants to know
After hearing the devil’s song, Kristofferson admits as how “I’d heard his song before.” But he is not simply resigned, as many of us might be, to the seemingly incontrovertible proposition that “no one wants to know” and, especially, that no one believes in the possibility of changing the things that they complain about.
Instead, despite the odds, he proclaims his faith that he doesn’t believe that “no one wants to know,” and this is what allows him to “beat the devil.” Or, well, as he puts it: “I ain’t sayin’ I beat the devil, but I drank his beer for nothing. And then I stole his song.”
And you still can hear me singin’
To the people who don't listen
To the things that I am sayin’
Prayin’ someone’s gonna hear
And I guess I’ll die explainin’ how
The things that they complain about
Are things they could be changin’
Hopin’ someone’s gonna care
I was born a lonely singer and I’m bound to die the same
But I’ve gotta feed the hunger in my soul
And if I never have a nickel, I won’t ever die ashamed
’Cause I don’t believe that no one wants to know
“Orogeny” is a geological term meaning “mountain-building event.”
Good work! And of course I love hearing about your mother. I myself am extremely skilled at asking for help!