Where is your nowhere?

Well mapped are our own middles of nowhere.

After my first year of grad school, my friend Kody flew out to Michigan to help me load my shit into a storage unit, and move me back home with my parents for the summer. Two day drive. Overnight in upstate New York with another friend. Save that one evening and our eventual arrival in our hometown, Kody never left the car.

As copilot, he had the sacred duty of handling the aux cord. He put on a playlist he’d prepared and promptly fell asleep. I didn’t mind because the music was good, and I too doze in every passenger seat. But then I did mind, because I couldn’t ask him who was that? No play it again, that was so good.

It was Sobs.

At the time the trio only had only released their 5-song EP Catflap, and we played it several times over the 16-hour drive. It’s ethereal, jangly, and smooth. He also introduced me to The Regrettes, and I showed him Lucy Dacus, whom he lovingly refers to as “the girl who doesn’t want to be funny anymore.”

I’ve made that same trek a dozen times since. I’m exhausted by the end, but I love the easy purpose of a long drive. I’ve got nothing to do but sit here, stay awake, and sing along. I love to take a little break, marvel at the truck stop showers, select provisions from the racks of various salted snacks, and piss in a trough with a bunch of strangers like we’re peddlers at a remote inn on some moonlit medieval night. I was baffled Kody didn’t want to partake, electing instead to remain in the car at every stop.

I don’t want to give the wrong impression of my friend here. We both grew up in the middle of nowhere, his middle even more nowhere than mine—his childhood home at the end of a dirt road in the woods. He’s traveled abroad further than I ever have. Still, the Ohio Turnpike might as well have been Mars.

I’ve jibed him about it recently, and he says, “Just didn’t want to.” Pandemic times have since made me skittish of these crossroads, and I understand his hesitancy better now. The capitalism carnivals of the turnpike Oases, strip mall foodcourts that porked a portapotty, are more enervating than reenergizing. The same can be said of the interstate offramps in Mexico, New York and other seemingly empty exits. Spaces of false comfort and familiarity. Hotel showrooms of the highway. It’s not that he felt unsafe in these places, simply out of place.

The final track on Catflap, “Ocean Song”, floats about this uneasy space. The guitar is bright as saltwater, chords coming in waves. It sounds like it was recorded just beneath the ocean’s surface, alien in its warbling, but oddly familiar as a memory of swimming lessons at the public pool.

Celine Autumn’s vocals are as coolly-comforting as her name sounds. She sirens the lines,

Autumn’s speaker is caught between this assurance, this insistence, that the ocean can be a site of safety and the knowledge that “I can't swim my way out of this mess.” I love this subtle wordplay. She cannot escape her problems just by swimming, “walking it off” in the ocean, and the mess is so vast and riptiding, treading water will only speed her drowning. Nonetheless she calls the listener to “hold your breath, and dive in deep, my friend.”

I think the ocean is a special middle of nowhere. Poets and pedestrians alike have long been fascinated by its endless churning engine, and while many venture into its depths and sail beyond the horizon, most often our relationship is to its edge, the shore we can still see. The familiarity with the water is an affection for the way we can put ourselves in its palm, access the illusion of floating free, while still tethered to the shoreline.

In the last movement of “Ocean Song” comes this stanza,

I love the phrase “sea change”, how it suggests such a massive transformation that might be invisible to the casual observer. The sea is the sea is the sea. It does not care what we do to it. As oil spills encroach and Texas-sized trash islands expand, we can’t help but feel fear and fealty toward the expanse. It outsizes our imagination, and there’s some naivety to thinking we can know everything or anything about it. After all, humans know more about the surface of the moon than they do the ocean’s floor.

That third line, “Is that you pretending it’s still the same?” Isn’t that the heart of the song? An illusory appearance of familiarity. The ocean, old acquaintances, interstate ramp rest stops. All our middles of nowhere are ours and ours alone.

According to the globe in my high school social studies classroom there are many oceans (also Yugoslavia is still a country). The titular body in this song is never specified.

On our drive through Ohio we passed through Cleveland, which seemed like a fine place I guess, though we couldn’t stop laughing at its uncharitable moniker, “The Mistake on The Lake”. We’d grown up next to a lake too. Found no end to the things we could call the same.

From the road you can’t see the other side of Lake Erie. Perched on the lakeshore is the hulking Cleveland Public Power building, decorated with a 100 foot tall mural. Ten whales, one breaching, others diving deep.

Y’all ever been to Cleveland? There’s nothing wrong with Ohio. Except the snow and the rain. I like my old roommate and I’d love to see the rock n roll hall of fame. I’m also told the best corned beef sandwich is to be found there.