Long Forgotten Things: An Interpretation

I was sitting in my Prius in St. Elmo at the CVS watching cars go by. The UBER app was on and silent as I waited for nonexistent rides. I was lost in the memory of my latest road trip to Glacier and the west coast. It was 2015. Two years earlier my life looked totally different. I was married, working at an insurance agency making way more money than UBERing, addicted to many horrible things, and so full of myself and my opinions that I believed myself indestructible.

Since then, I had gotten divorced, lost some close friends, sat on the side of a mountain attaining enlightenment, had a near death experience in an ambulance, all followed by a nervous breakdown that left me afraid of leaving my home because of the panic attacks.

But I had also faced my racing heart, stopped all substance abuse, met someone new and beautiful, driven across the country twice, and actually started playing music again. At the end of 2015 life was good. Life was a miraculous gift. And best of all, life was moving on from all the horrible things that 2013 had dealt me.

On the Lewis and Clark trip, I had taken my Yamaha Portasound, written a song everyday, and faced a lot of fears along the way. Even though I had been all over Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and Kansas, I had yet to see much wildlife at all. I grew up hearing about Grizzlies, Eagles, Moose, and Mountain Lions, but nothing had shown itself to me other than the owl and the jackrabbit on an off ramp at midnight outside of El Paso.

When I made it to Glacier that July, I was experiencing some major spiritual growth and personal enlightenment, praying all the time, and believing every word I prayed. I was focusing on praying very specific things to see what God and the Universe would say yes to. That day as I drove out toward Many Glacier, I prayed to see a Grizzly bear. Within five seconds, my back passenger’s side tire blew. I turned around and pulled back toward the wayside and began the slog that changing tires has always been.

As I stood on the tire iron praying now for the nut to budge, a man pulled over and started helping. We chatted a little and found out he was from Atlanta, two hours from my house, and had also made the drive all the way out here. He took over and hulked the nut from the exploded wheel.

My snack of choice at the time for cheap road trips was packs of tuna fish and diet Mountain Dew to keep my girlish physique. In removing the donut from the trunk, tuna and Dew laid strewn about the wayside by the hatchback. I looked up and felt small panic. Cars had parked on either side of the road and tourists from other countries had their nikons out and poised for the agitated Grizzly directly across the road from me and Atlanta man.

“If he moves this way, I’m jumping in the hatchback,” I said, knowing full and well that a Grizzly cares nothing about flimsy car locks and tempered glass. He moved our way. Being the slow humans we were, he was already past the front of the Prius and down the river bank to our right before we could think about jumping in.

I had a lot to think about as I drove the most beautiful road on the planet with a donut spare on the back for the next three hours. I had never in my life seen anything as exciting and dramatic as Glacier until that day. My breath didn’t return until I was down on the other side sitting by the last lake on the way out. I thought a lot about dying as I watched the sun setting over the distant peaks at Logan’s Pass. How sometimes what we want might kill us.

It all worked together. If my tire hadn’t exploded, I would have missed the man from Atlanta, the bear, the sunset, the pure death thoughts, and the thin air of panic that sets in with less oxygen. You can see the insanity in my eyes in pictures from that day. With this story in mind, I wrote the words to this song in the CVS parking lot in the rain.

Long Forgotten Things is about that moment. How in our death, we see life, we come alive. We sail out across the instruments that would have been our demise. It is a song about leaving. No matter how much I love something or someone, there will be a day and time when silence replaces them, when silence replaces me.

The sadhappy truth of this is that all of it’s beautiful if you look at it through the filter of understanding and acceptance, it’s all good. When we give up the things we think we have to have, we find out what it is we actually need. We need the slow and steady violence of glaciers to carve us out and make us beautiful.