ghostwolf howl

I heard the sound late at night in a Wal-Mart parking lot. It seemed to cut below the other noises, the whispering October leaves, the omnipresent highway rumble. I listened closer, catching its long, lonely whine blending with the bare branches as they scraped the trunks of the other oaks. It was coming from the opposite direction of the highway, out behind the store, behind the tall black trees that loomed over the lot. I pulled myself half outside my sleeping bag and leaned forward to peer out the bay window of my van. The store’s all-night lighting cast a shrill yellow glow onto waving tree limbs. As I watched, the sound bent down in pitch and disappeared, leaving me to strain my ears into the rustling quiet. A brittle clatter of dead leaves over asphalt, and it was back, literally sending chills down my spine. There was something out there in those woods, and it was howling.

I pulled open the side door to the frigid air and the sharp smells of the forest. Crouching on the metal floor, huddled against the chill, fumbling with my recording equipment, listening: this is just what I had hit the road to do, I thought with a thrill.

I tried listening to the howl more intelligently. What was it? It sounded like a wolf, but deeper, and each utterance seemed to draw out far longer than any animal’s lung capacity could allow. I began to hear modulations. Once in a long while, the pitch would abruptly shift one or two overtones up and then rapidly fall back down, the way you breathe through a flute without really knowing how to play it, or if you run your hand lightly up and down a violin string without pressing. Maybe the source was man-made? Perhaps there was some abandoned structure out there in the woods, a busted machine or a hollow shed, and the wind was rushing through it, creating different frequencies? The pitch, however, didn’t seem to have any correlation to how hard the wind blew. And besides, it was coming from the woods – it was out in the wild and sounded lonesome as hell. I sat there for hours listening, shivering, trying not to breathe too hard.

Wal-Mart was closing for the night, and I could hear the manager’s day-end announcements over the PA system. They drifted to me from the outdoor loudspeakers of the garden department, but the sound was far away and strangely warped. It came as a sort of wordless whine, a perfect complement to the howl. It occurred to me that it didn’t really matter what my ghostwolf – as I’d come to call it – was. The divisions between the civilized world and the wild have long become blurred to the point of irrelevance. I was reminded of characters in a DeLillo novel, disappeared old people, lost for days in a supermall, presumably stealing candy bars from the vending machines, trying to decode the anthropomorphic corporate sculptures through frightened, rheumy eyes. Is a Wal-Mart any less a jungle than the forest I saw before me? The whine of the manager was every bit as inchoate as the howl of the ghostwolf. They came, ultimately, from the same place. And what sound could be more distinctly American, this strange counterpoint of frontier savagery and urban alienation, this marriage of Wal-Mart and wild?

I was terribly disappointed to find the next day that the tracks were not that good. My recording equipment did not share the human ear’s ability to distinguish between and focus on particular sounds, and the ghostwolf was lost to the trees and traffic. I could bring it up by fiddling with the equalizer, but only at the cost of any sense of environment. The ghostwolf was like a lightning bug, I guess: so mesmerizing in its crepuscular dazzle that I felt compelled to capture it, but dead in the jar by next morning. In retrospect, it would have been a difficult musical tool anyway. In my recordings, I’ve consistently avoided music in favor of sound. Unlike music, which is already complete in and of itself, sound is raw sonic material waiting to be organized into music. But this ghostwolf tricked me; even had I taken a suitable recording, there was nothing I could add to it. The howl was already a coherent music of its own, rife with its own messages and mythology, whole as the hungry, wiry wolf it evoked.

a history of solitude

[this is a section of an originally longer post]

So, I have to admit, I had my apprehensions about this trip. Living in a van and roaming around the country doesn’t exactly scream “airtight security.” Especially with my budget – I had weighed my money heavily towards being on the road longer with less comfort – there were any number of things that could go wrong. Sure, I had passing images of myself leaning against a broke-down van in the Mojave Desert as buzzards circled overhead, or of ending up bloodied, facedown in the toilet of some sketchy backwoods rest stop, but ultimately, those extreme scenarios didn’t really stick to the wall. What did was solitude.

...

Almost immediately, van life revealed itself as a true pleasure. All around me, American life rolled out, people woke up in the morning, went to work, lived, went to sleep at night, and the whole process reminded me of the natural drama I found in the woods in middle school. Like any kind of living, van life allows you opportunities to pursue the white whale, but the chase is not impersonal as it is in a world of books or full of adversity as it is in the woods - it’s simply pleasurable. In the long hours between stops, time stretches out, your mind relaxes, and your thought rate decreases. I found I had inadvertently traded in the nonsense intellectual flurry that so characterizes modern living for something slower and truer, a thought every fifteen minutes; enough time to take it and hold it in your hands, regard it, understand it. Spend enough time at this pace and the whole world settles into finer focus, your mind and soul fit into a clarity of thought and feeling. I felt no additional loneliness as the days stretched into weeks with little human contact. Instead, what contact I had was cast into a bold relief. A simple interaction, exchanging money with a toll clerk, ordering a plate of wings, whatever, somehow sprang from thoughtless two-dimensionality to meaningful, three-dimensional nuance; it became a room you could walk into and look around. Longer conversations become invariably profound. Avdo, a Bosnian construction worker and a marvel of human decency and innocence, overturned a year of study at Princeton in the course of a conversation.

My gaze turned outwards; with fewer deadlines to meet and personal challenges to fulfill, I began to look outside and around me, to open my eyes and ears again to what was immediately present. Freed from the absurd self-orientation that college practically demands, I thought less of myself and more of my environment, less time wondering who I was and whether I was fit to belong, and more time simply being – and belonging.

...

All things considered, it’s not entirely surprising that finding real solitude again should produce reconciliation of mind, soul, and purpose. This was first made clear early in my travels to Acadia National Park. I shot up to Maine straight from New Jersey, intending to spend the rest of the fall trickling down through the northeast. I ended up spending most of my time stuck up there at the top of New England, unwilling to leave. Acadia National Park is a strange place in many ways; it’s hard to say what keeps bringing people back there, where the magic lies. There is no single, sweeping vista, no grand canyon or Niagara Falls, the grandeur is never overwhelming. But few places in the country have such a history of human investment; Acadia National Park has in some way been protected land for over a century now, and is currently one of the most popular nature reserves in the country. It is not quite wild; in the 1920s, Rockefeller created a series of walking trails and beautiful bridges throughout the island, and before a great fire in the 40s, it was dotted with magnificent estates of the super-rich. Now it’s less exclusive, and a ring road along the coast of the island permits people from all over to get a quick sense of the landscape, and to dig deeper only if they so desire. My life there was idyllic; I spent about a week and a half driving into the park before dawn every morning, watching the sun rise over the ocean, going for hikes, recording and exercising in the van, swimming in the clean, salty water, watching, listening, soaking it in, and leaving only after the sun went down over Cadillac Mountain. My favorite place to sit and think (or not think) were the rocks above Otter Point; I spent hours at a time there, watching the waves come in and the crows somehow find food amongst the cliffs. Then it was off to Sand Beach to get the blood flowing again. Here, at the only natural sand beach on the rocky coast of Maine, the water sometimes gets up into the fifties in the summer, and while I was there in October, I could sometimes feel ice crystals in the water. I would change into my bathing suit in the van and then take off at a run from the parking lot, down the hill, over the beach, straight into the water, never stopping until I could no longer touch the ground and I was far out in the chilly surf. Then I’d turn right around and do it in reverse, moving hard to keep my blood from freezing. I went religiously, once a day. Sometimes the surf was high and brown, sometimes the water was like polished glass. Sometimes I’d do it alone, other times there’d be bemused tourists gaping. “He must be training for something…” an old lady confided confidently. “How’s the water?” a big man asks in a Southern old-boy drawl as I shoot past, arms pumping, little wet droplets shaking every where. “Very cold,” I reply, not pausing to stop, “very good.”

Later, back in Pennsylvania, I had an interesting conversation about Acadia with someone who had grown up in Maine. I mentioned my uncertainty about the attraction of the place, the sense that it was truly magical, but how I wondered why. “It’s because humans and nature have grown up together there. We found it long ago, and lived there with respect for the place. When the fire burned everything down, we recovered with the land. Now it’s not really wild, but it’s not really human either.” That made a lot of sense to me. It’s a place humans can go not to test their might against the wild, or marvel at wild natural spectacles, but to rediscover Eden. Acadia is a new garden, a place still somehow unfallen, where humans can leave the cities to find mountains not made by the hands of man, but where nevertheless, man still somehow belongs.

so you can kiss goodbye to any narrative continuity this blog once had...

...and instead, I’ll just paint you a picture of a fast food evening. I’m driving through this cookie cutter town not far from the coast of Maine, packed in tight with its requisite gas stations and laundromats and lobster shacks. I drive down Main Street, a somewhat ragtag affair with October leaves and American flags strewn about the sidewalks. Night has almost fallen, but I can still read the signs. BELLYDANCING CLASS 6PM TUE DOG OBEDIENCE 6PM WED. I’m looking for a decent place to eat. It’s not forthcoming, and I’m tired, so I pull into the strip mall on the north side of town and opt for my old fail-safe. Every once in a while, I like to poison my body with a good, greasy Big Mac for dinner. It’s the most reliable meal I know; I can always count on finding it anywhere, those wide, yellow arches brightly shining my way towards familiarity. Each individual McDonalds will usually have some sort of locally specific knick-knacks hung up on the walls leading to the bathrooms. Here there is a handsome wooden sign slung on the bright yellow wall: “Old Jack’s Eatery,” it reads, “best burgers in Maine since 1912.” The rest of the restaurant, however, is comfortingly bland, universal in its facelessness, in the cheery void it evokes with its red plastic seats and yellow plastic counters, its happy meal figurines waving at you through a translucent plastic display case, the bright red ketchup dispenser with the little white cups stacked neatly nearby, and everywhere, that goddamn clown, grinning. When the robots become self-conscious and take over the world and enslave humanity, they won’t have to implant tubes into our stomachs to keep us fat until they can harvest our souls; they’ll simply keep all the McDonald’s running. Until then, however, the ketchup dispenser is still filled by a pimply red-headed teenager named Carl, and that thought always keeps me hopeful. Or at least keeps me from running out screaming.

Of course, what people come to McDonalds to do is eat, and so the heart of the operation is presumably its menu. It is here that you can get a 99-cent cheeseburger, a price simply unbeatable anywhere. Or upgrade to a three-dollar double quarter-pounder, or get a whole damn meal for just over five. You know it’s nothing but preservatives and high fructose corn syrup, you know it’ll clog your arteries and it may not even be real food at all, you know that the coke in your Extra-Value Meal is coming at the expense of some river in India and that the cow that made the beef of your Happy Meal farted so much it punched a new hole in the o-zone layer, and for all you know, the ketchup may cause birth defects in your children or something, but still, it’s the way to go. It tastes good, as long as you don’t have any pretensions, and it’s cheap, and you know it’s cheap, because it’s the same everywhere. And look around; if it does kill you, it’s going to kill everybody else too, so there won’t be anybody left to laugh. So many people can’t be wrong, and the few who do make a fuss – the tree huggers and the liberals, waving signs because they never learned to do any better work with their hands – ultimately only serve to lend the place an extra dimension of dignity. And so with a trustworthy, ironclad cheapness and a blanketing, vacuous universality, McDonalds beckons the masses. The dollar menu and its more glorified cousins are the lance of the McDonalds war machine, a formidable amour that can rumble through even the most backwoods community, slay whatever pesky local dragons lurk (like, presumably, Old Jack’s), and set up a well-ordered colony.

Tonight, however, is not a good night to eat at McDonald’s. There’s a whole boy’s soccer team in for a victory meal, so I decide to retreat to the van with its silence and its beer as soon as I acquire my food. The girl behind the counter – Kathy, according to her nametag – turns out to be a new employee, a spunky teenager vaguely resembling a fish. She’s got bug eyes and buckteeth, a goofy smile and bright yellow spiked hair awkwardly half-matted by her McDonald’s visor. There is an older employee hovering worriedly about her, watching the register screen. “Hi there!” she says cheerily. She waits for me to return her greeting, and then pipes out “welcome to McDonalds!” with such verve that I’m compelled to thank her. “What can I get ya?” I give her my order; she waves her hand over her electronic food-ordering doodad, wide eyes scanning for the right buttons and a long “uhhhhhh” escaping from between the teeth. The older woman frowns and leans in, her eyes never leaving the screen. “Ask him if he wants something to drink!” she hisses. “Oh!” Kathy says with a smile, “so, do you want something to drink?” I tell her no thanks. She grins with victory at her supervisor, who only nods at the screen.

Soon, I have my bag of goodies, and I begin to thread my way through the hordes of screaming sugar-high soccer players. Halfway to the door, I hear a shriek behind me: “bye!!” Kathy has picked me out with her bug eyes and is waving from behind the counter, almost lost in the sea of blue jerseys and yellow-uniformed coworkers hustling to feed them. Her buckteeth are bared in that same ludicrous smile. I make a point of turning fully around to return her wave and shout my thanks.

Back out in the van, I set down my dinner and breath a sigh of relief in the dark. I decide to relocate to a different part of the strip mall parking lot where I can camp out for the night. Switching on the lights, I’m met with a shock. I’ve inadvertently illuminated a whole family, my headlights beaming through the windshield of the minivan across from me. They’re all there, mom and dad in the front seat and kids in the back, some with open mouths poised at the burger, others reaching for the fries, all frozen dumb in the shock of my headlights. They looked lurid and two-dimensional and vaguely green, these strange specimens. It feels like turning on the light to a fishtank, or gazing by waterproof floodlights with all the sordid fascination of science through a little round window of a submarine. Here are the strange, sunless creatures of the deep, blinking back at this bright, inexplicable visitor.

I drive off to a nice, dark parking space and kill the lights. A whole family, eating McDonalds in the car in the dark. Who does that?? I think, biting into my Big Mac.

Of course, the robot invasion has already occurred. Here we are, the tattered human refugees, shrinking about in shadows of post-apocalypse strip mall parking lots, hiding from the neon glare of our aggressors and taking risks only to steal necessities from overturned vending machines. There are those few who still feebly fight back, boycotting products or waving signs or signing petitions or writing blogs. But in this bleak present, Kathy is the real hero of mankind. She roils in the belly of the beast, bright and unquenchable, proudly trumpeting her humanity even amidst the machines, communicating with indestructible innocence, thoughtfully refilling the ketchup dispenser.