The Autumns And Friends
Photo taken sometime in the 90s.
Perhaps deciding to embark on a 5,000 mile tour in 4 days was the single most foolish decision in the history of our band. And it didn't help when we noticed, within hours of our departure in December of 2003, that our van was leaving a perfect Hansel and Gretel trail of oil behind us leading all the way home. The only mechanic we could track down at that hour informed us that it was a very old van that needed special parts not easy to come by. It simply couldn't be fixed on our timeline.
We determined that at the rate the oil was going through the van we would have to stop to replenish it hourly but that we could handle jumping that hurdle if we needed to. If we had known that the next several days would find us driving into the heart of a blizzard in the Rockies (and off a cliff in Wyoming), destroying a gas pump in Reno, performing at a Christmas party for a mormon corporation that sold a dietary supplement drink, or sharing a stage in Denver with an obese man in a top hat who stripped so the audience could attach dollar bills to his body with a staple gun, we might not have spent that evening loading crates of canned oil into the van.
We knew we had crossed the Texas state line when our Ft. Worth host told us that he knew someone who could "nigger-rig" our vehicle, which we applauded with stunned silence. Given that our schedule required that we never stop driving unless we were at a venue performing, this possibility was never explored...a fact not lost on Dustin and I that night somewhere in the vast expanses of a sub-zero Oklahoma, as we unsuccessfully tried to curl our frozen hands into fists aimed at every deity in humanity's pantheon following our ejection from the cozy womb of our van to empty the contents of yet another can of oil.
Dread had been building as we packed our gear into the van at 2 am after our Colorado show because word had been coming in that a severe blizzard was moving in our direction and would be concentrated over our chosen route through the mountains that night. Someone suggested we consider another route, which would take us well out of our way by blazing a trail north through Wyoming, but would at least allow us to bypass the worst of the storm.
Either we were misinformed or the storm changed course in the night, because as we later found out, the "safe route" sent us right into its epicenter. By the time it hit us, we were at too high of an elevation to change plans. We spent that entire night navigating the switchbacks of the Rockies with a visibility of five feet at a pace under 20 miles an hour. Everyone was delirious from severe sleep deprivation compounded with exhaustion from performing and incessant driving. Certainly no one could sleep now because our car maintained traction with the road only a fraction of the time. We couldn't stop driving either because we would be snowed in with no way to communicate with the outside world. We could only stop long enough to get out once an hour to continue feeding the van its obligatory ration of oil, hoping we would make it back inside before the tires got stuck or the engine gave out.
Sometime around dawn the storm subsided. We still had a long way to go before we were out of the mountains, but at least we had our visibility back. We stopped at some log cabin that offered breakfast and decided to celebrate. In retrospect, I'm glad we erroneously believed we were over the worst of it. Our nerves were so frayed at this point, we all might have had breakdowns if we didn't feel a sense of relief, if only for a couple hours.
It all happened, of course, when we were feeling the most relaxed. The sun was out and the road was looking clear of snow for the first time. But then, looking out my front passenger-side window, I noticed a car down in a ravine below us. I could see the driver was still inside pointlessly trying to get his cell phone to work. "Hey," I said. "It looks like that guy needs help." Instead of a response, I heard someone say, "Hey Frank, watch where you're going." Frank, from behind the wheel, replied: "I'm not doing this."
By the time I had turned my head to see what was happening, I discovered we were sailing down the wrong side of the road, straight into oncoming traffic. Then without Frank doing anything (you can't do anything when you've hit a patch of "black ice"), we glided back to our side of the road and then right off it. It was one of those proverbial moments where everything seems to be happening at about a tenth of the speed it actually is and (having no time to get scared) we calmly waited in collective silence for the van and the trailer, with all our gear, to flip. Matthew, who had been woken from a deep sleep on a fold out seat/bed in the back, was probably contemplating the collossal feat of acrobatics it would take to get buckled in before the disaster.
That same day, media throughout the country ran a news story about a touring band whose van and trailer flipped 5 times in a blizzard in the Rockies. Somehow, everyone walked away with no more than minor injuries, though their equipment, strewn across the snow, would never work again. That band was Bleeding Through and it happened not far from where we sat leaking black oil into a white ravine. Frank, who somehow had the clarity of mind to steer into our direction of spin rather than fight it, was probably the single factor that kept that from happening to us. We slid down the slope like a tobaggan until we came to a stop and sunk into knee-deep snow.
Once we were able to shove the doors open just wide enough to get out, leaving little snow angels' wings around the van, we surveyed the area to assess our options. Our sustained silence pretty much summed it up. But the silence was broken by a shrill yell from the roadside above: "Whooooo-weee! Bravo! That was some fine driving!" Two men and a woman start descending the slope toward us.
My mind immediately embarks on a reverie of previous experiences in this part of the U.S. Easily one of the most beautiful regions of the country, it is populated by a lot of good people who nevertheless share the place with candidates ripe for a recasting of "Deliverance."
About a year and a half prior, in nearby Montana, I experienced the town of Shelby, when I was turned away from the Canadian border while driving to Calgary with my friends Jessica and Wendy (to film Zeena Parkins and Ikue Mori for my documentary), due to a sadistic border guard who had an issue with someone in my car. Given that it was necessary to film in Calgary as soon as possible, we had no choice but to backtrack 30 miles to the nearest town to get my friend on a bus to Seattle where we would later meet up with her again after crossing back into the states near Vancouver.
Shelby consisted of only a few blocks, and the whole town was in the bar. Upon inspecting our unfamiliar vehicle, one local pulled me aside and said, "California plates, huh? Be careful. They'll be watching you like hawks here."
"Why's that," I innocently enquired.
"Well, you see, a pedophile recently moved into town." My brain ransacked its resources to make a connection between California and pedophiles. "He didn't last more than 30 days here."
"Did you kick him out?"
"No," he stared back unflinching. "We killed him."
We learned that the vast majority of the people in Shelby, who were curiously all at the same stage of middle-age, had never left the town except to smuggle guns over the border, which they used their wives to conceal, in order to...well, to shoot things I imagine. They boasted having 3 times more guns than any other city in the country, which averaged out to about seven guns per household. And not just any guns either...the varieties that would take a bullet proof vest off a cop. It was clear that this stockpile was not viewed as an instrument of self-defence or sport; it was a bastion against the entirety of creation itself. A theological statement. The hunter-gatherer ethos of the male rooted in St. Paul. Manicheans with guns. Throughout Montana, we spotted gun and bear repellant catalogs sporting Bible verses such as "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me." Thanks to that fucking Canadian border guard, we now found ourselves in the trenches.
Just as we were about to bolt, we realized that the only town that wasn't several hours away was a place we had spent time in earlier that day called Sunburst, where the two blocks that comprised the town were riddled with warning posters of new pedohiles-on-the-run that had moved in and were not to be spoken to, kids shooting cans in the street, and one white steepled church which had been converted into the town bar. We had reluctantly befriended the owner, who insisted on taking photos of us to display behind the bar so he could advertise that Californians had graced his establisment, and proceeded to spend most of the afternoon explaining to us how he was NOT gay, and how one of his lifelong dreams was to bring his collection of dolls to life by automating them to dance like marionnettes and appear to be playing instruments. The dolls would then perform periodically in the bar. While describing this, his elderly leather-faced parents stopped in to restock the bar with hard liquor from the grocery store directly across the street and have a couple mid-afternoon shots.
Reminiscing over these events, we decided that maybe Shelby wasn't such a bad place after all. Yet when the man graciously sharing statistics about Shelby's fortifications encouraged me to spend the night in his town, I was reminded of the last person who had offered me hospitality in this area: a man whose rain boots were soaked ankle-deep in blood (complete with cleaver dangling from hand) in front of his lone house in the Wyoming wilderness where I had stopped to investigate an ominous cairn of bones and bison skulls piled on his lawn like some apocalyptic tower of Babel. When we opted for the Shelby Motel (whose decor was rather fittingly a Spanish conquistador theme) my new mercenary friend made us promise to say hello to the desk clerk for him, because they had not been on speaking terms since they had run against each other for mayor earlier the same year. That night we made futile attempts to sleep under the gaze of cold light reflected from Spaniards' lances.
Not far from where this scene once unfolded, our tour van was currently hibernating. So perhaps one can appreciate my apprehension about the three figures sliding down from the road toward our van. In a land of bonafide David Lynch characters (Lynch himself was raised not far from here) I didn't think the odds were in our favor. And they were peculiar slice of Americana, but of a different phylum. It turns out the three of them drive their reinforced pickup truck around this part of the Rockies when the weather conditions are this bad just so they can help people like us who get into situations like we were in, with no interest in pay or even thanks...and they happened to be right behind us when we went off the road.
It took them every trick in their book (and they certainly had a lot of them), but they managed to get us out even to their own surprise. Just ahead on the road, an 18-wheeler had jacknifed sideways across both sides of the road. We had to drive off the road again to get around, almost getting ourselves once again in the exact same predicament. For the rest of the day, the pedal never left the floor, not because we were in a hurry, but because the constant mountain ascents were nearly insurmountable for our weary Little-Van-That-Could, and every "I think I can" stank of the gasoline that was rapidly flooding our engine. Having to restart the vehicle so many times caught up with us 8 months later in spite of the extensive repairs it underwent and a successful expedition to Mexico, when it breathed its last after the starter broke while in transit through the middle of the Arizona desert, where we were left with no choice but to invent primitive games with rocks and lose our minds.
But at least we made it to our show on the other side of the Rockies, where our corporate hosts treated us to a fair share of their lucrative dietary nectar which tasted remarkably like regurgitated blueberries. And from there, an all-nighter through the Sierra Nevadas (so delirious from sleep deprivation that we drove away from a gas station in Reno with the pump still in our gas tank, dragging it for blocks before it collapsed in the street like roadkill) to our grande finale in San Francisco where an irate soundman suffering from incomprehensible neuroses and self-orchestrated purgatories kicked us off-stage in the middle of our set.
