Driving from Utah to Colorado with naught but Wyoming between us. Heather takes the opportunity to call her husband and update him on our travels travailles and goings ons. She recounts a lot of what we’ve Lived for the past couple of days and glowingly tells the tale of Sunday night’s show in Reno, pointing out that the music, beyond being well-received seemed to MEAN something to people. We got a lot of teary-eyed audience members, just so glad to hear our music, and though I guess I’d sort of expected that support for Heather, having so many people respond that way to US, ilyAIMY’s music, “New American” and “Good Enough” was a beautiful thing. It’s made me start eyeballing NEXT September, which could be another trip out here +/- Ellicott City Main Street festival, but I could imagine sacrificing that once AGAIN for the sake of being out here next autumn. There really doesn’t seem a better time to do it, and of course the best time to book the next gig is in the warm afterglow of the last one.
Heather’s had a rough time of it, emotionally and physically. She’s been ravaged by some sort of cough / cold that won’t let her go and she’d been very worried that she wouldn’t be able to sing. She even slept through Yellowstone in the hopes of kicking it out. *I* never had any doubts that we’d kick ass, but I’m grateful that the immense response we received managed to make her realize that the music is bigger than her. We create something that people are transported by. And even on our worst day we do that for them.
The concept of a wellness check on America still seems to grab people. A woman tearfully writes us a check. I’m almost tearful in accepting it because it’s the kind of support that we’ve never really gotten before, and I explain that we Live on margins so thin you can see through them. It makes a difference. She says WE make a difference.
I forget politics for a while, and I’m trying to stay tuned out of social media, the hate and the vitriol and the idiocy of a new America focused on suppression of information and rancor. We drive past a long-abandoned gas station on the plains of Wyoming, out of sight of anyone and anything but truckers and vagabonds the place is a jewel-like repository of brightly-coloured graffiti and just as I’m reveling in it’s, yes, outsider, visionary art beauty I see the giant caricatured black man painted on the side, like something out of a racist cartoon from the last century, with the text DEPORT THEM ALL painted in massive letters above his head.
It goes too fast to get the photograph but it hangs in the back of my throat, bitter and nasty.
Soon we’re being transported by as we transport over the absultely immense vistas of Southern Wyoming. Alien and rugged and erternal only from a distance, up close these buttes and ravines look almost fragile, cracked facades threatening to calve away from cliff-faces if you speak too loud. Cloudscapes that threaten and beckon and promise, fauna that runs and flora that tenaciously holds the whole landscape together.
Lands like this are exactly why I’ll never really have any truck with vertical formats. I believe in horizons.
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