The decision was made without my input. I would be riding with Dave, the owner of the camp, my stepdad’s best friend. Dave would put me in a spot on the mountain where deer moved around a high point. It was rough country where most people don’t go. That makes it a place deer find useful.
We were still two hours until light as I sat at the kitchen table. It was a highway of rides smashed into each other: a shiny aluminum tray of scrambled eggs was scraping up against an old piss-colored Tupperware full of bacon. Toast was buttered and towered in heaps on a couple goodwill plates by the dropped mess of silverware and the pepper shaker and the massive jar of generic grape jelly.
There were granola bars on the table. Lunchmeat and cheese for sandwiches to pack and take.
Our presence, 7 or 8 of us, all men, all white, from young teens to men in their 50s, it was something small- like a distant fire- seen from far away/ perhaps from the ridge up above the Miller’s farm/ perhaps from the eyes of a crow in a dark tree/ and maybe from somewhere else, I don’t know. The wild notion that we could have been seen by the operators of a UFO from some other galaxy never occurred to me back then, but these days it doesn’t seem so far-fetched. On December mornings in the late 1980s Pennsylvania was stomping grounds for spike bucks and teenage stoners and travelers from remote reaches of other universes.
How do I know this?
I don’t know.
How do you not know it?
In Dave’s blue van, he turned on the heater and the stars were so bright in the morning sky. We said almost nothing despite our familiarity. Sometimes people who know one another from certain pageants like deer camps tend to only be able fully function in true character when they are upon the stage, in a scene, with everyone at once. Isolated from the crowd, individuality is morphed and shaken. Shapeshifting happens when our inner selves are knocked out of the comfort zones we cling to so much.
The ridges on both sides of the valley were high dark spruces and weathered hardwoods and I saw them from our place on the road and they struck me with awe that morning. I was nervous; I still don’t know why. My minisculeness kept sliding out of me and then back in, like a lit up ghost playing games with my skin. I was in body and then out of body as I took breaths in gasps that made me feel as if I could be sick or shit myself from all the breakfast I had eaten.
Dave was a steady man, his hands were strong and worked, and he had a gentle rugged nature about him. He looked me deep in the eye whenever he busted my stepdad’s balls about something, and he grinned this magnificent smile that charmed me into believing that he had told the joke just for me/ just so me and him could laugh together. Our intimate bond rarely moved beyond that sort of thing, though, which was fine with me. I felt respected in Dave’s company. I felt like I belonged inside that small group of Pennsylvania men.
Halfway to the spot we would hunt, Dave turned the radio on. It was the local country station and the early morning DJ talked for a few moments in a comfortable tone for the hour before he played a song.
What he played I had heard before. For a kid of 17, I had a decent knowledge of country music already. And yet, I was still discovering. Still being selected by other forces, other beings or powers or whatever, to receive country singers and country songs in ways that maybe no one else who had ever lived had ever received them before. There is no telling with these kinds of things, you see. We walk around humble and cobbled by our own insecurities, but in the end it’s all bullshit.
That morning I saw that particular light for the very first time. The song the DJ played after he was done yapping was I Don’t Know A Thing About Love by Conway Twitty. The lights on Dave’s van dashboard were the only glow in my world right then and as Conway started singing, his deep backroad timbre moved from the dashboard speakers and out into the darkest morning until it surrounded me like snakes of smoke/ like cabin lights/ like women I had only fantasized about wanting and holding and kissing. I was moved almost instantly in that sudden way that the right song at the right time can move you. And if I had fallen out the van door just then/ slapping down onto the cold road in the predawn purple bruise that lingers longer here in the forest than anywhere else, I would have just laid there like I was meant to, the song still ravishing my entire being/ the lyrics to the chorus slipping from my lips/ sheets of blood spreading all around me/ Dave’s taillights disappearing around some bend up the road because the song is the song and the deer are on the mountain and the day is just beginning.
We rode on though and I left my body entirely, consumed by a feeling I could not understand. The immensity of the vibe off of Conway Twitty’s voice/ the sound of the music in the lonesome wild black/ the headlights dim on the road/ no other cars in the world/ Dave on his side and me on mine/ the rifles between us/ the granola bars in my florescent orange jacket pocket.
In the woods, I sat sweaty from the grueling climb, unzipped my coat, bled human scent all over the winds that would save all deer from young country over here. I lit a cigarette, I didn’t care. The morning stars were tied to the treetops and the silhouette of branches was all the old, old Roman ceilings but better. Dave had drifted silently into the eternal unseen. He was a legendary hunter. His hands had slid across the livers of hundreds of whitetails in his day.
Later, I would smoke a bowl, eat granola bars, stare at leaves and nervous squirrels and wonder if my life could ever offer me any more than this.
But for now, I sang to myself as my heart raced from hiking and my blood clotted with the breakfast of a hundred years ago.
“I talked to the Man in the Moon.
I said, ‘Sir, is she coming back soon?’
He smiled and he stated,
‘Son, I’m over-rated,
I’ve had to much credit in those old love tunes.
I don’t know a thing about love,
I just kind of hang here above.
I just watch from the sky,
Will love grow, will it die?
I don’t know a thing about love.’ ”
Everything was electric and the dawn came when it did.
People like all kinds of music for all kinds of reasons. Most of the reasons, if not all of them, are personal and true. None of us can argue against another person’s taste although I suspect it is hardcore human nature to want to do it anyhow. We are opinionated beings, if nothing else. And our tastes often dictate our brains. It’s stupid and gets us into all manner of jams and arguments, but there you go.
Country music, for all of its various incarnations and all of its zillions of personalities down the years, has often made me feel like it was written and sung just for me. Conway Twitty on a long ago morning, waking up to his own hangover and cigs, nursing a cup of black coffee, moving through his kitchen in a chintzy Chinese robe and signing about being the moon/ seeing all things/ no understanding of love. To me. Some zit-faced kid with weed and granola bars and a creative fire that he didn’t understand yet. I wanted to kill a big buck but I also wanted to just see a big buck.
To kill him would be pure masculine acceptance.
To only see him, would just be country as hell.
And honestly, from a very young age, that’s all I ever really wanted to be.
In the parking lot of Sunset Park, me and my brother, Dave, rolled up the windows of my ’78 Impala and sat there looking around with sharpshooter eyes. It was a Sunday afternoon, July, scorching hot, sun burning up the fields with an unforgiving burn. In my car, temps swiftly rose to pass-out level, but we were used to it. When you smoke a lot of weed in a world that frowns on such things, you learn to adapt to the imagined scowls and the state cop paranoia and you improvise accordingly.
In our case, there were no hippies here. There were no woody edges where fringe folk could wander off into the afternoon shade and blow a doob. This was old time country music people/ farm people/ Christian people/ nice people with deep conservative rural roots who just so happened to like some of the same music as two long-haired teenage brothers from suburban Philly. No one here had probably ever even smelled weed let alone smoked it. Except almost all of the beloved artists across the decades, of course. Which I still like.
To hot box yourself inside a parked summer car and pack/smoke/hide a bowl with your brother in the course of a quick minute or two is not something a lot of folks are good at, but I am. If you do a thing a thousand times you become a sort of expert at it, they say. If you do it a million times, you become like me in that situation. Fluid, flawless, baked, and gone. Before anyone could have ever even begun to suspect that there were hijinks unfolding in the parking area, me and Dave were secret giggling and hidden smile smiling as we emerged from my 150° F car into a breezy, refreshed world dipped in blue sky wonder and dry-rubbed in old fashion country charm.
Through the charcoal burger smoke by the concession stands we wandered, as we did many Sundays at Sunset Park, over towards the stage area to see if we could see anything. This was, after all, not a place like other places. Even at the Ryman, you would rarely see (or even hear tall talk about) someone like Loretta Lynn standing unaccompanied in the dusty grass, lit up by the summer sunshine, talking easy with total strangers, with lifelong fans, as if they were just both walking down the road in 1845/ one on their way to buy some fatback from the shop in town/ one on their way home.
Vividly, then, is how I recall that lazy July day. So long ago now that it rattles me to consider time as such, I can say I had a premonition, but it’s easy to speak that now. I had shaken Grandpa Jones’ hand here, smiled into the smile of Marty Stuart. On various Sundays across the last two years or so, Dave and I had said our special prayers to the woodchuck in the blast furnace of my car and then rolled out into these pastoral fields to stand a few feet from Waylon Jennings as he dragged on a cigarette despite the no-smoking signs, the diamond glint of his black cowboy shirt buttons as they sparked in random flashes of sunshine.
Stoned off my ass, seeing myself as the protagonist in some lost untold chapter of country music’s real history, I felt way more comfortable standing in the literal presence of these American titans and their redneck fans than I had any goddamn right to. As me and Dave turned the corner and peeked behind the stage, everything I had ever believed about being alive, about the limits of daydreams melding into consciousness, it all came crashing down like a whip-slashed hunk of true blue Kentucky sky.
Me and Donnie Pizza Sauce in his massive Crown Vic, our hands dangling out the window, flies dying against our wrists. We chain smoke Marlboros because the day is beautiful. Because we are young and more or less fatherless in the truest sense of the word, the two of us have decided to skip out on certain warnings and precedents set up for us by whoever came before us (with the nice family lives, I guess) and set up all these hard fast rules for young people to abide by.
It is the middle of spring and school has become a pan on the back burner. Summer is coming and with it all that youth will still allow us. Looking back now, I try to imagine what it might have been like just a short while before us/ if our lives and friendship had unfolded in the late ’60s instead of the late ’80s. I try to think what it might have been like to see Donnie dressed up in his military clothes, his hair shorn off, smoking a cigarette and wishing he was going fishing instead of going to war. I try to imagine what it would have been like for me standing there in his place then. After he was already gone/ me getting drafted/ feeling scared/ wishing I could hide in the dense jungle of vines and tangles along the Perkiomen Creek where we’d always looked for smallmouths instead of the jungles of this faraway land where I knew I was probably gonna die.
Now though, we have none of that. We smoke and laugh and uncap our sodas, take long draws of the cold sharp cola, let down the bottle like hobos used to set down the jar. The wind is the air slamming into the car as we roll down the highway, out past the massive shopping malls, out through all of this suburban sprawl where we spend our days. At the end of the line, if we don’t wrap ourselves around a telephone pole or send ourselves directly into the radiator of some oncoming truck like so many people our age end up doing, then we will reach the place where the creek runs into the river. And there we will tie on our French surface plugs and our Woolworth spinners and we will wade into the steady river, moving across the crayfish rocks, to cast our lines at the likely looking seams where wild bass exist, balanced on the sharp edge of razor, lurking out there somewhere between what we know to be truth and what we sense must be imagination.
The cassette deck is pumping out Hank Williams and me and Donnie know all the words. We fly by taverns that are gone now. We shoot by ball fields that lie beneath cul-de-sacs and parking lots these days. We move our cigarettes to our lips and inhale the smoke the same way that Hank did back when he was young and alive like we are now.
We don’t talk much, me and Donnie. Our lives are filled with voices, in the classrooms and the hallways, at home with our people. It seems we have stumbled, simultaneously, into this sort of hunger for the music to replace the chaos. At lest for a little while here today.
Donnie thumps an ash out the window but it blows back in. We panic a little trying to see if the back seat is burning. Hank is singing about settin’ the woods on fire and I holler this at Donnie and he laughs and smiles his wide-open smile and I feel the universe guiding us towards something unseen and unknown. Maybe it is a big bass coming at us this afternoon. Or maybe even a musky, it’s possible you know! Maybe it’s this lifelong friendship/ will it last and last? Or maybe it is the power of memory. The incomparable gifts that come with short flashes of another time, another place.
Donnie’s Marlboro dangling from his lips in the slow cool settling of the evening. A lone bass splashing across the river by a fallen tree. Birds singing. Our waders slapping against the current/ sloshing us forward/ propelling us towards uncertainty/ heaving us into the radical abyss.
Every time I hear Hank sing, I close my eyes and I’m young again.
Every time I recognize Hank’s song, I am carried off.
Such a country flood.
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Serge Bielanko lives in small-town Pennsylvania with an amazing wife who’s out of his league and a passel of exceptional kids who still love him even when he’s a lot. Every week, he shares his thoughts on life, relationships, parenting, baseball, music, mental health, the Civil War and whatever else is rattling around his noggin.
