I was 21 when I first heard the song ‘Car Wheels on a Gravel Road’ by Lucinda Williams. It was fall of 1998, my first quarter at The Evergreen State College. I wasn’t sure what I was getting into. On the first day of class, my professor, Craig Carlson, instructed us to bring him a set of blank cassette tapes labeled with our names on them. This was how he’d give us feedback on our essays. Then he told us that, because it was a beautiful day, class was dismissed. I looked around. Everyone was happy at this news. They looked like they had fun things to do like smoke pot on the trail to the farmhouse, or go back to the dorms and listen to music with the window open. I went for a walk. The sky was so bright, and the leaves were falling.
A couple of weeks later, after turning in our first essays, we each got a cassette tape returned with our pages. Picture me alone in an empty house inserting the tape into the deck. If you are old enough to have a sense memory of pressing your index finger against the wide play button, call on that. And then imagine a voice—gentle and wry—filling the space. If I wanted to, maybe, I could find that tape now in the back of a drawer somewhere. If I wanted to, maybe, I could play it on the boombox that I’ve kept all these years. But I don’t need to. I can hear him. I can hear Craig Carlson.
I wish you spoke in class more, he told me, so I’m going to fill this tape with some Lucinda Williams and hope that you will be so appreciative that the next time we have seminar I will look up, and you will meet my eye and say something insightful. So here you go. Metaphysical radio coming right at you.
I was alone in the house and just a little embarrassed.
The rest of that side of the tape was a dub of Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, beginning with the opening track, ‘Right in Time’, and ending midway through ‘Lake Charles’.
I wasn’t sure what to think about the album, which wasn’t something I would have chosen for myself at the time. But I listened to it who knows how many times because someone had given it to me, because it was listenable, because I liked it, because I could tell that it was good even though it was unfamiliar, because it seemed like maybe it was all part of some lesson. Of all the tracks on that album it was the title track I liked the best. At the time I just thought it was twangy and catchy, but over the years I’ve come to love it for the way it grounds me so fully in a childhood experience. The world of the song is a child’s world—sensory, complete, and also distantly informed by parental intrusions:
Low hum of voices in the front seat
Stories nobody knows
Got folks in Jackson we're going to meet
Car wheels on a gravel road
Cotton fields stretching miles and miles
Hank's voice on the radio
Telephone poles trees and wires fly on by
Car wheels on a gravel road
What I haven’t told you yet, but what you might have guessed, is that in 1998 I was so alone. I shared a house with a partner whom I was preparing to leave though I couldn’t quite admit it yet. I had thought that in college it would be easy to find friends, but it wasn’t.
Craig Carlson’s voice on the cassette made me feel strangely seen and valued.
He died three years later. He drowned in a rip tide in Costa Rica. I heard about it in an all-campus email, and though I was no longer a student, I came to the Evergreen Longhouse for his memorial. I had expected that I would see some faces I recognized from that program in fall of 1998, but I didn’t. I didn’t know anyone there. I just entered, and sat, and listened, and I left. Something felt right about that.
This week I decided I wanted to write a love letter about ‘Car Wheels on a Gravel Road’, and I had no idea that what I really wanted was to write a love letter about Craig Carlson. It wasn’t until I listened to that song on a loop on a long walk through the weather that I realized how I’ve carried him with me. He was, as most teachers are, just a little blip in my life. Occasionally I’ve thought about his loss, and in the kind of mental time travel I do sometimes, I think about what it would be like to let him know that I still write, that his class was the small beginning of something, and that it meant more than I could measure to just have a voice on a cassette tape, metaphysical radio, interrupting my isolation.
It was actually the distance alongside the intimacy that was beautiful, a voice in a room that I could play and stop whenever I wanted, no one imposing on my space or my actual life.
Pull the curtains back and look outside
Somebody somewhere I don't know
I remember once, at the very end of the quarter, he told a story. Early in his teaching career, he’d gotten back an evaluation from one of his students that said: I didn’t learn anything in your class because you didn’t like me. “And it was true,” he told us. “I didn’t like him, and I didn’t know why, and he could feel it. So I had to learn how to like all of my students.”
A student raised her hand. She was chubby and freckled and even younger than me. “Did it work?” she asked.
“You tell me,” he said.
I remember that because how could I forget it?
Book Love
I just finished The Angle of Flickering Light by Gina Troisi, a book that kept me awake turning pages several nights in a row. This book, like ‘Car Wheels’, offers a glimpse into childhood. There’s a scene with a stepmother and a folding cot that I haven’t stopped thinking about.
I am slowly reading and savoring The Illuminated Space by Marilyn Freeman, one of the beautiful books put out by The 3rd Thing Press. It’s one of those books that’s so many things: a multimedia experience (the book integrates visual art and video), a soothing companion, an intellectual kick in the pants.
I’m excited to read this week with authors Meg Weber and Diana Whitney via Village Books in Bellingham, Thursday, 3/11, 6 pm PST. You can read about our books and find the event link here.
I also got to talk to Diana Whitney about community, emotional labor, and gender roles over at Pulp Magazine.
Thanks for reading all the way to the bottom. Take care of yourself. 💛