Blues in E

As late mid-life crises go, this seems pretty benign. Red sports cars, grisly and deplorable drinking binges, and overly young girlfriends are all landmines with the potential to kill and injure people, sometimes in unimaginably hideous ways.

When I walked into the music store four months ago, I intended to leave with a cheap Japanese or Korean guitar. I strummed the two chords I sort of knew on several of them, and they all seemed fine. Then I picked up the Martin (SWOMGT). The same two inexpertly played chords reverberated deep in the wood and hung in the air around me, dissipating with a long and graceful finish like a sip of top-shelf Barolo. The action, i.e. the complicated interactions between the strings and the fret board, seemed perfect even to my unskilled left hand. The strings were neither so high that pushing them down was painful, nor so low that they buzzed against the metal frets when struck. The relatively small size of the sounding box made it easy to caress and to see what my fumbling fingers were up to. And it was beautiful, with the warm spruce and deep red cherry as pleasing to the eye as the sound was to the ear. So instead of the $150 import I had in mind that afternoon when I walked in, a zero was added to the figure, but I left smiling.

Biology is not in my corner. The muscle memory, flexibility and perceptive agility required for learning a new musical instrument is much diminished in a 50-something. The time to learn to play the guitar is in middle and high school. I was prepared for that, but I was unprepared for a great natural advantage I have over the younger me.

In late middle age, I’ve seen enough frustration to temper my anger substantially. This has been an especially interesting transformation to undergo, because my tolerance for bullshit seems to be declining precipitously with age. Even so, my capacity to not react explosively to it has greatly increased. Who knew!?

What this means for the older aspiring musician is a capacity for patience. I play my guitar for 15 or 20 minutes almost every day. Improvement comes very slowly and in small increments, but it comes, and I am satisfied. If I cannot bend my fingers into an odd shape and nail that new chord today, or this week, or this month, that’s fine. At this point, the long view comes readily, and I understand that simply attempting to make that chord guarantees success if I just keep trying and wait for it. It is inevitable. With due respect to Pete Townshend and Jimi Hendricks, I never feel the urge to smash my guitar.

I chose to learn the guitar for reasons both mundane and aesthetic.

At the simplest level is the instrument’s versatility and simplicity. It has frets, thus if it is properly tuned, depressing the third fret on either E-string will give you a G every time you do it, and all you have to do is pluck the string with a pick or your thumb to get that G. The 20 total frets and 6 strings gives you 120 discreet notes (a piano has 88) and God knows how many chords, and that’s just with the standard tuning. A friend of mine currently struggles with the fiddle. The fiddle has no frets, so where, exactly, is that G???? Worse yet, as an expert fiddle playing friend once explained to me “The violin is very loud, and capable of making a great many sounds, but most of them are displeasing. The most important skill in fiddle playing is simply producing a pleasing sound.” So my poor student friend is reduced to practicing his scales in a woodshed to avoid his wife’s wrath. His efforts, pleasing and otherwise, are reserved for the squirrels.

I suppose I also became interested because I have many close friends and family members who play guitar. For years I have accompanied them on harmonica, an instrument with which I am skilled enough to occasionally play in front of strangers, but the harp’s limited range has always frustrated me. Playing music with others is one of life’s great joys, and given my pair of left feet and general lack of physical grace, the only way I am likely to ever actively appreciate live music is as a musician.

Making music and writing well are both expressions of artful creativity, and I simply can’t live without that. Like the man in the cave at Lascaux all of those millennia ago, I am simply driven to create something beautiful and I’m not sure I can explain why.

I’ll try.

I’m sitting in a wooden chair with my guitar in my lap. I have just run through my scales and a few chords, and I begin a repeated pattern of notes on the high E, B, G and D strings. It’s from a blues sometimes attributed to Big Joe Williams. The blues are the deep tap root of almost all American folk and popular music, a root that extends to West Africa, to the bones and to the heart of what it means to be human. It moves within the dark and light of emotion, and frames a painful entreaty…

Baby please don’t go
Back to New Orleans
You know I love you so.

Yeah, we’ve all been there, haven’t we? Down on one knee. And what will she do, how will she respond? God knows…

I strike the last note on the D string, then come back to the G note on that high E and bend it up ending on the open E. Despite the fact that I’m not yet much of a guitarist, I can feel that last note ring down in the core of my body. I let it fade away into stillness, then stand up, put the guitar back in its case, and close the lid.

The Farm Show Explained

In order to understand why 500,000 people would congregate in Harrisburg Pa. in the absolute dead of winter to stare at farm machinery, examine swine and cattle close up, and eat unhealthy things, you begin with the fact that Pennsylvania, one of the agricultural heavyweights of the eastern US, doesn’t have a state fair. It used to. The last one was held in the 1890’s. It was discontinued in response to Victorian-era outrage over the “unwholesome” carny-type tent shows that grew up around it.

Fair enough.

The tent shows continue at other more traditional fairs. When I was in my twenties I attended a large county fair in another state. There was a tent with “dancing girls” which I and my companions entered for five bucks each. Once inside we noted a local fellow who had paid extra money for a place at the edge of the stage. He had on overalls and black plastic frame glasses with welding spots on them, held together with electrical tape. He weighed at least 300 pounds. He did not appear to have spent much time in town. When one of the girls began to gyrate provocatively in front of his face expecting a tip, he lunged forward with surprising speed, buried his face in her g-string and seized her buttocks with both hands. The bouncers laid hands on him, and hit him many times with a shovel handle, but he would not let go. The girl was shrieking, the barker was cursing into the microphone at the top of his voice, and the sheriff and his deputies came running. My companions and I left.

So yes, the tent shows are in fact, unwholesome.

The Pennsylvania Farm Show as we now know it began in Harrisburg in 1917 and continues to this day, since 1931 in the massive multi-acre Farm Show complex at the north edge of town. Unlike traditional state fairs, the Farm Show isn’t a summer or early autumn affair, but occurs during the second week of January. The original intent of this schedule was to increase farmer’s attendance at the exhibition by holding it during their least busy time of year. By and large that schedule has worked well, but it puts the Farm Show into a crap shoot with the weather. Not infrequently, Farm Show week coincides with a savage winter storm or single digit cold. Surprisingly, it never seems to hurt attendance. Farm Show brings thousands of very rural Pennsylvanians to the State Capitol. They bring their money along, which has pleased generations of the city’s hotels, honky-tonks, restaurants, strip clubs, museums, tourist attractions, shopping emporiums, etc. Visitation is also swelled by many thousands of local and regional residents. It’s a great deal for families; aside from a nominal charge for parking, the farm show is free.

What began as a purely agricultural exhibition has evolved into a combination of the traditional farm exhibits and activities and more peripheral private and public sector exhibitors hoping to take advantage of the enormous crowds. There is also a lot of food. The “food court”, which features several acres of vendors and their clientele, dishes up delicacies and abominations in close proximity to each other. A few years ago, I watched an elderly food vendor from a rural part of Snyder County with tufts of hair protruding from his ears explain to an astonished hip-hop couple from Harrisburg the composition of the pieces of fried scrapple he was offering them as samples. When the actual content of the small grey cubes finally dawned on them, they acted as though he had invited them to participate in an act of cannibalism.

Most years I help staff an exhibit on Pennsylvania Archaeology hosted by several State agencies and non-profits. The exhibit always features a replica dugout canoe some 15 feet long that is a big hit with kids and their parents. It sometimes leads to some interesting exchanges.

Farmer: “What the hell is this?”
Exhibit Staffer: “It’s a replica dugout canoe like the Indians used.”
Farmer: “Make a hell of a pig trough.”

…and so on.

The exhibit also features a flint knapper, reenactor, and all-around astonishing character named Bob. Bob, who is some part Shawnee on his mother’s side, reenacts a Shawnee from the 18th century right down to the war club, breechcloth and scalp lock, and he engages visitors as he patiently produces stone tools. There is no doubt that a guy bristling with weapons and strange decorative items, sans pants, and making symmetrical and beautiful arrowheads draws a crowd. He can hold that crowd with an incredible string of banter that he can instantly adjust to the age and demographic in front of him at any given time. He would have made a superb classroom teacher, excepting the minor problem that he would likely eat the school board and principal and would cuss during parent-teacher conferences (he can be a little hot headed).

The exhibit’s worth doing. We had nearly 500 visitors in an hour, and whatever you’re promoting or selling, if you have a booth at the Farm Show, many thousands of people will see it.

If you’re not staffing a booth, the show is the show. You might see anything. A small child asks her grandmother about the prodigious set of equipment hanging between the legs of a prize Charolais bull. An old order Mennonite boy learns to eat Korean noodle soup with chopsticks from a West Indian kid with a head full of dreadlocks. A straining team of muscular Belgian horses pulls a concrete weight of impossible size across an arena infield before a cheering crowd. An elderly couple whirl through a square-dance competition, smiling and staring into each other’s eyes like they are the only people on earth. A large group of visitors stares transfixed at a multi-ton butter sculpture as though they were looking at David in the Academia.

You really should go.

Opening Day

As traditions go, this one’s pretty odd. For about 15 years now, an old friend and I break in our new fishing licenses on New Year’s Day. We rig up fly rods, and fish for trout in liquid water. By mutual agreement, actual ice fishing is for dilettantes and would not count. This tradition, whose origins are lost to our respective memories despite the inarguable fact that 15 years isn’t a huge gulf of time, has at least a few idiosyncrasies that test our mettle. The idiosyncrasies of our winter fishing might also cause a less dedicated person to question our sanity.

For example…

As any idiot can tell you, New Year’s Day follows News Years Eve. Neither my old friend nor I have ever been mistaken for Mother Theresa, so you may assume that in the course of some of these expeditions one or both of us has perhaps not looked or felt his very best. There is also the immutable fact that the first of January in the northern latitudes is more conducive to indoor activities than to standing in a trout stream in a pair of waders. Finally, consider what awaits the angler. Fish are ectotherms: their body temperature assumes that of their environment. Critters with a body temperature in the 30’s don’t eat much or all that often. The result of this combination is, most years, a pair of uncomfortable and mildly ill men shivering in a bleak landscape for several hours while awaiting an occurrence that is not very likely to happen.

But we do it.

We do it because we are usually the only people on the water. This is a benefit not to be underestimated around here. My corner of the world is blessed with decent trout streams, and cursed with a large and dense population. The crowds during the fine spring weather and mayfly hatches, and the bad behavior that comes with them, are legendary. A stretch of quiet water around here is well worth substantial discomfort.



An accident of regional geology is also in our favor. My house, and the valley in which it is situated, sits atop a huge slab of limestone. From the limestone flows slightly alkaline water in bubbling springs that feed our local streams. This keeps many of these streams well above freezing in the winter, and less acidic than the mountain streams around us. Our fish aren’t as cold as their mountain cousins in the winter, so they’re a little more active and hungry. The higher PH also produces abundant aquatic insects and crustaceans, including clouds of small midges that hatch on nearly every warmer (40’s and above) winter day.

Thus our annual expedition isn’t always fishless, and even if it is, it’s usually relaxed and quiet, and what could be wrong with that? So maybe we’re not so dumb, maybe we’re getting smarter. Our winter fishing is always instructive, since any substantial amount of time spent in nature cannot help but teach you something.

The lesson of time spent in the sere, quiet, and subtle landscape of an Appalachian winter is that nature is not dead now, it is sleeping. The evidence is palpable, if not immediately obvious. In the quiet sipping of a trout taking midges in a slow eddy, in the chipping of a Cardinal in a leafless oak, in the rustling of snow landing on water, you can actually hear it breathing.


Happy New Year