On Sundays I facetime with Keegan and Eleni. It started not long after lockdowns, after my television screen filled with scenes from crammed New York City hospitals and refrigerated trucks for the bodies overflowing from the morgues. I called to make sure they were okay, called because the reassurance of their voices in my ears and their faces on my screen canceled out my worry, if only until the next call and the one after that. The COVID-19 pandemic did this, causing worry but inciting the great, deep down need to connect with those we love. Being tethered to one another, in some way, tamps down fear.
The year before, when Nate was on hospice, Keegan would check in with me. Never with the “how’s your brother” type inquires but the “thinking of you” kind. At a time when loneliness seeped in at the edges, these regular, unprompted missives felt like focused beams of light. And now, as he and Eleni hunker down in their tiny box in the epicenter of the crisis, our ritual is to come together and chat. When that happens, of course the conversation veers toward cover songs. Obsessions trump pandemics.
“And have you ever considered writing about ‘Wagon Wheel,’ Ren?”
I hadn’t until Keegan brought it up, and for the summer months, I’ve been listening and considering this song. It made me think about how this summer, before we knew it would be the summer of pandemic, I’d planned to travel to Iceland. For some time now, I’ve wanted to see it: the lagoons, the glaciers, the epic green glimpsed only in photographs. To escape the heat that wrecks my joints. The week of my would-be departure, I finally got a refund for my airfare. The year before this one I’d journeyed back and forth for months to suburban Atlanta to be with Nate as he descended from sickness toward death. The frequent-flyer miles ticked up with each trip. I’d envisioned my Iceland trip as a journey from sorrow to acceptance, now stunted by a sickness not ravaging a single loved one but a whole population.
Ironically, Iceland largely contained its outbreak, a reminder of how much of my life I’ve wanted to escape sickness and the sorrows that attend it. But, like so many other things, I never made it. It has, as of now, stayed outside my grasp.
*
An actual wagon wheel includes a center hub with spokes radiating out towards a circular band, the wheel itself. That’s my very un-craftsman-like description. These wheels, designed with loose tolerances, designed to rock, fascinate me with their simple design. They swayed over the land, over not-quite roads and trails, made to give into steady motion over unsmoothed terrain. Most wagons transported goods, not people, and that says a lot more about what we wanted to move, perhaps, than we consider.
“Wagon Wheel” as a song uses the motifs of movement and travel, this sway over rough land, and it’s an ironic choice to be listening to during a pandemic that leaves most of us homebound. To listen to the song right now is to beat back the stagnation necessary to avoid a quick-spreading contagion. To be rocked like a wagon wheel, to be cradled because of those loose tolerances, suggests movement both internal and external, and I can feel it in the song itself. Rock me repeated, like the swells of land, like the swells of sex, things that jostle and jolt as well as soothe. We lilt with motion even if our only destination is the deep recesses of memory. Hub to spoke to band, spinning. We sway with the melody, going everywhere and nowhere at once.
Wheelwright: the person who makes or repairs wagon wheels. I feel this word on the tongue like a whisper, the pursing of lips to make the “w’s” and the embedded “right” as if to make right. Like most things, I don’t quite get this correct. The “wright” comes from the Old English word “wryhta” meaning a worker or shaper of wood, part of the lineage that includes “shipwright,” the maker of ships and “arkwright,” maker of chests and coffers. All things crafted, which feels so far from this writing being shaped and forced into being as I listen to a version of “Wagon Wheel” by the Swedish band Dev Manito featuring harmonica. I wonder how the Swedes understand wagon wheels, which must be different from our insistent push westward, the covered wagon that takes over my imagination when I hear those words together. Dev Manito sounds as though they could as easily be from Appalachia. When they hit the line about Johnson City, Tennessee, I think about how many times I passed through it on my way south to see Nate before he died. I crisscrossed through Appalachia on the dark asphalt of highways, through mountains and valleys, until I hit the grid traffic of the North Atlanta suburbs. Sometimes this makes me cry and other times I sit with it, still and quiet. No rocking at all.
I wonder if cancer is a sorrowwright, maker of my sadness.
The playlist queues up Darius Rucker’s version, a voice I associate with his 90s incarnation as the lead singer of Hootie and the Blowfish. A totally different sound. Rucker sings that familiar strain about seeing his baby tonight, which has nothing to do with despair. It’s strange to hear that hopefulness right now, a time where so little feels hopeful. Ravaged by illness, fires in the West, social unrest, hope exists as a relic from another time, or maybe something we all longed for but never quite attained. And yet hope still comforts. Rock me.
Rucker’s version, well known but not my favorite, doesn’t sound misplaced in his voice. Instead, I consider that, for some time, I’ve been the one misplaced, like a cover gone wrong, a misguided attempt. I miss my brother every day, a dull ache that pulls at my heart. Every Sunday I find respite in connecting with two people I’ve come to love as family.
Darius Rucker has enjoyed a second career in country music. We all grasp at these alternate chances, these ways to move forward again. Early on, when I would call Keegan and it turned seven o’clock, his neighborhood erupted with the clanging of pots and pans, the collective whoop of a city that had made it through another day.
*
During one of our weekly chats, Keegan and Eleni describe the virtues of the air fryer, the yumminess of wings, and it makes me think of Mario’s Fishbowl, which, in my opinion, has the best wings in Morgantown, West Virginia. Keegan and I were there with people about a year ago, the day before the West Virginia Writers’ Workshop, which I would direct just once, a month and a half after Nate died, the beginning of my life without him. Maybe that last time at Mario’s was a spoke between my old life and my new one.
I keep listening. My list of “Wagon Wheel” covers flips to Lily Kershaw. Deep drums and a pop-inflected folk sensibility pair well with Kershaw’s songbird voice. She is one in a series of spokes from a hub created by Bob Dylan and one of the founders of Old Crow Medicine Show, Ketch Secor. Dylan wrote the chorus in 1973, and never formally recorded it. Secor wrote the rest over two decades later, or so the lore goes. Dylan’s version, only performed live, came into being through a now famous bootleg tape.
Memory takes on a bootleg quality. I have been to Mario’s Fishbowl many times since the pandemic hit, but only grab-n-go memories, igniting the recesses of my brain with the sensory flametongue of taste. Wings! Somehow, last summer, filled with writers and friends, lodges itself first among those Polaroid memories from before our current plague, slowly developing right in front of my eyes, and then I’m stuck in the moment. Or so my lore goes. That night, it was me, Keegan, our friend and workshop assistant director Dominique Mick, poet Jeff Mann, and prose writer Sherrie Flick. Jeff declared it “damn nostalgic,” a place almost anyone who passed through West Virginia University might have spent a night with beer and wings and friends and laughter. It was only a year ago, but it feels like a whole other age. We can’t gather in that way. When I want wings, I go curbside, the glow of “Beer on Tap” lit on the building that houses Mario’s.
We are all hitchhikers of a certain sort, our backpacks spilling over with bootlegs. My hitchhiked memories manifest between bites of wing sauce and house-made chips, the salt tangy on my fingers.
Back on screen, Eleni reminds me of a young Ingrid Bergman—slight of frame, intelligent, thoughtful eyes. Natural and unpretentious. My way, so often, is to describe others in terms of Old Hollywood stars, and among them Bergman, that beautiful thinking woman. That’s Eleni—the open look, always just beyond the grasp of any leading man. Yet there she is, cuddled close to Keegan so that their faces both fit in the small screen of the iPhone. Next to her, Keegan’s relaxed smile and slightly disheveled hair, an easy rapport we’ve maintained for over a decade.
The speeding pixels or whatever it is that allows the shapes of Keegan and Eleni to appear on my screen in Morgantown fills me with a sense of travel. I’m seeing far away friends, traversing a kind of time and space the way travel would in other times. Eyes play tricks on us, I suppose, and our emotions well up. Technology fulfills one of its great promises: connection.
It brings me back to the insistent drum of Lily Kershaw’s version of “Wagon Wheel,” which strikes me as not quite right and not wrong either. Maybe it’s these times, not the drumming, which insists on movement when such a thing is currently so limited. Our understanding of a song, even a version of it, depends greatly on context. When we hear a song affects our emotional bond to it. What happens in our lives as we listen shades and colors the contours, forever altering the texture and shape for us. It makes the song ours. Maybe those drums at this time and in this place give me a sense of an epic voyage I cannot fulfill because this time feels like endless, restless rest.
*
Old Crow Medicine Show officially released “Wagon Wheel” on their eponymous album in 2004. At least, that’s what my cursory research lends me to believe. It has a distinct old-time band sound, consistent with the O.C.M.S. overall aesthetic. Layered strings, voices jagged at the edges, a sprawling sensibility that I would associate with Bob Dylan—call it ramblin’—and also something familiar, hemmed in the way hills cup steep valleys in West Virginia. While it seems complicated, perhaps it really isn’t. Perhaps my view of things complicates more than the thing itself. I’m making it more difficult. It could just be my pent-up wanderlust, my desperate need for connection, and some deep longing I can’t articulate that makes the straightforward version of the song more complicated than it actually is. We refract what we consume, and I’m reinventing the reinvented song.
What I’ve lost emerges like a theme song in a movie, repeating at specific intervals in the longer story. Losing the ability to travel, whether day trips in West Virginia or neighboring states, or longer voyages to more faraway destinations is one of understanding. That is, I understand myself better through the lens of the unfamiliar, as if experiencing something new focuses all that’s familiar. By leaving and returning, I understand my tenuous connection to Appalachia—cradle of my ancestors, and yet the place rejects me time and again.
I have lived in my little house in Morgantown’s First Ward longer than any other place. Doesn’t mean I belong—like another song of this place, “Country Roads.” The place I belong. More often than I’d like to admit I feel like an interloper, occasionally like I am doing penance, but for what sin I couldn’t quite say. Perhaps we all feel this way about the places we call home, especially when restricted from seeing them from the outside-in, our ability to travel restricted, making it impossible for those temporary escapes.
For now, I simply listen over and over to a song about hitchhiking and wonder, if I die in West Virginia, will I die free?
*
When we engage with art, we’re invited outside ourselves. I get lost in a song or book or painting. I don’t exist in my time and space anymore, but in the time and space invited by art. I can be whisked away by a narrative of someone or someplace else. It’s a bit escapist, but also thrilling.
Just as transformative, art invites us deeply inward into the recesses of ourselves we might not know any other way. Books and songs and paintings and what-have-you can all take us on this flip-flop of outer and inner selves, and for the tumble we might emerge just a bit different than before. That’s where I’m at now.
I listen to Nathan Carter’s version of “Wagon Wheel,” described as Celtic-country, somewhat redundant since the roots of country music can be traced to Celtic music, among other traditions. Yet, Carter is Irish, and so perhaps it is Celtic-country, and though his version of the song doesn’t strike me as derivative, it also doesn’t break with the song’s tradition. I sense the web from Dylan through O.C.M.S. and perhaps even Darius Rucker and Lily Kershaw connecting to Carter’s version. A pop-punk version might knock us out of tradition, but a bit of Celtic coloring strikes me as pointing out a shamrock on a fisherman’s sweater.
There’s comfort in the familiar, though. I can see where I’m at in this version, following a script in some ways. Hardworking, dutiful. If you asked me if I took pride in these things, I’d say I do.
Maybe now I stand at a crossroads where I might stick out my thumb like a hitchhiker and choose a less conventional life. I almost went that way as a dancer, but the road stopped short when I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, and if I didn’t quite backtrack to the highway, I took a better paved, well-worn route. I flirted with the less conventional life when I returned to graduate school in my thirties, full of hazy dreams of becoming a writer. And what is such a mythical creature, writer?
Too easily, I’ve hewed towards the expectations of modern life: be productive, achieve professional stability if not success. And what is that mythical place, success?
I write at the edges of an academic career that’s more focused on teaching and administration than being a writer. I take pride in doing those things well, but it doesn’t fulfill me the way writing does. Writing frustrates and exhilarates. Breaks my heart, and, occasionally, allows me to break hearts. I stay loyal to jobs but yearn for the meaning dangling just outside where I’m willing to go. I live the gospel of safety, even as I know it to be an illusion.
The hitchhiker submits to chance, with all its risks and rewards. The roads taken are not the hitchhiker’s to choose, only the choice to take that ride. I’m no hitchhiker. I hedge my bets. And, so, Nathan Carter’s Celtic-country version of “Wagon Wheel” fits me, neither wholly expected nor unexpected. No insistent drums but still movement. And I wonder, can I travel deeper inside myself, and if I come up short, can I make my peace with it? Mostly, I see myself as a loner, but not by choice. So, I keep trying. Our human need to belong might be the one thing that tempers our wanderlust.
*
Light changes in August, a first hint of autumn. The breeze, still warm, doesn’t quite fit the light. Sunday, a traditional day of rest, and I am due for my weekly chat. Keegan and Eleni appear, and comforted by this ritual, I settle into our conversation and where it takes us. Once a week, I sit at the hub of a wagon wheel, all of the connections like spokes radiating out to those we love, and they form a continuous band that allows us passage over the undulating terrain.
Not long after the screen goes blank, I’m left in my First Ward neighborhood with its workaday roots, just like my own. My people were carpenters and farmers. Makers. Wrights. I compose sentences. The dusk brings in the first shiver, autumn not far behind it. Barbeque smoke will give way to fire pit embers, the twinkle of gin to the twang of rye whiskey. Night encroaches bit by bit on time once demanded by a low-slung sun. My time, this liminal space between light and dark, between seasons, when the eye adjusts to the fade of summer nights into a lingering fall, exuberant with leaves and first frost. I ache to see my breath in whisper clouds puffed into punches of sounds and words. That first sting beneath my ribs announcing, yes, you’re alive and today that’s enough.
