The Dam at Otter Creek

It’s been a few years since I used this space to write about the band LIVE.  They will always be one of my favorite bands, but like all artists, their prominence in my life waxes and wanes.  Seeing as I recently returned to the midstate after a lengthy absence and the once-broken-up band recently reunited, they’ve been top of mind lately.

As such, it also occurred to me recently that, having lived so close to the birthplace of a band I am passionate about, it is perhaps a shame I never took an opportunity to explore the landmarks they’ve created.

LIVE is, to my knowledge, the only rock band, of any era, to call Central Pennsylvania home and to also make that geographical fact an integral part of their identity.  Many bands exist that you don’t know anything about where they’re from–personally I have no idea where Queensryche or Deftones are from (and if you do, it doesn’t disprove what I’m saying, so can it) and many bands claim places like California or cities like Boston or New York, or regions like the South or New England.  But LIVE is from Central PA, and York specifically, and their (early) songs are unabashedly about this region.  Ed (the singer) mentions York often, from the stage during concerts all around the world.  So they’re not just a band from Central PA.  These are contemporary artists who have made incredibly successful art about our area; music that is sung by fans all over the world; Ed Kowalczyk crafted lyrics inspired by the very specific blend of elements present in this region and mined universally recognized themes from them.

Their second album, “Throwing Copper” was really the first that most people heard, and it was an international phenomenon.  Their fall from public favor over the years may have obscured the degree to which they were succesful at the time, but “Throwing Copper” was a truly behemoth hit.  Rolling Stone named the band their entertainers of the year that year.  And as popular as the album was in America, it exceeded that breadth in Europe (as the band continues to, to this day).  And “Throwing Copper”–the album the whole world was hip to in 1994 (it would eventually sell 8 million copies) opens with a song called “The Dam at Otter Creek”.

Most of “Throwing Copper” consists of taut, pop-inflected rock with singable choruses. Not so “The Dam at Otter Creek”.  The song opens the album with quiet melodic guitar fuzz, as if an imagined sound from far away.  Like music that had been read in a book, or dreamed. A man’s indistinct voice can be heard.  Is he on a megaphone? What is he saying?  We can’t be sure.  Slowly the sound coagulates, forms into simple repetitive chords, and, like a slow roll of thunder, Ed intones,

When all that’s left to do
is reflect on what’s been done
this is where sadness breeds.
The sadness of everyone.

This is not the typical stuff of radio rock.  This is a song about not living in the past–a common theme, for sure, but not presented in a typical fashion.  For the rest of the song, Ed makes a very bold decision as a lyricist.  In the first stanza (the one above) he presents to us his thesis: if all you think about is the past, that is some sad shit. But then instead of just presenting more lyrics about that idea, he tells us a story, about a time “the guys” built a dam at Otter Creek, and a man dove into the deep water and died.  It is up to the listener to decide how this story relates to the thesis.  Then, after the story, Ed treats us to the wailed refrain:

Be here now.

Of course, if you simply remove the story about the boy at Otter Creek, you have this:

When all that’s left to do
is reflect on what’s been done
this is where sadness breeds.
The sadness of everyone.

Be here now.

So that is a fairly neatly encapsulated philosophy: live in the moment, living in the past is sad.  BUT the “Be here now” line also interplays with the Otter Creek story; is Ed asking us to place ourselves in the shoes of an observer, on the bank of the Creek, watching the boy get carried out in the stretcher?  The listener can make choices about how they want to hear this song; Ed has left some of it in our hands.

Musically, the song builds to an unforgettable crescendo as Ed implores us to Be here now in a vocal rhythm that can only be described as highly unusual.  As a teenager, I had to consult my liner notes to figure out what he was saying.

Before I go on, I will present the complete lyrics and a YouTube of the song itself:

“The Dam at Otter Creek”
Ed Kowalczyk

When all that’s left to do
is reflect on what’s been done
this is where sadness breeds.
The sadness of everyone.

Just like when the guys
built the dam at Otter Creek
and all the water backed up.
Deep enough to dive.

We took the dead man in sheets to the river
flanked by love.
Deep enough to dive.
Be here now.

We took him three and three
in a stretcher made from trees
that had passed in the storm.
Leave the hearse behind.
To leave the curse behind,
be here now.

 

A few weeks ago, it occurred to me that I live awfully close to York, and so I probably live awfully close to Otter Creek.  So I started researching it.  Where is the creek, where is the dam?

Well, it’s a thorny question to ask.  A lot of people on the internet have a lot of answers.  Where the creek is is simple enough–it meanders for a few miles in the rural farmland outside of York, eventually emptying into the Susquehanna near a tiny place called Airville.  But the dam?  Some say there used to be one, some say there never was, others that the song tells a true story about kids who made their own dam.  Ultimately I decided I’d go see for myself.

There is a famous picture on the back of “Throwing Copper” that shows a sign for the Otter Creek Recreation Area.  This is that album art:

 

I was able to figure out quite easily where this was.  This is a parking lot that belong to the Otter Creek Campground, but is open to folks who are not campers at the campground.  The interesting thing about this parking lot is it is RIGHT AT the spot that Otter Creek empties into the Susquehanna River, AND it is in a spot that there is a river island about 150 yards from shore, making the Susquehanna look very small, so people pulling into the parking lot might be confused as to what body of water they are really looking at.  It’s, quite frankly, a little confusing.  Here is a picture I took of this confusion:

Alas, the famous sign from the album art has been changed, as one would imagine it would be after 25 years.  Here are the sings there now:

While the sign has been changed, after having been there, one can clearly tell it is the same parking lot as the one in the album photo.

Here are a few more pictures I took while in the campground parking lot:

Interesting, right? Given the lyrical content of the song. However, this is ALL Susquehanna River right here. If one dove here they would not be diving into Otter Creek,

One immensely interesting takeaway here is that the creek emptying into the Susquehanna finally sheds light on the lyric “They took the dead man in sheets to the river”.  What a perplexing line that has always been for me! I’d often wonder if we were talking about a creek or a river, and why/how do you take a dead man from the place he got hurt…to the place he got hurt?  But standing there, I can see that they would be moving him from the small creek to the large river.  Now…why they might do that would still be a mystery.  Also, this geography coupled with the lyric almost makes it certain Ed’s lyric is about this very specific spot.

And so, voila, that being the case, I will tell you, there is no dam there.  Maybe there was at some time, of that I have no idea.

Yes, some people will say this: there is a dam on the Susquehanna about a mile downriver.  I’ve seen some folks say THAT is the dam in the song.  That’s clearly poppycock.  Admittedly, it would be more clear if the song was “The Dam ON Otter Creek” instead of AT; the at does leave room for interpretation, but it is my assertion that the line “we carried the dead man in sheets to the river” authoritatively places the story at the confluence of Otter Creek and the Susquehanna River, dam be damned.

After I spent some time in looking around the confluence area, I got back in my car and drove for an hour or so around the country in the area, criss-crossing back and forth over the creek as many times as I could, looking for more access points; maybe secretly hoping for signs of a dam, but also just vibing in the origins of LIVE and remembering there are things about the midstate that are worthy of high art.  Yes, it is beautiful, serene, and contemplative, but as Ed is aware in plenty of other songs, it can be dark, derelict, and sinister.

That being said, here are a few other shots I took of the creek at other points on my drive:

Snow Angels in the High Grass

Once, many moons ago, I spent a week living on the couch of some people I barely knew in a small town I had never spent much time in, with too little money and nothing to slow a march of days that seemed to speed by while also being interminably long.  It was September, and each morning and late afternoon a wind would crawl down from the sloping Appalachians and swirl through the wide valley, sifting and reshaping the clouds.  By early afternoon, the sun would begin to set, the lights of distant truck stops making shadows of the nearby hills.

I spent much of the week walking through the unfamiliar neighboorhood, trying to imagine what it would be like to make a life there, behind that fence, in that shed, down that crumbling walkway.  This wasn’t an unusual pursuit, since at the time I was a stranger to adult life everywhere I went, no matter where I laid my head at night.

I had come to this temporary situation after failing to please the last people I had been staying with, and I had come to those folks after failing to please the people before them.  I was now occupying one corner of a dingy living room in a second story efficiency that smelled like dogs despite there being no dogs.  I followed the kind of schedule only the truly underemployed or severely addicted can devise.  Each morning, I would walk to the corner greasy diner that had become my office.  In the evenings I would wander to the pond on the outskirts of town and read. In the evenings I’d sit in the silent dark and write down individual titles to my sleeping dreams from the night before, scribbling details on the insides of book covers and the backs of ATM receipts.

The days came and went like half-remembered tremors.  It got uncharacteristically warm for a few days.  I laid down in the thigh-high grass in a farmer’s field one afternoon and pretended to make a snow angel, but nothing happened.  I remember the buzzing of the insects, and the precise smell, and the feel of the heat on my face which made my outside feel the opposite of my inside, which was dark, frigid, and dying.

It would be interesting, if someone were to make a movie about my life, if they just made it of this single, listless, seamlessly depressing week, leaving the viewer to wonder what could possibly have come before, and be anxious for what was to come after, and then the credits roll, and they never know.  Just leave them with the image of this drunk, solitary, silent 22-year-old, making snow angels in the high grass.

The Light From Everywhere

A long time ago, what must be over 10 years ago now, I was a man just recovering from alcoholism—a long bout of sickness— and the first few weeks and months were filled with a special kind of freedom.  But aside from all the weighty big topics that came up in such a time, I also was just able to start discovering the internet. It had been there during my drinking but it wasn’t something I had much interest in or capacity to utilize. My very first blog was on some sort of AOL blogging community.  I loved everything about it. I loved that I could write was on my mind, and write whatever I wanted to say, however I wanted to say it, and some people would actually read it! This is back before everyone was doing it (and way before everybody stopped doing it!) But of course, basically still nobody was reading. Anyway, one of the first entries I ever wrote was called “The light from everywhere, the light from nowhere”. It had just snowed the first snow of the year, which must have been 2004. I was in love with a woman at that point in time who was a pain in the ass, but I was in love with her anyway. That night, as the snow was coming down, I drove her home to where she lived on the side of a mountain, and in the cold snowy wind, we shared a kiss on her doorstep. I wrote a lovely blog entry about it on that AOL website, which has long since been erased by the great internet gods. I wish I could remember most of it, or  that I had saved it somewhere, because I know even now it was a doozy.  I talked about that ambient light which those of us who live in wintry states are very familiar with, which seems to slowly take over the nighttime in the first few hours after a snowfall, seemingly coming from nowhere and everywhere all at once.  And then I made an analogy between this light, which I had just seen that night for the first time in my sobriety, and the slow sneaky way that love overtakes a person. It was a really great piece of writing. Well, I am a 10 years older old fart now, and a little more cynical. Still happy as a clam, but I kind of hate snow, and I don’t plan on falling in love anytime soon. I often think of that blog entry when I see the light from everywhere. Tonight, as a big nor’easter blew into Philadelphia, I had already done all the outside things I needed to do for the day, and was just planning on settling in for the night, putting on my sweatpants and maybe putting in my DVD of “Picnic at Hanging Rock”, and eating some rice and drinking some diet soda. But as I got up to go to the bathroom and walked past the front door, I saw the light from everywhere and the light from nowhere, and I was drawn outside. I can’t re-create for you the magic of that first blog entry 10 years ago, but I did take some video, and I was feeling pretty good about the world:

Rattlesnake

Faithful blog readers may recall a year or two ago, I was kinda sorta obsessed with the song “Rattlesnake” by the band LIVE, and specifically, taking photos to set to this song. Nobody gave a shit then, so I won’t be offended or surprised by your complete lack of interest now, either.

LIVE is (was) from the area I am from.  Not simply the same state, but the very specific same part of that state.  And they write music about this area.  Now, this is nothing incredibly new; plenty of songs have been written about “south central PA” and/ or Pennsylvania’s Appalachia, however, most of those songs contain fiddles, ukuleles, and the word “yonder”.  Don’t get me wrong, I like a lot of that music (mostly what is known as Bluegrass) and it is representative of this area.  But what draws me to LIVE’s renderings of the area is their markedly different approach.  (here is their first song about the area, Shit Town, about York, a city I once ran a restaurant in).  But nothing, as far as I’m concerned, matches “Rattlesnake”.

“Rattlesnake” is actually one of LIVE’s most derided songs.  Critics of Ed Kowalzcyk’s lyrics accuse him of putting actual nonsense into “Rattlesnake”—and they may be right.  Even I don’t know what “we’ll go find Lurch/ and we’ll haul ass down through the abbey” is talking about.  But to me, a lot of the lyrics here are meant as mood-setters.  The true purpose and triumph of “Rattlesnake” is to view this area through a new lens; one of mysticism, danger, and brooding darkness;  because there are definitely elements to living in Appalachia that are sinister and where the light—metaphorically—never shines.  Ed doesn’t ever really sing about this in the song, but it sure sounds like he is.  Musically, the song could not be much more different than most of the songs written about the area; hear that humming, suggestive, supernatural guitar underlining everything; hear that thwap-thwap-thwap rock thump that seems so juxtaposed to the humming guitar that the two seem to battle each other; hear that drumming that is practically March Militaire during the verses and practically Keith Moon on the choruses; “Rattlesnake” threatens to take you to a witch’s coven in the mountains, make you drink snake blood and have sex with a shadow-drenched moon-goddess. (and don’t get me started on the majesty of Kowalzcyk’s line “the rack is full and so are we/ or laughing gas, and ennui”…I have had hours of fun pondering it. Is the rack this or this or this?  How does the meaning change each time?  How does it not?)

I mention all this now not because I’m re-obsessed (it never really went away), but because now that I’ve discovered Windows MovieMaker, I can finally set my “Rattlesnake” pictures to the song in the way that I always wanted to.  I present to you here the first of a few slideshows of pictures I took in south central PA set to the song “Rattlesnake”.  First, in case you’re an outsider or dumb, a few things that might make the song more enlightening about this area for you (these are all links):

1.  Rattlesnakes in Pennsylvania

2.  Skinning Hunted Deer

3.  Jesco White

4.  Ennui

And now, my slideshow:

The Lost Andrea Pictures

What is now many years ago (five? six?  fuck…seven?) my friend Andrea and I spent a lovely day together doing this and that in the middle of a lovely, blistering hot summer day.  We took with us a disposable black-and-white camera and took many jolly photos.  That disposable camera promptly became forgotten in the bottom of my messenger bag for half a decade. 

Shortly after moving to Erie, I found the camera and had it developed.  What a stunning, bizarre feeling, to see these images from one day so long ago, all of a sudden.  And I was stunned, too, by the quality of the images.  At least for my taste, these are some terrific photographs (taken by both Andrea and myself).  And I am pretty much in love with how the black-and-white prints look after being scanned into my computer; there is a timeless, classical quality to them.  Here are some of my favorites of what I’ve come to call “The Lost Andrea Pictures”:

 

Believe it or not!

1.  I almost forgot to mention, about my recent trip home:  I had more fun riding around aimlessly in a car with my momma for two hours than I would have had on a round-the-world cruise.  Pure bliss. 

2.  I stopped for dinner at this small town of Zelienople for dinner yesterday.  I Facebook’d and Tweeted it just because I thought it was a cool town name and a rather adorable tiny, town-that-time-forgot kinda place.  And of course 6 of my FB friends replied that they knew the town, and it led me eventually to IMDB and finding out that it was one of the filming locations of the original “Night of the Living Dead” (and a few other movies)…kinda crazy!  Now I’ll have to go back sometime on purpose to sightsee the filming locations!

3.  I love this line from a song by The Band:  “Life is a carnival, believe it or not.”  Ha!  That shit is funny.

4.  I am very annoyed that my buddy Kyle mentioned Tim Allen’s ubiquitous voice-over presence in a blog entry before I could.  I’ve been bitching about it IRL for months!

5.  Just about every day lately, I am reminded of this great line from one of Kurt Vonnegut’s most famous short stoires, “Harrison Bergeron”, which is set in the year 2081:  “April, for instance, still drove people crazy by not quite being spring-time.”  Good to know this was a problem in the fifties, when the story was written, and will continue to plague folks well into the 2080s.

In an effort to make the “You Would Not Survive a Vacation Like This” blog post a little shorter, I did not include the photos that I took in the countryside around my dad’s house in Newville.  So now here some of them are:

 

 

 

Monday’s Song: LIVE, “Rattlesnake”

 

Rattlesnake
by LIVE

Let’s go hang out in a mall,
or a morgue,
a smorgasbord.
Let’s go hang out in a church,
we’ll go find Lurch
and  we’ll haul ass down through the abbey.
Is it money?
Is it fame?
What’s in a name?
Shame?
Is it money, is it fame?
Or were they always this lame?

It’s a crazy, crazy mixed up town.
It’s the rattlesnake I fear.
In another place, in another time
I’d be driving trucks, my dear.

Let’s go hang out in a bar.
It’s not too far.
We’ll take my car.
We’ll lay flowers at the grave of Jesco White,
the sinner’s saint.
The rack is full, and so are we:
of laughing gas and ennui.

It’s a crazy, crazy mixed up town.
It’s the rattlesnake I fear.
In another place, in another time,
I’d be driving trucks, my dear.
I’d be skinning hunted deer.

Sure Enough (short fiction)

Sure Enough

After the cows had been pailed and the barn chores done the man and the boy walked in the twilight down the dusty lane toward a corn field on the other side of the meadow.

The man balanced his elbows on the top strand of fence and scanned endless rows of stalks that had sickened and jaundiced under the scorch of rainless weeks.  Sensing the man’s anxiety, the boy minded his place and stayed silent.

“She should’ve been knee-high by the Fourth of July, and look at her,” the man finally worried aloud.  From his mouth he pulled a stem of timothy and waved it in the general direction of the runty corn.  “We just got to have rain soon,” the man continued, more to himself than the boy, “or we aint gonna have fodder worth a tinker.”

Corn, as the boy well knew, was a mighty important crop to the family.  There had to be the yellow ears that’d feed the Berkshires into sow belly and hams for the winter; and from fodder came the ensilage for Holsteins that gave milk to fetch in what cash money there was.

The boy, still quiet, wondered why God never seemed to make the weather right for crops.  It was always too wet or too dry—too wet or too cold.  No, never exactly right, it seemed.  It rained when you needed to plow; and it didn’t rain when you wanted to grow corn.

Dusk blotted the parched field from view as the two tramped back up the lane.  Reaching the weather-blackened barn, the man and the boy, each in overalls of scrubbed-out blue, sprawled on the side of a grassy bank that formed a driveway up to the barn floor and its haymows.

Sitting in the quiet the boy felt a sudden closeness to this stern man who was his father.  It was nice, the boy allowed, just being there together—not talking words.

The feel of the moment was broken for the boy when the man exclaimed:  “Hey–smells like rain in the air right now!”

They got up and walked beyond the locusts near the watering trough for a better look at the sky.  Sure enough.  It was blacking up, and a breeze started freshing the evening’s stickiness.  In a few minutes a rumbling and a flashing let loose.

The man and the boy stood for a spell in the barn’s open doorway and peered silently at the rain as it spattered into the thirsty earth.  Even in the darkness the two could see the downpour give new green to grass and leaves.   The air smelled good in their noses.

“It’ll save the corn sure as shootin’,” said the man to the boy.  They grinned at each other, and, looking up, they let the rain pepper their faces as they walked side-by-side down the path toward a light in the kitchen window.

I Keep Getting Stuck in Rain!

First this (it was worse than it looks):

Then this (it was worse than it looks):

Which lead to this:

Laughing Gas (and Ennui)

Sheer Desperate Hunger

The young swallows are learning grace this morning
by failing.  I mean their rough, difficult flight,
the way they flap too much,
not trusting the thin air to hold them,
the way they refuse to use the wind.
Easy flight isn’t natural.
The knack of a barnswallow’s quick and accurate,
almost-to-falling glide is not, as I had thought,
inborn intelligence (a sort of ether that fills
a barnswallow’s hollow bones).

Simplicity is the achievement.
Consider the elegant parent swallows that skim out low
across the lake—the mist rising, the reeds jutting,
their glassy mirror image—in effortless,
unerring flight.  They are willing to ride the air,
but like their young, when they were young,
they must have flapped, toiled, flustered,
have failed, too.  Every muscle resisting the pull
of what pulled them.  How did they learn
that graceful giving-in, that belief in invisible air?
It must have been exigency—fatigue,
gravity, hunger, sheer desperate hunger.

Only in Pennsylvania…

Mom posing with the Grand Campion chicken at the Pennsylvania Farm Show

“In another place, in another time…”

More “Rattlesnake” pics in the vein of yesterday’s post.

Picture Sunday: “It’s the Rattlesnake I fear.”

Was driving home from work this morning (I worked the overnight last night), listening to the LIVE song “Rattlesnake” over and over again, amazed by how two verses and a chorus could keep revealing new things to me, and how I kept feeling more and more like I had a very personal connection to the song, and how it was even possible Ed was thinking about the very highway I was on when he wrote the song.  Then I realized it was Sunday, and I needed some pictures for my blog.  So I kept “Rattlesnake” on repeat and drove around Carlisle and its surrounding areas (as a light drizzle gradually turned into an ice storm) and I took pictures that were “inspired” by the song blasting from my car.  I often pulled over to the side of a road and left my door hang open so I could even hear the song as I snapped the photos.  I encourage you to play the YouTube video which I have posted before the pictures (it’s just the studio version of the song) as you view the pics.  And if you end up loving the song, under the YouTube video there’s a link to an awesome live performance of the song!  Without further ado, the pics:

And here is a rad live performance of the song!