I made a nice road trip the other day through my corner of the West, driving from the southern Puget Sound south to Portland and on to Bend for a few days of skiing at Mt. Bachelor. When I stopped to run some errands in Portland, I got a text from my nephew recommending a podcast just as I was queuing up podcasts for the drive across the Cascades. Bryan sent me a link for Expanding Mind, and in particular Erik Davis’ conversation with Grateful Dead scholar and professor Ulf Olsson regarding Olsson’s book Listening for the Secret: The Grateful Dead and the Politics of Improvisation. Olsson says says he began listening to the Dead in the late ’60s. “I had a friend who was well off and he could buy any record he wanted and he had all those early albums but we didn’t understand them but we were fascinated.” I came in several years after that, but I’ve been listening to and thinking about the Grateful Dead for some 45 years now, so I enjoyed these two dissecting the complex anatomy of the Grateful Dead, such as whether the journeys of improvisation were actually freedom or just interesting kinds of coercion.

This was great conversation for the road, (Grateful Dead music was erotic but not sexual; the band knew how to use silence; they could be frightening when they stretched out–what if they couldn’t get back?) but I had trouble maintaining my lane position when Davis, quoting a guitarist who doesn’t like Garcia’s playing said, “He kinda never really resolves what he’s doing; he never really lands.” I corrected my lane position and focused. Garcia doesn’t resolve his musical line? He never lands? This can only be true if you expect a guitar line to follow the structure of Freebird. Garcia always resolves his line; he always lands, but the Grateful Dead are on a symphonic timetable. The remarkable piece of music from February 18, 1971, for example, from Dark Star to Wharf Rat and back to Dark Star through Beautiful Jam is more than 21 minutes long. (25 minutes if you include the seamless Me and My Uncle, of which there are 613 recorded renditions, according to Olsson.) Like a symphony, the band presents a theme, turns it inside out and upside down and plays it backwards. There is a second movement and a third and a fourth. I need to play this piece of music for friends who between them compose, conduct and perform classical music and see if I’m off my rocker.

When the podcast was over, I opened to the Relisten app which interfaces with the Live Music Archive at archive.org where there are millions of audio and video files. Relisten provides an easy user interface to more than 170,000 concert recordings. There are 100s of artists represented, but I rarely get past the Grateful Dead. To use the interface, I tapped Grateful Dead in artists (other temptations include: Animal Collective, Bela Fleck, Blues Traveler, Charlie Hunter, Del McCoury, Derek Trucks Band, Donna the Buffalo, to name just a few through the letter D, then Everything, then Years. I scrolled down to 1971, tapped, then scrolled down to the February 18 show. There are 11 sources for that show, each identified by a description of who taped the show and the genealogy of the source. First I listened to Dan Stephens’ and Scott Thompson’s Soundboard (4.75 stars). Later I listened to Betty Cantor’s board. Nor surprisingly, the Betty Board is warmer. I scrolled down to Going the Road Feeling Bad and the ultimate road tune began to play. LyricFind lists it as traditional, but the members of the Grateful Dead are credited, too. Probably because they’ve played it more often for more people than anyone. Woody Guthrie played it memorably. The tune came to mind not just because it’s a great road tune, but because I was going down the road feeling sad. The Expanding Minds podcast had taken my mind off my melancholy for a good hour, long enough to get into the devastation of the Beachie Fire. I had just come from my bio-dad’s home on Puget Sound. Paul Petredis died a year ago this month, and I’ve taken over the reconstruction of his home after it was partially destroyed in a fire four years ago when he was in a nursing home. During the last year of his life I’d pick Paul up at the Washington State Soldiers’ Home and take him to the site so he could see the progress. Progress was always slow, but his dementia was advancing and he was always thrilled to see what had happened the previous month. He loved these field trips and discussing how great it was going to be when it was finished and he could move back in. He particularly liked to discuss that over tacos or ice cream. Paul knew he’d never be able to leave the nursing home, but he liked to daydream he could. Often he’d reflect on the great care he got at the Soldiers’ Home. It was true; they took really good care of him there. He was with his tribe, aging vets of WWII, Korea and Vietnam and he liked the camaraderie, for the most part. The cabinets were installed on this trip, and I framed the structures for the fireplaces and replaced a garage door opener. The granite countertops were templated, the plumbing fixtures delivered and the heating and lighting fired up. In the past year we have installed the plumbing, heating, electrical, insulation and drywall, built the decks and, interior millwork, and painted. He missed so much progress in the past year; his absence at the stage felt particularly acute. And I had to make some special accommodations for the countertop interface with the garden window. Paul really wanted a garden window over the kitchen sink. I tried to discourage it; garden windows are a little dated, but he really wanted one, so we had it installed. He talked about that garden window every time we visited the site. Now, after solving how the granite countertop would engage the garden window, I would carry that window on my mind for a few hundred miles. Or at least what the window represented.

The night before I got on the road I had watched the extraordinary televised stage production of Derek DelGaudio’s In & Of Itself; I had raved about it to friends and family; that’s what prompted Bryan to send me the link to the Expanding Minds podcast. Hulu’s description:

Derek DelGaudio’s In & Of Itself is a new kind of lyric poem. It tells the story of a man fighting to see through the illusion of his own identity, only to discover that identity itself is an illusion. An intimate and powerful exploration of what it means to be and be seen, the film chronicles Derek DelGaudio’s attempt to answer one deceptively simple question, “Who am I?” His personal journey expands to a collective experience that forces us to confront the boundaries of our own identities.

As part of confronting the boundaries of identity, (spoiler follows) DelGaudio tells us he was born to a teenage mother whose father left when his mother became pregnant. That is my story, too, a common part of my identity I share with DelGaudio, who urged the viewers to consider what makes up their identity. I thought of things like entrepreneur, builder, father, son, brother, friend, nephew, uncle, musician, sailor. My story was much different than DelGaudio, who never found a father figure. Very early in my life my mom married my dad who adopted me and gave me his name and raised me as his own with my mom; together they made me the son and brother in that list of words that give me my identity. But DelDaudio had a different word: accident. He was an accident. But if he was an accident, I must be as well. I’ve never really thought that deeply about being an accident, but there it was. Life is full of accidents, and a good portion of us wandering around on the planet are probably accidents, too. Mostly my life has been a long series of happy accidents, but reflecting on the powerful and emotional performance of DelGaudio and his notion of being an accident really scrubbed at me. I carried that feeling out of the burn zone of the Beachie Fire, up over Santiam Pass. The view from the garden window was now the view from my windshield, and the horizon of Oregon’s high desert lengthened and expanded in various grays spotlighted by holes in the cloud cover as I dropped over the divide of the Cascades. Suttle Lake appeared far below to the right. Another half hour and I’d be at my home in Bend with three days of skiing fresh snow ahead. Another happy accident.