November 2020

I went to bed early in the count and in the morning made coffee in the half dark, looking briefly at the news to learn which of my illusions had survived the night. Not many, and I sat reading Turgenev’s Sportsman’s Notebook by the fire, absorbed in the lives of peasants and rich men hunting the outlands of a different dying empire. I took coffee up to my wife, poured the dregs into a thermos, dressed in my hunting clothes and pocketed a few shells, lit a twist of sweetgrass while the truck warmed up, and drove north.

I went to hunt in the calf-deep snow where the power cut crosses the state line, nosing through adjacent parcels logged over and grown up in scrub and sparse trees, following the morning traffic of deer through the juniper and sedge. No sound in the stillness but chickadees, or an occasional jay.

I struck a road working downhill and entered the woods again, dead reckoning to a broad wetland clearing I’d found once before, skirting the edge and crossing a shallow beaver pond on a thin strand of earth, watching salamanders move under skin ice in the bright sun, and the shadow of my breath bloom and subside in the cold. I stood there a long time.

When I was a kid I ruined the television. Sunday morning, Dad and brothers out fishing, I was running around the house with a giant horseshoe magnet that my Illinois Grandma, Betty – an earth science teacher for thirty years – had given me, conducting research on what was and was not susceptible to magnetism (refrigerator: yes; dog: no). I might have been four.

Mom was at the kitchen sink with her back turned when I fired up the brand new hand-me-down Sony Trinitron, our first ever color set, gift of my Illinois Grandpa, Frank (the old television was a hulking black and white with a large bullet hole dead-centered on the screen, brought home from Frinzi’s Flea Market for $15).

I put the magnet near the glass of the screen and to my surprise it nearly leapt out of my hand, attaching itself to the set and, thrillingly, pulling all of the colors on the screen into a weltering knot at the point of contact. Now we were getting somewhere.

I said,

“Mom, look what I can do!”

She said,

“That’s nice honey,”

looking out the window, and failing to turn around (to be fair, I talked pretty much non-stop, and we spent a lot of time together). After a while I lost interest, turned off the set and wandered away. An hour or two later Dad came home in time for the noon kickoff, and when he turned on the set he said,

“Look at this Barbie, they’re having some trouble with the cameras in Green Bay.”

Proud as hell, I came running up behind him with my magnet and said,

“I can do that!”

And I did. I stuck the magnet onto the screen again, and this time it made a second great bruise, subdividing the color profile of the first. Dad let out a yell, and I ran for it.

The vibrant snarls of color subsided over time but the proper color assignment never came back. After a while the whole set played like a black and white without black, just a deep green as the default value, graduating to a queasy light green. Everyone on it looked seasick. In a strange turn of events we acquired another television and for reasons I still don’t understand, they put the little Sony on the desk in the room my brother Jimmy and I shared.

This was a terrible idea and one that still mystifies me, as my parents were generally touchy about how much and what kind of television we saw, and even how close to it we sat. It may be that they put it there for a specific reason – a party perhaps, when they preferred that we remained corralled in the bedroom – and then it stayed a month while they were too busy to move it. However long it was there, it was one of the signal events of my life, because I became a junkie.

I watched every re-run of every show America produced between the war and Reaganomics, from the Twilight Zone to Andy Griffith, Hee Haw! to Three’s Company, for as many hours as I could get away with. I was too young for school, and Mom had chores to get on with, errands, soap operas, Jimmy Swaggart preaching as half cups of too-sweet coffee went cold. She had three boys by the time she was twenty-five, and I imagine she liked the peace and quiet (except maybe when it resulted in me Magic Markering my whole left arm green while watching The Incredible Hulk).

At some point I started to feel sick. I'd had my mouth on the firehose of the Great American Emptiness for weeks without pause for breath, and the visceral reaction was illness: like a kid caught smoking the butt of a cigarette out of curiosity and made to smoke the pack. I conditioned a physical wariness of television into my body, and never lost it.

I never owned a TV and never wanted one. I like watching it alright, but I knew that if I had one around I would watch it, and if I didn’t have one, I wouldn’t. Then the internet came along, merrily dismantling the music industry while helping me to start a career in it. I got a cell, and then a smartphone, because it made life on the road easier, and finally bought a computer after years of hand-me-downs, so I could design my own abums. Over the years the alternate reality proposed by television – the speed and avarice, silliness and brutality, cheapness and spectacle – grew up like creeper vine over the whole country, invaded every part of our lives. The internet became television, only a bespoke version, and then it broke the country.

Now we all have a TV in our hands all the time, but we aren't watching the same show. And not one of us, least of all me, is equal to the temptation to be confirmed in what we already believe, to absorb passively what requires no thought, to enjoy a righteous outrage against people we’d probably like if we ever spoke to them. Good people no longer agree on what constitutes apparent reality. That's trouble, but we could fix it if the power went out.

I can’t hunt Montana with Dombrowski this year and I've been exploring my own watershed on foot, trying to learn the bones of the land the way I know the rivers, hunting grouse without a dog, in heavy cover. Hunting is just learning to see, a particular way of paying attention, and a reason to go outside where the real world still lives and breathes, with its own ambit, and reasons. Until a hundred years ago human beings spent most of their time there. I'm not preaching, I'm just thinking out loud, but it beats hell out of TV.

SALT AS WOLVES - This week – Friday night 11/20, 8PM EST/USA – I’ll play through all the songs on my fifth solo album, and talk some about writing the songs and living through the recording and touring. Wolves is my favorite of my records, the first one that felt fully realized. I knew exactly what I wanted to do, and I did it, with one of the best bands anyone ever put together. The recording was magic. I’m proud of it, and I’m looking forward to playing the songs and telling about them.

You can tune in via the link below, on the TOUR page, or on Facebook. These shows represent the bulk of my income this year, and I'm grateful for the support of friends and strangers. My experience has been that if eight or ten thousand people ‘interact’ with the shows, about five hundred seem to watch more than half an hour, and about two hundred of those send some cash along. The folks who overpay me take care of the ones who can’t pay. If you're able, and these songs have meant something in your life, you can square up via Paypal, Venmo, or the U.S. Mail, however feels right. I appreciate it.

I’ll see you Friday night, on television.