Jackson Browne expressed my inmost yearning 42 years ago in a song called “The Road and the Sky.” It’s by far his best rocker, a perfect driving song, turbocharged by the late David Lindley’s slide guitar. “They told me I was gonna have to work for a living,” he sings in the first verse, “but all I wanna do is drive.”
Just a few years before he wrote that, Browne lived in an apartment in Echo Park, a long half block down Laguna Ave. from our Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles offices in St. Paul’s Commons, Echo Park. It’s where he and neighbor Glenn Frey wrote the Eagles’ first hit, “Take It Easy,” the highway song that made Winslow, Arizona famous. I invoked this mystic proximity of addresses last year while unsuccessfully trying to persuade Browne to perform at our building’s 30th anniversary celebration.
Preparing for ordained ministry helped me understand and master my fight or flee response. People sometimes run away when they feel unloved or unworthy. Fleeing doesn’t always mean heading for the literal hills. Sometimes we isolate in place by putting off making a phone call or choosing not to connect, ask, apologize, or forgive.
When I was younger, pace Mary Chapin Carpenter, I scattered stones in the road by virtue of a failure to commit or complete. We would have to ask my college chum Richard Yep, now retired after a successful career as an association executive, if he remembers whether we had Jackson Browne’s album on cassette when we set off for Yuma, Arizona in June 1976. We were undergraduates at UC San Diego. Our road trip was in lieu of taking our final exams. We fried our GPAs as well as the rotary engine of his uncle’s bright red Mazda. Rich went along willingly. But it was my idea. As he still reminds me.
Knowing ourselves better usually doesn’t make our less constructive impulses go away. But it can sometimes make them our friends. The innate worrier sweats the details and makes projects succeed. The insecure people pleaser can be a great pastor if they find ways to feed their hunger for affirmation and acceptance other then barreling down the road of promiscuous codependency or addictive escapism.
My friends around the diocese may not realize the extent to which this understanding is baked into the messaging of my episcopal ministry. Only the discerning fan, knowing that the motto #feedinghungryhearts comes from a Bruce Springsteen song, also knows that “Hungry Heart” is about a man who goes out for a drive and leaves his family behind. “Like a river that don’t know where it’s flowing,” Bruce sings, “I took a wrong turn and I just kept going.”
Satisfying our hungry hearts by letting down the people who count on us is generally not the best ticket to ride. Accepting the love of God is a crucial ingredient when we’re feeding our hearts with a healthier diet. We stay better engaged with all our joys and struggles once the gifts we each have, and we all have them, entwine with our faith that our God in Christ abides no matter what.
That doesn’t mean we don’t still eye the exits from time to time. So sometimes, we take a break, with Lindsey Buckingham’s holiday road leading in the same outbound direction as Bob Dylan’s unarmed road of flight — though always bringing us safely home after a well-planned pilgrimage.
Like the one I begin Friday, the first day of my first week of vacation. The greatest road song of all, and one of the greatest rock songs of all time, is Chuck Berry’s “The Promised Land.” Coming in a strong second on the highway hit parade is “Six Days on the Road,” written around 1960 by Earl Green and Carl Montgomery and recorded, like “The Promised Land,” by everybody. I first heard it on a Livingston Taylor album. It’s about a truck driver trying to make it home to his beloved. I appropriated the title to describe my annual week-long driving trip around the American Southwest.
I’ve been doing this for well over 10 years. Some stops are canonical. I begin with a night and morning in Twentynine Palms and Joshua Tree. You’ll probably find me on day two at the Crossroads Café in Parker, Arizona, enjoying a buffalo chicken salad, the morning after that at the The World Famous Coffee Cup Cafe in Boulder City, Nevada, wrapping myself around a Godfather omelette. The Grand Canyon almost always figures in.
Last year, I got as far as Santa Fe. On the way, I reread, on tape, Willa Cather’s “Death Comes for the Archbishop,” the lightly fictionalized story of the 19th century Roman Catholic bishop who built the Santa Fe cathedral. This did not impress the docent on duty. “Cather only spent a few months here,” they sniffed. If someone has written one of the great American novels of the 20th century about the place I work or volunteer, remind me to try not to look quite so far down my nose.
The trucker in “Six Days on the Road” wants to get home with his nose clean. “Now the ICC is a’checking on down the line,” he sings. “I’m a little overweight, and my logbook is way behind.” I wouldn’t say Kathy is delighted to have her overweight septuagenarian plunge into six days of August 105°. But she’s characteristically kind about it. On the brink of retirement, I shortened my itinerary this year and promised that this is my last solo haul.
Kathy knows she’d be welcome. But her ideal getaway does not comprise driving 350 miles a day, veering off the road at every hand-painted sign denoting dinosaur tracks, listening to SiriusXM Outlaw Country, and comparing and contrasting the Denny’s in four states. So week two of vacation will find us in her happy place, sitting by the beach in San Diego, my well-exercised highway toes garaged in the sand.
(Photo: Winslow, December 2019)