Salt Creek
The tune was called Salt Creek, and I liked it. It was a classic bluegrass song, first recorded by Bill Monroe in 1964, and something about the frenzied strumming and the yearning stitched through it appealed to me. I didn’t know anything about music––still don’t–-but this bluegrass stuff, and that song in particular––had become a soundtrack for my life. Years later, I read a quote from Bill Monroe about the genre, which he described as: "Scottish bagpipes and ole-time fiddlin'… a part of Methodist, Holiness and Baptist traditions. It's blues and jazz, and it has a high lonesome sound."
High and lonesome, yes. That was the mood. Blues and jazz? It seemed about right. I was living in Syracuse, New York, the Salt City, so named for the saline springs on the southern end of Onondaga Lake. Or maybe for the salty tears cried into pillows in the rented rooms of the drafty houses near the university. I was taking classes, but mostly taking flight from a life that didn’t seem to suit me, not that this one did. In fact, maybe Syracuse was a good place for me because it was very hard to love and thus seemed inevitably temporary, which was reassuring. “I won’t end up here,” is what I told myself.
It was like the affair I had with the Assistant General Manager of the bus company, a confident young man from Utica who had reached his potential at twenty-eight and was very pleased with himself. He understood all the workings of the bus company, was in charge of management negotiations with the union, and could drive a forty-foot transit bus if needed. On mornings after sordid nights in budget motels, he bought me scrambled eggs in Denny’s, eyed his wrist watch, got the check, and grinned his satisfied grin. I liked his self-confidence, since I had very little, but I knew he would be temporary, and that was his best feature.
Harder to explain was my long-term relationship with the alcoholic professor who cheated on me and punched me in the face. I knew he was temporary too, but sometimes it’s hard to extricate from psychodrama.
In the meantime, there was bluegrass music. A friend of mine was dating the guitar player in a popular group, and we were sort of regulars in the audience at a campus venue called Jabberwocky, in the basement of Kimmel Hall. I was fond of a mandolin player named Greg, who had kind eyes and dark curly hair, and sometimes we’d smoke weed and have philosophical conversations late at night. (And when I think all of this could not possibly have happened, I need only look on Facebook to see that indeed Greg exists, living in Maryland with the same woman who was his girlfriend then, and they are listed among my friends.) I also remember a banjo player named Tony Trischka, who was already drawing notice as a virtuoso. He’s famous now, apparently considered one of the most influential of modern blue grass artists, Earl Scruggs reborn.
But having no music in me, I just listened, high and lonesome. The energy infused me, but I remained motionless, still waiting for my life to begin, a pillar of salt who needed to be turned into a living woman.
The Salt City was not without beauty. You just had to look for it, and the inclement weather made that challenging. Summer and fall were fleeting, but that’s when the trees were lavish with leaves, fragrances lingered in the air, and lakes sparkled. You could climb the Thousand Steps up to the top of a drumlin in Westminster Park…actually, the steps numbered 178, but a thousand sounded more impressive, and with altitude and distance, the city became a dreamy place.
But the weather was notoriously overcast and snowy, enveloping the world in a kind of miasma. And it’s true the snow could be beautiful when it first fell, but it got old fast. My vague ambitions grew sluggish, and I felt mired. The streets were treacherous with ice and slush, and early morning crews came out and scattered salt, and the buses ran late, and I had to warm my car key with the flame of a match to get it into the frozen lock. It was customary to pack sacks of rock salt into the back of the car for better traction, but one day I substituted fifty pounds of potatoes, which were cheaper, and I thought potentially more useful. By April, they were rotting, and the stench never left, like evidence of a crime. Or just stupidity.
Fast forward nearly fifty years, and I am a silver-haired lady walking up a hill in Gaviota, salty with sweat, perhaps, but loved and grateful. I click on “random shuffle” of downloaded songs, and suddenly I am hearing Salt Creek, and all those memories come rolling back to me, and blue grass is my sound track again, but all I feel is joy.
I did six or seven years in the Salt City. And I’m not saying that blue grass music saved me, but it’s one of many things that helped. When everything was stuck, it moved. It moved in a kind of manic way, freighted with sadness, but fleet-footed. It was affirmation in a dreary space, looking back but winding its way to elsewhere, and I too found a way to leave.