I woke up this morning with Dire Straits’ song “Brother in Arms” playing through my head. I had heard the song recently, and it resonated. There’s something so sad about all of Dire Straits and Mark Knopfler’s music–beautiful and sad, even when it's joyous and celebratory. It touches those own sad chords in me.
When I was a child growing up in Zachary, Louisiana, northeast of Baton Rouge, it seemed we were always driving to Texas. My dad’s mother and grandparents lived southwest in the black-dirt farmland, his father and those grandparents northwest of Houston in the hills, gullies, and ranchland of Central Texas, and my mom’s parents lived northeast of Houston, in the piney woods.
When I was very young, the road to Texas was mostly a two- or four-lane highway through long stretches of woods lining the road and permeated by bayous with green swamp water often visible from the windows of the car. Every now and then we’d hit a little town with little wooden houses, and sometimes a big fancy brick house. I was always excited when we hit Houma, Louisiana, and I saw the sign for the Jim Bowie house. I would beg for us to stop and go to the museum, but it was always closed when we drove by, and my dad always said we didn’t have time and would laugh at me. I had heard all the tales of the Alamo and of his knife, and I wanted a Bowie knife. I had no idea that he was a slave trader and killer–my head had been filled with tales of adventure that left out all the facts, and I absorbed the hero-worship.
There wasn’t much to look at for a little kid, and it was a long drive, usually taking 8-10 hours. I watched out the windows and let my imagination run free. Or counted billboards.
Eventually, the highway was supplanted by an interstate, and the trip shortened to 5-6 hours. We bypassed all the little towns and most of Houston, only stopping for gas, usually at a Speedway near Vidor-Orange-Beaumont, sometimes getting a burger, but for the most part, just driving as fast as we could to the little towns where my grandparents lived that had been bypassed by interstates and the progress of the 20th century and were becoming museums themselves. Our destination was always to visit with the old people in the old towns out in the country.
Years later, Christmas 1982, I was driving with my mother and husband, Jim Milles, to my mother’s family home in Magnolia, Texas. We were driving at night, and my mom was a talker. One memorable time she had talked non-stop for the whole 5-hour trip about one set of drapes she was designing for a client. It was a tour de force that Jim and I still laugh about, but at the time it was a kind of torture. We had found that the best way to travel with my mother was to play music that we could all listen to, and one of the good things about my mom was that she loved music and was very open to hearing new music.
On this trip, we were listening to the radio, and had found a station that was playing one good song after another, and we were all having fun. The traffic was light, and we had just approached Houston on a Sunday night. The lights of the city were shining, and the skyscrapers of downtown soared into sight. That first glimpse always took my breath away. After hours of nothing but dark countryside and interstate exit signs, the emerald city was before us. And beyond that, our destination, my favorite place in the world, my mother’s parents’ home, with a perpetual fire in the fireplace, deep in the piney woods, 300 acres of forest and lakes that was our own private paradise.
Right at that moment, “Telegraph Road” came on. My mother stopped talking. The song has a long, slow instrumental build-up, and my mother was all in from the first note. We all were. Jim was driving, and we were mesmerized.
Then came the first words:
“A long time ago, came a man on a track
Walking thirty miles with a sack on his back
And he put down his load where he thought it was the best
He made a home in the wilderness
He built a cabin and a winter store
And he ploughed up the ground by the cold lake shore
And the other travellers came walking down the track
And they never went further, no, and they never went back”
My mother caught her breath, and I could hear her thinking with every word, that this was her personal history being told in a song. Her grandparents and parents had settled in these piney woods, built a cabin, manned the only store, raised and butchered animals to sell in the store, built roads, surveyed the land, and helped make a town.
The rest of the song told the whole story that my mother had witnessed from her childhood to her current middle age:
“Then came the churches, then came the schools
Then came the lawyers, and then came the rules
Then came the trains and the trucks with their loads
And the dirty old track was the telegraph road
Then came the mines, then came the ore
Then there was the hard times, then there was a war
Telegraph sang a song about the world outside
Telegraph road got so deep and so wide
Like a rolling river
And my radio says tonight it's gonna freeze
People driving home from the factories
There's six lanes of traffic
Three lanes moving slow
I used to like to go to work, but they shut it down
I've got a right to go to work
But there's no work here to be found
Yes, and they say we're gonna have to pay what's owed
We're gonna have to reap
From some seed that's been sowed
And the birds up on the wires and the telegraph poles
They can always fly away from this rain and this cold
You can hear them singing out their telegraph code
All the way down the telegraph road
You know, I'd sooner forget
But I remember those nights
When life was just a bet on a race
Between the lights
You had your head on my shoulder
You had your hand in my hair
Now you act a little colder
Like you don't seem to care
But believe in me, baby, and I'll take you away
From out of this darkness and into the day
From these rivers of headlights, these rivers of rain
From the anger that lives on the streets with these names
'Cause I've run every red light on memory lane
I've seen desperation explode into flames
And I don't want to see it again
From all of these signs saying, "Sorry, but we're closed"
All the way down
The Telegraph Road”
My mother had seen the country road that led to her parent’s road–Beyette Road–named after her family–turn from a narrow 2-lane in the woods with only a Lone Star Feed sign as a marker into a 4-lane road with traffic lights and businesses and even six-lanes for part of the road, with a bridge bypassing the little antique shop she liked, which soon disappeared.
She had seen her mother and her mother’s friends go from working in the little country store in town to driving into Houston to work at the fancy Sears in the rich part of Houston, and then when the traffic got to be too much, and my grandmother’s friend died in a traffic accident, to my grandmother not driving to Houston at all and tending graves of her loved ones as her main occupation.
Instead of mines and ore, she had seen the piney woods cut down for lumber, and the main business of town being a sawmill. Until it was no more.
I could feel my mother thinking and remembering all of this as the song played on, and she sat stunned into silence.
It’s a 14-minute song, symphonic in its scope and drama, soaring at times, and then fading away at the end.
The song played as we circled outside of Houston and ended as we came to the road leading to my grandparents. We turned off the radio and sat in silence the rest of the way, turning off the highway onto Beyette road, driving on the gravel road through the pine trees, over the bridge and up the long red dirt gravel driveway twisting through pines, with lakes on either side, until we arrived at my grandparents, with smoke rising through the chimney.
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