Blues Run the Game

Try another city baby another town
Wherever I have gone
Wherever I’ve been and gone
Wherever I have gone the blues come followin’ down

I remember the first time I heard it. It was with a friend of mine from school. Maybe she liked me, maybe I liked her, it was hard to say, but nothing ever happened. I’d taken her on a drive out to the ocean one night, well past midnight, to look out over the sea—as Robinson Jeffers might put it “to watch the stars go over the lonely ocean.” She was in a downward spiral and was in danger of failing out with just a semester to go, unable even to get out of bed to haul herself to class. She perked up a bit on the drive over, the promise of the destination bringing a brief respite from what was increasingly clearly depression. But the grimness returned just as we were pulling up to the overlook, almost the instant the first glimpse of the water came into view.

I’d take another friend on a similar drive years later when his mother was ailing and had little time left. The ocean, I’ve always felt, is a provider of perspective. It seems to tell us: No matter what one is going through, or in the case of Jeffers’ poem, whatever the world is going through, the ocean has been there for millions of years before we were born and will be here for millions of years after we are gone. But perhaps this message is better received among those suffering from an anxious mind rather than the sort of depression that tells one: Nothing matters, especially you; I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

The girl I drove out to Long Island Sound that night must have been in the latter camp, and as we merged back on the highway to go back to school, only a few hours now before classes were set to start for the next day, she reached over and plugged in the aux cord of my phone, and it started to play:

Catch a boat to England baby maybe to Spain
Wherever I have gone
Wherever I’ve been and gone
Wherever I have gone the blues are all the same

One encounters this idea of escape—of reaching a place where one’s troubles don’t follow him— periodically in music, in literature, or in the sort of pie-in-the-sky conversations one has either in adolescence or just as that fourth beer starts to hit. In Desert Solitaire, a book I have in parts praised and deplored, Edward Abbey writes: “We need wilderness whether or not we ever set foot in it. We need a refuge even though we may never need to go there. I may never in my life get to Alaska, for example, but I am grateful that it’s there. We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope; without it the life of the cities would drive all men into crime or drugs or psychoanalysis.” For Abbey, the idea of being able to go elsewhere is what can keep the overworked, cubicle-bound office worker from flipping his lid, from becoming Lester Burnham.