Episode 10: Horses, Imaginary New England Farms and the Man on the Marquee Moon

Wherever you are at this moment, whether you’re in motion or sitting still, take a second to consider your surroundings and realize that, no matter where you are and what you’re doing, you are moving through the cosmos at inconceivable speeds. Earth is doing laps around the sun at a clip of 67,000 miles an hour. The solar system is orbiting the Milky Way at an average of 448,000 miles an hour. The Milky Way is hurtling through space at 70 miles per second – blink once and you and I have traveled as far as it takes us to drive in one hour on the interstate. Lean into it enough and you can almost feel it, or at the very least get a faint awareness of it. It’s crazy when you think about it, especially with all that motion pulling the planet in three directions at once. It’s not something I recommend trying to wrap your head around at 3 in the morning.

A few years ago, I was lying in bed one night, possibly at 3 in the morning, restless and waiting for my ping-ponging brain to stop bouncing and let me get back to sleep. I was staring at the windows across the room, thinking about the perpetual intergalactic thrill ride we’re on, and I started imagining that our tiny house was a spaceship. And the image stuck. When the pandemic hit and we all suddenly found ourselves living in a sci-fi film, maintaining connection through handheld computers and video communication systems, I thought more and more about the home-as-spaceship in the context of our newfound isolation. Star Wars is great and all, but the science fiction that resonates with me the most explores the psychology and mental calisthenics of space travel, zeroing in on the loneliness and disconnection – the Sam Rockwell of Moon and the Matt Damon of The Martian come to mind – and I find strange solace in these stories. Physically and emotionally, I’d probably last five minutes in their moon boots, but that’s beside the point. We’re all the hero of our own fantasies, right?

We have a new spaceship in Hudson, Ohio. It’s twice as large as our old one and docked on nearly an acre of land along the southwestern border of the primary Lake Erie snow belt. The population density in Hudson is 867 people per square mile versus 2,749 in Boise. The block we live on is a mile-and-a-half around, and relatively speaking, there aren’t that many houses on it. We have 60 trees on the property – my daughter, Magnolia, and I counted one day – and our back yard smells like a forest. Waking up the first morning after moving in last September, we were greeted by three deer foraging in our backyard. We’ve watched a fox nonchalantly trot through the yard like it belonged there. In the warmer months when the windows are down, crickets and frogs sing us to sleep.

For a suburb tucked in between two large cities with three highways cutting through town, Hudson is relatively quiet. And peaceful. Granted, this is no Walden Pond – after all, I run over and under the Ohio Turnpike on most of my jogs, and in winter Interstate 480 peeks through the woods on the edge of the neighborhood – but Hudson feels remote compared to our life on Boise’s West Bench, where the roar of motorcycles and the whine of police sirens pierced the night and our street was a popular shortcut around the rush-hour traffic snarl two streets over. When you’re in our neighborhood in Hudson, there’s no easy way out unless you turn around, and when you’re there, you’re there for a reason, and it’s probably to get home. On one hand moving back to Ohio was about family, but on the other hand, it was about creating this space for ourselves, physically and emotionally, as we rocket through space. If we’re going to be stuck in our spaceship for the foreseeable future, we might as well be more comfortable, right?

We carried our work with us from Boise, and right now it gets carried out completely within the confines of our new home. My wife, Erica, and I have dedicated spaces we’ve carved out for ourselves, but throughout the day we rarely stay put. Working primarily through laptops and smartphones, we’re more like operators of roving command centers that move from place to place depending on our comfort, the weather, the time of day and our proximity to the turntable.

Reconnecting with our record collection was one of the best things about moving in. Most of our records, which number just south of a thousand, were boxed up and stored for three months as we prepared to sell our house in Boise and move to Ohio. When we staged our house before putting it on the market, the only time I put my foot down with the stagers was to keep a working turntable in the house, regardless of how they felt about its aesthetic appeal (or lack thereof). The big speakers and beat-up record cabinets disappeared from view – that much we conceded – and in their place we fashioned a compact system of a turntable and powered speakers on a roller cart that we wheeled into the living room every night after the house showings were done for the day. We held on to about 50 records – reliable family favorites, mostly jazz, classic rock and selections from Magnolia’s LPs – that we thought would help us get through our lost summer of 2020. We chose wisely; certain albums in certain moments were the only things that kept me grounded amid the organized chaos of preparing for a cross-country move.

Unpacking our records in September was something like Christmas, or a reunion with old friends. For the first time in our lives, we had the space to set up a dedicated listening room, and we decked it out with a new stereo console, storage shelves and chairs. Some of these albums have been a part of my life for more than a quarter-century – I’m not yet old, but the fact Nevermind turns 30 this year doesn’t make me feel any younger – and in new spaces, records have a way of taking on new lives, of opening themselves up to new interpretations and renewed appreciation. And that was the case earlier this spring when, as I found myself missing everything we left behind in Boise, I started drip-feeding Television’s Marquee Moon and Patti Smith’s Horses.

On the surface, Marquee Moon and Horses are urban records of a certain time and place, and that place, specifically, is 1970s New York City. The two albums are forever entwined. Both have been called the first punk record, and both feature cover photos taken by Robert Mapplethorpe, Patti Smith’s one-time lover. The Patti Smith Group and Television shared a two-month residency at CBGB in 1975, and Television frontman Tom Verlaine co-wrote and played guitar on the Horses song “Break It Up.” Both albums draw heavily from French symbolism. Clearly Smith and Verlaine did not have the static comfort of suburbia in mind when they wrote these songs, but the way I gravitated toward Marquee Moon, in particular, makes sense considering it feels like we’re living on the moon.

I’ve been here before. I moved to the middle of nowhere after college, taking a newspaper job over the phone in a town I had never visited, and Marquee Moon and Horses were lonely late-night companions in Northern New England. I was young and idealistic, still unlearning much of what I had learned growing up in Middle America, and the world was inspiring and adventurous in ways specific to a kid making his way on his own for the first time. Most of my friends were lured to Cleveland, Chicago and primarily, New York; meanwhile, my first post-college address was a New Hampshire mountain town of 2,800 people. It was a short flight to LaGuardia – one time I drove on a whim and made it to Greenpoint in six hours – and the lonelier I got, the more I showed up in the city.

In between visits, listening to New York records like Horses and Marquee Moon was a way of staying connected to my friends and their alien urban lives, yet with both albums, what resonated most was not the glitter and grime of the city but the poetic gestures of escape and retreat. In “Birdland,” my favorite song on Horses, the subject finds himself standing alone on the New England farm he inherited from his late father, right after all the cars had driven away from the funeral. “Friction,” my favorite from Marquee Moon, takes place “a little bit back from the main road where the silence spreads.” For all the specific references on the album, Marquee Moon seems to float on an astral plane more than it lurks through the Bowery. Of all the characters I’ve encountered in songs, the ones who flee and find themselves jarred by their strange new surroundings are always far more interesting than the ones in the middle of the action. That’s never been a place for me, at least not long-term. In the end, I prefer the fringes, the back of the room, the New England farm of my mind.

This spring, as we emerged from a long, forgettable winter that left me feeling rudderless and adrift, revisiting Marquee Moon and Horses was a visceral experience. As a listener, I have a habit, in moments of shameless self-absorption, of subverting music to reflect my life. And I’m usually left with something closer to fiction. But years ago I discovered one truth for myself, and that is, I like disappearing. Which explains New Hampshire. Which explains Boise. My greatest vanishing act yet might be moving back home, ironic considering that albums like Horses and Marquee Moon inspired escape, and here I am right back where I started 43 years ago. But I’ve been gone so long that I may as well be a stranger, and right now I’m happy, relieved even, to be playing that part. Aside from my family and a few friends, nobody knows us here. We are more or less anonymous. The likelihood of running into someone I know, or someone who actually recognizes me after 25 years – especially with a mask covering half my face – is low.

I’ve never lived in New York City – a “world so alive,” as Verlaine sings on “Venus” – but it’s clear after visiting over the years that living there, like living in willful obscurity in the suburbs or on a New England farm, is a conscious choice, full of trade-offs and concessions. Moving to Hudson, a place both familiar and foreign to me, was an odd retreat, especially against the backdrop of a global pandemic, especially after the life we built for ourselves in Boise, especially after we left the Boise problems behind in Boise yet continue to reap the benefits of that life we built. But leaving Boise wasn’t a kiss-off; we weren’t galloping away from something so much as we were galloping toward something, but when we left, in the relative absence of human connection in the five months leading up to the move, we still felt like thieves in the night. Listening to Horses’ “Free Money” in this context, a song that in moments of struggle I’ve heard as equal parts twisted fantasy and motivational tool, I started asking myself: Is this a cop-out? Are we cheating? Or – torn between the dueling lure of the middle of nowhere and the middle of the action – is this weird, wooden suburban perch we stand on the solution? It may feel like we’re living on the moon, but here on my imaginary New England farm, hurtling along through “a place called space,” to borrow a line from Horses, for now, at least, I can breathe freely.

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