Our theme for the month of October is “states.”
I am waiting for this book to get good
I do not have your patience
So I’m driving up to Chicago
And getting weird looks at gas stations
And thus begins the Celtic-inspired folk song that I have never skipped. It is dreamy, the first five seconds picked softly out on both the mandolin and guitar, and the harmony on the first few words is low and haunting.
The harmonies continue through the first verse, with Aoife O’Donovan’s high, clear voice mingling with Donovan Wood’s whispery tones as they both pick at their chosen string instrument. The swift and sad acoustic sound creates an almost regretful feeling, and as I’ve listened to this song—for three or four years now—the lyrics have settled deep beneath my ribs, though I’ve never really sat down to understand them.
The first verse, half of which is above, follows the narrator as they drive to Chicago and regretfully announce their lack of patience, foresight, and a winter coat. In O’Donovan and Woods’ balancing voices, the narrator addresses a “you,” who does possess those things, and whom the narrator seems to wish to have more in common with. In fact, the whole first verse seems to set up this idea that the narrator is different from whoever “you,” is, and they feel that gap deeply.
Iowa
Where the tall grass prairie used to ripple like the ocean in the breeze
Where the hummingbirds still suckled
From the flowers in the trees
It’d bring to your knees
In all I’ve heard from Iowa, nothing has ever made the state seem quite so beautiful as this song. The chorus (half of which is above) is idyllic, identifying the things I know of Iowa—it’s emptiness, it’s quiet flora and fauna that do not boast the way Lake Michigan or the Rockies do—as its strengths. Here is a place the narrator longs for, a place whose very smallness and peacefulness my friends have always laughed at.
The song continues, the second verse ending with a picture that always stumped me:
I called a taxi in Des Moines
I met him at the corner
When I asked about his army coat
He said he would not tell a foreigner
The “othering” that happens here, in this verse, juxtaposes painfully with the beauty of the chorus. But it reflects the exact gap the narrator seems to feel deeply in the first verse, as they are different from “you,” and constantly reminded of it as they receive “weird looks at gas stations.”
And of course, this is the flip-side of longing, isn’t it? In the middle of the deep longing reflected in the chorus is the very reminder that the place you long for does not have a place for you, even somewhere that seems to have as much space as Iowa. And Woods—a Canadian—said of the song (here), “I feel like I fit in anywhere, [but] in America, I’m often swiftly reminded that I don’t.”
As someone who has lived life on the road—from Boston to Wheaton to Addis Ababa to Holland and on—this type of longing is one that sits deep beneath my ribs, in the same way that this song does. Woods, O’Donovan (a first-generation Irish American), and I each have walked the tension of beholding a thousand beauties that could be ours, from Iowa to Ireland, and have each time despaired over the fact that they are not—and could never be.
And the narrator, in the final verse, accepts this:
I am waiting for this book to get good
(I have been waiting for my life to feel like home, while still getting what I want out of the road)
But you won’t meet me halfway
(but I’m realizing it’s not possible)
So I’m driving up to Chicago
(And if I must pick one, I would rather live on the road than have a home here)
I am sorry to keep you waiting.
But—in a surprise twist from what seems like a despairing end—there is still 1:09 left in the song. As the singers fade out, a whistle and Uilleann pipes fade in, high and clear and open like winds over the Great Plains, as if to say: yes, but must it be one or the other?
“You see, you cannot draw lines and compartments, and refuse to budge beyond them… You have to maintain a fine balance between hope and despair… Yes, in the end, it’s all a question of balance” (Rohinton Mistry).
