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Artist Profiles
Driving with Jim Pepper
Bill Siegel
Bill Siegel, of New Hampshire, maintains the Web site, www.jimpepperlives.wordpress.com, and can be reached at bmsiegel@comcast.net. His work also appears on www.inmotionmagazine.com, in Planet Jazz, and elsewhere.
It was a dark and stormy night. No really, it was dark and it was stormy. I was driving home, maybe halfway from Leicester, Massachusetts to Nashua, New Hampshire. Ordinarily, it was maybe an hour-and-a-quarter's drive, but in this rain it would take at least two hours, I guessed. It hadn't been a particularly snowy winter, but as spring approached it seemed that nearly every weekend that I made that trek it was raining. Raining hard.
There are stretches along the noisiest, most crowded highways in Massachusetts where you can almost forget that you're surrounded by semis, minivans, U-Haul trucks, canoe-topped station wagons, pickup trucks and those obscene monstrosity SUVs - you sail over a gentle hill and suddenly all you see stretching out in front of you, and to either side, is green forest. It's as if all the towns - Marlboro, Stow, Boxboro, Acton, Littleton - are mere interruptions dropped here and there and hidden among the maple, pine, oak and birch-covered hills. Hawks and crows patrol the roadside, watching the frenetic traffic buzzing by - busy people, on their way somewhere, or on their way back from somewhere, and doing it again the next day, and the next... It's easy to imagine those roadside hawks shaking their heads and thinking, "What's the hurry? Why so frantic? Chill out, people. Sheesh." After all, when's the last time you saw a hawk in a hurry? And then there's the crows, squawking as if they barely have the patience to deal with us, even as they gladly pick at the carcasses - squirrels, racoons, hedgehogs, the occasional deer and fox - left behind on the highway by all the speeding cars and trucks.
But on this night, there was just darkness and rain.
I remember exactly what time it happened. And I definitely know how hard it was raining. It was 10 minutes before 11 at night, and I was on I-495, heading north through Boxboro (a town that, like its neighbors Marlboro, Westboro and Southboro, after some 200 years or more, still can't decide if the town name is spelled with "-boro" at then end, or "-borough"). Nothing to be seen through the windshield but the hint of a wall of dark trees on both sides, lots (and lots) of water in front, white divider lines blinking their way under my tires. And nothing beyond the feeble reach of the headlights - even their beams seemed waterlogged and heavy. Eric Jackson was winding up his "Eric in the Evening" jazz show on WGBH radio out of Boston; he had just announced his last call for listeners to pledge their contributions to the station's spring fund drive and receive a "Jazz All Night" t-shirt. I couldn't resist.
Jackson had been playing several recordings by Jim Pepper that night, an impromptu tribute to the Native American saxophonist that made it so much easier for me to deal with driving through the rain and the dark. "Witchi Tai To" and "Hello Young Lovers." "No More War Dance" and "Polka Dots and Moonbeams." That almost surreal repertoire of his.
With one hand on the wheel, I groped around on my seat, flicking old peanuts and chewing gum wrappers out of the way, feeling for a pen. Finding one (and hoping it wasn't yet another dried-out one), I quickly stuck it between my teeth and went back to the gum wrappers and peanut shells to find a piece of paper to write down the station's number.
Ten minutes left. And I needed to find a phone somewhere in this rain-soaked forest.
The exit sign read Boxboro (although the town line sign just past it snootily proclaimed the more "colonialistically correct" Boxborough), and the little symbols said there was a gas station there. Five minutes left. Can I make it? Now the sign says gas stations to the left and the right off the ramp. But what are chances of one of them having a phone? Worse yet, what are the chances of one having a phone that actually works? And what if it's the one to the right that has a working phone, but I turn to the left? Who cares, no time to worry about these things - I dropped the existentialist mind patter and let the van take itself around the corner, to the left, where I quickly found the Mobil station a mere hundred yards away.
There was the phone, on the outside wall, between the men's and women's bathroom doors (with the usual broken locks). Totally exposed to the elements and idling truck motors (just who was the genius who decided it was a better idea to have public phones completely open to all the road noises and weather? Where the hell did all the telephone booths go, anyway?).
Inside myself, I yelled at the obsessive voice that's always pondering these kinds of details and got myself back on track. I pulled in and parked right by the phone. I was pledging for that t-shirt. For Jim Pepper. And, oh yeah, "to support my local public radio station." But I have to admit, it was mostly for Jim Pepper and that black t-shirt.
