Though
physically I sat in the front seat of my Dad’s car, driving reluctantly towards another school
day in March of Leaving Cert year, track one of Neil Young’s 1971 classic
‘Harvest’ transformed reality into a countrified vignette of blown apart barroom
romance and sour mash aftermath. Each morning, that stoic foot-drum tapped out
tentative and sad sounds before the thin, pining harmonica began to weave its
way about, eventually stretching out, long and vast, in a steady, pained whine which pierced my chill bones and clenched teeth. Neil, who knew what it
was like to be young, sang to me of ‘the woman I’m thinkin’ of... she loved me
all up’ and it was the most empty and emptying song in the great, big world and
I could for four minutes and forty-two seconds envision losing all but never the
poetry of the lovelorn. Suddenly, sinking entirely into this dust bowl dirge I’d
find Waterford forgot, reclining in that
rusty pick-up headed ‘down to L.A.’, chugging along a low, open plain with
blue moon memories of how ‘she got pictures on her wall that make me look up,
from her big brass bed’. My toast and nutella became a rough griddle cake and
my juice a scalding hot and muddy coffee, as I meanly chewed and slurped them
down. The Cork Road housing estates blurred into deserted gold mining
settlements, which looked as hollow as boot polish slapped on cardboard
cut-outs of stagecoach towns, echoing Neil’s misery and mine. Finally, the
harmonicas piped up once again, louder still, screeching out in emphasis the
loneliness of the lonely, lonely, lonely boy out on the
weekend, ‘tryin’ to make it pay’. Then the lulling fade-out and everything was
vacant as we’d trundle along to a halt, reaching the end of the journey. Parked at the gates of school, I’d suddenly feel less weighed down, having dumped some heavy baggage in the back of Neil’s battered old pick-up on our escapist
hitch for a ‘lonely boy’, in need of a contemplative ride to
nowhere.
