The Tarzan Trail

Today's drive in was dark, but dry.  Technically, it was foggy on the hilltops, and fog is certainly a form of moisture, but the roads were dry if not entirely clear.  Usually, fog settles into the low spots on the drive, but this morning it encircled the high points.  Also, leaves are really starting to accumulate.  Driving home from work yesterday was the first top-down drive in a few days and I really saw (and smelled!) the brown and orange leaves accumulating in piles along the road.  There is a particular smell to the arrival of fall.  It is a breezy smell of decaying foliage, and it always takes me back to the woods of my youth.

I grew up here in the PNW and in a place where we had many small (often connecting) patches of woodland around us. The walking route to my elementary school (I know the idea is unthinkable now, but back then it was perfectly normal to let small kids walk a mile or more to school) took me out the back end of a dead-end street, through a small copse of woods between neighborhoods, and across an undeveloped field. There was even a log over a pond on the route.  To us kids it was known as "the Tarzan trail." I have no idea who coined that name for it, but one of us kids must have. To us, the woods were fun places to explore, and the early season of decay especially ripe for discovery.  (The other memory that fall's smell brings back is actually a spring time memory of family trips into the woods to hunt for morel mushrooms – what I wouldn't give for a fresh batch of those today!)

One of this morning's tracks would have made a good soundtrack to a Tarzan film, come to think of it. Marco Benevento's Diego Garcia is an almost entirely percussive work with piano and xylophone (guessing) along with a variety of drums and other formal and informal percussion instruments banging away intensely for ten-plus minutes. It lies at the far boundary of what most folks would consider music, and I grew tired of the cacophonous clanging and banging long before the track finished (though I did listen all the way through).  It was also at odds with the other three pieces in this morning's random playlist, which are all mellow and melancholy:

• John Barry/Chris Botti: Remembering Chet
• Kings of Convenience: Homesick
• Marco Benevento: Diego Garcia
• Robert Plant/Alison Krauss: Stick With Me Baby