Behind the Song

by K. M. Walton

  I wasn’t exactly a virgin, but like my kissing, I hadn’t had a whole lot of practice. Luckily, everyone was more than willing to show me the ropes. Figuratively and literally. Cocaine enhanced both my courage and performance. It was heady. Surreal.

  Girls touching girls.

  And boys.

  Boys touching boys.

  And girls.

  We went all night, and well into the morning. By the time I crawled into bed, still buzzed, but spent, I was grateful Pearl had booked the room for an extra night. Caught a few hours of sleep, then it was back to a whole new round of feasting, though I really wasn’t all that hungry. Well, not for food.

  Night two, I auditioned for Ron again. On guitar. And on the floor. Turned out that was the kind of cigar he’d offered the previous evening. I tried to say no, I’m really not gay, but he insisted on having his way. “I can make or break your career right here.” I knew he was right and relented. Luckily, with the smorgasbord of powders and rocks available, I could pretend I was somewhere else, with someone else.

  After that, I dove into the scene. I joined the band, signed up with Ron. Problem was, none of them had a clear plan for the future. At least the gigs we played covered our room and board, and I got to do some original songs. Two were deep-track metal—“The Irony of Suicide” and “Shallow Water Drowning.” One was a ballad, and when I sang it I closed my eyes, conjuring Sarah’s face because she was my “Willamette Angel.”

  But the hotel’s lure was impossible to fight. I stayed for months, an endless cycle of flying and crashing, fed by Candy, Molly, Mercedes, and rock ’n’ roll. Finally, though I’d done my best to avoid her, I even tumbled for Tiffany. That one almost broke me.

  Tiff was seriously insatiable. She wouldn’t let me eat. Wouldn’t let me sleep. She was a demanding mistress, and what she wanted was my soul. It wasn’t like no one had warned me that even the tiniest taste could very well be the end of Lennon. At first I was happy to give her pieces, a little of me here, a little more of me there. But my brain began to jumble. Sometimes she was Crystal. Always, she was ice. Didn’t really matter. I wanted her more than anything. Even my attraction to Candy faded.

  Before long, I, too, became Tiffany-twisted.

  My skin crawled with need. My brain screamed for more. I might’ve died right there in Tiff’s arms, except for an intervention of fate. See, what I hadn’t understood in the beginning was that the party carried a hefty price tag. Eventually I spent every penny I’d brought, and every cent I earned. Then I put what I could on credit, but finally the card maxed out. I wondered if Dad was angry. It was the first time he’d even crossed my mind in a long while.

  One night I was sitting cross-legged on the floor, strumming Dora. I was considering selling her, or trading her for another week’s stay. After that, all I’d have left was my car, if it was even still there. Was it there? Could I find it in the parking lot? Would it start?

  My car.

  My guitar.

  Highway 395 north.

  Home. The green woods of Oregon.

  Sarah. Was it too late to apologize?

  Becky. Had she missed me yet?

  When I got to Dad, I closed my eyes around a mad flood of tears, and I swear my sister’s voice came floating up out of the ether. “It isn’t so hard to die. You’re close already. Just let go.”

  “Harmony?”

  I thought of the last time I saw her, concrete stiff and waxy-skinned in her satin-lined casket. Dead. Deceased. Soon to decay. In a moment of clarity, I knew I wasn’t ready to wind up earthworm food.

  I jumped to my feet, swaying with my head’s sudden change in altitude. I wasn’t exactly sure I could drive, but I figured I’d better try. I stuffed everything into the backpack gathering dust under the bed, nestled Dora into her case, and opened the door.

  As always, the hallway was dimly lit, and I stumbled on an odd lump in the carpet. When I looked up from my tripping feet, it seemed the corridor had grown longer. I ran its length, searching for the elevator, but could not find an exit. Where was I? Nothing was familiar. And then the lamplights faded to near darkness.

  Somewhere, I knew, was a staircase, to be used in case of fire. I felt along the wall until, finally, I located a big metal door. Beyond, it was totally black, but my feet found steps, descending toward the passage I needed. Down. Down. Carefully down. One flight. Two. Three. Finally, by my count, I reached the ground floor.

  When I opened that door, the lobby’s glare hit my eyes full force, lifting little clouds of sleeplessness to float across my irises. Still, I could see the front desk was unmanned. No Pearl to greet newcomers or arrange for my departure. Night Man was on duty, however.

  Close to panic, I yelled, “I need to check out!”

  He glanced at me with no real interest. “Relax, dude. You can check out whenever.”

  “Great. Thanks. I had a good time, but I need to go home now.”

  I pushed into the revolving door. It kept spinning round and round, and every once in a while I’d catch blurry glimpses of home. Becky, meditating in front of her teepee. Dad, picking mushrooms in the Oregon woods. Sarah, kissing some random guy. With each revolution, I tried damn hard to come down.

  Clear my head.

  Find my way out.

  Remember the boy I used to be.

  I don’t know how long I was stuck in there, but finally that damn door spit me out into the hotel lobby.

  Harry looked up from his newspaper. “Welcome back. Luggage?”

  “No! Don’t you remember? I told you I want to check out.”

  “You did, Lennon, you did. And you can do that any time you like. Only problem is, you can never leave.”

  Author photo

  by Sonya Sones

  Ellen Hopkins is the award-winning author of twenty nonfiction titles, twelve New York Times bestselling young adult novels, and three novels for adults. She enjoys mentoring other writers, especially teen writers, and traveling in support of her work and readers. She lives near Carson City, Nevada, with her extended family, two dogs, one cat, and too many aquarium critters. Visit ellenhopkins.com and follow her on Twitter @ellenhopkinslit.

  HOW MIRACLES BEGIN

  A PERSONAL ESSAY INSPIRED BY JAMES HOWE’S AND MARK DAVIS’S “PLANTING TREES”

  By James Howe

  Imagine the story behind a favorite song. “Anthem” by Leonard Cohen was the first that came to mind. But then there were “When I Was a Boy” and “After All” by Dar Williams. And “Easy People” by the Nields. And any number of songs by Mouths of Babes or Over the Rhine or Meg Hutchinson or Janis Ian or John Gorka or Eliza Gilkyson or Sam Baker or…well, it was going to be a problem. There were so many songwriters whose songs I love and whose lyrics speak to me. And then I thought, “Wait! Mark and I write songs. And I won’t even have to imagine the story behind them. I know the story behind every song we’ve written.” Right away I knew which song it would be, because every time we sing it I feel in my body how much it means to me and how important it is to share its words with others. This is the story behind that song. It’s called “Planting Trees.”

  —James Howe

  Each day in India

  A man walks alone

  For forty years he’s planted trees

  Where none before have grown

  With sticks and seeds

  He farms gray sand

  Now elephants roam a forest

  Born from one man’s hands

  His name is Jadav Payeng. He lives with his family in a small hut on the banks of the Brahmaputra River in Assam, India. I have never been to India. I have never met Jadav Payeng. But he has changed me as surely as he has changed the once barren sandbar of Majuli Island. The miracle he has created in my life is a small one compared to the miracle of a thriving forest rising from sand, but who can measure a miracle or know
where it will lead? And while it may be a bit self-aggrandizing to say that writing a song is a miracle, that’s how it feels to me each time I sing the words of “Planting Trees.”

  It was my husband Mark who told me I had to watch this KarmaTube video he’d just seen about a man planting trees in a desert. “After you see it, you’ll know why this is what our next song has to be about!” (Italics, even more than Texan, is Mark’s native language.)

  So how did Mark and I come to write songs and perform together as Old Dogs New Tricks, only half-jokingly referring to ourselves as the World’s Oldest Breakout Folk Duo? I will get to it. First, there is more to say about Jadav Payeng and the miracle he brought about on the banks of the Brahmaputra River, nearly eight thousand miles from the banks of the Hudson River in New York state, where Mark and I live and write.

  Jadav “Molai” Payeng was only sixteen the summer of 1979, when he saw the bodies of snakes washed up from the flooding river near his home and left to die on the parched sandbar. Because there were no trees to provide cover, the snakes died of dehydration and exposure in the searing heat. In his words, Jadav “sat down and wept over their lifeless forms.” And in that moment, it occurred to him that if so many snakes could die in such a way, then one day the human race itself might perish.

  Something had to be done. Trees had to be planted. Jadav began with a handful of bamboo seedlings, hoping these hardy plants would take hold in the sandy soil. Thanks to his painstaking efforts, the seedlings grew into a huge bamboo thicket. And then—here’s where the word “miracle” comes into play—so did the wide variety of trees Jadav began to plant despite the naysaying and derision of his elders. As we say in the song, “with sticks and seeds he farmed gray sand.” The trees grew and they grew and they grew until they became a forest, each from a single seed planted, watered, pruned, and cultivated by a solitary man who walked into a desert each morning and, in time, over the course of nearly forty years, returned from a lush, green forest each night.

  Jadav Payeng has earned the title “The Forest Man of India.” His self-made forest of 1,360 acres is now called the “Molai Sanctuary,” after his nickname of Molai. It is home to more than a hundred elephants who spend three months of their migratory year there, as well as other animals—birds and Bengal tigers, rhino and deer, and, yes, snakes—who live there year-round. He has received honors and acclaim, yet he still goes into the forest each day, still lives in the same small hut with his wife and three children, still makes his living raising cattle and selling milk. He has not been transformed by the attention he has received as much as he has transformed his corner of the world and, because of the attention he has received, has made many people think about environmental issues in a new and personal light.

  And he has made many—myself included—think about the ways one can, in the words of Mahatma Gandhi, “be the change you wish to see in the world.”

  “I worry about the fate of the world, just like everyone,” he has said. “I see bad things happening on my island and I do what I can to help. I’m just a simple man. There are many just like me.”

  It is debatable that there are many just like Jadav Molai Payeng. Many of us think about how we wish the world were different, but do little to make it happen. Most of Jadav’s friends have left Majuli Island for professional careers and comfortable lives in nice homes and city apartments. Jadav remains, doing his solitary work and changing the world one tree at a time.

  “The forest,” he says, “is my sole life achievement. Today I am the happiest man in the world.”

  “Look how contented this man is with his life,” Mark said as we talked about the video we’d both now seen. “Every day he leaves his small hut, walks out into the desert, and digs with a stick in the sand to plant another tree. Every day. This is what he loves doing. And he’s turned a desert into a forest. How do we make this into a song?”

  And where do we begin?

  In thinking about our new song, the word “miracle” didn’t occur to us for some time, although it seemed it would take one for us to write a song at all. We’d written only one song, and we’d done that under pressure in order to qualify for a five-day songwriting retreat being offered in the summer of 2014 by Dar Williams, our favorite singer-songwriter. And by “favorite” I mean of nearly heroic proportions.

  Dar Williams, who has been writing and performing her songs for nearly thirty years, is considered one of America’s finest singer-songwriters. Her fans are legion, and they are passionate. Many can cite a particular song that has changed their lives. For me, it is “When I Was a Boy,” the first song of hers I had ever heard. For Mark, it’s “The Christians and the Pagans.” And for my daughter Zoey, it is “After All,” a song she first encountered when it was taught as poetry in her high school English class. I think it is fair to say that “After All” has been a life-changer for many.

  When Mark and I met in 2001, we discovered we had many things in common, with our love of music high on the list. We didn’t always love the same music, although we did have a number of musicians in common, and Dar Williams was one of them. For years now we’ve listened to music together at home and in the car, and have gone to folk festivals, coffee houses, church basements, theaters, and concert halls to hear live music every chance we could. Living in the Hudson Valley north of New York City, we are blessed with abundant opportunities to see and hear our favorite musicians and discover new musicians who become favorites. More than once, we had the chance to see the legendary Pete Seeger and hear him exhort the crowd to “sing out!” because he believed that singing together was a way of making community, bridging differences, and bringing hope to the world.

  We took Pete seriously. We began singing folk songs together, old favorites like “If I Had a Hammer” (a Pete Seeger song), Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and “When We’re Gone Long Gone.” We invited friends to our home for sing-alongs, or “hootenannies,” as they were called back in the day. Having quite a number of friends who are talented musicians, we’ve had as varied a backup band as several guitars, banjo, piano, flute, a violin or two, and whatever forms of percussive instruments were at hand. To which I’ve recently added the cello, an instrument I studied briefly in the seventh grade and took up again—half a century later!

  By the time Mark and I got married in Vermont in 2011, it only made sense that we had live music, including a square dance band, and ended the evening leading a rousing hootenanny.

  But we weren’t writing songs. It wasn’t until a few years later, after we had started adding covers of current favorite songs to our repertoire and begun working with a voice and guitar coach, that we thought about performing. Once we thought about performing, we began to ask, “Shouldn’t we be writing songs of our own?”

  So there we were in the summer of 2014 at Dar Williams’s songwriting retreat, feeling a bit like a couple of frauds, with just one finished song and fragments of a first verse of a second song as all we had to show for ourselves as writers. Okay, fine, I had been writing books for children and teens for almost forty years, but I’m talking about songwriting, and that’s a totally different thing. And Mark—lawyer by day, guitar-playing songster by night—had mostly written legal briefs. It took chutzpah to be there. Or maybe what it took was a belief in the words we were beginning to formulate as we considered the chorus for our song. If we just embraced what we loved, did each day the thing that we loved, it would give birth to…something. We just had to have faith in that process, not knowing in advance what the “something” would be. But isn’t that true of all creative endeavors? You could say it’s true of life.

  We started with the first verse. Knowing Jadav’s story and how we felt about it, it didn’t take us long to figure out the words we wanted, even if it was a new kind of challenge for both of us to know how to combine those words with the music that was just taking shape in our heads. Though Mark was more the musician, we worked out the
music together, just as we did the words.

  It wasn’t long before we decided that Jadav’s story would be one of two or three stories we would use as the verses. The chorus still hadn’t come together yet, but we knew that it would hold the theme of the song, the “message” that tied the stories together.

  In trying to come up with a second verse, we considered making up a story of a gardener, but quickly realized that planting a garden was too much like planting trees. Then, perhaps because we were thinking about gardens, we remembered an amazing place we had visited the year before in Philadelphia. It was called Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens, and it truly was magical. Awed by the dreamlike strangeness and beauty of the broken tile and ceramic mosaics covering every surface of the building and adjacent terrace, we wondered who could have created such a place. What we discovered led us to another story of one man’s doing each day the thing that he loves and making miracles in the process.

  Each day in Philadelphia

  A man takes broken glass

  Making art of what he finds

  To heal his broken past

  Now people come

  To walk within his dream

  And know in their hearts

  The man who was redeemed

  It was 1968 when artist Isaiah Zagar returned with his wife Julia from a three-year stint in the Peace Corps in Peru. Feeling lost and struggling to adjust to life back on U.S. soil, Isaiah suffered a mental breakdown that led him to a suicide attempt and commitment to a psychiatric institution where he lived for five months. It was there, polishing brass and cleaning mirrors, that he saw, in his words, “the art project that was to become my sustenance for the rest of my life.”

  Shortly after he left the hospital, he put aside his dream of becoming a great American painter and turned to mosaic as his medium. Using mirrors and handmade tiles, colorful glass bottles, folk art, and found objects—bicycle wheels and dishes and pots—he covered an entire building, inside and out, with mosaics that sprang not just from his imagination but from the stories of his life and family.