Interview With The Phantom Engineer

Relax Inn
Memphis, Tennessee

Floating like a restless, bemused surfer in the south & waiting for more waves... highway boredom & gently propelled locomotion... looking out the corner of my eye for the ghost of Casey Jones in a spectral locomotive, Elvis riding shotgun on the mystery train...

Entering Kentucky, we moved across slow, monumental hills. We passed a sign that told us we were entering Trimble County, which - to me - couldn't possibly sound more idyllic. Moments later, another sign welcomed us to Henry County. Everything has a soft green edge to it, unlike the sharply cut industrial browns of Ohio. The segue between states is pretty abrupt. It's as if a band started playing one song in the middle of another, reverted to the first momentarily, and then headed full throttle back into the second.

Southern Ohio is mostly edges with a few hills and lush valleys towards the very end. The Ohio River introduces the new theme to the picture: overflowing hillsides and blue skies. Immediately following the entrance into Kentucky is a fairly typical sprawl, filled with strip malls and gas stations. This continues sporadically until I-71 splits with 75. After that, it's all green again, though only moderately different from parts of eastern Ohio.

The difference is a subtle rise and fall in the landscape -- like a bay gradually increasing from a glassy stillness to cresting white caps. The waves increase into huge breakers and then back to calm for a while, while the driver floats in the middle, waiting for the next swell to surf. After a while at a steady speed, it felt like we were staying in one place - floating in a warm sea, treading water - and the landscape was moving around us. By nightfall, we were drifting on the current, the unlit highway an inky black around us.

Occasionally, we would pass other drivers, who seemed to be set in their own states of drift. The average speed down here is higher than up north, somewhere between 70 and 80 miles per hour, but it barely seems it. The speeds simply don't have the same edge. It's not so much laid back as just plain accepted. No one seems to be really worried about shooting along at a speed of 80 or higher. There's no frenzied movement when someone decides to pass someone else going upwards of 90 or a hundred. Drivers just drift easily aside, pushed by the current, and wait.

Most of the day was spent in this zone. As things changed around us, I watched as my mythic, timeless south staggered into reality, trapped like a ghost in the early days of the 21st century. We came upon the Nashville skyline at sunset. We passed the Casey Jones House and Museum. Towns and song lyrics flashed through my head: "When I get back to Memphis, there'll be one less man alive..." "Blue moon of Kentucky, keep on shinin'..." "I got a women in Jackson, I ain't gonna say her name..." Countless others surfaced and sank again.

It's hard to reconcile the two universes. Did the one present in these songs ever really exist? I'd be hard-pressed to decide in either direction. Right now, I'm stationed in a motel room outside of Memphis, being cooled by a faulty air conditioner and lying on a bedspread punctuated by occasional cigarette burns. Is this the same Memphis? It's certainly mutated in the last century, so that the details of the song world don't quite exist anymore in any tangible form. But, who's to say that the same lowdown travelers and highwaymen haven't found new homes?

In ambient music, the specifics of a piece - the audible details: patterns, drum beats, basslines, etc. - can completely change from the beginning to the end while the color and feel remain precisely the same. I wouldn't go so far as to say that the world outside this motel room feels exactly the same as old, strange America embodied on Harry Smith's "Anthology of American Folk Music", but there's a definite genetic connection.

The translation from personal myth to objective reality is always a rough one, and has the potential to be quite dangerous to the psyche if the myth is built up enough. I can't say I'm too disappointed with what I saw today. More, I'm fairly confident in thinking that our visit to Graceland tomorrow doesn't have the potential to shatter too many illusions. Right now, I'm still very much in the variable stage of the game. All I know about the place, about Elvis, are vague sketches picked up in pieces over the years.

I'm sure anything I find will only feed the myth. Graceland is a pickled slice of strange Americana -- the preserved palace of a genuine icon, perhaps the most recent American to gain such status. Elvis Presley existed on this planet a little bit less than 20 years ago. He was real and so, apparently, was everything that surrounded him. Tomorrow, it will be there for me in all of its glory. We didn't stop at the Casey Jones house today (perhaps we will tomorrow), but I doubt his heirs realized his historical and mythical importance when he died. Graceland, I hope, will be as if someone took a Polaroid of that old America.

Jesse Jarnow is on the lam from authorities in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He can be reached at jesse.jarnow@oberlin.edu or by way of his home page.