BEGINNINGS
"I've been to both ends of every major interstate in this country. To understand the road at the end? I think the best place to start is the beginning."
In 1986, shortly before I was conceived, my aunt’s life was brutally taken—submitted to a case file likely dusty now, that remains unsolved. My family was given a burden of pain. I was given her name.
Laurie: Still I carry the sounds others made with their mouths when they called on her. I carry them as an homage to those who came before. An homage to bloodlines.
Told across 16 moments on the road in Big Red, my uncle's borrowed Kenworth 660, This Americana Life is a rumination on kin and spirit, fidelity and wrath, blindness, obstinance, the tender bits in each of us, and the pieces that families carry of one another, to one another, and against one another, whether we asked for it or not. It is one story of modern americana—kin without common, except bloodlines and stories we tell each other, like this one.
It is the story of Sasquatch and Adawe, two CB handles on a long drive through the country.
POETRY