Still Aways Away

On Trains, Writing, and Early 80s Power Pop

You were a kid back then, in the early 1980s, maybe you had some rock posters, Queen and AC/DC possibly, and your folks listened to that old bluegrass and hummed hymns after church on Sundays. The territory of your childhood seemed old, dark, inscrutable and therefore forgettable. It was something to resist. You flipped on the college radio station when your tapes got worn down to nothing and snapped. One day you put the headphones on and dialed it in, and on came “Driver 8.” You’d heard REM before; one of the kids you bummed cigarettes from in the school’s courtyard had the Murmur album cover on a t-shirt, that field of dormant kudzu draped on the trees like a shroud, all gothic-like. You’d coveted that look, man, though you weren’t sure about the band. You’d heard “Radio Free Europe,” and who the hell cared about Europe?

But “Driver 8,” that was different. You knew it was different the first time you heard it. You could see it:

I saw a treehouse on the outskirts of the farm.

The power lines have floaters so the airplanes won’t get snagged.

The bells are ringing through the town again.

Children look up, all they hear is sky-blue bells ringing.

And you thought, This was unexpected. Here was the sound of the town, your little grease skid by the tracks with its churches and crossings and vines. Here was the way it looked. No: here was the way it looked after you’d looked, smelled and heard it ten-thousand times, after you’d developed the learned synesthesia of a child given only a limited set of things from which to build something new of the world: Children look up, all they hear is sky-blue bells ringing. And of course there was a treehouse on the outskirts of the farm. If you look at the same thing the same way every day of your life, you go mad eventually, and so you built that treehouse as high as you could in the scarred walnut tree because the higher you got the more the town looked like a painting and the old men at the gas station looked like elves, dwarves, and wizards.

Later on you came to see the pain in the face of Driver 8 looking up at airplanes and heard the melancholy in He piloted this song in a plane like that one/She is selling faith on the Go Tell Crusade. You remembered how those men had seemed very old, tired, and sunburned. You had become old yourself.

From the very beginning the thing that most shocked you about the song was that someone had made art from all that, wrapped up in elliptical, mysterious E minor arpeggios that brought it all around to that most basic aposiopesis: We can reach our destination. We’re still a ways away. But it’s still a ways away. It’s always a ways a way, on and on, trailing off down the tracks, and if you were a sensitive child with antennae tuned to the right frequencies of the outer world, it was possible to read this so that still a ways away meant that you were on the right track and someday you’d be invited to take a break and sleep.

The song is full of material pulled out of observed life and claimed for art. There’s fieldwork in the song. The Southern Crescent, now called just the Crescent, was a passenger train linking New York to New Orleans by way of travel through the Southern Piedmont and the little towns of Georgia where Michael Stipe might have watched it roll. There really was, and still is, a Go Tell Crusade, still saving souls for Christ, and they really do put orange ball floaters on power lines so they’re easy to see from aircraft. Any child growing up in a small Southern town can testify to the sounds of the bells, which would be both the bells at the train crossings and the bells in the steeples of the churches calling you home or declaring your soul-peril, depending on where you stood at the moment the blue-sky bells rang. It isn’t only metaphorical to point out that out the window of the engine it’s possible to see that the fields are divided and the walls are built of stone, one by one. These are the things you see if you pay attention.

The trick is to write it down. It has been a revelation to me that you could do this, or even should do this, for the modest and overlooked things out of which we build our treehouses, figuratively speaking.

Here at the Center for Documentary Studies we often get asked what we mean by documentary writing. One of the last things the broad field of nonfiction needs is another subcategory, or a new name for an old category, or a made-up name for a kind of writing that doesn’t exist but, in our drunken daydreams, would be very, very cool. But we think documentary writing is a sufficiently real and necessary category of nonfiction writing, and it deserves its own term.

At first, documentary writing got coined at CDS as a way of describing a writing course offered alongside courses in documentary film, documentary photography, and documentary audio. This was instinct and habit. We use the word documentary a lot around here and put it on books, flyers, posters, blogs, and bumperstickers. Here at the center, our documentarians include filmmakers, photographers, audio artists, editors, designers, writers, folklorists, lawyers, curators, painters, activists, sociologists, playwrights, historians, and farmers. The thing all these people have in common is that they conduct or support fieldwork.

Fieldwork is what distinguishes “documentary writing” from the broader categories of “creative nonfiction” and, sadly, quite a lot of “journalism.” By fieldwork we mean spending significant periods of time observing, talking with, and sometimes living among the people we’re writing about. That documentary writer brings back, documented, news of the world. The documentary writer’s attention is turned outward, engaged with stories that might involve the writer but aren’t primarily about the writer. The documentary writer tries to make art, deliberately, embracing all that the term implies, from this outward engagement with the closely observed world. The documentary writer doesn’t think “fact” and “art” are exclusive terms. The first task of the documentary writer is discovery and documentation, the second task is form. The documentary writing process is fundamentally open to integration of other media, but the story itself always dictates the form. Documentary writers think of themselves as storytellers first, writers/filmmakers/photographers/recorders second.

Sometimes this means a story told as a work of narrative nonfiction only, and sometimes it means a story that integrates audio and moving image. Sometimes it will mean fiction, and sometimes it will mean writing a song.

It’s hard for me to describe, fully, what “Driver 8” and the album Fables of the Reconstruction meant to me as teenager. I think it’s a great song off an uneven album, but that hardly matters to me anymore. The song is a place and a time and a history now. No song could bear all that I’ve laid upon it. I no longer separate my feelings about the song from my ideas about the Southern Crescent, of small railroad towns in the South, of the culture and architecture of small towns, of Protestant revivalism, of what a field of row crops looks like when it’s looking thin, and what that means not only for the farmer but for the whole town. This is the new synesthesia of my middle age.

If documentary writing is worth anything (let alone documentarism, generally), it will — like James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, or Junot Diaz’s novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, or Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, or James Lord’s A Giacometti Portrait — take up the rough, uneven, and occasionally irreconcilable facts of our lives and, stone by stone, build something true and new that we can look at for another ten-thousand days without going mad.

Driver 8

(by Stipe, Buck, Berry and Mills)

The walls are built up stone by stone,

The fields divided one by one.

And the train conductor says,

Take a break, Driver 8. Driver 8, take a break,

We’ve been on this shift too long.

And the train conductor says,

Take a break, Driver 8. Driver 8, take a break,

We can reach our destination.

We’re still a ways away.

But it’s still a ways away.

I saw a treehouse on the outskirts of the farm.

The power lines have floaters so the airplanes won’t get snagged.

The bells are ringing through the town again.

Children look up, all they hear is sky-blue bells ringing.

And the train conductor says,

Take a break, Driver 8. Driver 8, take a break,

We can reach our destination.

We’re still a ways away.

But it’s still a ways away.

But we’re still a ways away.

But it’s still a ways away.

The way to shield the hated heat,

The way to put myself to sleep.

The way to shield the hated heat,

The way to put myself, my children, to sleep.

He piloted this song in a plane like that one,

She is selling faith on the Go Tell Crusade.

Locomotive 8, Southern Crescent hear the bells ring again,

The fields of wheat is looking thin.

And the train conductor says,

Take a break, Driver 8. Driver 8, take a break,

We’ve been on this shift too long.

And the train conductor says,

Take a break, Driver 8. Driver 8, take a break,

We can reach our destination.

We’re still a ways away.

But it’s still a ways away.

But we’re still a ways away.

But it’s still a ways away.