I bought Hejira not that long after it came out way back when I was a
teenager in the highlands of Scotland. I was very taken by the album and
played it a lot believing that this group of songs could never be bettered
by anyone. The whole collection really connected with me. But of them
Hejira, the song, connected to most securely. It was late March and we had a
lot of snow lying deep and dry. Where I come from, on the coast, it doesn't
snow a lot and stay. But this year it did. My gran had recently died giving
me my first close encounter with mortality. I was awash with teenage
melancholy - it was great :-)
As was my way - ever the loner at that time - I would take off for walks
into the hills and forest behind our village on the weekend. I can very
clearly recall, trecking one Sunday morning up into the first set of hills
on which a golf course had been built. Under the thick blanket of snow, the
fairways glowed in the early morning and low winter sun as they rolled down
to the village and the sea beyond. The whole landscape bathed in an almost
blue light. The Grampian Mountains blue some fifty miles distant.
>From there I descended to the river crossed, this far up stream, by a small
ironwork bridge built during the second world war. It served to support an
oil pipeline. Somewhere under these hills were buried enormous storage tanks
for oil reserves used to supply the Royal Naval fleet moored back then at
the nearby deep water port of Invergordon.
Across the bridge, I was immediately inside the forest. Dense with Larch
trees, their branches hung heavily with snow. The light wind would carry off
a fine spray of the chyrstalised water into eddies and clouds as I tramped
through the undisturbed whiteness along the river's edge.
'Listen, strains of Benny Goodman coming through the snow and the pinewood
trees.....'
You bet.
Les (London)
