Tolono by Skateboard

I first heard U. "Utah" (Bruce) Phillips at The Town Crier Cafe, a coffeehouse located in the tiny hamlet of Beekman in upstate New York, a small out-of-the-way place that became a hit despite its remote location. Phillips ("I come from Utah, where the men are men and the sheep are nervous.") was a scraggly folksinger who seemed to know every union song there ever was, in addition to many standards. Wabash Cannonball was one of the standards he did, but with a twist. He sang about being on the final run of the Cannonball, along with every other folksinger (and poet and writer, if I remember) in existence, but he didn't take it all the way to the end. He got off somewhere in the middle, and I bet his little spiel about that day is on one of his albums, probably the one I mean to get some day.

He wrote a song about that day -- Tolono, I believe -- and appended it to Wabash Cannonball. So naturally, after a night of dreaming about cars and driving in the fog to the mountains of Tennessee - the misnamed Chattanooga mountains, by the way -- I woke up with "Tolono" going through my head. There's no round ticket, you're on the final run... this Cannonball is never comin' back. It's a sad song, as are songs about things that are gone, but one wonders if songs about other things that became obsolete would be sad. Is there a song about the Corvair? The turntable? Big, vacuum tube radios? Black-and-white television? Probably not.

So I found myself, last night, with a group of people. That happens frequently, and I rarely remember who any of the people are. And for natural reasons -- I'm not a leader, I'm more of a behind-the-scenes inciter -- I wound up following these people as they got into their cars and headed north, up a two-lane road that went through small towns and rural areas. My car was... in a state of repair. It seemed to be more of a Flintstones car, in that I had to run alongside while holding on to something that seems, as I recall, to have been a pair of handlebars. The good news is that I was able to go pretty fast. Forty miles per hour, maybe. The bad news is that this wasn't good enough to keep up with the gang. And then there was The Fog.

Everybody else on the planet seems to drive fairly fast through fog. Not me. I read about those hundred-car accidents during the fog, and I figure that if I can't see what's in front of me, I'm likely to hit it. So I slowed down, even though everyone else maintained their frenetic pace. And since I hate driving in the fog, and since I seemed to have hit a little town (one that looked suspiciously like Fishkill, N.Y.) I woke up. To the tune of Tolono. Tomorrow she'll just be another memory, and an echo down a rusty railroad track...

Update: It seems the Town Crier Cafe is still there, albeit in a different (bigger, spiffier) location. I trust it's still run by Phil Ciganer. I still have my membership card -- number 056 or so -- from thirty years ago.