Thoughts Arrive Like Butterflies

I guess everyone knows that music has a way of tripping off old memories. There is something about songs when they become linked to certain places or times, a certain transformative power that is almost scary.

No matter where I am or what I am doing, every time I hear Even Flow by Pearl Jam I am instantly swept away and placed neatly in 1991 Phoenix Arizona.

I am rolling down the Superstition Freeway towards Mesa, squinting into sunshine hardly dimmed by my car's "limo-black" windows. It's August and hot, really hot, heat like you only get in summertime Phoenix (It was 122 degrees there on June 26th, 1990, and I have a tee-shirt to prove it). Just released and instantly a favorite, Even Flow is playing loudly on my stereo and everything just feels...well...it feels right.

"Even flow, thoughts arrive like butterflies
Oh, he don't know, so he chases them away
Someday yet, he'll begin his life again...life again..."

But it wasn't always so.

The landscape in Arizona was so completely unlike anything I grew up with, I might as well have moved to an alien planet. Majestic red buttes and mesas towered above me. Mesquite trees crouched at the side of the freeway, twisted and seeming more dead than alive. Enormous Saguaro cacti, some weighing tons, reached towards the burning sun with strong prickly green arms. The pale blue sky was huge and ever-cloudless. Sunsets were blazing oceans of color, in reds, purples, and oranges that seemed to be a mile deep.

There is no way for me to adequately describe the feeling I had in the spring of 1990, right out of college, moving, alone, two thousand miles away to a place with which I had no previous connection whatsoever. It was traumatic in the extreme. The feeling of isolation was complete and relentless.

I had no friends. I didn't recognize any of the stores or streets. I was used to Farmer Jack, but here they had Safeway. Arbor Drugs was replaced by Drug Emporium, Harmony House by Tower Records. The street signs were big and hung over the road with the traffic lights. I had no idea which neighborhoods were safe and which were not. It got dark very early because Arizona doesn't go on daylight savings time.

There was no email, phone calls home were long distance and very expensive. I wrote many letters, but they aren't very interactive and didn't really help with my loneliness.

I was cut off from everything and everyone I ever knew. I had to do something.

I tried to get into a routine. After work I would go out for a run, unless it was too hot and then I would wait for dark. I watched M*A*S*H reruns at night on my fuzzy black & white 13-inch television and then tried to sleep. It wasn't really living, but it gave me a sense of purpose to be doing something structured.

It took me weeks to come out of survival mode, relax and start to get involved in my new surroundings. I made friends. I explored. By the late summer of 1991 when "Ten" came out, I was married, settled in and knew my way around the city, from the ritzy shops of Scottsdale and Paradise Valley to the wonderful Mexican markets of Guadalupe Road.

So on that fateful day I drove down the freeway, feeling confident and adjusted, Even Flow planted itself in my mind and hasn't let go yet. In fact, I'm pretty sure it's here for good.

This irony was not lost on me though: It took Eddie Vedder's ballad for the homeless man to make me realize that I was finally home.