MY BLOODY VALENTINE: “To Here Knows When”

(Tremolo 12” EP, Creation, 1991)

Green River Road, Halifax, Vermont: a corduroyed gravel stretch tracing the curves of hills and river. The dry weeks of August and September, passing cars and pickups kicked stones into wheel wells, lifted dust that settled on ditch grass. I lived here one year in college, in a basement apartment at a trout farm, with my girlfriend—who, during the fall semester, seemed gradually to inhabit a reality unobservable to anyone else. She interpreted her odd dreams (children with glowing eyes, etc.) as prophesies, stopped talking much to me or anyone else, and then dropped out, but not before her mother, in some sort of cleansing ritual, placed small seashells from a Cape Cod beach in the apartment’s four corners and smudged the rooms with sage. Another friend’s mother died, and that friend, too, dropped out. A third friend confessed one afternoon that she found little to admire beyond Tess of the d’Urbervilles, and that she was contemplating dropping out. Mornings, I watched through the window as my landlord, Mr. Dalrymple—now retired, in matching green workshirt and workpants, his combover undone in the wind—flung handfuls of what seemed to be dog kibble into the old aboveground swimming pool that served as his trout hatchery. The water churned, brown and hysterical. Afternoons I didn’t have classes or work-study in the college bookstore, I’d lie on the couch wearing a pair of red Snoopy sunglasses I’d bought at a yard sale, drinking gin and tonics, and writing so many short stories that my professor nicknamed me Josh Carol Oates.

My car rarely ran reliably, so I lugged my Fender Precision bass uphill two miles to campus for band practice: it was 1992, and Rebecca, Sean, and I called ourselves Uma Thurman’s Death Posse. On clouded or moonless nights, walking home, I followed the mostly invisible road by looking for the strip of slightly lighter darkness between the trees on either side of it. Still, I drove when I could—to get to town, to get away from my girlfriend, to listen to music in solitude. Though I knew how to make a low-tech tape loop—loosen the tiny screws clamping the halves of a cassette; slice the two pieces of leader tape and discard; cut a length of tape to suit your desired loop; splice the ends; reassemble the cassette; record—I opted instead to fill one half of a ninety-minute cassette with a fake loop I created by playing the coda of the first song on My Bloody Valentine’s 1991 EP, pressing pause, replaying it, pressing pause again, and so on, until I had forty-five minutes of seesawing drift. (With iTunes, it’s easy: set “To Here Knows When” to start playing at 4:42.778—the slight bit of staticky fadeout from the actual song is necessary, in my version; select repeat; press play. The track’s blurry, minute-long tail—a bunch of processed guitar tones and chords that might be the best thing Kevin Shields ever recorded, a perfect soundtrack for anything lost—will go on forever, if you let it.)

My tape—agitated and peaceful, confused and confusing—sounded like something that might be the noise clouds make when their movements are sped up in a student film. It matched the rhythm of winds disturbing the unmown pastures along Green River Road, Ames Hill Road, Lucier Road. The rhythm of blood in my ears when, on hands and knees to retrieve a dropped pen, I discovered the tiny whelk my girlfriend’s mother had hidden under my desk. Of a twenty-one-year-old girlfriend sobbing in a dingy stall shower in a dingy basement apartment, and my own worthless, unuttered guilt. Of the freight train the woman I soon found way more interesting than my girlfriend told me she’d jumped one afternoon while we sipped hot tea with cheap whisky from plastic dining-hall mugs and yellow maple leaves spiraled down around us—and of those leaves themselves. Of so many short afternoons I wasted watching the sky outside my windows darken, and contemplating how to describe it. Of my skittery heart, the night during finals when two friends and I crushed ephedrine tablets and stayed up in the music library, playing records and grinding our teeth until dawn.

That afternoon, still humming, I wrote the last eight pages of a final paper on Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, pinned it to my thesis advisor’s door, then drove back to the trout farm and packed up the last of my junk. I’d heard that my former girlfriend had driven to the west coast with some trust-funded guy, and married him, or had a kid with him, or both—no one knew, exactly. Mid-May, and exams had almost ended, but it still felt cool in the hills. Did I miss her, or was I glad she’d vanished from my life? That winter, at one of Uma Thurman’s Death Posse’s three public performances, I’d torn in half a picture of myself and shouted, “Fight the real enemy!” Most of my friends had already dispersed for summer, and I drove home having said few goodbyes. A month or two later, I sold my Subaru to a junk dealer for $ 125, then bought a used Telecaster for the exact same amount. Sean had graduated; Rebecca had transferred. Sometime that summer, I lost the cassette I’d made. But it didn’t matter: my mother had recently sold the house I’d grown up in, and most of my childhood leftovers had been dumpstered. Anyway, every time I heard “To Here Knows When,” my mind let its ending wander on and on down back roads.

Twenty years after I left the trout farm, My Bloody Valentine’s repeated excerpt could have scored the fury of Hurricane Irene’s rains and the floods that followed, temporarily erasing Green River Road from the map. The rebuilt road is, the Brattleboro Reformer reports, now paved.