Angel from Montgomery

A story from Y2K. Yes, that was a very long time ago now.

[To my gorgeous, brilliant, and impeccably well-mannered paying subscribers (not that the rest of you don’t have your own fine qualities, of course): Audio version of this story and an accompanying song video will arrive in your inbox this weekend…]

The events in today’s story took place 23 years ago, but I was reminded of them earlier this week when the polymath author Ted Gioia, aka “The Honest Broker,” posted a Substack piece entitled “Every Prediction from My Teenage Years Turned Out Wrong.” A contrarian by nature, he’s bothered by the inaccurate prognostications themselves but more so by the cultural fear-mongering around them. Gioia notes that certain dire predictions may fail to come about precisely because people meet the anticipated threat with effective solutions. I don’t agree with all of Gioia’s conclusions here but in general, he makes a great case for avoiding hysteria and extremism in favor of measured responses. Now onto my little tale about small, personal disasters and triumphs on the eve of the new millennium.

There were about twenty of us standing around on the sandy eastern bank of the Rio Grande and smiling sheepishly at each other as our river guides finished loading supplies onto a pontoon boat at the put-in. It was a warm, sunny day in late December 1999. Soon it would be Y2K New Years and if, as had been predicted, airplanes were going to fall out of the skies and entire banking systems were going to go offline and modern computer-dependent civilization as we know it was going to come to an end, we and our fellow river rafters would not hear about it until January 2, 2000, when we returned to our base in Terlingua, Texas. Someone—possibly I—decided to break the awkwardness by going around the group and shaking hands and introducing ourselves. It was all proceeding happily and smoothly until I arrived in front of a moon-faced white woman with long flat hair and small unfocused eyes behind her round rimless glasses. Oh don’t even bother telling me your name, she said to me. I’m just going to call you Chandra, like my college roommate. I laughed in momentary shock, as I always did in such situations. Maybe a few other people chuckled, too. It’s not as if I hadn’t noticed I was the only nonwhite person in the crowd, but there was always one helpful soul who found it important to remind me and everyone else of the fact. She was Peggy and her gangly, pimple-faced husband was Paul; they were biology professors at some university in Tennessee. They also claimed to be improv comedians and offered some shtick about how they were so close as a couple that they (she said:) finished each other’s (he said:) sentences. Later they both proved themselves to be insufferable know-it-alls. In an amiable crowd of tourists from Texas, California, Maryland, and New York, and river guides from Oregon, Idaho, and New Mexico, Peggy and Paul would turn out to be the only people instinctively, universally loathed. I felt bad for them, a little.

Patrick and I were okay for the time being. Back home I was playing a lot of music as wanted by me, and pursuing pregnancy as wanted by both of us, theoretically, even if he was dead sure and I was still struggling with ambivalence. We’d flown into El Paso, met up with some of Patrick’s friends from the San Francisco Bay Area, and driven a huge rented Lincoln Continental about five hours through the desert, down to the edge of Big Bend National Park. After the blazing orange-purple sunset subsided, I looked out the broad windshield and saw the dark indigo sky festooned with stars, an absurd profligacy of light sources signaling us from millennia ago, and I felt myself both contract into the smallness of my one little life and expand infinitely into the fabric of everything that ever was and ever will be. It was peace and it was mine for just a moment. The American Southwest, the flat endless desert under the infinite heavens, had always been the only place I could indulge in a little woo-woo without rolling my eyes at myself.

We spent four days and three nights rafting or kayaking down the gentle rapids of the Rio Grande, taking meal breaks to eat crackers and hummus, sliced fruit, steaks and potatoes and green beans, all accompanied with wine. I generally hated camping, but I found I didn’t mind sleeping in a tent on the clean broad sand of the river banks with stumpy cactuses and mountain sage and giant ferns all around us, or waking up early to pick my way across a dry pebbled expanse to the helpful port-a-potty with a real toilet seat on top of it, set off at a discreet distance from the center at camp. At nightfall the tall canyon walls on either side of the river would block out most of the light from stars and moon, plunging us all into a natural dungeon of deep darkness. But somehow I was never scared, not the way I could be in the dank, snake-and-insect-and-critter-filled woods of the Northeast. Here there was always a welcome transparency on the landscape and a lightness in the air. The lack of humidity felt like an invitation to breathe easy. One night we were half-woken by the sound of wild horses galloping through camp, like a visitation from desert demigods on chariots. 

The Texas musician Butch Hancock was with us and had been scheduled to perform and lead sing-alongs every night, but he had the flu. Poor guy would sit miserably at the back of the supply boat wrapped in blankets during the day and disappear into his tent in the early evenings. Instead, several of the guides played guitar and encouraged us to come up with song ideas to join in together. We encircled the campfire on canvas camp chairs, with our beers and plastic wine glasses in hand, and warbled amiably through “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” “King of the Road,” “Wichita Lineman.”

Big Bend at night. Photo by David Morris on Unsplash

Peggy the moon-faced bigot seemed like she was a part of us but I could see her holding herself aloof, inventing a spotlight for herself. Earlier she had announced that she was also a trained opera singer, and now she had seated herself on a low rock close to the fire, legs tucked prettily to the side, back erect, head tilted up and eyes closed in rapturous concentration as she made a deliberate show of her songstress sensitivity. Her voice was a bit louder than everyone else’s and she held out the ends of phrases just a beat or two longer. She insisted on finishing every song on a high harmony note of her own choosing. I recognized what she was doing because I’d seen this kind of uninvited performance a million times before from diva types, and had occasionally stooped to its desperate ploys myself. I’d come to think of it as the I want you to look at me but don’t want to admit it show.

It happened that my birthday was the third day of the trip, and either I had mentioned it or the staff was already aware based on our application forms. Somehow the guides used their simple camp stove to bake me a delicious chocolate cake with chocolate frosting, better than ones I’d had in fancy restaurants—or maybe it was just the contrast of location and taste that seemed so wide. Everyone sang “Happy Birthday” and from their booze-fueled gusto you’d have never guessed I’d only met these people two days earlier. John, a middle-aged, weather-beaten guide with a drooping mustache, said, Let’s hear a song from the birthday girl. Peggy flinched and shot me a subtly hostile look. John was seated just to her right and I could tell that he’d noticed it too. 

What song to choose? My current favorites were jazz standards, not the right repertoire for this crowd, this setting. But I had always loved the John Prine song “Angel from Montgomery,” made famous by Bonnie Raitt. I announced my choice and chatted with John about the right key and the chord changes. Once he had sufficiently remembered the song form, he urged me to stand up.

I went into myself for a moment to reach the sound I wanted, and then let the air move out of my mouth and into the beautiful night air. I knew this song well, was maybe a bit too indebted to Bonnie Raitt’s phrasing and note choices, but I knew this crowd would love an accurate cover, and not care if I hadn’t created some new personal interpretation of it. This wasn’t a jazz audience, after all. I didn’t need to improvise to impress. When I was done, I could tell that the ringing applause and hoot-hollering from these people were more than obligatory. Afterwards, several individuals took me aside to gush, to ask if I was a professional, if I ever intended to make a CD. It was almost seven years before I’d have the nerve to do so, and their validation landed hard. Had Patrick noticed? Would this audience response make him a bit more comfortable with my growing if still unformed professional music ambitions?

I noticed that Peggy, standing at a short distance, had witnessed the approbation I’d received and was keeping her eyes averted. 

Two nights later was New Years Eve. In front of a tremendous bonfire, we drank champagne, blew into noisemakers, and lit sparklers and bottle rockets. Days earlier the guides had warned us there’d be a “talent contest” and that we should each prepare something. One young man recited “The Ballad of Casey Jones” from memory, and another borrowed a guide’s guitar and played some classic bar sing-alongs for us all to join, “American Pie,” “Me and Bobby McGee,” “Margaritaville.” Peggy and Paul recruited a reluctant group of people who had nothing else to offer and made them go through the painful motions of two or three improv games. No one laughed. Patrick and one of our Californian friends had worked out a little juggling routine with smooth river rocks, although before they had a chance to go on, two young guides, an adorable boyfriend and girlfriend about as good-looking as TV actors, wowed the crowd by juggling lit torches. My husband and his co-juggler saw that and decided not to go on at all.

But earlier, while he’d been practicing, I’d watched Patrick goofing around in the light of the fire and felt this strange but not unpleasant doubleness about him. I loved him, of this I was sure. He was his own man. He was an individual alone, as was I. A part and apart. Back in middle school I had marveled to learn that the word “cleave” had two opposite meanings, and now all these years later I finally understood how the world itself contained both possibilities at the very same moment. I was cleaved from my beloved best friend even as I cleaved to him. I was a part of this mostly pleasant crowd of new and temporary riverside friends even as I held myself apart from them: I sang the bar songs with everyone, blended into the crowd sound the way Peggy did not care to do, and then when invited, I sang my solos. I did not know if my marriage would survive but Patrick and I, each of us and both of us, surely, would eventually figure out how to thrive. For my “talent contest” selection I decided to sing the Cole Porter tune “It’s De-Lovely,” and it went over well enough, although didn’t hit the same communal chord as the more familiar tune I’d chosen a few days earlier. 

It was shortly after that when Peggy decided to fight her way to the top. She placed a camp chair near the center of the “stage” area and recruited stone-faced, skeptical guide John to sit in it. She began with an overly long explanatory introduction—almost always a bad sign. Peggy was going to give us O mio babbino caro, the famous Puccini aria, and John was meant to be the titular “beloved father” to whom she’d address her melodic supplication. Peggy faced John at one-quarter like a good stage actor never forgetting where the audience is, and sang right toward his face, as blank as any poker player’s. 

Now I am not one to judge the quality of a highly trained singer performing art music. From what I could tell, Peggy sounded just fine, if you liked this sort of thing. Her gestures theatrical, her bearing confident, her voice full of vibrato and dramatic yearning and….loudness. That was what you noticed most of all. She was able to sing very, very loudly, especially when she went up to hit the famous high note in the second phrase.

And just at that moment, from out there in the semi-hidden kitchen area where some of the guides were busy cleaning up after dinner, the voice of one of our young rugged river-runners, the one who couldn’t play guitar but was adept at telling obscene jokes, could be heard yelling with equally loud gusto: WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT????

Peggy either didn’t hear it or pretended not to, plowing on with her song. 

John looked down at his feet so as not to burst out laughing.

The rest of us tried also to muffle our hysteria. 

Peggy kept singing all the way to the end. Everyone clapped politely, and with a certain measure of relief. 

Soon after that, when it was clear there were no more displays of talent forthcoming, the man who’d recited Casey Jones earlier in the evening spoke up in an authoritative voice, looking at me and all around the fire at each person, except, perhaps, for Peggy. He said, Last night we heard one of the most beautiful renditions of one of the most beautiful songs. Then he asked me to sing “Angel from Montgomery” again. I obliged, and the applause and hollering were even louder and warmer than the several days before.

My nemesis was somewhere out of sight and we wouldn’t exchange so much as a glance or single word the next day, the last of the trip. I wanted to feel a little bad for Peggy but it was difficult. She’d done almost nothing to endear herself to any one of us, and the more we disliked her, the harder she tried. 

But Peggy was not alone in her yearning to be loved. I was just slicker than she was. I had a better nose for social context and better skills at hiding my own greed for an audience. We were in many ways the same. And I wondered, mildly, whether I was fooling myself to think that I could pursue these growing musical ambitions of mine without becoming as blatantly, obnoxiously needy as this despised woman whom nobody wanted to hear sing.

In fact, I proved it the very next day, when we’d made our way back to Terlingua and got dinner with a subset of our group at a Tex-Mex place. We were all laughing again about the absurd Opera in the Woods moment, and somehow I found a way to sneak in the fact that river guide John had taken me aside late in the evening to tell me I’d won the talent contest. 

I cringe with shame to remember this now. It had been obvious enough at the moment that my second performance of “Angel from Montgomery” was a high point on New Year’s Eve. Yet I could not stop myself from letting it be known that a fake judge in a fake contest had singled me out. And so a bit later, one of Patrick’s California friends looked away from me and said to the table at large, “Oh yeah, John told me I won the prize for Neatest Camper” and got everyone to laugh. Including me. I was abashed but I could still be a good sport. 

Later that night Patrick and I got back to our hotel room, turned on CNN, and were simultaneously relieved and disappointed to learn that the world had not ended. In fact, almost nothing had happened at all. In terms of disaster-story entertainment value, Y2K had been a total bust.

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