Utopia Drive by Erik Reece

Author:Erik Reece
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780374710750
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

A Clearinghouse for Dreams

UTOPIA PARKWAY: QUEENS, NEW YORK

Mile: 001430

I wake again with the roosters, but today I quickly pack my truck and put the community of Twin Oaks in my rearview mirror. I’m cruising along the incredibly straight Zachary Taylor Highway, while to both my right and my left white sails swell with a morning breeze as small boats skim lightly across the beautiful Lake Anna. My spirits are slightly buoyant as well, as they always are when I find myself alone, especially alone and driving, after a few intense days of community. For now, my utopia of solitude is this pickup truck with the wind whipping through the cab. By the time I reach Manassas, I’ve decided to abandon for one day my interstate prohibition. I’ve decided it’s time to cover some ground by shooting up the Northeast Corridor along I-95. But when I reach the stalled traffic on the D.C. Beltway, where nobody is driving in the Ride Share lane because everyone, including me, is driving alone, I’m met once more with the redundancy of it all. It’s as if ghost cars from Twin Oaks and Acorn are zooming along the Ride Share lane like our collective guilty conscience (or, at least, mine), and I remember one of the bumper stickers on a car in Modern Times, the Twin Oaks auto shop. It read MY OTHER CAR ISN’T MINE EITHER.

Actually, the utopian community of Modern Times, forty miles outside New York City, on Long Island, is where I’m soon headed. But for now I can’t shake the problematic nature of my trip, the irreconcilable dilemma that I’m burning a lot of fossil fuel so I can visit this country’s most stable sustainable communities. There’s a good reason the naturalist Donald Culross Peattie called Americans “speed-drunk monkeys.” Today I’m certainly one of them, so to drown out such thoughts of my hypocrisy, I pop in the “Utopia Mix Tape” I made prior to departure. My only real criterion for the tape was that it bear no evidence of John Lennon’s saccharine and overexposed “Imagine.” Beyond that, a general sense that the world could be a better place determined my choices. Once I hit on Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come,” everything else followed from there, into this:

“A Change Is Gonna Come,” Sam Cooke

“Blake’s Jerusalem,” Paul K.

“Saturn,” Stevie Wonder

“People Have the Power,” Patti Smith

“The World Is Turning,” Toots and the Maytals

“After the Gold Rush,” Neil Young

“One,” Mary J. Blige and U2

“Road to Nowhere,” Talking Heads

“Move On Fast,” Yoko Ono

“Zimbabwe,” Bob Marley and the Wailers

“Tir Na Nog,” Van Morrison

“Tree of Life,” Nadirah Shakoor

“Maundering,” Bonnie Prince Billy

“I’d Love to Change the World,” Ten Years After

“First We Take Manhattan,” Leonard Cohen (with ghost track “Democracy”)

“The World Turned Upside Down,” Billy Bragg

That last song marked another early directive that would eventually point the way toward my utopian drive. A couple of years before I bought George Lockwood’s book The New Harmony Movement, I discovered Billy Bragg’s album Life’s a Riot. It’s just Bragg singing over a blustery electric guitar that he plays as if he were sharpening a knife.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.