Music That Moves ME.
In the months following my return home from Vietnam in the summer of 1969 I found myself increasingly disquieted by the events of the war and, if I may say, by the kind of reception that I think we all received when we got back. slowly, against my will, I became embittered and alienated.
In an effort to understand the war and indeed the way the world worked I decided to go out to the coast and enroll at the University of California at Berkeley and major in International Relations.
Shortly after arriving there I met a young woman from southern California. We immediately fell into each others lives and for the next two years we were very happy indeed. One spring day at the end of the school year she stunned me and said, “I’m leaving California. I’m going back east to spend the summer on my grandmother’s farm in Connecticut.” Without missing a beat I said, “I want to come with you.” she looked at me for a long time and then she said, “Ok, let’s go.” the school year ended, she flew out and a week later I had my motorcycle tuned up and ready to ride. The next day I got up at 4 am, climbed the bike up on to highway 80, dumped the throttle and headed east at 80 mph with 3,000 miles of interstate and the whole summer ahead of me.
Two or three days later I awoke on the desert floor at first light. I rolled up my sleeping bag and tiptoed the bike back to the highway to begin the day’s run. An hour or so later I came to a slight rise in the road and just as I reached the crest I had to catch my breath. Stretched out there below me I looked down on a valley perhaps 150 miles across and there, just at that moment, the first rays of the sun were coming over the horizon directly in front of me from far across the other side of the valley. Almost involuntarily I heard myself say, in the words of the Arlo Guthrie song, “The City of New Orleans” that was popular at the time, “Good morning, America, how are you? I say don’t you know me I’m your native son?”
That summer in the Connecticut Berkshires flew by. The leaves turned and the fall came on as it always does and we went back to the coast. The following spring at graduation we were married.
That young woman and I have now been married for 44 years. We have two grown daughters each one of whom has an advanced degree and a successful professional career. We also now have a three-year-old granddaughter.
When I hear that Arlo Guthrie song now, as I occasionally do, I’m always taken back to that one surpassing moment when I crested that rise and looked down at the valley below. It was a moment when everything changed for me — I was home from Vietnam and still alive, I was 23 and freer than free and in love with a beautiful woman that loved me. It has become for me much like John Steinbeck’s, “The Pearl.”
Where everything that happens is reckoned as before or after this one fulcrum in time, this one moment when both literally and figuratively, as I raced down to the valley floor, Vietnam receded behind me and I was able once again to reconnect with my country. “I say don’t you know me? I’m your native son.”
My name is James Appleton. My wife and I live on and operate a small family farm west of Bangor and this is music that moves me.