The road snakes away and to the left, and in my vision a big field, green as Galway, rolls up almost to the top of a hill. Trees at peak color flood the hills and line this road — I feel awash in reds and oranges and red-yellows. No one is ahead of me, no one behind. Sunlight comes slanting through the gaps in the Berkshires and pop, pop, pop, on either side the colors shiver as if alive.
I am singing Mexican folk songs in my own version of Spanglish, garbling every word — I don’t get the tunes right either, but I don’t care. I am driving alone through country so beautiful it makes me wish I could be immortal. Then Dylan comes on singing “Duquesne Whistle” and sounding like a frog being strangled, but its Dylan and he’s 71 and still writing songs that are better than 99% of everything else out there, and my God, he’s 71 and going on tour, and his singing is joyful, and I think anything is possible in this light and amidst these colors, and Bob Dylan is alive and in this car, driving with me, west from the Berkshires toward a Hudson river that looks like someone took silver trays and laid them out between mountains and then turned on every light in the world full bore.
