Four Strong Winds

If a guy's outfit included a sharply pressed Gant shirt, Weegin tassel loafers worn without socks, plaid slacks like old men wear on the golf course and a rolled umbrella that wasn't to be opened in even the harshest downpour, Athens, Georgia was a great place to be in 1966. On the other hand, if you happened to be wearing wide bottom bells with Zig Zag patches on the leg and dimes for buttons on the fly, a pull-over top with a full-chest red Chinese star and long unkempt hair, it mostly sucked. Oh, and at the University of Georgia in 1966 there were 17,000 guys and girls in the rolled umbrella crowd and about 6 of us bell bottoms.

What a revolting development that was, but I guess I brought it on myself. As my remarkably unremarkable high school years came to an end, my parents approached me and said: “Hugh, you're an adult now. Choose a college you like, get accepted, and we'll send you there.” So I applied to seven good schools that shared a common trait: up until that time they had been all-girl schools and now they were going co-ed. I guess ratios of three guys to every 200 girls somehow seemed academically appealing. OK, anatomically appealing, but hey, I was 18! When the parental units found out they got all twisted over it and said: “Hugh, apparently you're not an adult now. We're sending you to the University of Georgia in Athens because your sister lives there and she can keep an eye on you.”

Having grown up in New Jersey in an affluent suburb of NYC, Athens, Georgia may as well have been the moon. I had been riding a bus into the Port Authority terminal to run around in “The Village” for a few years by then and enjoyed listening to Bob Zimmerman croak his heresies and traversing back streets trying to score a matchbox or two of bad Mexican pot. Now I found myself stranded in a room on the top floor of a huge men's dorm that sat almost on top of the UGA football stadium with a roommate from a small town in Idaho who had never been anywhere but there, and here. He was amazed by life off the farm and punctuated each new discovery with a sincere "gosh!" or "golly!". I thought I was in a sensory deprivation tank, 20 years before it was invented.

One Spring day the newspapers reported that smoking dried banana peels produced the same effects as smoking pot, I could be seen trudging back to my room with an entire stalk of bananas over my shoulder. Special order. With my roommate back in Iowa for the holidays, I skinned, dried and smoked seemingly endless banana pelts in hopes of finding some kind of salvation from the hell I had been relegated to. Of course the whole thing had been wishful thinking on my part. Smoking dried banana peels does produce a bit of a high, just as replacing oxygen with any kind of smoke would do. Mostly it was good for a nasty headache.

What's a boy to do? Well there was one thing: a refuge so sweet it was almost sacred. My older brother had bought a new reel-to-reel tape recorder when the Army had him stationed in Hawaii before they sent him to Vietnam and ruined him for the world we had grown up in. He lent that recorder to me. So I had this great reel-to-reel and a padded headset with an extra long cord that snaked across the room to my bed like a curly tailed needle to a junkie's arm. Overhead two long pieces of twine connected the corners in an "X" shape hung with the Playmate fold outs torn from multiple magazines. Underneath my boob canopy the sound was fantastic. All pre-CD left and right channel bliss. Ian and Sylvia had released their “Four Strong Winds” album two years prior and I had it on the reel to reel.

"The song is a melancholy reflection on a failing romantic relationship. The singer expresses a desire for a possible reunion in a new place in the future, but acknowledges the likelihood that the relationship is over."

I feared the loss of that close proximity to the electric sparks of social change that NYC had offered, lamenting the loss of my former life,

Things eventually got better of course and vastly more exciting. I also grew to prefer Neil's version of "Four Srong Winds" as well. But then and there, it was Ian and Sylvia who helped me escape.

Lying on my bunk, a square peg, that album was an opiate that floated me up, out of the physical world. It helped me survive my imprisonment. I traveled the astral plains.

So when Vince Dooley and his Bulldogs played their games in the arena next door and shook my dorm to its roots, I cranked “Four Strong Winds” through my headset and lay back, bulletproof.