A 'Ferry' Personal Essay
I wrote a lot this year, just not on substack
Hello it is almost 2026. Yikes. I have been, like many, suffering during these past few weeks. I was a liberal arts major for my undergrad so I never had actual finals, it was all papers and porfolios that were due before finals week. Having to take actual tests on top of final projects blows and I apologize to all the kids having nervous breakdowns in the library that I made fun of when I was an undergrad.
But now the holidays are over and I have a few weeks until my next semester starts. Usually this is when I would do my big bracket roundup of all the books I read this year, but the total came in at a whopping 24 books. Maybe I’ll hit 25 before NewYears.
I finished The Lord of the Rings Trilogy this year (it only took me two years!) and I watched 76 movies and I’ll probably add to that total too before the year is officially out.
I also did a lot of generative writing over the course of my creative nonfiction class this semester. While not all of it is publication-worthy (yet), there are a few pieces/excerpts that I might pursue publication for as personal essays. My big project will likely be a book-length memoir type deal someday, but in the mean time I want to share the lower stakes side project we did. As a class we all picked a song (or piece of media for the less musically inclined amongst us) and wrote a short essay about it. I of course wrote about music, which was also the overall theme of my memoir piece. Every single moment of my life is soundtracked, every moment filled with music, whether it’s WQXR (the classical station out of NYC) at my desk or trying to get Radio Goldfield to come in as I drive south across the state, or the same 35 songs on repeat on Spotify (Hi, 186 plays of Nathaniel Ratefliff and the Nigh Sweats’ “Love Don’t”). I hate silence. If it’s too quiet my brain starts buzzing and I can’t focus. Much love and respect to my classmate who writes in complete and total silence, but I also think they might be a psychopath.
So as my end-of-the-worst-year gift to you, dear reader, my short music essay (haha “short”, mine was twice the length of everyone elses, I like to hear myself talk both irl and on the page, apparently). I changed everyones names, obviously, but if you’re reading it and you think it’s about you, it might just be about you.
Carrying the Case of Gone – A Reflection on Charley Crockett’s “Jamestown Ferry”
If you asked me what music I listened to when I was an undergrad, I would have told you everything except country music and death metal, and even then, I could still name an artist I liked a little bit from each genre. I claimed I hated country music because my mom always said she hated country music, except we listened to a lot of Johnny Cash when I was a kid, and family sing along time always included Waylon & Willie’s “I Can Get Off On You,” with lyrics my late grandfather adapted after my mom was diagnosed with Celiac in 2004 – changing “weed” to “wheat.”
My grandfather was proud of his birthplace, Sugarland, TX, and he was a self-proclaimed cowboy, influenced by the cowboys of the silver screen and the heroes of west on the TV shows he grew up watching. But as far as I was concerned, country music (except Johnny Cash, and Waylon & Willie, and “El Paso” by Marty Robbins), was the worst and I wouldn’t be caught dead listening to it. Instead, I listened to 80’s new wave or 70’s classic rock or late 2000’s indie rock. The vintage pink cowboy boots I had as a kid were just a fashion statement, and I wasn’t interested in watching westerns.
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In 2019, two things happen to alter the trajectory of my life: Orville Peck releases his debut album, Pony (March 22nd) and Ken Burns releases his nine part documentary Country Music (September 15th). My little sister Jamie, four years younger but four hundred times cooler than I’ll ever be, plays me Pony and I am in love. It’s mysterious, and dark, and it’s not like country country music. It’s different. After listening to the album on repeat all summer, we are certain whoever the man behind the mask is, he’s from Northern Nevada, just based on the way he sings about Carson City, or at least lived there for a while (My friend Henry later insists that, like him, Orville Peck is from South Africa, and when Peck reveals just that a few weeks later in an interview about his second album, Bronco, I’m miffed. I wanted him to be from Northern Nevada, like me).
The Ken Burns documentary ruins my life. As I watch it and the snippets of songs and performances play, I realize that there are an awful lot of country music songs I like, and not just the classics. I try to deny it, I try to pretend, but the playlist I named “New Boot Goofin’” on Spotify quickly grows from a few favorites from the documentary soundtrack to 100 songs, and then continues to grow (The playlist has 343 songs as of the writing of this and will likely gain a few more with the release of Orville Peck’s newest EP, Appaloosa, when I get around to listening to it).
Jamie and I get VIP tickets to see Orville Peck at The Ace of Spaces in Sacramento, paying $60 extra apiece to meet the masked man and have him pin deputy sheriff badges to our chests. The concert is scheduled for April 22nd, 2020. It is of course canceled, our tickets refunded at the point of sale. It is not the worst thing that happens to either of us in 2020 (even aside from the pandemic), that award goes to our mother’s cancer diagnosis.
When Orville Peck goes on tour in 2022 for Bronco, we try again. This time the VIP tickets are for the House of Blues in Las Vegas, and we don’t get to meet him, and the exclusive VIP shirts are not finished in time for the first few shows on the tour, including ours, but we get some other merch and we have early entry. We are right on the barricade and Bria Salmena, the guitarist for his tour band, winks at me and Jamie during “C’mon Baby Cry.” Orville Peck himself is a mere six feet away from us. He closes the show with “Take You Back (The Iron Hoof Cattle Call),” lyrics from which I will get tattooed on my thigh a year later.
While we waited for the show to start, amidst the numerous ads for upcoming shows, one stands out - a man in a cowboy hat and brown jacket against a pink backdrop. “Lil’ G.L. Presents: Jukebox Charley.” The man in the hat - Charley Crockett. My sister’s boyfriend at the time wonders aloud if he was any good.
When we get back to my sister’s house after the show, I look him up, and to answer the question posed – Charley Crockett is excellent. Off the album he’s touring, I am immediately drawn to “Make Way for A Better Man,” a Willie Nelson cover. I had been dumped by my situationship a few weeks before and I was trying my best to be nonchalant about the whole thing, even though I felt like my heart had been stomped on. I listen to a few other songs off earlier albums, and I also really like “Jamestown Ferry” off his third album, Lil’ G.L.’s Honky Tonk Jubilee.
As I dive further into Charley Crockett’s (that’s two T’s, like Davey, whom Charley Crockett is actually a descendant of) discography, I find that I love the way he sings about hardship in the songs he writes. “The Valley” and later on Ten Dollar Cowboy “Hard Luck and Circumstances” are on constant repeat. His matter of fact attitude about his history and the struggles he’s endured to get to where he is feel like he’s talking directly to me, even though compared to where he’s been I’ve got mostly champagne problems and only experienced run of the mill childhood poverty trauma.
Despite my mother’s own insistence that she hates country music, I play her Charley Crockett and at first she’s ambivalent. But she listens a little more and the horns in “I Need Your Love” and “I’m Workin’” pull her in. She listens to him while I’m at work, and I get two tickets to his show up at Tahoe. I come home one afternoon to find that she cut the ad out of the paper for that show and she’s taped it up on the wall.
The only time I have ever left a concert before the encore was that Charley Crockett show in Tahoe. The venue is set up like a classic showroom, with tables through out and the “VIP” tables pushed up against the stage. Halfway through the show a woman drunkenly climbs onto the table and then onto the stage, before she is carried off by security. People get antsy as the show continues and more security guards keep appearing, and the people dancing in the aisles are getting a little too close to people sitting at the showroom tables, and my mom is nervous, and the chemo makes her tired, so we leave before the end of the main set. I heard “Jamestown Ferry” and “Make Way For A Better Man,” so I was happy enough, leaving didn’t feel like I was being cheated.
After the concert, my mom sells my uncle Ray on Charley Crockett by sending him “Jamestown Ferry,” and when he comes to visit for her birthday that year, they talk about how the song makes more sense from the perspective of a man. The original, recorded by Tanya Tucker (whom my grandmother used to tailor costumes for when Tanya Tucker lived in Henderson, NV), isn’t a favorite of anyone at the table, but I think the song makes perfect sense from the perspective of a woman. I don’t argue though, because I’ve successfully gotten everyone on the Charley Crockett train. In a family where it feels like the most important currency is music and the cool stuff you can introduce others to, I’m feeling richer than I ever have. Even Fleet Foxes wasn’t this successful with anyone, and that had been the last time I introduced something new to my mom that wasn’t met with mild dismissal.
“Trinity River,” off of 2022’s The Man From Waco is my mom’s favorite song because of the horns. It’s her number one song played in 2023 according to her Spotify wrapped. My mom loves horn sections and horns in music. Her favorite Sturgill Simpson album is A Sailor’s Guide To Earth because it features horns the most prominently (whereas I love Metamodern Sounds in Country Music because I am plagued by melancholia and yearning and that album has lots of both). She claims she only likes Sturgill because he’s not country country, and she likes Charley for the opposite reason – he’s real country, like Johnny and Willie and Waylon. She calls them all by their first names, like they’re her personal friends. My friend Henry does the same thing. It is one of many little connections between the two of them that they never learn about each other. Though she has lots of favorite songs, my mom’s favorite Charley Crockett album is his Live at the Ryman recording because it features the horn player so prominently, just like all his live shows do when he tours.
She gets to see “Trinity River” live when Charley tours again in 2024 for Ten Dollar Cowboy and plays in Reno at the Grand Sierra. Uncle Ray had meant to surprise her, coordinating with me to buy a ticket right behind the ones I had bought. But he ends up telling her before the fact though, when she had calls after a rough round of chemo, telling him that she wasn’t sure it was all worth it. He tells her and she is immediately bolstered by the fact that we’re all going to see him together, and I laugh when she tells me he told her.
Jaime and I have always joked that the only suicide prevention program the youth need is the Pennington Sister Method – buying concert tickets. You can’t kill yourself if you’ve got tickets to whatever concert, you have to get your moneys worth and also don’t you want to see that band? As long as you always have a concert to look forward to, you’ve got a reason to live at least another few months. My mom always scoffed at this joke, but now she was experiencing the effect in real time. I don’t gloat, but I want to.
The show is better this time, and we get to see the whole thing. The folks sitting next to us end up letting Uncle Ray sit next to us instead of behind because the third in their party wasn’t likely to make it, and if he did, he’s fine sitting in my uncle’s seat, as long as my uncle buys him a beer. Uncle Ray buys the couple each a beer for good measure.
In March 2025, while my mom is in the hospital for the last time before she goes on hospice, Charley Crockett releases a re-recording of “Jamestown Ferry,” with a horn solo, like the way it’s performed live. I listen to it as I drive home from my first graduate level class, taken as a graduate special while my application for the University’s MBA program pends. It’s late, after 9pm, so the newly released songs are already on Spotify, since it’s Friday on the east coast. I feel like there is a finality to it, as I listen to it, sitting at the stoplight at McCarran and Sutro. There is a metaphor there, in this woman catching the Jamestown Ferry, leaving behind someone who loves her, only carrying a case of gone. I end up crying so hard I have to pull into the Sonic parking lot, afraid I’m going to wreck. When my mom is released from the hospital, I send her the link while I’m at work, since I don’t think I can listen to it with her without crying.
My mom dies in May of 2025, after a five year battle with colon cancer. She does not want a funeral, she only wants a final toast. I, on behalf of my family, invite a few of her close friends for drinks and wings at Great Basin Brewery. After the official final toast, Uncle Ray and I walk down three doors to O’Skis Pub with my mom’s friend and improv partner Lisette. While we sit on the patio, “Jamestown Ferry” plays, and I opt not to interrupt the conversation and go inside to cry in the bathroom, embarrassed that I had managed to not cry through my toast, but now was having a harder time holding it together just because the song came on. The music is louder in the bathroom but it’s also private, so I take the win where I get it.
Henry invites me up to see him in Washington for the Fourth of July, and because he’s planning on driving me all over the Pacific Northwest, he creates a shared playlist that I immediately add five hours worth of music to. By the time he adds his picks, and I add a few more, the playlist is nine hours. I have not been able to listen to Charley Crockett since my mom died, the connection to her still too raw, too tender. But, Henry also likes Charley, so I add a couple songs. Unnoticed by me, he adds the first recording of “Jamestown Ferry.” When it plays while we’re driving back from Mt. Rainier National Park, I tell him about the new recording, and how it is more like the live performances, and I try my best not to listen to the song as it plays.
One of the activities Henry planned was a day trip to Victoria, B.C. and while we’re on the ferry, I point out that ‘Blackball Ferry’ (the company taking us across the water) and ‘Jamestown Ferry’ have the same number of syllables. He says both out loud, slowly like a kid in elementary school and I tap out each syllable against the railing of the ship. He chuckles and sings the song to me, except instead of catching the Jamestown Ferry, this woman catches the Blackball ferry. I find myself feeling like once again there’s a metaphor there, but this one is more slippery. I try to grab for it, there on that ship as we watch for breaching whales, but it’s out of reach.
Throughout the day I catch him singing “she just caught the blackball ferry.” Sometimes he sings softly to himself, as we wander around the city, and sometimes he sings a little louder to make me smile if he notices that I am caught up in my head, a little lost in the fog of grief that comes and goes. I’m still looking for the metaphor, reaching a hand out in the mist toward some sort of meaning.
Henry sleeps on the ferry ride back, and I go out to watch for whales again. The only thing that breaks the surface of the waves is the ferry. The metaphor feels closer, and I stop trying to grasp for it. I just breathe in the cold, briny air. I look out at the horizon and up at the moon. The idea that maybe I need carry my own case of gone and start anew floats past, carried by the salted air. I let it pass by, instead of trying to clutch at it, the way I’ve tried to clutch at meanings in everything else.
I find that after that trip I can listen to the song without immediately crying. Henry’s new association to the song, the connection I have with him and the song overrides the grief, just enough. When “Jamestown Ferry” plays at the bar my sister takes me to when I come down to Vegas for a Vampire Weekend concert a few months later, it doesn’t feel like a metaphor, and it doesn’t feel like touching a live wire to raw flesh. It feels like a message from the universe, laughing with my sister and her friends, thinking about my mom and about Henry, reminding me that Universe conspires to put me right where I need to be, when I need to be there. All I have to do is carry my case of gone, and the universe will find new ways to fill it with joy.
Thanks for sticking it out this year with me, even though I’ve been pretty absent. We’ll see if I read any more books this year or if I just watch movies, and then maybe next week we’ll do some sort of bracket-y roundup.