Hwy 61

North and South

Think about this list:
                      Rte. 66, Pacific Coast Hwy 101, California Rte. 1, 

Blue Ridge Pkwy., Green River Pkwy

These are historic roads along beautiful sights. We have traveled along 101 and 1 here in California. They curve along the Pacific Coast. Indescribable.   

We drove on 66 briefly, since it is now in short stretches and bits. Ate at Road Kill Cafe, Rte. 66, Seligman, AZ. Great French fries.

Blue Ridge and Green River Pkwys are beautiful beyond description, as the YouTube videos show. God is amazing.

So, what is this post all about? What Hwy didn't make the cut?

Hwy 61, of course. By Bob Dylan.

How to describe this song is way beyond me.  There are five stanzas. Each one describes some sort of problem resolved on Hwy 61. Or, maybe it isn't about anything, because Dylan's style is a swirl of images and rhythms? Or, maybe Dylan was just playing with words, all pouring out from his crazy great brain?

Hwy 61 travels from Minnesota (or beyond into Canada) in a winding way to New Orleans. The heart of blues strolled along the Mississippi South to North, stopping off to share the music's beauty and rhythm.

So, here is Bob Dylan:

YouTube, about 3 minutes

Highway 61

Check out the lyrics at this site. They are brilliant.  

Song of the Soil: Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman has been called “The Father of Free-Verse”, as a writer in the mid-1850s who was pulling away from traditional rhyming poetry.  So very talented, Whitman was a teacher, a government employee, journalist, and a volunteer nurse during the Civil War.

Walt Whitman was connected to the earth, the soil, and he wrote passionately about its beauty, as well as its cycles of life and death.  Toward the end of his life, he moved to Laurel Springs, New Jersey, which he called “the prettiest lake in: America or Europe.”

I took these photos in Bremgarten bie Bern, Switzerland, when I visited my new grandson (and his parents) in 2012.  The photos reminded me of Walt Whitman’s poetry.

One day....

...and then the next.

A song of the grass and fields!

A song of the soil, and the good green grass!

A song no more of the city streets,

A song of the soil of the fields.

A song with the smell of sun-dried hay, where the nimble pitchers

        
             handle the pitch-fork,

A song tasting of new wheat, and of fresh-husk’d maize.

Please notice the next field over is green and tasseled with stalks of corn.