I found myself driving to work every day on a crowded and dangerous piece of California freeway. The sense impressions were heat, the smell of gasoline, and the blinding glint of sunlight reflecting off chrome. Then I found the back road. It took longer to get there, but I arrived refreshed, nourished. The sense impressions were stopping the car in a dewy morning meadow to listen to the contrapuntal melodies of meadow larks, glimpsing a fox dashing across a field with a mouthful of pheasant, circling hawks, the smell of alder, the fluff of cottonwood, and in the fall after the first rain, dozens of tarantulas crawling out of the thirsty hills to sun themselves on the wet pavement. These tarantulas creeped me out most wonderfully. I wrote this song for them:
Tarantula moves in the hills again
All the senses are attentive
Buckeye dancing in the summer wind
Time to capture lost incentive
So many roads so many chances
So many ways to rise above
Lord, forgive these furtive glances
Guide me through these brief romances
Love, love, love
Tarantula pauses in an open field
Big moon rises high above her
Secret causes in a spider sealed
Some try to kill her, some to love her
Sometimes this heart gets filled with sorrow
Sometimes it strives to rise above
Rise and soar o’er field and furrow
Farmer’s hope and foxes’ hollow
Love, love, love
One day these hills will break their silence
Cast off these highways, tell it all
Then He will come to regain His brilliance
Love’s true prize as kingdoms rise and fall
Tarantula moves in the hills again
All the senses are attentive
Buckeye dancing in the summer wind
Time to capture lost incentive
Lord, ordain these many chances
Give me strength to rise above
Show this heart its vast expanses
For the hour the mountain dances
Love, love, love.
—Jim Nail