A Divide from The Heartland

Somewhere in a pastel gingham photo box at my parents’ house is a photo of me in the backyard of my childhood home; young, freshly cut mullet because I started my love affair with scissors before I knew how to spell my own name. From the vantage point I can only now assume was the back porch you can see our shed, the white fence separating the garden from the rest of the yard, a trailer full of canoes, and a piece of the red barn at the back of the property that I can still intimately encounter the five senses with.

Smell the weathered wood.

Hear the breeze blowing outside the door.

See the 1976 Yamaha snowmobile that I spent most pre-teen snow days driving, then throwing snow on the motor to “cool it down.”

Feel the cold of the dirt on the ground, reminisce on how refreshing it felt on hot days.

Taste the curiosity when it came to places I needed to be careful in.

In the garden to the left of the barn were the roots of every vegetable and flower my mother planted. Tomatoes, potatoes, corn, green beans, my understanding of what it felt like to belong to a place. All carefully nursed year after year in my mother’s garden the same way they were in my grandmother’s garden 3 blocks west, with the addition of gourds and rhubarb. Now in my 30s, I faintly remember the tone of her voice as she told me that a stray man, working in town or on her house (either I fail to remember now), asked if he could take some rhubarb from the garden because he couldn’t find any good stalks this season. I can’t remember, these decades later, if she agreed he could take some, but I do remember never being told what rhubarb was and still thinking it sounded repulsive just because of how the word rolled off our tongues.

In my single digit ages, the town I grew up in would always suffice as my world of possibility. How fast could I go down country road 48 without my bike starting to wobble? Should I take the alley or the sidewalk to the café, and would it be open? Surely the lightning flashing over the horizon can’t get me if I’m in town, right? From the E Avenue bridge, you can see miles of fields dotted with generational farmhouses. This is a landscape I’ve come to romanticize in the time of my life I can’t look past my nose and see further than the dimple at the end of it. When the sun sets or bad weather moves in, it’s like watching it happen on a screen. The wind hits you straight on because there are no trees softening the blow. From there, from anywhere, you can see the water tower towns over, waiting for the siren to sound at 12:00 noon and then again at 6:00 PM, only to triple when a tornado is threatening its ground.

I have recently found the world of possibility being bigger than 6 rural blocks, and my hometown of less than 700 seems like a story I keep telling like I’m pitching my first piece of fiction, rather than the first act of my one-woman show. The last time I was in town was for my grandfather’s funeral and there was a piece of me that felt the roots slowly being pulled out from underneath me.

Smell Rabanne Fame.

Hear the rifle salute echo against the open landscape.

See the Busch Light soaking into the ground where his urn was just placed.

Feel the wind cutting clean through me.

Taste the angry orchard that held notes of nothing being the same when you sip it and the aftertaste of everything going back to the way it was.

They’re the same senses I had when I was a kid, but with more at stake. They’re less familiar. Easier to identify. Harder to poeticize. This is simply a symptom of growing up, one could assume, but I can still feel the root of those morals pulling at me as the world continues to feel vast and the feeling of disorder continues to increase. Yet, graciously, there are things that come along and break the routine of me finding myself acutely aware of how intimidating my world at large is. These are things that put me back in the red barn, that put me in the cemetery by the interstate, that put me in the bed of a truck watching the dust from the gravel road coat the car behind me.

The Great Divide by Noah Kahan is the freshest iteration of what it is I love about the Vermont native and his craft. As someone who has been an avid fan since 2018, I can confidently say that “freakish success” doesn’t seem to scratch the surface of what sort of phenomenon this notoriety is, despite those familiar with him not feeling the need to question where the success came from. Noah has always had such an incredibly visual and abstract way of explaining the things the rest of us work so hard to bury within ourselves, our families, and our histories. In my case, there is a frequent impression that he has his thumb on the pulse of what I, myself, didn’t even realize I was trying to process.

In retrospect, the first release felt like standing atop an anticipatory precipice. Similarly to watching the sun rise, watching the timer for your cooking dinner wind down, standing face to face with the person you love without having yet said it, the deep breath after a good cry. I didn’t have an idea of what I was preparing for at the time The Great Divide, the single, released. In a generation of average singles staying 3 minutes or less in time to aid our collective failing attention spans, The Great Divide was an unwavering 5-minute-17-second sample of what was to come from The Great Divide, the record. What I didn’t anticipate was to experience the varying levels of catharsis I did as the releases went on. His construction of these retellings is precisely crafted to give you just enough insight to the feeling, but keeping you at enough of a distance that you have to put the pieces together yourself, thus forcing you to find your own consequences in them.

This album has made me take a step back and identify the pieces of me that relate with growing up in a small town, versus the conscious experience of aging in another. The pieces of me that associate with the responsibility of American Cars, Orbiter, and Headed North are only identifiable because of the aching of Deny Deny Deny, Willing and Able, and All Them Horses. The conviction of this album has re-rooted me in the place I haven’t stepped foot in for 18 months and simultaneously begun to root me to myself. The Great Divide has come along as a validating piece of evidence that we’re always developing, but the foundation of where we’re from plays a huge part in how we continue to grow. It’s something I’ve always identified as neutral, but I’m now finding I may be equally as scared of losing that part and could never verbalize it.

What strikes me differently with this record in comparison to past releases is not just the production value, but the clear intention in the construction of the album from beginning to end. For someone like me who is also creative and also from a small town and is also trying to re-root in the face of an already built forest around me, the conception of this album coming from a very real, unmanufactured place has undoubtedly enhanced in Noah’s success with this release, the preliminary success of his upcoming tour, and the success of continuing to speak to and for the multitude of people who feel similarly. This hardly differs from the past years, but to have the continued notice from masses constantly ready to move on to the next thing, sustaining authentic attention is half the battle, and he continues to do an incredible job of it.

My attention, for certain, has piqued once again. Maybe it’s the novelty of it all, maybe it literally is the feeling of being alive for the first time in a long time. Whatever it is grounds me to the exact moment I need to be in. The morning the album released, I went for a walk, and recalled it to my therapist shortly after, feeling an amendment to the walks I had been on all week. She asked “what made this moment so different?”

Smell the laundry scent in the air from neighboring houses.

Hear the 32 seconds in the middle of End of August that prickles my nervous system.

See the leaves gripping to their branches as the breeze blows through the walkway.

Feel my attention on the bottom of my feet while I take strides with my eyes closed.

Taste the salt coming from my cheeks, and my lips, and the tip of my nose.

I didn’t need a lot of time to answer. “I let myself be in it.”