Casually avoiding death – part two

BY HOWE GELB

Joby and I were best friends as boys. His Air Force dad had passed away before I met him, at a time when my dad was unavailable because of divorce.

We would hang out on the second cement support that we would stupidly call ‘the 2nd pier’, and it also had no guard rails. The drop was sheer and unforgiving if you fell off.

We would learn to smoke up there. Attempt to drink. Figure out how to fight. And each of us would fish from that insane height.

We lived on that bridge and casually avoided death daily.

One snow day, when school was cancelled, Joby and I got his dad’s rifles and walked the bridge with them, to shoot ‘em in the woods across the river where no one lived.

The two of us carrying three rifles – 30-30, 30-06, and a 12 gauge – across the slippery ties piled up with a foot of snow like it was a good idea, instead of a sensationally stupid one. The dice were ice.

The bridge spanned half a mile long, and before we would get to the end that day with arms full of heavy metal weaponry and slick traverse, we spied a train on the other side coming down the tracks to turn onto our bridge.

We looked at each other without saying a word and then ran towards it to get off in time. I don’t know how we survived that day either, but we slid down the snowy embankment with the guns just before the train hit the bridge. We lit up a Marlboro and loaded up the rifles to shoot at various trees.

We learned how to handle the kick of each weapon. Then back home we went.

A snow day survived.

During the summer months, we would make molotov cocktails from Joby’s lawnmower gas supply, and toss ‘em against the cement pilings of the railroad trestle behind his house.

That was our fireworks; exploding balls of fire. Pretty cool, we thought. And then, we would sneak into the rows of corn and tomatoes of the farm just beyond the trestle and steal some to cook up on the grill.

Those kids unlucky to get caught had their butts peppered with the farmer’s salt-pellet shotgun. We managed to avoid that seasoning.

Joby would go on to deer hunt – a big deal in Pennsylvania, like rodeo week in Tucson – and I would pop over to help him dress it at his place. I didn’t take to hunting, and, instead, became surprisingly proficient with my bow and reel fishing the river.

Then, in June of 1972, when we were 15, the river came knocking at our doors. Six feet over our roof.

The neighborhood was devastated.

Our neighbor’s home was lifted up and tossed into their neighbor’s house. The house across the street from ours, which sat in front of the long dike built to hold the river back in such unlikely events, sunk into the ground so that the roof was at ground level. (You can see a blurry photo of that on the inner sleeve of Giant Sand’s ‘Storm’ album.)

Our house, like the rest of those that were still standing when waters receded, was coated in the thick stench of polluted river mud and crawling with snakes.

Everything was destroyed except for a bedroom mural I drew of our favorite bands at the time: The Stones, CSNY, Grand Funk Railroad, and Led Zeppelin. The two twin mattresses in my room washed up against it and protected the wall. Everything else was coated in mud.

That’s when Joby and I, as well as everyone else, lost touch with each other.

We had no way of staying connected back then. My mom, brother and I had been evacuated to the big city of Scranton, which was also the same time frame my dad remarried out in Tucson where I spent summers until finally moving there when I was over 18.

Joby and I stayed in touch infrequently, until the internet helped us all find our lost childhood.

Last time I saw him was somewhere in PA, while I was on tour some years ago, and he showed up with his dear siblings, Leo and Lise and fam. He had grown into the image of an impressive Pennsylvanian back mountain man.

He looked like what I would’ve looked like if Arizona hadn’t happened.

And when I think about all the adventures we survived as kids, it was not just luck: It was because of the mustered courage and determination he was figuring out on the fly, which became so contagious. He was funny as heck, too.

Joby Davis passed away on Aug 15, 2022.

I did not find the reach-out messages on Facebook from his ex and sis that he had been wanting to get in contact with me while he lay sick in the hospital, until it was too late. But his signal came in loud and clear.

That same day I found myself at a mysterious spot in Ireland by Malin Head.

We didn’t even know what date it was when we came upon a crumbling ancient small house by the tumultuous sea.

The ocean there is extraordinary.

The energy from the way the land’s end causes the wind to go wild showing off some of the most immense powers of the planet. And there we were drawn, my Irish friend and I, to some mysterious storm worn house we hadn’t meant to come upon. There was a history of the abandoned place on a plaque before it.

It stated that a hermit had long ago lived here beside its mythic spring water and its shelter that would always fit any given amount of people needing it. It went on to say that when the Christian priests came to attempt to sway the people with religion, they first took part in the pagan rituals that the locals carried on there for centuries, to maybe win the people over eventually. It is, to this day, still considered a sacred place.

And the plaque ended by stating that pilgrims seeking to pay homage to the spot would arrive every year on August 15. My friend, Mark McKowski and I looked at each other astonished when we realized that very day was August 15. Come to think of it, Joby surely must have been of Irish descent.

A few weeks ago I found myself on a tour in Canada, like a gift from the gods.

It lasted several weeks throughout Ontario at various indigenous events.

We had only one show booked stateside. We left the gig at the Indigenous Cannibis Cup, and headed to the next down in Ithaca.

We arrived at the border crossing just upon the midnight hour.

The camper truck we were riding in drove over the old steel two lane bridge, spanning the mighty Saint Lawrence.

It became a dream. A time machine. Déjà Vu.

As we slowly traversed the arc of the narrow bridge in the inky black night, I was transported back to that inky black lake just north of it; the night Joby manned the outboard at full speed as we sat there plunging into the empty beauty of a daunting darkness that sizzled our cells while we electro-glided in search for the great lodge.

I hadn’t been back on this bridge since that day 53 years ago.

Something guided us in to safe harbor that impossible night, and gifted us the allowance of daylight the following day when we crossed this span between dream worlds.

Maybe with the grace of assisting ancestors, or the lake spirits providing safe passage, with a conduit named Joby at the helm; ruddering the vessel through in transition back to the safety of shore and a welcoming lodge.

Joby, my best friend through the difficult years of becoming a man without fathers, before the flood waters took away all the danger dice of our childhood.