Pick the Cat's Eyes Out

It's a long drive to Jackson. One's throat becomes raw from the repeated singalongs to Phil Wilson's version of "Jackson" ("Well, go on down to Jackson / Go ahead and wreck your health"; thanks, I will). Travel companions flinch at the infinity of country radio stations. And there's patience for the one that specializes in swing music, but only for several exits.

So we lean on Great Lake Swimmers' Ongiara. It's become the go-to album for these journeys. Sonically, it's hardly akin to the folk music indigenous to this corner of New Hampshire or the watered-down blues-rock one winces through at local bars, but GLS frontman Tony Dekker is playing with a rural aesthetic that's perfectly at home in places like Jackson. Where woodland beauty outvalues all the plastic playthings we left behind. Where nature's patience becomes your own. Where you like the trees -- the way the trees are on the mountains, all different.

As I once scribbled for Stylus, "Tapping into a childhood spent in the rural, southern reaches of Ontario (Wainfleet, to be exact), Dekker explores mankind's kinship with nature and our most vexing conundrum in the modern age: travel the road to technology or travel the road to spirituality?"

I listened to Ongiara on my iPod in my automobile. What does that say about my choices?