RRR005: “Coltrane” // John Coltrane Quartet

TL;DR = Coltrane and fire pair well.

It was September of 2024, so a few months ago. I was having a bad time in my head. My wife generously suggested I spend a weekend at the family cabin in the great Northwoods of Wisconsin.

After making sure no one else had reserved the place for the weekend (maybe someone else was having a bad time!) I got there early Friday evening after the four-hour drive from Evanston. I did what I usually do before doing anything else upon arrival at camp: I cracked a beer. Then I strung up a few fly rods, something I used to do with my dad on Friday evenings at camp.

OK, let me just get this out of the way. My family has always called it The Cottage. I don’t know why; I guess I blame my great grandparents, because they’re the ones who built the place. Maybe cottage meant something more rugged in the 1920s. Or, on the contrary, maybe it meant something just as genteel and Cape Cod-y as it sounds today, and maybe that’s exactly what they were going for since it was the 1920s and any chance to create an illusion of prosperity might have been a good thing. One way or another, I hate it and I’ll use this space to rebrand The Cottage as either “camp” or “cabin” or “gangster getaway” or whatever the hell I feel like. It’s my blog and I can say whatever I want.

I probably had cracked another beer. Many beers were cracked that night. Coltrane’s self-titled 1962 record was playing on my phone, and it sounded good. Not just good; it sounded like good company. It was resonating. You know you’ve got something good when it sounds great coming out of your phone. So I took the cracked beer and the axe I had bought years ago for my dad and my Coltrane-playing phone and went outside to the fire pit. It felt like summer but was starting to smell like fall. A dreamy Friday evening on the lake.

I made a fire. A good one. No foul smoke, just clean burning hardwood. I set my phone to play Coltrane on repeat and reject any other evidence of the world. My phone complied.

There was much wood to burn. The residents at the camp next door surely saw me and surely knew to leave me alone, for they not only didn’t speak to me, they didn’t even turn their heads in my direction. Grateful for that.

Early evening turned to night, the sky cycling through a spectrum of lavenders and pinks and oranges on its way to blue-black infinity with that trace of light in the West. I began to know the five tunes on Coltrane with a deep intimacy, understanding the feelings and intentions of Trane, Jones, Tyner, and Garrison in a way that no one else on the planet was understanding them at that moment, maybe at any moment.

(OK, in fairness, it was hard to pick up the feelings and intentions of bass-man Garrison from my iPhone speaker, but still.)

I was sitting in my mom’s reclining Cabela’s chair, and the later it got, the more I reclined. I heard the coyotes that I often hear at night, yipping maniacally, but I had my axe, so, you know. Several beers in, I liked my odds against a pack of coyotes as long as I had an axe, and sitting here today I enjoy picturing myself fighting off a pack of coyotes with an axe. Really though, I didn’t care. Bring on the coyotes. They should hear this shit too. This shit is fire. Once they get a bit of Coltrane I won’t even need the axe, cuz they’ll be just as mesmerized as I am. They’ll hear this quartet reinventing the DNA of the universe on “Out Of This World,” and they’ll join me in staring up into the night sky full of stars and satellites and other assorted celestial mysteries. We can all get along, the coyotes and the universe and I.

Bring on the coyotes. They should hear this shit too. This shit is fire.

As it got later and later, you could tell summer was on its last leg. The cold asserted itself in a way it wouldn’t dare in mid-summer. Tomorrow there would be dry flies and brook trout. But now I had the fire. The fire and the axe and the beers and the shooting stars and the coyotes. And Coltrane. Coltrane.