JOHN PEPIN

“I’m heading for the blue horizon, where the mountains meet the sky.” — Aston “Deacon” Williams

For me, time seems to have a strange, elastic quality to it.

It stretches back and forth in my memory.

Sometimes, the rubber band of time is slack, and recalling those very earliest parts of my life seem so distant I can hardly remember anything about them.

Those experiences and recollections are scattered and spread out like jet plane wreckage across a long ribbon of highway that snakes from here where my boot heels pack the dirt to places beyond the far horizon.

Thinking about this idea recalls to me an old song from my very young days called “Where the Mountains Meet the Sky.”

My fond affinity for that song, and easy recollection of every word, would not be the type of slack memory I am talking about.

Rather, it would be one of those instances when time’s elastic snaps my memories back almost immediately in vivid technicolor, detail and immediacy, as though those events had only happened a few days ago.

That old song was on an album of cowboy songs my dad had on 8-track stereo tape by Eddy Arnold, his favorite singer.

“I’m gonna ride, ride, ride, ride, down that dusty trail to the land of sweet enchantment, where hardship don’t prevail. I’m heading for the blue horizon, where the mountains meet the sky.”

The name of the album, which came out in November 1963, was “Cattle Call,” for the title track, which is still being used in a current television commercial.

I have my own compact disc copy of that album and still love to listen to it. It does suffer a bit somehow without the vinyl crackling, and big depth sound.

The songs are simple and are each produced in the same fashion, making them very accessible to everyone from my dad, who would have been 37 years old then, and me, who was 2 going on 3.

There are plenty of western music standards on the record, like “Cool Water,” “Tumbling Tumbleweeds” and “The Wayward Wind.”

However, my favorites are those that are less well-known like, “Cowpoke,” “Leanin’ on the Old Top Rail” and especially “Jim, I Wore a Tie Today,” which many years later would be recorded by Johnny Cash.

That lament about Jim is basically what they used to call a “recitation,” where the lyrics are almost all spoken, with only a few lines of the song sung.

As a kid, I would listen to those old songs over and over and over and over. The images in those story songs were so vivid I could imagine myself inside them.

The recitation opens:

“Jim, I did everything that I could, but your fever just wouldn’t die down.

So, I tied your horse to the wagon bed and last night, I brought you to town.

But when I got there, you were gone, Jim.

And there was nothing nobody could do.

I bought you a suit and a tie, Jim.

And today, I wore one too.”

Then the singing part comes in: “Jim, I wore a tie today, the first one that I ever wore. Any you’d have said I looked like a dummy out of a dry goods store.”

The song is produced with Countrypolitan strings heard first during the late 1950s in country music. In those days, cowboy singers were in a resurgence, especially since Marty Robbins’ “Gunfighter Songs and Trail Ballads,” birthed a crossover No. 1 hit with “El Paso” in 1959.

All these songs were like technicolor motion pictures, as big as “The Searchers” in my boyhood, rambling mind of deserts, dusty trails, saguaro cactus, hot summer days, cool nights, senoritas and of course, horses and saddles and cowboys.

I am allergic to horses, but the rest of those things would eventually be things I would encounter, experience and love in the American west and southwest.

I would guess these quick-recall memories are the instances that somehow made a bigger impression or for some reason stuck to the walls of my mind.

All these years later, I have discovered that visualizing things can help bring them into being, from my mind to my reality.

They might even produce a subliminal, mental map of how things will be headed down the road. The Law of Attraction, Norman Vincent Peale and all that.

I know those type of notions will indeed work, turning lead to alchemist’s gold – at least in a localized, small-scale sense.

For example, I am starting to experience wintertime flashes and feelings of summer days or at least the lush, green grasses of May.

If I close my eyes, I can hear the singing birds and feel the warmish winds, see and smell the nodding wildflowers blooming, the exuberance of springtime in this rugged little corner of the world.

If I think about it longer, deeper, if I let my mind sink down softly into that shady glen, I can see a big brook trout testing the strength of my fishing line, the sun going down over the silhouetted trees. I can even hear the mosquitoes buzzing.

When I indeed find myself in a very similar scene come May, will I encounter a sense of dejavu? Perhaps that is how that all works?

I know there can be an odd sense of satisfaction in feeling like I’ve been someplace before or done a specific thing previously. I don’t understand why that is.

On a parallel, does that same kind of visualization process work in a backwards fashion to bring about my feelings of loss, disappointment or paralysis when I come to realize that something I’ve done or visualized before is no longer possible?

For example, if I recall halcyon days and experiences I had when I was a kid that I cannot relive because of the loss of special places, friends or family, I often sense a loss that can influence my current reality.

There are no photographs in existence of my dad and I fishing together. There never will be. None of my brother and I fishing together either, but that can still be remedied.

It is a powerful realization for me that so many of my positive and negative sensations can be linked to visualizing past, present or future events.

All my collected happenings must somehow be packed away like old dishes in my mind, ready to be used again whenever I decide to pull the dusty boxes out of the pantry.

This type of unpacking rediscovery often leads to finding things I’d forgotten about, plates, cups or saucers that had apparently slipped and fallen into the folds of my slackened, serpentine memory belt.

In this manner, things I haven’t thought about for decades can suddenly put up right there in the front of my mind.

This often produces a rush of feeling and emotion, and sometimes a contented sense of having reclaimed something from so long ago, no matter how insignificant.

It’s like magic made from thin air, like lightning, something I can’t hold in my hand, but truly wonderful and incredible.

Maybe all this magic based in visualization is why some folks spend a lot of time dreaming or remembering. We all hope for change of some kind, past, present or future.

Visualizations and memory can also send you down a rabbit hole of strange redundancy: As in, I remember thinking about recalling some old times when I was thinking about things we used to do and how we had talked about back then some of those things we might want to do tomorrow or the next day, things that never did happen.

Despite all of this, some things remain entirely out of reach.

No matter how much I visualize some things occurring in the future, I am certain it’s just not in the cards. But I’ve always heard that anything is possible, especially with a little encouragement.

Given that, maybe I will one day indeed become a Japanese heiress, sitting comfortably a wicker chair in the sun, staring out at Mount Fuji, with the swimming pool beside me lined with jade tile.

I will sip some of that monkey poop coffee, shade my eyes with a Panama hat and consider my sizeable investments in securities and various commodities produced in foreign lands, like America.

For today though, I’m happy to put on that old Eddy Arnold album and imagine myself “leanin’ on the old top rail in the big corral.”

Editor’s note: Outdoors North is a weekly column produced by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources on a wide range of topics important to those who enjoy and appreciate Michigan’s world-class natural resources of the Upper Peninsula.