Over Jordan

Two days into her cross-country podcasting journey, Cassandra was cruising through Pennsylvania on Interstate I-80 West with her influencer friend, trying t0 half-sleep away her anxiety in the passenger seat of her boyfriend’s 2015 Nissan Versa. She dipped briefly into dream logic and felt, for a few seconds, that the cold wind blowing through her naked toes was the same sound as the twangy guitar crackling through old speakers in her memory.

A voice was there.

I found a lonely mountain

And I wandered through the trees.

I traced the lonely rivers.

And conspired with the breeze.

I heard the towhee singing

Said “I have a lonesome song.

But I know a hard storm’s comin’

And my melody’s so long.”

Oh a hard storm’s a-comin’…

Nearing the event horizon of dreams she could see the soundwaves emitting from the low, antique speakers in her dimly lit Brooklyn loft, thumping through the haze of pot smoke and fog and the low, mythical gray light of the New York sun streaming through her alley-facing window on a rainy autumn afternoon.

But the car hit a bump, and Cassandra shook awake only to realize that the sound was Imogen slurping her almond milk iced coffee too loudly from the driver’s seat.

Cassandra yawned. “We pass State College yet?”

Imogen glanced at her through her sunglasses. “We haven’t even passed the Scranton exit.”

Cassandra stretched her legs farther out the open window. She tried to set her mind back to the music flowing through her half-dreams, but instead got a flashback to the semi-fight she’d had with Niels back in New York. She was sitting on the futon they shared in their modest loft apartment in Brooklyn, across from the hazy sun cutting through the shadow of the fire escape outside their lone bedroom window. She was in underwear that didn’t match, her chin perched on her knees and her sore eyes browsing over the pile of audio equipment, the various drafts of her scripts, and her Podcasting for Dummies book.

Niels, who had slept in again, was only just then brushing his teeth.

“You’re leaving tomorrow for that podcasting trip, right?”

Cassandra bit her lip. “Yes, I already told you.”

“You know I’m leaving for Morocco on Thursday,” he said. If he picked up on her annoyance, it didn't come out in his tone. “I just wanted to make sure you don’t forget anything while you’re on the road…”

“I won’t,” she tried to interrupt.

“…because, you know, the lease is in my name, and the landlord’s going to have to talk to me to unlock the door. And I don’t want to have to call from Morocco.” He spat a wad of bloody toothpaste gunk into the sink.

“I won’t,” she repeated.

“I mean, it’s cool,” he said. In her memory, Niels wasn’t looking at her. Instead, he was lazily putting on a white undershirt. “This podcast idea of yours. You gotta let me hear it when you’re done!”

“I will,” she said. She remembered the rough feel of her knees against her chin as she tried to make sense of everything sprawled out on the table in front of her. “It won’t be ready for a while, though…”

“But, I did want to ask,” he said in a muffled voice through the shirt he was trying to force down his head. Cassandra remembered herself cringing. “This singer you're researching, I know you told me about her. Penny…something?”

Cassandra nodded on her curled-up knees. She didn’t finish the name for him.

“You think enough people will be interested?”

Cassandra opened her mouth. She wanted to say yes, yes of course. But nothing meaningful came through her thoughts other than disordered, unformed images of something great, bound in a merciless murk of fatigue that clouded everything else.

“I hope so,” was all her memory self said.

“She’s been dead for a while, right?” he said.

“Declared missing,” Cassandra said.

Memory Niels didn’t notice this. “Because, like, I love you babe. But, you know, I do have a financial stake in this. So, I just wanted to make sure…”

You’re just lending me your car, she thought. But didn’t say.

“All this audio equipment wasn’t cheap,”

Memory Cassandra clenched her eyes. “I know.”

“So,” he continued. “I wanted to make sure…”

“I know.” Her voice was harsher than she intended. Niels had conquered the shirt and shot her an annoyed glance.

The caustic taste of the memory forced Cassandra out of her attempt at sleep. She rubbed her eyes against the sun streaming down through the car windshield and glanced over at Imogen.

“Can I assume you still want to make a detour there?” she asked.

“Where?” Imogen said.

“Scranton.”

Imogen took another slurp of her iced coffee, somehow challenging the roar of the wind blowing through Cassandra’s open window at 70 miles per hour.

“Well, Office nostalgia gets views,” Imogen said. “Just saying.”

Cassandra sat up and tried to focus on the bland, late summer greenery of Central Pennsylvania that streamed through the smudged windshield.

“Nostalgia for a show that’s less than 20 years old?”

Imogen snort-laughed. “Folks have nostalgia for shit that aired two months ago. It’s attention spans babe. The digital age turned everyone into goldfish.”

Imogen had spent the drive from New York trying to stop at any place that would maximize her Instagram views. The trip to Central Pennsylvania that should have taken a few hours had taken over a day. Cassandra looked down at her phone. The Apple Maps app displayed their current course in an unsteady blue line traced across the next hundred miles of I-80 West. The app helpfully informed her that they were 4 hours and 18 minutes from arriving at their destination, going at their current pace. Their destination being a cheap motel outside of Pittsburgh.

As if trying to be as unhelpful as possible, the highway suddenly produced in front of them a green sign informing them that the I-81 junction to Scranton was a mere two miles away.

“How long would it take to get to Scranton?” Cassandra asked.

Imogen shrugged. “An hour? Two? You’re the one with the map.”

Cassandra and Imogen had discovered shortly after leaving New York City that the Car Play on that particular Nissan Versa, the one that would have let them synch their phone’s blue tooth to the dashboard screen and get a better visual display of the route, was quite busted. Niels had forgotten to tell them when they borrowed it from him, evidentially. The same Niels who spent $350 a month of his trust fund money parking his crappy Nissan Versa in Brooklyn and then took the subway everywhere. Why Cassandra assumed modern conveniences would be working she had no idea. But now whoever was riding shotgun had to keep her phone perched in her lap lest they end up in Delaware.

“I don’t think there’s anything in Scranton,” she said.

Imogen looked indignant. “Babe, we can roll up to one of those office buildings. I can stage a bunch of selfies in front of the Dunder Mifflin building. I got this down to a science. You know how many views that’ll get?”

Cassandra’s feet were starting to get cold, but at the angle she was sitting she could only retract her legs into a crude fetal position.

“You know I don’t think that’s a real place.”

Imogen made an indignant gesture with her free hand. “But it’s an aesthetic!”

Cassandra tried to roll her eyes, but her temples were too sore. “Im, it’s Central PA. They all have the same aesthetic. We could get off at the next town, find a vague office complex, and boom, world-famous Scranton.”

“My god, babe,” Imogen said. “I love you, but you have no idea how the influencing world works. There’s armies of basement-dwelling assholes following your account who’d love nothing more than to play amateur detective and prove you’ve lied in a pic. I try to pass off some bumfuck town as Scranton in one picture and about three hundred virgins are doing like fucking Trigonometry with the angle of the sunlight to prove the latitude’s off Scranton’s coordinates by like .003 degrees or some shit. Internet points, babe. Not even once.”

The pounding of the wind through the open window was beginning to hurt Cassandra’s ears. She pressed the power window button with her big toe and tried to straighten her mussed-up hair by hand.

“And these are the kind of people you cultivate for your little influencer audience?” she asked.

Imogen’s iced coffee was down to little more than damp ice, but she still took another optimistic gulp.

“God no,” Imogen said through her straw. “Not those people. But, you know, they’re inevitable. Parasites, if you will. Like those gross fish that suck onto the bottom of whale sharks.”

Cassandra squinted through the smudged glass of her now-closed window. “Well, you won’t have to worry about anyone cracking your Scranton code.”

“Why’s that?” Cassandra asked.

“We just missed the exit.”

“Shit!”

But Cassandra’s dream of making it to Pittsburgh before sundown would be in vain. Not long after missing the I-81 junction, Imogen saw a sign for Rickett’s Glen State Park, a mere 29 miles up State Route 487.

“They have waterfalls!” Imogen chirped as she eyed a sparsely populated rural road trailing off from the interstate. “This place popped up on one of those ‘one hundred spots in Pennsylvania to see before you die’ things. You know the kind of views that waterfalls pull?”

Cassandra grunted. “Office nostalgia numbers?”

Imogen gave her a mean side-eye. “Of course not. But it’s better than nothing. Need I remind you I’ve been doing most of the driving since New Jersey.”

"I know," Cassandra attempted. "But I did want to get to Pittsburgh before it gets too dark."

Imogen's lips curdled into a ball. "C'mon, Cass," she said. "I came along on this podcast trip to help you out. Can't you do me a favor?"

"I mean, you asked..." Cassandra began. But she saw that Imogen had already hit the turn signal and was drifting the car towards the exit.

"This is important for me babe," Imogen said. Cassandra's mind flashed back to her parting conversation with Niels in their flat. The feeling of her knees against her chin. The sharp glare of the sunlight through the bedroom window. She felt a surge of anxiety erupt in her chest and constrict her shoulders and back.

"Please, babe," Imogen finally said. They were already halfway down the exit. Cassandra heard notes of something like desperation in her voice. Some armor she had forged for protection but could no longer go without.

"Sure," Cassandra said softly.

In the haze of her thoughts, she heard those old, crackling speakers. And the sharp, siren twang of an old guitar.

And then the soft, mezzo-soprano voice breathing a raspy, whispered melody.

“Can I play some music, at least?” Cassandra asked.

“No problem,” Imogen said. Cassandra could tell she was already lost in planning the angles and poses of her upcoming waterfall Instagram excursion.

Cassandra tapped the music app on her phone and scrolled through yet-unheard podcasts and indie rock until she found the well-worn folder labeled Blake.

The familiar acoustic guitar chords streamed from her speakers through a haze of digitized antique audio fuzz.

In the sonic ether, invisible fingers strummed out a sad theme in a minor key. And then, a woman’s soft, raspy, whispered voice.

Oh a hard storm’s a-comin’…

The playlist drifted through the car for the rest of the drive through the mostly empty Route 487. Cassandra kept her face pressed against the window and tried to construct a coherent image of a forest from the blur of passing trees. After a while, Cassandra heard Imogen begin to softly hum along with the melody.

“Is this that woman you’re doing the podcast on?” Imogen asked. “Blake, right?”

Cassandra nodded without lifting her head, so her cheek smeared against the glass and made a brief squeak that cut into the music. “Yes. Penny Blake.”

“It’s very pretty,” Imogen said. “You said this is from the ‘50s?”

“Yup,” Cassandra said. “I think this one was ’59. She wrote this when she was staying in Pittsburgh. She spent some time working with the steelworkers union. She wrote a bunch of songs there.”

“Ah yes, I think you told me,” Imogen said. Cassandra thought she saw a twitch of guilt in the folds around her eyes. “That’s why we’re going to Pittsburgh tonight.”

Cassandra nodded again. “Tonight.”

Imogen Diaz-Thuong, Williamsburg’s most famous half-Dominican half-Vietnamese social media influencer, was Cassandra’s only remaining friend from her lonely days as a freshman at NYU. The two had found each other less through mutual interest and more through an organic collision of refugees adrift in a stormy sea of anxiety, loneliness, and the hollow expectations of their newfound adulthoods. Back then, influencer Imogen was still unborn. Instead, Cassandra had found a shy, quiet, artsy girl who took refuge in the library and the darker corners of the Greenwich Village cafes. The two of them sought solace in dusky folk singers at half-filled coffee shops, herbal teas, and compassionately critiquing each other’s bad attempts at poetry. Cassandra watched as Imogen clutched the lifeline that Cassandra had sent her, navigate the prying eyes around her. The boys and professors and staff who could never pronounce her name, never figure out what country she was from (Poughkeepsie), never entirely peel their eyes from her. Cassandra watched as Imogen realized the strength of her beauty. How her face and a sly smile and the mysterious allure her eyes gave off when half-obscured by her long black hair drew a kind of attention that a shy freshman girl could never have imagined.

And when Imogen, now a rising social media star, asked to accompany Cassandra on her podcasting journey (and maybe take a few pics along the way), Cassandra hadn’t hesitated to say “yes,” even knowing what “a few” meant in this context. But she had never spoken the deeper truth circling just underneath all of that. How Imogen had been a lifeline for her. How even with all her research, expensive tech, and mapped course, Cassandra was no less lost than her own freshman self. How the strange, foreign beauty Imogen had cultivated spoke something to her. Like she was nothing more than the sad, lonely men who sent Imogen obscene requests in her DMs.

Cassandra kept her eyes closed the rest of the drive to the park.

By the time Imogen found an acceptable spot near a waterfall for her selfies, Cassandra had long since despaired of ever reaching Pittsburgh at a halfway decent hour.

“There’s like twenty fucking waterfalls here!” Imogen sang, more at the surrounding trees than her traveling companion.

“Well, pick one,” Cassandra said. The visitor's map suggested a rough hike of several miles, mostly uphill. And there was Cassandra, still wearing her flip-flops. By the time they reached the first falls, she had already gotten five of the forest’s sharpest sticks caught between her shoe and her bare feet.

Imogen, despite also wearing flip-flops, seemed unaffected.

After over an hour of hiking, Imogen finally stopped to set up her phone in front of a wooden footbridge overlooking one of the larger falls in the park. As Imogen practiced her Instagram poses, Cassandra collapse onto a moist rock, barely aware that the ass of her yoga shorts was immediately soggy.

She pulled out her phone. At some point during the last hour of their ascent, she had gotten three texts from Niels.

Don’t let Im drive. I think she picks her nose and I don’t want that shit on the steering wheel

And

Remember my friend Ethan? He studied musicology @ new school. Wants to be on podcast. Told him I’m booker. Better forgiveness than permission, rite? [puppy eyes emoji]

And

Oh I think carplay may b busted. Forgot 2 tell u. But still win best boyfried 4 lending u car to drive x-country yay me!

Cassandra wiped the sweat off her forehead while texting back one-handed.

Were in middle of wood near waterfalls. Somewhere in pa. Im wanted to do Instagram shit. May never reach Pitt. Send supplies, lol

She tapped SEND and watched the green bar struggle a bit before the phone produced a helpful text box informing her MESSAGE FAILED TO SEND.

In the top corner, she noticed she had precisely zero bars.

“He Im,” she yelled towards the bridge. “There’s no service.”

From that angle, Imogen looked like she was trying to pose with her hand out so that the angle of her phone would create the illusion that the waterfall was going directly into her outstretched palm.

“Maybe not for you,” she said without looking over to her friend sitting on a wet rock and a wetter ass.

“What the fuck,” Cassandra said to no one. She was answered by the angry side glance of a 30-something woman passing by with her toddler in a hiker carrier on her back.

Lol, I just expanded your kid’s vocabulary, she thought. She then cringed at the realization that “lol” was now part of her inner monologue.

By the time Imogen began attempting handstands, seemingly every mosquito in the park had found Cassandra’s warm and blood-filled body. She fled to a narrow stairwell carved in rock along the side of the gorge.

“Hey Im, how much longer?” she shouted down towards the bridge.

“Don’t rush art,” Imogen shouted back, speaking through the peace sign she was making in front of her face as she mugged towards her phone. She seemed to have no difficulty ignoring the older couple who had to step around her as they tried to get across the bridge.

Cassandra sighed. “Look, if you’re going to be a while, I’m going to rerecord the podcast intro. I still don’t like any of the takes I’ve done.”

“Whatever,” Imogen said. Her eyes did not stray from the camera on her phone.

In the trees ascending into the glen above her, Cassandra suddenly became aware of the echoing songs from the birds that sounded from branch to branch. The late summer wind picked up, a cool caress against her sweaty brow, and Cassandra felt a rogue impression of the coming autumn ebb and flow somewhere in a deeper gorge of her thoughts. Somewhere as of then still buried in her waking dreams, where a twangy old guitar rang out a sad minor key melody through crackling speakers, and a soft, raspy female voice took in a single, slight breath and began to sing.

A hard storm’s a-comin.

Cassandra pulled the small, portable audio recorder from her fanny pack and opened the NOTES app on her phone. The portable recorder wasn’t as good as the bigger audio setup packaged away in the trunk of their trusty Versa. But, Cassandra assumed the lofi vibes of the portable mic would synch up well with the sounds of nature echoing around her, the chirping of the afternoon birds, and the murmuring of the creak as it descended the jagged rocks into the ambient background roar of the nearby waterfall.

“Check, check, check,” she chirped into the mic. When she played it back her voice sounded reedier than she would have liked.

She scrolled down the notes she had written on the app, though she had long ago memorized most of the details.

“September 23, 1975,” she spoke into her mic. “The first day of fall. The autumnal equinox. And the day that Penelope Eudora Blake disappeared from the world we know.”

Cassandra had gone back and forth on whether she should use the full name. The records she had managed to dig up were so scarce she wasn’t even 100% certain of “Eudora” as the correct middle name. But the rhythm of all the syllables together seemed to chime a refrain that posed a tone of beginnings, of something epic and significant making itself known, as the listener fell into the primeval tones of nature reverberating around her voice. Nature and the soft ascent of an acoustic guitar slowly building from the background noise.

Cassandra lowered the mic and typed have niels mix blake song 2 audio 4 intro into her NOTES app.

“Twenty years earlier,” she continued into her mic. “Penny Blake was called the female Woody Guthrie. A rising star in the Greenwich Village folk scene, Blake forged a lone female voice in a male-dominated world. With a combination of a mythic folk sound, brilliant lyricism, and a mysterious, sad, raspy voice, Blake seemed poised to walk the path taken by the likes of Bob Dylan and Dave van Ronk nearly a decade later.”

The wind picked up again and shook a jagged rustling from the trees. Cassandra suddenly sensed the lusty billows of cigarette smoke seeping from somewhere off-screen. She closed her eyes.

“Flash forward twenty years. Penny Blake, now 50, sits in her small cottage outside of Ann Arbor. Forgotten by all but the most obsessed musical aficionados, her voice ravaged by years of chain smoking and alcoholism, deaf to the phone calls from the few friends and family she has left…”

Cassandra paused to tap open her phone and write 2 mean? in her NOTES app.

“…deaf to the phone calls of friends and family, that’s the last picture we have of forgotten American folk singer Penny Blake. We don’t know what went through her mind those last few days. But we do know that she sent a letter to her brother and sister-in-law, post-marked September 23, from her home in Ann Arbor. We know she wrote ‘The world is bigger than I could ever sing. There are still songs yet unheard. Let me go. Let me be if I can. Let me not be if I can't. Your beloved...Penny.’”

Cassandra paused again. A screenshot of the only image of the letter she could find was embedded in the notes on her phone. She saw the ragged, tilted handwriting. The shaky yet poised signature cast like the ruins of an Ionic column holding its dignity in shattered caryatids as it lay broken on the floor of a forgotten temple.

And then, a few spaces underneath that signature, one last two-word postscript scribbled at the bottom of the page.

Over Jordan.

She clicked the mic on again.

“On September 23, 1975, Penny Blake put that letter in her mailbox, packed what few bags she cared to take into her 1965 Volkswagen Beetle, and drove. To where, no one knows.”

In the rustling of the trees in the wind, Cassandra heard the twanging of a dusty, out-of-tune guitar strummed by old, sore, weary fingers. In the dreams beneath her thoughts, she heard that twanging swept by some sacred wind down an empty highway at night.

“To this day, no trace of Penny Blake has ever been found. What new life she created for herself, what fate she met, what resting place she lies in to this day…”

She pursed her lips. In the back of her thoughts, something else fluttered into hearing range.

What new songs had she heard.

She cleared her throat and went on.

“…no one knows. But that does not mean that the ghost of Penny Blake should be forgotten. Follow me, Cassandra Howell, and I trace the steps that Penny Blake walked more than 50 years ago. From her childhood nestled in the White Mountains of New England, to her cross-country journeys as a young woman. From her bohemian life in Greenwich Village to her voyages down the Atlantic. From her spiritual awakening in the Southwestern deserts to her trails alongside the Pacific coastline, and those lonely, final days in her small cottage in Michigan, I will take you on the journey of a lost American icon.”

She twisted her mouth over the phrasing of the last few sentences. On the nearby path, a group of teenagers hiked by without noticing her. Cassandra scrolled down in her notes, looking for any points she may have missed.

And there, embedded at the bottom of the folder, was the picture, the one promotional picture Ithaca Records had taken upon the release of the single album to the woman’s name. Cassandra zoomed in on the picture and squinted at it, through the sweat blown into her eyes by the breeze and the shadows twisting above her by the dancing branches of the trees arcing up the corridors of the glen.

In faded black and white the woman sat at a table. She wore a plain, smooth dress, the color unclear in the black and white but something dark. An acoustic guitar hung from her shoulders. Her left hand suspended lazily over the strings while her right hand held a half-burned cigarette off to the side of her face. Her hair, clearly dark blonde even without color, was cut in a neat, shoulder-length bob. Through a pair of thick glasses, she looked down at the table, at a cluster of disorganized sheets of music and handwritten lyrics scattered across from her. Her mouth was open in a half-chant, poised in anticipation of song, hinting at the possibility of music blooming from the stillness of the world.

Cassandra’s eyes focused as if she could unravel the grime of the picture and set free the music hidden there, to flow on the wind and join the chorus of bird songs echoing through the glen. And then…

Her phone buzzed. A new text from Niels appeared at the top of the screen, blocking from view the face of the woman in the picture.

also DON’T FUCK UP MY AUDIO TECH THAT SHITS EXPENSIVE!!!

A few seconds later a pic of him standing in front of the mirror, nude except for his dark gray boxer briefs, sucking in his stomach to maximize his limited six-pack.

U miss? was the text accompaniment, followed by three heart emojis.

Cassandra looked back at her messages. Her outgoing message to Niels still stood at “MESSAGE FAILED TO SEND.”

She put her phone away and buried the mic back in her fanny pack. Across from her, on the wooden bridge, Imogen had found a few pieces of wayward garbage someone else had left and was conspicuously picking up in front of the camera. Cassandra watched her do this for a moment or two, check the subsequent video on her phone, apparently be satisfied with the result, and let the trash fall back down the ravine it came from.

Cassandra sat there on the uncomfortable rock of the gorge carved by generations of waterfalls. She watched her friend by default, the wannabee Instagram influencer who she was now carrying with her across the country, ostensibly as a research assistant but really as a conduit to building something like a foundation of ghosts across a digital world. She thought of the wannabee hipster boyfriend back in Brooklyn, who waxed his mustache and drank IPAs and lived off of a trust fund from unseen parents somewhere in Rhode Island, much of which he had already lost buying bored ape NFTs. She thought of her boring administrative job in a Manhattan law office named after a string of vaguely WASP surnames she could never remember. She thought of her student debt, and her small, cramped apartment. Her landlord who could never remember to fix the air conditioning but never failed to notice when she missed the rent by one day. She thought of her glorious future as a podcaster, the mind and voice of the one series to break through the growing haze of millions of nameless podcasts and achieve something approaching cultural relevance.

And she thought of Penny Blake, sitting at her table, guitar in hand, in the haze of cigarette smoke, deciphering the music hidden on those pages, waiting to give her coiled voice permission to sing.

The birds sang on and on above and around her. The trees lumbered in the winds sent to herald the coming autumn and the equinox some choose for their departure to a new world. The shadows embraced her, and she saw ghosts emerge from the firmament and hitchhike across the endless wires of highways in a vast, mysterious land between oceans.

And the ghosts called from her dreaminess in the crackling of antique speakers, the twang of an old guitar, and the sadness of a soft, raspy voice arising from memory.

I found a lonely mountain

And I wandered through the trees.

I traced the lonely rivers.

And conspired with the breeze.

I heard the towhee singing

Said “I have a lonesome song.

But I know a hard storm’s comin’

And my melody’s so long.”

Oh a hard storm’s a-comin’

But don’t you cry for me who roams.

I’m only going over Jordan.

I’m only going over home.

I’m only going over Jordan.

I’m only going over home.