Look in her eyes

When the score got to 17-0, we decided to leave. Brown University, my alma mater, was beating up on the University of Stony Brook. Not even a line of fans of all sexes, bare torsos painted S-E-A-W-O-L-V-E-S -- the Stony Brook team name -- could spur a measure of competitiveness. It was fun to see Brown score, but it was getting tedious watching SB's incompetence.

Still, it had been a spectacular show. The Brown mascots, two students dressed in bear costumes, roamed the stands for photo-ops. Kids swooned in delight. Cheerleaders in skin-tight short dresses did their peppy routines -- twirls, kicks and smiles -- to pump up the audience. Adults swooned in delight. The SB marching band staged a precision halftime show to Paul Simon tunes, though Late in the Evening might well have been Too Little, Too Late in the Evening as an oblique reference to the efforts of their struggling team. Their cheerleaders were, let it be said, nowhere near as svelte as Brown's. Then again, the Brown band was nowhere near as slick as SB's, though a deliberate scruffiness has been a long-standing Brown band tradition.

Thus did several alumni spend a sunny September afternoon in a football stadium in Providence, reliving memories of carefree campus days. Me, one of those alums, back at Brown after years.

In the States, college football is a fall tradition. Standards in the Ivy League, where Brown belongs, are pretty abysmal compared to the national powerhouses of the game, and if Brown was beating up on SB, that's a sign of SB's own standards.

Still, something about fall in New England and Ivy football has always grabbed me. Part of that is because the Ivies try to hold on to what college athletics should be about: a pursuit that's an adjunct to academics. Part is because my fellow computer science students -- bright, motivated and hard-working all -- would on a whim throw aside assignments, pile into someone's car, and spend a day driving country roads to gasp at fall foliage. I joined them often, never tiring of the orgy of pinks, yellows and oranges as the trees shed the sedate greens of summer.

It became a computer science rite, this drive. Except Saturday afternoons, when not even the foliage kept us from cheering on Brown's footballers. Or maybe we were really ogling the cheerleaders, who knows.

This time too, the stomping of SB was one stop in our September romp through the fall colours of New England. Every day on the road, more trees turned aflame. Driving along, I found myself often bereft of words, able only to extend my index finger in the direction of the latest brilliant stretch of foliage, hoping my wife would look and gasp too.

Fall memories. And wandering through Brown, others too: struggling to finish programming assignments; camaraderie in the lab as we slogged into the night; reversing onto Irving Avenue, straight into the back of another car doing the same but from the other side of the Avenue.

And of the time, too -- speaking of sports -- when I fought hard to win a game from friend Nancy, member of Brown's squash team.

Game after game, Nancy had been steamrolling me, and as I succumbed in still another, I sensed a resigned scorn in her: "Why won't this guy try harder?" Even all these years later, I remember telling myself, "Win one! Just one!" Scrambling after every shot, I did that -- I won the next game by three points. Nancy looked at me with new respect, then shifted gears. She returned to beating me, but at least it was never again as one-sided. She was never again scornful.

It was a lesson that stuck, and remains one of my favourite Brown memories. That afternoon at the Brown stadium, how I wished SB could find some of the fight that I'm still proud I dug out of nowhere, that changed the look in Nancy's eyes.

Ely effect

Among other charms, the capital of Texas, Austin, has always attracted up-and-coming musicians. There's a long city tradition of small hard-rocking bands playing their hearts out, and that rollicking music scene both feeds and feeds off the city's always gently eccentric feel.

That icon of the Woodstock generation, Janis Joplin, first made her name belting out Me and Bobby McGee in smoky Austin bars like Threadgill's. In the decades since, cult heroes like the Fabulous Thunderbirds (Tuff Enuff) and Joe Ely (Mustta Notta Gotta Lotta) have rocked a slew of hole-in-the-wall Austin bars, even if they couldn't spell very well. Inevitably, one of those holes in the wall was actually called "Hole in the Wall." (You Austinites -- is it still there?)

An Austin friend woke one morning to find Ely in bed with her roommate; they had picked each other up after his gig the previous evening. That night, my sister pronounced with a smirk when I told her, must have inspired the early Ely rocker, Musta Notta Gotta Lotta, one line in which goes like this: "Please understand me, everything's all right, I just musta notta gotta lotta sleep last night!"

Neither, we presume, did the roommate.

Some years ago, U -- another Austin friend -- and I went to one of those tiny bars to hear Butch Hancock, one more talented Texas singer and pal to Ely. The two had played together on a band legendary in Texas, The Flatlanders.

We were late, Hancock had begun. Outside, three of us stood waiting to enter: U, me and a leather jacket who looked a lot like Joe Ely. Was Joe Ely. He had come, he told us, to hear his old buddy Butch. "I never miss his shows", he said, then asked with a shy smile: "They've heard of me'n'Butch out there in India?"

Inside, Joe Ely sat alone and quiet through the evening, nursing a longneck, unrecognized in the dark. For two impressionable Indians, reared on tales of celebrity noses in the air, it was one refreshing evening, and not just because of the beer. U celebrated with a late night jaunt on his macho red-and-silver Yamaha, ending with a skid and crash, and we found him much later in the hospital with several cracked vertebrae.

The Ely effect, I don't know.

Right-angle town

The intersection is reminiscent, first of all, of that intersection in Alfred Hitchcock's classic, North by Northwest: Cary Grant in the middle of flatland nowhere, looking puzzled yet dapper as only he can, and eventually he gets cropdusted. Admittedly, this meeting of roads isn't quite as nowhere as that, isn't quite as flat, isn't surrounded by miles of crops and above all, isn't frequented by malevolent cropdusters. At least, none that I can see. But nevertheless, it is the first thought that comes to mind.

Cary, while looking for Casey.

After driving miles through a sunny but cool afternoon, I have stopped at a tiny dot on the map where two roads -- Kentucky Scenic Byways both -- cross at right angles. And as I roll to a halt, I remind myself: I have come here on purpose. Meaning, for weeks and months, going back to home on the other side of the planet, this very intersection has been a destination.

So having arrived at my destination, I get out and look around, feeling an inexplicable urge to soak in everything, maybe because it is such a nondescript spot. On my left a yellow sign says "High Water Possible". On the right is CJ's Liquor, Wine and Beer, where they sell Keystone Light -- featuring the vaguely suggestive slogan "It's Good To Be On Top" -- by the six-pack at $2.99, or by the case at $9.99. A few seconds go in trying to figure how "It's Good To Be On Top" might apply to beer. None of my answers are fit to print.

Next door, another store has dispensed with niceties like names. Above its entrance, a sign says simply, "Milkshakes, Burgers, Fries, Pizza, Catfish, Chicken", and another sign says simply, "LOTTO GAS BEER DELI". A few dozen yards south is Cayce Oil and Lube, Bait and Tackle. There, you can stock up on "crappie rigs, worms, jigs, lures, catfish, bait", while getting yourself a $23.95 oil change which will "feature Valvoline Products."

I like this place already. Cayce it is: tiny flyblown windswept nondescript you-pick-your-adjective town centered on this intersection in the far southwestern corner of the Kentucky.

Why did I come here? For that, oddly enough, it helps to know how you say the name. For months, I had known that Cayce is not, as I might have imagined, pronounced "Case". No, this is "Casey". As in Casey Jones, legendary train-man, subject of song after song, grew up here. One, by the Grateful Dead, famously if unfairly asserts that he was "high on cocaine". But that accusation, like all else we know about the man, only adds to the legend.

And this right-angle town gave him that name.

Casey was really John Luther Jones, a successful engine driver in these parts in the late 1890s. The story goes that early in his career, some colleagues asked him where he was from. When he said "Cayce", the name "Casey" stuck.

One day in April 1900, Jones took charge of a New Orleans-bound passenger train, the "Cannonball". A few hours later, whistling through Mississippi at 70 mph, he saw a freight train parked on the tracks ahead. With no time to brake the "Cannonball" to a stop, Jones ordered his fireman, Simeon Webb, to leap off and save himself. He himself stayed at his post, trying to slow his train. Futile, because he plowed into the freight train anyway. When they found his body, he was still holding the controls of the "Cannonball".

That kind of legend.

CJ's belongs to Judy and Kenneth Blackburn: she hearty and whitehaired, he tall and terse. Referring to the Casey Jones museum in Jackson, 2 hours south of here, she tells me: "That museum should have been up here, honey! Seeing as how he grew up here, not in Jackson."

"Would you have liked it here?" I ask.

Judy Blackburn thinks for a few seconds, and when she answers I realize she has misunderstood. "Yeah hon," she says, "I think Casey would have liked that."

It's such a charming answer that I don't feel like correcting her. Now I don't know what Casey Jones might have liked. But this intersection in Cayce, this desolate spot with its dollops of breezy quirkiness, makes a fine memorial to the man.

Sorry, Judy, but I hope they never have a museum in your one-junction town.