The first night of vacation is always a weird feeling. Especially when you travel. It's a hurry-up-and-wait adrenaline pumping through your veins all day, because at least in this case, going coast to coast, complete with delays and rescheduled flights and, thank the gods, enough residual willpower to stay out of the airport bars because I knew eventually we'd land and then we'd have a 3+ hour drive still to go, it's just a lot to get from here to there, which at the moment was there to here, but now it's reversed again. You know what I mean.

We ate on the way out of LA, which would have to be a post unto itself, and made the long drive to Joshua Tree as the afternoon progressed. Wine and beers and food were acquired along the way, in a quantity to be modestly embarrassing for an average Wednesday, but hey, what are you going to do? We needed supplies. Vacation is, even temporarily, being separated from judgement. That's a rule.

This is the early part of the cycle of vacation. When the supplies are plentiful. When opportunity is abundant.

The sun was still up when we got to the desert. Which was extra good because the roads to the Airbnb, at least in the first night had it been in the dark, are just familiar enough from having stayed there before that we’d probably be ok when the GPS inevitably conked out, but they’re bendy and bumpy and same enough looking as is in daylight to be insane feeling in the blackness.

Before we left the just above freezing east coast, I’d looked up the sunrises and sunsets to get them in my head. Pink moon on the night we got in. Perfect. I'd figured out the timing and once we were loaded in with our suitcases, booze, and assorted ingredients, my wife asked, “What about music?” There really only was one album to put on, given the circumstances. And a bottle of wine to open. But, only one album.

"Let's put on Pink Moon by Nick Drake," I suggested. She agreed. And why wouldn’t she? It's the album of the moon that was about to rise. I didn’t even have to sell it. "When again?" "It's a full moon so, basically right after the sun is all the way down and the sky gets dark in the west, dead opposite in the east we should see the full moon coming up fast and strong."

Sometime in or around 1996 my (older, cooler) friend Dan played me Nick Drake for the first time. It was probably framed as a guitar nerd-thing of a reason. The open tunings and jazz adjacent drones and harmonies, I have a feeling Robert Johnson or Joe Pass got us there. He’d said this would also be right up my alley and it was. Dan had a four CD box set I coveted and by sometime in 1997 I'd acquired my own from the local record store. I remember having to save up and have them special order it. One CD in that era cost a lot. A 4 disc box set with extensive liner notes? Watch out now, high school budget.

The set contained all three of Drake's albums, plus a fourth of unreleased stuff. The third record, from 1972, was the standout. It was almost all solo acoustic guitar and voice. There was one other instrument on it, a lone piano, that plunked out a basic melody, kind of in a demo way, where you'd expect it to be replaced by lush strings or something later, but it wasn't and it suited just fine.

The liner notes said the whole album was recorded in two days. Two nights, really. Drake had wanted his third record to be stripped down, so he asked Island, his label, if John Wood could engineer it and if Joe Boyd could produce it, as minimalistic as possible, at Sound Techniques studio, and they signed off on it. I wonder why. I wonder how much they cared or were concerned or even if they were excited by the concept. Whatever way, they signed off and it happened. It happened fast, too. Literally two October nights in 1971 was all it took to make the whole record.

It sounds and feels so close. Like whisper singing, like whisper plucking the guitar strings, with thick calloused pads on the tips of his fingers, and with the tubby-ness coming through in the low end on his acoustic guitar, especially with the strings tuned down and slackened off on some of the tracks, seemingly to abnormal degrees, to have strings tuned so low a few are definitely flopping about over the fretboard, but that tone they got, and - the mic captures everything. Because of that up-close feeling, it sounded like you were in a car with him, with the windows rolled up.

Pink pink pink pink
Pink moon

It's kind of funny he recorded it closest to a Hunter's moon. That's the October one. The one you do the final hunt by, if you're a North American, and probably an American Indian at that, all those years ago. The Hunter's moon is the one that comes after the Harvest Moon, which, people really valued the extra hours a full moon could put in the day, especially before winter. It makes sense.

It also makes sense because a Pink Moon doesn't show up until spring. It's the name for the April moon. It's in reference to spring and some pink flower or moss that would show up and shimmer under the moonlight around that time. The other moons are for work. The pink moon is for the poets. At least, it would appear that way.

To teenage me, this album found me, the most, if not the deepest, in the car. It would have been through the CD player delicately balanced on the cup holder or the dashboard, or maybe the center minivan console, skip protection button activated, with the disc man headphone out connected to one of those faux cassette tapes that turned your tape deck into a makeshift CD player and, that's all you needed, really. It’s how we did it in the 90s, kids. Bluetooth and wifi, what can I say, future is amazing.

Because the record sounded like you were in a car with him, personally, and like you had the windows rolled up and he was strumming along in the backseat, that disc became the soundtrack of days when you had had the windows open before. And that was an important detail, for some reason. It's a temporary presence I want to highlight. How it's not a winter album, like when it was recorded or released, but a spring, summer, and fall album, where the day is hot but at night, when it cools down, you roll up the windows and put it on with just a fan or even the heat on low, and you drive to it.

The outside world is dulled by the glass and the movement all around you. The air in the car holds all the vibration you’ll get from the voice and the guitar. And the piano. Can’t forget the one hand line on the piano.

It plays best when the stars are out. A lake helps. I'd regularly do this. Especially by myself. On occasions as a shared experience with a friend or friends, too. But, it's a peaceful, listening experience of an album. Always with the windows up. Always with the sounds close and the background at a hush so you can hear all of those details. You can smell the wood of the studio, I swear.

Which is why, when we got to the desert, in April, and the sun started setting and the cold started setting in, enough to make sure all the windows were closed and the extra layers were pulled on, with extra blankets at the ready, and a long pour in the glasses, and an ocean of sand and rock and desert breeze moving in the way only desert breezes move,

Pink pink pink pink
Pink moon

Vacation is a good feeling. You survived the winter before. You have a sense of a summer in front of you. Seasons and moons, with suns and days in the middle. The pink moon goes from first moonlight, to breaking on the horizon, to fully rising into the sky. It's majestic. We take turns looking at craters through the fancy binoculars my wife brought with us. Our teeth are light red, you can see it in the moonlight, from the wine in this case, and we're both exhausted from the day. We weren't going to make it much longer. The moon can do the rest on its own.

We let the album play out and fell asleep with the curtains drawn.