My Life In 35 Songs, Track 29: “Carry Me Home” by The Alternate Routes

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We got the street lights, we got it all right, we got this whole night, carry me home

There’s this stretch of roadway just south of my hometown that I’ve always loved, where you go around a bend and suddenly find yourself surrounded on both sides by towering pine trees. The road gradually climbs from there, taking you out of this beautiful, tranquil valley. But the feel of that short passage – the indescribable power of those trees and the many, many years they’ve been there – lingers for the rest of the drive.

Throughout my life, that spot on the road has always been the checkpoint – the spot where, when I pass through it, I know I’m home again. I came to feel that way during college, when I drove that road literally hundreds of times to get back to my parents’ house – for weekends, or Christmases, or summer vacations. I kept feeling that way after I graduated, when the visits home became less frequent, and therefore, that much more precious. I still feel that way today, when I come back into town after a vacation, or even after a quick jaunt downstate for a concert. No matter how many times I pass into that forest of pines, I always feel the same way about it, like I’ve just entered the gravitational pull of the place I love most, and can lay whatever burdens I’ve been carrying down. “Rest easy child,” those trees seem to whisper; “everything will be alright. You’re safe here.”

“You’re home.”

I could live 100 more years and drive that stretch of road a million more times, and I doubt that feeling would ever fade away. Some places are just places to you. You pass through them as a traveler, and you rarely think of them again. But other places imprint on you. They enter your veins and take up permanent residency in your bloodstream, following the path all the way to your heart. Depending on where life takes you, you might end up with a few of those places. A lot of us only ever have one. I only have one. One place, of all the many places on this planet, that I have ever truly considered home. It’s Traverse City, Michigan, and for me, it starts at the edge of that mysterious, beautiful wood.

While that stretch of road will always have power for me, though, I doubt I will ever feel it as forcefully as I did in January 2018. “There’s nothing I know now/No way to slow down/I’m drunk on the dancefloor/Carry me home.” Those were the words tumbling out of the speakers of my car as I careened around that bend and saw those towering trees and knew I was home – not, this time, for a visit or a holiday, but for good. For the first time since I’d left home on my way to college for the first time, I was returning without an expiration date. There was no imminent departure two days away, or two weeks, or two months, no moment when I’d have to pack the car again and hug my mom and say goodbye. This time, I was sticking around.

Of course there was a playlist to commemorate the occasion. I think I started building it on December 15, the day my wife got the call from an employer in Traverse City offering her a job. The two of us had been angling to get back home for years. Some people wait their whole lives to escape the place they were raised, and never want to go back once they’ve gotten out, but we weren’t like that at all. We loved our hometown, and the prospect of returning to it was a sweet one. And so, on that mid-December day in 2017, my wife accepted a new job, and we began planning for a new chapter.

I actually made two playlists: a “Leaving Grand Rapids” playlist and a “Coming Home” playlist. The former was filled with songs I’d fallen in love with while living in GR, which meant it was mostly country-centric. Chris Stapleton’s “Traveller,” A Thousand Horses’ “Where I’m Going,” Steve Moakler’s “Wheels.” These were tracks that were intimately linked with the era of my life that was now ending, but each also spoke to the hurtling inertia of life, and how the one-way road keeps stretching on and all you can do is follow it. “They drive you away and bring you home again,” Moakler sang on the latter; “I swear sometimes it feels/Like life’s just a set of wheels.”

The “Coming Home” playlist, meanwhile, was meant to herald my arrival back in the place that had raised me. Josh Ritter’s triumphant “Homecoming” is the opening track. Butch Walker’s aptly named “Coming Home” is an emotional fulcrum. An achingly gorgeous country song by David Nail and Lori McKenna, simply called “Home” sits right near the end, where its patient, thoughtful energy felt most appropriate. The latter has, quite simply, one of my favorite choruses that will ever exist, and I was feeling it quite powerfully that day: “It’s where you’re from/It’s your oldest friend/And you think it will forget you when you go but you know it’ll take you back in/It won’t fade away/It’ll watch you leave/And stay sitting there waiting in the fields, in the sky, in a storm/In your blood and your bones/Home.”

But the song I remember most from that drive is “Carry Me Home” by The Alternate Routes, because that’s the song that happened to be playing when I hit that magical stretch of road that told me I was really, truly home for good. “I’ve been a miner for gold on the outskirts of town/And there’s no one like you,” howled Tim Warren, the Connecticut band’s frontman, as the song built toward its first chorus. “I’ve been a face in the crowd, going without the likes of somebody who/Loves me like you do.”

It didn’t take long before I was openly weeping in the front seat of my car, and it didn’t escape me that this moment was a perfect mirror image of the day I left home and headed off for college the first time. That day, as I’d said farewell to my home, I’d truly realized for the first time how much it meant to me. Now, I was returning to that place, and my love for it had only grown in my absence. It was a beautiful full-circle moment.

It’s been the better part of eight years since that day, and I still pinch myself sometimes at the fact that I get to live here. It happens when I see the sunset over Lake Michigan, or when I get to reconvene with my past in some deeply meaningful way that would be nearly impossible if I lived anywhere else. It’s not the same place I knew when I was young, of course. There’s a line in a Death Cab for Cutie song I love that goes “Home’s face, how it ages when you’re away,” and Traverse City certainly lived up to those words. It’s grown, for one thing, and become an even more popular tourist draw than it was 10, 15, 20 years ago. Some of the hangout spots my friends and I used to frequent – the diners and coffee shops and restaurants and movie theaters – have long since closed or transformed. And a lot of those friends aren’t here either; a few moved back, but a lot of them didn’t.

But so many things have stayed the same, too. Earlier this year, I got a chance to walk the halls of my high school again, for the first time in the better part of a decade, and it still looked and smelled and felt exactly how it did in my youth. And sometimes, when I’m out for a run on local roads or trails, when the sun hits the trees just right, I could swear I just stepped through a wormhole to 20 years ago, when I was running those exact same roads and trails, training for high school cross country season.

Some people believe that if you’re not moving forward, you’re stagnating. And I guess moving back to your hometown can seem like a kind of stagnation. Because how can you be moving forward if your life’s map ends up being a circle? But I, for one, have never regretted moving home and making a life in the place where I grew up. In fact, when I look back now, it’s those “in between years,” from when college ended to the day my wife and I moved home, that felt stagnant. So much of the life I love today, from the friends I have to the job I work to the passions that most define my days, has come into focus since I adopted Traverse City, Michigan as my home address once more. It’s a good life, and in a lot of ways, it began in earnest the moment I hit that beautiful stretch of roadway on the outskirts of town, when I saw those towering trees, and when I heard the most apt lyric possible coming through the speakers.

“Carry me home.”

Past Installments:

• Track 1: “One Headlight” by The Wallflowers
• Track 2: “Hanging by a Moment” by Lifehouse
• Track 3: “Hide” by Creed
• Track 4: “Wheel” by John Mayer
• Track 5: “Kill” by Jimmy Eat World
• Track 6: “Fix You” by Coldplay
• Track 7: “Walk On” by U2
• Track 8: “Feeling a Moment” by Feeder
• Track 9: “When Canyons Ruled the City” by Butch Walker
• Track 10: “Truth Is” by Sister Hazel
• Track 11: “Breaking Free” from High School Musical
• Track 12: “Come Around” by Counting Crows
• Track 13: “Someone Like You” by SafetySuit
• Track 14: “Crashin’” by Jack’s Mannequin
• Track 15: “Thunder Road” by Bruce Springsteen
• Track 16: “Go” by Boys Like Girls
• Track 17: “Ride” by Cary Brothers
• Track 18: “Growing Up” by The Maine
• Track 19: “Dusk and Summer” by Dashboard Confessional
• Track 20: “The Sound of You and Me” by Yellowcard
• Track 21: “Holocene” by Bon Iver
• Track 22: “Handwritten” by The Gaslight Anthem
• Track 23: “Can’t Smile Without You” by Barry Manilow
• Track 24: “The House That Heaven Built” by Japandroids
• Track 25: “Miles Apart” by The Dangerous Summer
• Track 26: “Song for the Road” by David Ford
• Track 27: “Speed Trap Town” by Jason Isbell
• Track 28: “Dibs” by Kelsea Ballerini

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