Nine Mile Hill Lost Poem
Doug Knowlton
. . . don't have the original poem. That’s what I would have called it though. A bleak image that stuck with me, no words needed. I'm sure I wrote it down, maybe later in California—but who knows where it went. The memory of listening to Janis, and the lines that follow are the remains stamped in my brain and written out a year or three ago forty years late, with that anxious anticipation of catching a ride in a northwestern direction. Strangely enough, returning later that year to the South my earlier me felt a need to escape. No prose poem writer, but, hey, why not, here’s a first and a last.
. . . Early in ‘71 caught a ride out of Chattanooga with a convict, headed south on the 59. It was February, about four months after she recorded the cover of Kristofferson & Foster’s masterpiece. It hit the stations just as the squirrely grease monkey at the wheel took the 20 toward Shreveport. Skinny and edgy with a head of dark, slicked back hair. Not someone to be messed with. Speed freak. His proud tale—that he'd left the garage in Choo-Choo town and the asshole he worked for with four brand new tires on his Mustang. He showed off the pistol under his seat and I got busy conceiving a poem in my head about the ride. Somewhere over the Texas border we picked up a couple hitch-hiking and things got real interesting. Heard some stories about a place called Angola. Apparently not the country in Southern Africa I'd learned about from collecting stamps. Stayed with the woman’s Christian sister in Albuquerque. That was tense. We were back out on the road in no time though, and later, I was relieved to be alone again, up in Santa Fe. Pitch black hitchin’ up to Colorado, Janis riding along the whole way. Traded jackets with Mr. Angola. He must have had a sharp eye for WWII collectibles, and I was cold. Sorry Uncle Fred. A Latino Air Force pilot picked me up in his drafty car just past Taos while the temperatures plummeted. He fed me breakfast in Denver before I went on up to Big Thompson. Reckon there are more than a few of us with our nothing-left-to-lose legends . . .
Doug Knowlton was raised in Huntington, New York, and attended schools in Massachusetts, Tennessee, and Michigan. He spent twenty years employed in various psychiatric facilities and community mental health services. During the last ten years he found his bliss working in bookstores. Filling notebooks full of scribbles began in 1967 as a way to deal with the inconceivable, and occasionally find beauty in the moment. Writing poems and song lyrics was always a way of expressing the inexpressible and connecting with parts of himself and others not available through other means.