The Jew in the Phish

It is night on Sugarland Highway in the middle of Florida. I can’t see it, but Lake Okeechobee is lapping at my left. There are no streetlights, and it is black all around my Buick Century. A few dark minutes pass and I see a pair of pinpoint lights ahead and then other pairs appear and I start to feel that maybe I have friends out here, but then a few more minutes are gone and those sparkling eyes have become bursting beams that blind past and bring everything back to that heavy black.

I smoke a cigarette even though I don’t smoke cigarettes. I check my iPod even though I know the song won’t be finished for another 15 minutes and I hate stopping songs before they finish. I look and wait and look and worry about it, but I certainly don’t stop at the next gas station even though I need gas. I just keep driving, and even though everything gets black again, somehow somewhere I know that down the road the air will be clear, the sky will be light and I won’t be alone.

Two hours earlier, I had dropped Sager off with his parents at a gas station near the Tampa International Airport. Fresh off a plane from Austin, they were now heading down to Sarasota for their annual Florida family gathering. This is the first time I’ve met Sager’s parents, and, though it only lasts minutes, it’s a meeting that adds a couple more pieces to the puzzle of who he is.

Almost a year earlier, in our basement apartment in Nachlaot, an old and mystical neighborhood in Jerusalem, Sager told me he gets his sense of humor from his mother, a woman whose presence seemed to tower over me with booming warmth at the gas station where she immediately hugged me tight and told me to pass the love along to Carl, one of the guys I would be meeting down the road.

From his father, a professor at the University of Texas and Great Clips franchise owner, Sager said he gets an ability to talk and talk and talk and talk. But I don’t experience this. When I meet him, the old prof is quietly chomping at a Snickers Ice Cream Bar that he bought inside. He shakes my hand, gets into the passenger side of his rental car and that’s that.

Back on Sugarland Highway, every few minutes I pass a bright yellow diamond with a big black tractor on it. It’s sort of jarring. I know this sign, but I don’t expect to see it on this road because everything I know about South Florida tells me that the sign should’ve rusted from irrelevance and been taken down long ago.

My Buick is cutting through the blackness and a sense of doubt is cutting through me again. It started soon after I dropped Sager off. Getting to Tampa had been easy enough. The day before we’d taken back roads to get from my parent’s home in Jacksonville to my house in Gainesville. It’s a trip I’ve made a thousand times, coming home for holidays, doctor’s appointments and the dire laundry run. And Gainesville to Tampa is more or less a straight shot along I-75. No problems there.

But now, Sager is gone and I stare at a map, searching for the best route. Staying on the highway will take me out of the way, almost all the way to Orlando just so that I can cut back down south. The back roads are more direct, so, even though it’s nearing night and I’ve never been on them before, I opt to stay off the highway and soon enough I’m passing these tractor signs and wondering in the dark if maybe I’ve headed north by mistake.

Florida is folded on the steering wheel so that I can only see her mid-section. Pass a town on the road. Check Florida for the facts. It always seems to match, but the doubt still manages to creep in to my consciousness. Pass another tractor. It’s dark again. I’m doubtful again. I barely know where I’m going. This is South Florida, right? I’d called Harper late the night before from Gainesville. Sure, I could stay with him, he had said. We’d caravan down together. But South Florida doesn’t have tractors and it doesn’t have an endless blanket of sparkling stars for a sky. Does it? Check the map again. It all lines up. I call Harper to confirm. “Tractors? Lake Okeechobee? Where the hell are you, man?” I tell him the name of the next town. “Yea, that’s somewhere I sort of recognize that but why oh why the hell are you there?” he laughs and asks. His laugh emboldens my doubt and it just seems to get darker all around me.

Put out that cigarette. Pull in for gas. Wait to shut the car off until the song finishes. Shut the car off. Get coffee. Get doubtful. Get darker. Get back on the road. Forget tractors. Remember another sign from dozens of miles back. “Big Cypress Seminole Indian Reservation –>” It’s like a beacon in my brain. South Florida must be somewhere near me, Miami somewhere beyond that. And the light must be growing somewhere out there, too.

Ten years before the sign for Big Cypress, before the Jerusalem apartment, before I knew Sager existed, before I could really worry about darkness and tractors and expectations, I was 12 and the world was freaking out about mass technological failure. The TV and other trusted sources of information were claiming that some numbers would soon roll over and thereby destroy everything we’d ever worked toward, and that to me sounded like nothing to hyperventilate over, but what did I know, anyway?

So on New Year’s Eve 1999, as the ball dropped and as my parents did things that I do now but didn’t do then like drink and worry about mass technological failure, I snuck up to a balcony with some other kids where we pulled strings on a dozen confetti poppers so that multicolored strings shot out over our parents’ heads and got caught in the fan spinning above them, and we thought that was the funniest thing ever. Of course, the fans kept spinning and the lights didn’t suddenly go out. It was just the end of one year and the beginning of another.

And while most Americans—hypochondriacs, all of them—were realizing they had imagined the whole Y2K fever, somewhere out in South Florida where there is still swamp and it doesn’t feel like South Florida feels in 21^st century, the largest millennium-eve gathering was going down. Out on the Big Cypress Seminole Indian Reservation, Phish, an improvisational rock quartet from Vermont, was playing the greatest concert of its career, a marathon midnight-to-sunrise performance that many Phishheads call simply “The Show.”

They say that every Jew was at Mount Sinai when God and Moses gave the Torah. Well, I have a corollary to that midrash: Every Phishhead was at Big Cypress when Phish gave that Show of all Shows.

What follows is the tale of mine and many other souls finding a way, consciously or otherwise, back to that South Florida swamp and back to that mystical mountain.