No. 928 – Cowgirl In the Sand

Performer: Neil Young

Songwriter: Neil Young

Original Release: Everyone Knows This Is Nowhere

Year: 1969

Definitive Version: Road Rock Vol. I, 2000. If you’re into the teeth-rattling guitar stylings of Neil Young, this 18-minute treatment is not to be missed.

When you own a home, if you take any pride in ownership, suddenly your schedule and priorities change. Take raking leaves, frinstance. If you don’t want your lawn to die off so you have to replace big chunks of it every spring, you need to attack those fallen leaves ASAP. And I did with relish. Fortunately, we had a bunch of ash trees in the back yard, so we didn’t have wave after wave of leaves falling at different times.

But by the fall of 2000, I’d decided to hold off as long as I could for three reasons: One, raking leaves is not one of the more fun lawn-and-garden chores. Two, this year, the leaves were taking an unusually long time to drop, and I had a pretty good handle on the early ones from mowing. (I don’t recall that it was a warm fall, but it must have been.) And three, I wanted to see exactly how many bags it would take to do them all at once.

Now, I admit that I might have the timeline off a bit, but I have a crystal clear vision of a bright sunny day with this album and particularly this epic song on as I raked those piles. However, this album came out in December, and I don’t recall that I would have waited past Thanksgiving to do the raking, but since this was the last fall I was at the house, it had to be this fall. And why let the facts get in the way of a good story?

When the time came, I knew it was going to be an all-day job—or at least one that would take me all day from the time I got up to the time I had to clean up to go to work. I had about 6 hours. I fired up my Discman, put on my grubbiest outdoor clothes, which consisted of a thick sweatshirt, my crumbling jean jacket from years before, a beat-up pair of Levi’s and a nasty mesh baseball cap, and I began to rake. I kept the piles fairly small so I could load them more easily into bags without re-raking constantly to collect the leaves. I’d start close to the house and deck and move slowly but surely out to the lot line, which was ankle deep.

My record for lawn bags left out for the trash collector was 14. On my most recent trip to Lowe’s that year, I bought two more packs of paper lawn bags—6 bags to a pack. With the remaining bags from the last pack, I had 16 bags. That wasn’t enough. I had to make a Lowe’s run, which meant I could grab lunch on-the-go via the hot-dog stand that all home-improvement stores now seem to have for the home-improvement guy or gal on-the-go.

In the end, as Neil’s tortured Gibson was ringing in my ears, I hauled 18 bags of leaves out to the street. (I bet the trashman absolutely loved me that week.) The backyard looked immaculate, and I still had time to spare to toss my clothes in the laundry, shower up and get to work with a real sense of accomplishment.

What I didn’t know then was that that would be the last time I’d do any serious raking. Turns out, like Crash Davis, I hit my dinger and hung ‘em up.