Samsara Remembers “Morning Dew”

 

Samsara’s no spring chicken. A great-grandmother-Deadhead, “Morning Dew” on her headphones, she floats past a mama grizzly and her cub on this, her long dreamed Yukon River solo––Alaska blue-gold vault of sky 2:00 a.m. pink swirling clouds overhead. She knows the song well. Of the entire Grateful Dead songbook, “Morning Dew” paints a uniquely stark image of nuclear war––not the threat of it, but its aftermath. “Morning Dew” did something different to Samsara than anything else in the Dead’s catalog. The threat the song carries into the future follows her throughout her life, dust to dust. As she listens to the piece once more, both hands cupped in the river, she remembers the first time she saw the band perform, which was also the first time they played it live. On the river, alone, listening to a tape of that show, one she’d made herself, she has a Three-fold Vision of “Morning Dew.”

 

 

[Published in The Ongoing Saga I Told My Daughter: Expanded Edition.

© 2016 by Jim Cohn.]