Constellating in the beautiful “Valley of Dooms” in Virginia in the spring of 2006, the “Can We Sleep in Your Barn Tonight?” MYSTERY TOUR involved a three-day/night roadside movement and musical procession of a motley band of artists and barnyard inhabitants—musicians, poets, a nanny goat named Pink, her kid Green, and the spotted she-asses Aliass and Passenger, among others. Echoing both the title and itinerant theme of the old-time Appalachian ballad “Can I Sleep in Your Barn Tonight, Mister?,” our Mystery Tour had two major, intertwined aspects: first was a slow trek of about ten miles along highways and rural back roads, while our second aim was to enter some of the phenomenal structures native to the region and explore their deepest echoes and resonances through improvisational music, amplified by listening to what these places might have to say for themselves. In this sense, the adventure was both an investigation of troubled rural idylls and a rollicking wake for the unwritten stories and ways of knowing that stand endangered in the present Appalachian landscapes—especially in some old wooden barns subsiding by the wayside of interstates, sprawl, and industrial agribusiness. So the Mystery Tour passed, on foot and hoof, through the Valley and then deep into it, ending the journey hundreds of feet underground in Grand Caverns, an ancient show-cave. Along the way, we sought to fathom the mysteries hidden in the motes, seeds, stalagmites, and oak-beams of these places’ creaks and hums, and to discover how these mysteries resonate inside our own hides and bones.

Origins and Destinations
Though the journey itself was three days, the Mystery Tour brewed like a secret, small-batch bourbon for many years in the lost oak barns and rural wanderings of my own art practice. As a communal enterprise, the Mystery Tour grew from years of conversations, friendship, and artistic endeavor with each of the travelers involved: Pamela Albanese, Aliass, Sean Cummings, Rennie Elliot, Jacob Mitas, Melanie Moser, George Murer, Alexander Ney, Passenger, and Lydia Peelle—along with some new collaborators who joined the band along the way: Jessica Bozek, Shane Carpenter, Layne Garrett, Green, Kate Herron, Pink, Eli Queen, Susannah Slocum, and Douglas Smith. Significantly, the Mystery Crew came together in the Valley from far-flung points of origin: from the dirty, vibrant streets of American cities (New York, Los Angeles, D.C., and Portland, OR) to the cornfields-made-suburbs of New England, mossy orchards and cottonfields of the Deep South, deserts of Kirgizstan, and the golden fields of South Dakota. Each Mystery Tourist brought along a collection of remembered places, paces, and landscapes. In this sense, the project spoke toward various degrees of longing for/exile from homelands (both real and imaginary), and to native landscapes made unrecognizable by suburban sprawl or industrial development (or even by our distance from them in time). One way or another, we were all strangers passing through this here place.

When I moved homeless to the beautiful Blue-Ridge valley of Virginia in the spring of 2005 with my mutt and two she-asses, conundrums of shelter and family/community weighed heavy on my mind; indeed, the whole notion of a homestead in Dooms was a kind of private joke and melancholic passion, acknowledging both the longing and the impossibility of finding that pastoral greener grass I longed for. In a sense, the Mystery Tour’s slow-ass, roadside trek through the Valley of Dooms (as we nicknamed it) sought to both illuminate and assuage a common paradoxical struggle to find a place to settle ourselves in this increasingly placeless, homogenously global and urban-technocratic age. Knowing I was not alone in my sense of displacement, I summoned to my transitory Valley dwelling a motley crew of conspirators—people and other mammals for whose individual visions, voices, listening ears, perceptions, and creativities I hold deep love and esteem. My ultimate goal for the Mystery Tour was to assemble a band of wayfaring strangers of various mammalian persuasions, with whom to make soundings and sightings of the earth, skies, and underworld of the Valley of Dooms, in search of something as hard to name and fleeting as home.

Strange Migrations and Communal Hauntings

On the morning of the first day, Sunday, June 4, we set out from our base camp in Weyers Cave, Virginia, a field beside the North River belonging to my former landlady, Libby Tucker). The Mystery Tour began its soundings at a ramshackle structure we called the ChurchBarn which served as both livestock shelter and tabernacle in its time. Here the Mystery Crew came together with a wildly various assortment of strings, woodwinds, drums, goatbells, board-stomping boots, digital recording equipment , and the two Mystery Tour goats, Pink and Green. For several hours, the spontaneous band teased tunes and beats out of the woodwork, scrap metal, and shadowy corners of the haggard old barn. From floorboard-stomping fiddle tunes to eerie, 21st-century versions of old folk ballads like “Wayfaring Stranger”—some of which even adapted lyrics from the peeling, hand-painted religious placards left behind by one-time worshippers—the musicians wove strains of aural imagination into the physical presence of the barn’s unknown past and future. According to experimental musician Layne Garrett, the ChurchBarn improvisations truly captured the “unnamed essence” of the Mystery Tour’s collectively-understood aims: “barn essence channeled directly and lovingly.” On down the road, we practiced the same process of attunement and improvisation the next night in a storied old octagonal barn in Mt. Meridian, Virginia. On the third night, we entered the phenomenally mysterious and ancient labyrinthine spaces of Grand Caverns, where I had worked as a cave tour-guide over the previous winter. Of all the hours and hours of recordings made in the spaces we explored, the cave recordings were some of the most profound and cohesive performances of the Mystery Tour—evidence of a band deeply attuned to both the places at hand and to each other after those days on the road together.

Reflections

In the end, we did not go all the way to Dooms as originally planned. We forsook the roadside trek of remaining (mostly highway) miles that would have delivered us into that strangely-named township of derelict dairy farms, doublewides, and a single gas station/hot-dog stand called “downtown dooms.” Nor did we actually “sleep” en masse in any barns, as local barn-owners were a bit too mistrustful of traveling strangers with spotted asses and weird instruments; but some did welcome us to camp in rolling creekside hayfields along the way.

Underlying the Mystery Tour’s central question (Can We Sleep?) is a sense that when a person or people are exiled in some way, they must create the longed-for homeland and community out of the raw materials available to those with no real estate—that is, imagination, memory, music, and shared presence in time. Whether they are songs, stories, journeys, or otherwise, works of art build structures that we can seek both shelter and revelry inside of. In this regard, I think we did go all the way: the project sought uncommon communion with special, endangered places and with each other in this place—mourning and celebrating, tracing residues through backdoors of awareness. From the first twang of ChurchBarn soundings to the last hums fading into cavedarkness, we held a newfangled barn-dance, a wayward-ass revival in the tangled grasses, roar of traffic, wild skies and companionship we met along the way. The overall feeling was not one of exile, but of communal revelry and action—even in light of our roles as wandering strangers. As Pamela Albanese described it: “’Can I sleep in your barn?’ Well, the answer is ‘No,’ without trespassing on an invisible agent's space. And we filled the ‘no’ void with sound. We were haunting a landscape.”

No, we were not able to sleep in those barns; instead, the Mystery Tour became our own strange, nomadic, 21st-century way of waking into these places.

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