Golden Memories: Singing Into the Silence
This painting was inspired by a long afternoon I spent alone on a remote road in Guatemala.
In the early 1980s, Guatemala was a large country where getting even simple things often meant hours on the road. I was making a six-hour trip to pick up materials, traveling along mountain roads far from any town. No cell phones. No quick help. Just you and whatever the road decided to give you.
That afternoon, far from any town, the truck suddenly pulled hard to the side.
A flat tire.
When I checked the back, there was no spare.
I sat on the running board as the engine cooled and the silence rushed in. No houses and no traffic on the road. Nothing but thick green mountains and an empty road stretching in both directions. For the first time in all those years of travel, real fear took hold. What if no one came for days?
Sitting there, I reached for the cassette player.
I pressed play, and the opening notes of Supertramp’s “The Logical Song” spilled out into the quiet. I turned it up loud and started singing at the top of my voice, raw, off-key, and completely alone. I drummed on the truck, lost in the music, performing for mountains that didn’t care. Again and again the song played. Slowly, the fear began to loosen its grip.
The road was still empty. The truck was still broken. But the music had changed everything. What began as a frightening breakdown became something strangely beautiful. I was no longer simply waiting. I was present, surrounded by Guatemala’s deep green silence, singing into it.
As the afternoon passed, the sun began to move lower in the sky, casting golden light across the mountains and the road around me. It felt as though nature had created a stage of its own, and the fading sunlight became my spotlight as I sang.
I don’t remember how long it took before another truck finally appeared and helped me continue on my way. But I never forgot the feeling of that afternoon.
When I stand before Golden Memories now, I feel that same empty road. I see the heavy greens, the golden light, and the small act of singing that pushed the fear aside. The painting holds both the uncertainty of being stranded and the unexpected beauty that appeared in the middle of it.
Sometimes the moments that interrupt our plans become the ones we remember most.
