Knavin.

Rifling through the contents of an old hard drive I have kept but had forgotten about, or forgotten what was on it. Turns out to be backups of my old Mac G3 tower, the one I made Life in a Box on, the one I dragged from Jersey City to Nashville to West Hollywood to San Francisco, put in storage while I lived in Utah, and then brought to New York.

This image haunts me. The photo was taken (by Roger, that’s why he’s not in it) at the top of a hill overlooking Visalia, California in 2002. We’re packing up after a picnic, getting ready for the walk home.

We played a show at a Unitarian church in Visalia California in the spring of 2002. A young couple in the audience, Mike and Kerry, heard we hadn’t yet found a place to park our camper, they lived on a small farm, told us we could pull up next to the chicken coop and stay as long as we wanted. It was not at all unusual for us to receive this kind of hospitality when we lived on the road. I still remind myself of these encounters when I start to wonder if people are naturally good.

A few days into our stay, we all took the dogs — theirs was as I remember a chocolate lab, and ours (Roger’s) was a yellow lab named Knavin — for a long walk. We all, Mike and Kerry, their wonderful kids whose names I can’t remember now, Jay and me and Roger, walked along a short stretch of country road, jumped a fence, walked up a hill covered with long, gold grass, and picnicked at the top.

One the way down, nearly to the road, the dogs charged ahead. When we got to the fence, we saw that they’d crossed the road and were playing on the other side. Concerned about their safety, we called to them to come back and join us, but just as Knavin responded and started to cross back, a pickup truck came around the bend and slammed into him.

Knavin was badly injured. He did recover and live a long life, but none of us really survived that day intact.

(I told this story in the rough cut of Life in a Box. It didn’t make the final cut. I hated to lose it, but it was the best decision for the film. The Knavin story starts at 1:14:08.)