Seven Swans’ sorrowful optimism and the lessons my father taught me

Sufjan Stevens, giving up, and getting through.

I told everyone in Laramie that I was moving back to Star Valley to work for Dad; I told people that he needed help, presenting myself as nothing more than a helpful, attentive son.

The truth is that I had given up on myself. The experiment of higher education had collapsed beneath me with the embarrassing, heartbreaking, and troubling certainty that I was incapable of living in the real world.

I don’t recall the beginning of the collapse, but I can pinpoint the exact moment when the certainty hit: leaving an evening French class as the darkness drew down around Prexy’s Pasture. This was late autumn – snow had not yet begun to fall, but it was certainly in the air. Whatever had gone on in the forty-five minutes of that class had confirmed that I was broken, a failure: I couldn’t understand French even though months had passed. I knew I wouldn’t be back to the class, and somewhere deep in myself I knew that I wouldn’t last long in the others.

Not only did I leave school, I fled town, crossed the state, and hid my head.

At the time, my father kept an apartment in Salt Lake. My brother lived there, and my Dad spent the work week there – he came back to Star Valley on the weekends. I didn’t have a room in that apartment, but I had taken up residence in a bedroom of my parent’s basement that had once been mine but that became a catch-all for a quickly cluttering empty nest. I was part of that clutter.

To keep myself as minorly self-sufficient as possible, I drove my old Ford Taurus back and forth between Star Valley and Salt Lake. That’s around four hours one way, taken two or four times a week (depending on what nonsense reason I could think of to keep my own schedule). That Ford Taurus had the requisite portable CD Player and adapter than any kid my age had in the early 2000s; one of the albums I listened to most on those drives was Sufjan Stevens’ Seven Swans.

The Sufjan albums released on either side of Seven Swans are more famous, more popular, and much more dynamic recordings: 2003’s Greetings From Michigan The Great Lake State was the album that put Sufjan on the map, and Illinois pushed him even further into the zeitgeist. Why Seven Swans was the one that hit me hardest might have something to do with my mental state at the time: it was an equally ethereal and morose record. Sure, the same can be said of much of Sufjan’s discography, and for a lot of folk and folk-adjacent albums released in post-9/11 America, but there was something different about Seven Swans.

Seven Swans worked a small bit of strange alchemy for me: in its understated soaring, I began slowly to view myself as someone who could exist in the world.

After all, when the la-la-las hit in “Sister” wasn’t I already 30 miles south of Cokeville, headed to the city? Didn’t I have plans to meet Jeremy at some Cuban restaurant after work? Wasn’t there a trip to Gray Whale with Breckon on the horizon?

I wasn’t a hopeless person; I had a job, for chrissakes. Sure, it was for my dad and yeah, there would be no taxable pay stub. But it was employment, which is more than I could say if I’d have to struggle to get to class back in Laramie. Jobs were either at a premium in Laramie, or they felt that way because nobody wanted one.

If Taurus might have felt like a life raft, and the clanking banjo on “All the Trees of the Field Will Clap Their Hands” was the rise and fall of the ocean. The repeated soaring chorus the titular track raised with a sorrowful, almost holy sort of optimism, and what was my life if not sorrowful and, slowly by degrees, optimistic?

As the winter closed in, some of that light got shut out; I stopped making the long drives to Salt Lake and preferred, instead, to ride in the snow-safe cab of my father’s truck. Our jobs took us outside of Wyoming and Utah, chasing us to snow-buried Idaho and even dusty, dusty Ely, Nevada. Seven Swans got left in the car the length of all that seasonal sadness and darkness.

I think back on that time, now, and I’m thankful.

For all the inescapable depression and collapsing sense of self, I spent more time with my father in those months than I ever did again.

We spent hours in his truck, driving through the pre-dawn snow toward some Sun Valley condominium or another. Though I don’t recall every small task we performed during those ten-, fourteen-hour days – the reality of carpentry never worked its way as deeply inside my bones as it did my brothers, and it certainly wasn’t inherent in me the way it was for him – but I nevertheless learned vital portions of myself from my father in that time.

In those post-college months, on those dusty job sites, in those lonely motel rooms, Dad was quietly teaching me to work my way back to life.

I don’t know if he knew what he was teaching me, and I can’t say if I could name the precise lessons I was learning, only that I became a better person for my time with him – all the sweet kindnesses he had spent my life giving me only solidified, even under the hardship of labor.

Run along the rough edge of exhaustion, decency somehow sharpened toward strength.

Seven Swans means something else to me, no matter how much it reminds me of those four-hour commutes alone in my car, Wyoming in the rearview, and the canyon passes of Salt Lake quickly approaching ahead. I’m weeping now, writing this. Lyrics like

My father was in the first part/He came, he came to my bedroom. . . 
But I'm still asleep/And you woke me up again/And I'm still asleep/But you woke me up to be holy.

hit harder, now. It’s been almost four years, now, since he passed away, and I still find myself lost at sea whenever I remember that he’s gone. The damnedest thing is that I don’t think I’d ever be able to explain to him how this little record somehow relates, in all its mutable emotions, to him; he wasn’t an openly poetic man.

I didn’t realize when I sat down to write about the record that I’d be writing about my father. It had been an album of self-discovery. Now, it seems, it’s a record of a challenging time I am forced now to treasure.