The Ride Home

We drove home from the Folk Festival that night, sunburnt and reeking of bug spray, the windows down to let some of the coolness of 2:00 a.m. into our car. We usually drifted in and out of sleep while my father navigated the highways back to Winnipeg, the thousands of other cars in the night with us sliding similarly in and out of view. My father thumbed in one of his tapes, keeping it low, and when “The Mary Ellen Carter” came on, we were all somehow feeling—even my father, who never sang—unencumbered enough to add our voices to Stan’s.

—Ariel Gordon