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I headed up the mountains
I was gonna take some back roads over to a ghost town
Called Jerome, Arizona
Well, it's half a ghost town, you know
I had gone up there to meet
To find somebody very important to folk music
In an odd way, a woman by the name of Katie Lee
You know a name of Katie Lee much?
Well, she was a folk singer in the 1950s
You might recall an old record called
"Songs of Couch and Consultation"
Yeah, it was satirical songs about the psychiatric profession
And she sang, wearing a tight dress for the playboy clubs
But she sang folk songs
Well, she had retired, disappeared into Jerome, Arizona
And went to work, she was one of the founders of Earth First!
And wrote a lot of songs about saving the Colorado River
Powerful woman
Well, I was driving through Prescott, Arizona
On my way to Jerome
Driving down the street and I saw a sign there
A street sign that said Gale I. Gardner Avenue
Well I stopped and I said, "I know that man"
I had met him twenty-five years earlier in Montreal, Canada
Saul and I were up there
Terre des Hommes, Smithsonian Festival
And Gale Gardner was invited up to tell poems and songs
That he had made up years and years ago as a cowboy
Well, I went to the museum there, the Sharlot Hall
And I said to the woman behind the counter
"Now, Mr. Gardner wouldn't happen to be alive, still?"
And she said, "Oh yeah, he's ninety-five years old now
But he's in the hospital and ailing
Probably isn't going to come out"
So I went over to the hospital
And I spent the afternoon with him
Shrunk down in his wheelchair
Well, he had been a small man when he was alive
I knew him as a small man with an enormous white Stetson
And a silver-headed cane
There he was shrunk down in his wheelchair
With his great domed head covered with the big liver spots
And his glasses, one side blanked
Out so he could barely see through it
And the other lens magnifying an empty socket
In a grotesque sort of way
The high desert sun had given him over the years
Many small cancers on his nose and on his ears
That had to be cut away
He was visibly diminishing right before your eyes
But there was still that pillar of youth and energy inside of him
Trying to burst out in any way that he could still find
I sat on the floor in front of his wheelchair
So I could see his face because he couldn't lift his head
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