Old Crow Medicine Show, “Wagon Wheel”

This is one of my favorite songs.

In high school, when I was NOT a huge dork despite what my sister claims quite publicly on her Tumblr, my friends and I would ride in the back of trucks, always with systems, always with lifts, always with 30” tires, always listening to stuff like this. We would squeal and hold on for dear life after we all decided to take a break from video games— the girls watching, the boys playing (we were far, far too patient for these boys who never kissed us anyway, who always ended up asking younger girls to prom and sitting next to us on porch swings with our love letters in their hands and staring out at the clouds with nothing constructive or generous to offer us back)— and we would sing, yell, really, this song, which was maybe one of the best songs we had ever heard, and something we could all agree on as we slid through the mud of abandoned properties and empty fields, spinning and screaming and squeezing each others palms excitedly when we yelled, JOHNSON CITY, TENNESSEE! because that was where we would go camping every summer, with me the least likely of tagalongs, each of the girls’ best friend but sometimes the boys’ worst enemy, always squeaking to “Wait up!” while we hiked and crawled around in caves, my feet dragging like the cliche that I was, arguing with them, with my liberal politics (there is maybe no pretension so thrilling as that of a 17-year-old) and unabashed talk of tampons and boobs and how far away to college I’d go and how I was still in love with someone in Louisiana and isn’t James Joyce the best writer EVER and I am totally going to set aside the center spread of the next issue of our school paper about this one funny thing that happened to me (what has changed? nothing!) and IF I DIE IN RALEIGH AT LEAST I WILL DIE FREE.

One of those friends got married recently— in fact all of those friends are married now, who am I kidding?— and she played this at her reception and we held hands in a circle just the way we would have at a school dance back then and we screamed the words and we were older this time but “caught a trucker out of Philly / had a nice long toke,” still gave us all a thrill and we laughed and I cried and oh, this song!