by Gregg Winkler.
There’s a state park not too far from where I live. It has a 19-mile hiking trail complete with swinging rope bridge, scenic routes, wildlife including deer, turkey, and foxes, a primitive campsite, and several rock formations that make for good climbing. I’ve never been able to complete the whole trail. A buddy and I once hiked five miles into the woods and then five miles back – but I realized how out of shape I was the next day when I had to have Uber Eats deliver a large pepperoni pizza directly to my bed.
There is one bit to the hiking trail that I don’t much care for. It’s this mile-long stretch where the trail comes out of the woods and runs along State Highway 10. The highway crosses over a lake, so you have to walk along the highway’s shoulder while cars zip by. The speed limit over the bridge is fifty-five miles an hour, which means drivers are doing sixty-five when they pass. That includes the eighteen wheelers, who threaten to blow you off the bridge as they roar by. In addition, the bridge is covered in roadkill, so as semis are blasting by you, you have to hopscotch along the edge to avoid stepping in dead armadillos and raccoons.
It’s not much better off the bridge. At each end of it is an appalling collection of litter tossed from the windows of cars. The place is covered in fast food containers, baby diapers, and a worrying amount of empty beer cans and booze bottles. There are also more ominous things that take the imagination into darker places. Things like stained mattresses, discarded underwear, and rolled up rugs (I’ve seen enough gangster movies to know to stay away from those).
Despite all of the disgusting refuse that accumulates there at the end of the bridge, there are also little islands of wild flowers growing up amidst the garbage. It’s amazing how wild flowers will stop a person in their tracks. These flowers are a deep maroon, and they grow in small clumps here and there. You can’t help but pause and smile and admire their beauty, even when they’re growing up between empty boxes of Marlboros and those itty-bitty bottles of booze they sell next to the register in liquor stores.
It’s this trait that I admire about wild flowers, their ability to grow in the trash of life. My wife and I have tried growing all kinds of plants, and most of the time, we’re not very successful. Whether it’s watering too much or too little, the more we try to keep it alive, the more we seal its doom. But wild flowers are built different. They grow where they want, when they want, how they want. In Oklahoma, we can go months without rain. Wild flowers couldn’t care less. Floods, tornadoes, droughts, ninety-degree temperatures in March followed by a snow storm at Easter: wild flowers are here for it. They are a constant bright spot amongst the chaos and ugliness that life throws at us.
Another thing I like about wild flowers is that they always make me think of Tom Petty’s solo album, Wildflowers, which came out at the end of 1994, when I was fourteen-years-old. In 1994, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers was all over the radio with “Mary Jane’s Last Dance,” which came out the year before. I’m not sure if it was Mike Campbell’s guitar, the effortlessly singable lyrics, or if it was the music video in which Petty danced with a beautiful corpse (played by Kim Bassinger) – “Mary Jane’s Last Dance” was undeniably a banger. Compared to “Mary Jane,” though, the album Wildflowers was too mellow, too mature, and too quiet for me at that age. It would take decades of living, making mistakes, and making a mess of my own life before I could appreciate what Petty had accomplished with that album.
Prior to Wildflowers, Petty had a bit of a reputation for being an ornery musician. In the 1970s and 80s, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, despite their roots in classic rock and roll, were often referred to as part of the punk scene despite the Heartbreakers using far too many guitar chords to be considered truly punk. Wildflowers, though, was an abrupt departure from the hard driving rock and roll of the typical Heartbreakers albums. Wildflowers was thoughtful, mature, and introspective. It’s not “Free Falling,” which you scream-sing as you drive down the road ala Jerry McGuire – Wildflowers is the kind of album you put on and point to the sky as the lyrics speak to those feelings deep in your soul you’ve not been able to put words to.
Wildflowers was written during perhaps the hardest decade of Tom Petty’s life. In the years just leading up to and following the album, Petty’s life was turned completely upside down. In addition to being a world-famous musician, Petty underwent a number of challenges. His house was burned down by an arsonist. His marriage, always tenuous, completely fell apart ending in divorce. Stan Lynch, the original drummer for the Heartbreakers, was fired from the group. Not very long after Wildflowers’ release, death struck another Heartbreaker, Howie Epstein, who died from complications of drug use. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. As the losses piled up, Petty himself slipped into drug addiction and deep depression.
BUT like wild flowers growing along the discarded garbage strewn along Highway 10, some good began to grow in the mess that had become Petty’s life. After his divorce, he met, fell in love with, and eventually married Dana York, who was instrumental in helping Petty put his life back together. With York’s help, intensive therapy, and a strict drug rehab program, Tom Petty was able to rise from rock bottom. According to Warren Zanes’s biography of Tom Petty, “There was enough there to make some onlookers think that ‘reborn’ was a fitting description [of Petty]. And it is a good story, the best one to tell if you want to divide a life into discrete parts and get on with things. But Petty wasn’t reborn. Rebuilt, maybe. But from parts left over from a wreck” (Zanes 271).
In this same book, when discussing the making of the Wildflowers album. The author states, “After Petty’s therapist heard the song ‘Wildflowers,’ he asked who the singer was addressing. ‘I told him I wasn’t sure,’ Petty says. ‘And then [the therapist] said, “I know. That song is about you. That’s you singing to yourself what you needed to hear.” It kind of knocked me back. But I realized he was right. It was me singing to me’” (Zanes 253).
You can hear the trauma in the songs on the Wildflowers album. The beautiful lyrics and musicianship seem to stand in stark contrast to it, the same way those wild flowers stand in their beauty amongst all that garbage on Highway 10. I’m reminded of a passage from Falling Upward, a life changing book by Father Richard Rohr: “Sooner or later,” Rohr says, “if you are on any classic ‘spiritual schedule’, some event, person, death, idea, or relationship will enter your life that you simply cannot deal with using your present skill set, your acquired knowledge, or your strong willpower. Spiritually speaking, you will be, you must be led to the edge of your own private resources. At that point you will stumble over a necessary stumbling stone, as Isaiah calls it; or to state it in our language here, you will and must ‘lose’ at something. This is the only way that Life-Fate-God-Grace-Mystery can get you to change, let go of your egocentric preoccupations, and go on the further journey…. There is no practical or compelling reason to leave one’s present comfort zone in life…. So we must stumble and fall….Falling, losing, failing, transgression, and sin are the pattern, I am sorry to report. Yet they all lead toward home. In the end, we do not so much reclaim what we have lost as discover a significantly new self in and through the process” (Rohr 65-67).
I’m a 45-year-old man as I write this, practically the same age Petty was when Wildflowers was released. This album has become a lantern in the dark for me. I’m reminded each night that I’m getting older. The number of pill bottles on the side of my bed keeps growing. The person I thought I would be when “Mary Jane’s Last Dance” was on the radio didn’t survive the nineties. Since then, I’ve spent a lifetime collecting resentments and have in recent years come to realize how self-poisoning they are. Where the resentments used to be, I now have regrets – regrets for all the hurt I’ve caused and regrets for the good I could’ve done, but chose not to.
Maybe there are folks out there who have never made a mistake, who have never hurt a loved one, who have never been led astray, or who have always managed to make the right choice – but I doubt it. In my experience, when you meet someone who tries to convince you that they’ve got it all figured out, they’re either a narcissist trying to manipulate you, or they’re the type of person who is so fearful of getting something wrong, the real reason they haven’t messed everything up is because they’ve been too scared to try anything with any real stakes involved. Neither of these people ever seem to actually be happy.
No, the people I see whose smiles truly meet their eyes are the ones who have left a bit of destruction – self-destruction most often – in their wake. They have tried things and failed. They have hurt themselves and others. They have stared up at the ceiling in the dark of night wishing they had spent more time with those they’ve lost, chased that unrealized dream, said ‘no’ to that drink, or hadn’t been such a coward when it mattered. These are hard-won nuggets of wisdom you don’t get by sitting in the front row at school. It’s the ugliness that leads to an appreciation for beauty; doing something unforgivable reveals the power of grace; and there’s nothing better than a belly laugh after hours spent crying in pain. This is the kind of stuff Jesus was trying to get at with the beatitudes, I believe.
These are life’s wildflowers. The little bright spots that appear even brighter because they’re surrounded by so much unpleasantness. I believe Tom Petty’s therapist was right when suggesting that Petty was singing to himself – telling himself that despite all the awfulness, he deserved happiness. But I also believe Tom Petty was singing this to all of us as well. It doesn’t matter if you’re innocent to the harsh realities of life, in the middle of your dark night of the soul, or if you’ve come out the other side of it – it’s important to notice the beautiful things in life. As the Buddhists tell us, in life, there is suffering. But it’s in that soil that the most beautiful flowers can bloom. Petty sang, “You belong amongst the wildflowers.” And he was right. We all do.
Works Cited:
Rohr, Richard. Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life. Jossey-Bass Pulishing.
2011.
Zanes, Warren. Petty: The Biography. St. Martin’s Griffin. 2015.