Joy To You, Baby
- Jenny Rule
- Jun 10, 2018
- 5 min read
(For full effect, please buy the song Joy to You, Baby by Josh Ritter and listen prior to or while reading this story. If you’re not sure you want to buy it quite yet, you can listen first here. Then buy it. We need to pay artists for their work. Thank you!)
I heard this song for the first time while driving west to east through Iowa. It was late and dark and peaceful and quiet. My family slept in their seats while I helmed us through the midnight blue land and sky leading home. I switched on the radio…and…Joy To You, Baby. I didn’t know the title or artist at the time, but the song belonged there, with me, in that moment. I want to tell you why, but first, I have to tell you the story of our sojourn…
We were returning from an unlikely Great Western Adventure – and by “unlikely”, I mean two parts foolhardy and one part bold. My husband and I had always wanted to take our boys west, and neither Mike’s advancing neuromuscular disease nor my grief over recently losing my father to Alzheimer’s was going to stop us. It was “do or do not” time, and the loose plan of heading west from Wisconsin and getting to Mike’s alma mater (Washington State University) in Pullman, WA was the only scaffolding. The two teenagers who had no interest in going? Tough. We took off work and started packing.
The first leg of the journey should have scared us off. We drove to the Madison airport to pick up a minivan we had reserved online, but the car rental company didn’t have one available. They showed us four alternative vehicles and we picked a Chevy Traverse, piled our stuff in and headed out. Mike was terribly uncomfortable – grimacing with every bump on the highway. We decided to search for a cushion or two at the next opportunity and forged on. The boys complained about the lack of space; my cell phone straight up stopped working; and the Traverse was packed all wrong for pit stops, so our first one took an hour. We breathed, we smiled - we kept rolling.
I am eternally grateful that our first overnight stop was the home of my sister and brother-in-law in Minneapolis. They were instrumental in finding the aforementioned cushions, a fortifying dinner, and a nearby hotel with a pool and hot tub. We took 2 days in Minneapolis to regain our courage, play with my nephew Cormac, and then we set out once again. Pullman or bust!
We reached Pullman in record time, and my brother and nephew from Seattle were - surprise! - waiting there with a hotel room for us to share. After a night of catching up and using the hotel pool, we woke early the next day and toured Pullman together. We happily revisited the town where we spent the early days of our marriage, boring the kids with stories of past jobs and professors. Of course, we went to the cougar statue and took a photo of Mike and the boys.
For the first time, I kept a blog on TravelPod.com, a now defunct travel blogging website. I posted entries, and then email notifications would go to extended family members so they could follow along on our journey. I still have the entries and comments, though they aren’t online anymore. Reading back I can hardly believe all the amazing adventures we had, and how supporting my family was. I’d stay up late writing on the app on my cell phone, just to try to capture the feeling of the day.
And man, did I have plenty to write about! After leaving Pullman we went down many different roads. We jumped in rivers and hotel pools with equal abandon. We steered ATV’s through an Idaho forest with Mike’s former professor. We read bedtime stories to two nephews within 24 hours– one that lives in Minneapolis and one that lives in Seattle. We saw buffalo and snakes and moose and black bears. We drove on a road with a sign that said “Curvy Road next 99 miles” surrounded by a forest fire. We met up with old friends at a Montana state park and played for hours in a fast-flowing river. We ate ice cream in nine different states. We saw Yellowstone and Mount Rushmore and Badlands and Lolo Pass. We took a family photo at 10,926 feet above sea level. We played John Denver’s Rocky Mountain High while driving through the Rockies, and Bruce Hornsby’s On the Western Skyline during a western sunset.
We also squabbled and struggled and battled and got on each other’s last nerve. We growled at the boys for looking at their electronics too much and they groaned every time we tried to tell them about Lewis and Clark and Sacajawea. We learned that an accessible hotel room is not always accessible. We tried to not be frustrated at the paths we could not take – the camping gear we brought but could not use. At the end of it all, we were exhausted like counselors at the end of summer camp or musicians at the end of a tour….but we had done it.
So… back to the car in Iowa. It was late and dark and peaceful and quiet. My family was sleeping in their seats while I helmed us through the midnight blue land and sky leading home. And then Iowa radio sent out a song that matched the moment. Joy To You, Baby by Josh Ritter.
The feeling I had in that moment has stayed with me, and will be with me forever. The song itself is a simple, repetitive rhythm. It is a heartbeat – the sway and clack of a train from the safety of a berth. It has an optimistic tone and lilt, and a gentle, leading quality. And resonating through the whole song is one optimistic word: Joy. The song made clear my emotion – one I hadn’t felt in a long while. We were coming out the other side of a cloud I didn’t even know we’d been in. We were on our way back home and we were healthier, stronger people than we’d been when we set out.
In that moment I realized I hadn’t been all that sure that we would make it to Pullman. Or make it to Yellowstone, or Rushmore. I hadn’t known how much our family and friends would factor in – that they would find amazing ways to take the journey with us, enhancing it in every way. I couldn’t have known. And prior to the trip I wasn’t sure we would hold up to the pressures. I just wasn’t sure.
But we had done it. And in doing it, we proved that the future was going to be OK. If we could do this trip - the one with no plan and no hotel bookings and the wrong car and the flimsy premise - we could do anything. A sense of peace and joy coursed through my body, spread out to the car, diffused across the countryside. I felt so much joy that I wanted to beam that joy back out to the world. To my loved ones near and far…to anyone who needed joy…because I was inexplicably overflowing with it at that moment. “Joy to the many. Joy to the few. Joy to you baby. And joy to me too. Tonight tonight tonight.”
Maybe you felt a twinge of joy in late August 2015 around midnight CST and wondered where it came from. That was from Iowa, from Josh Ritter, and from me. Joy To You, Baby.
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