I left the house first thing, alone. It was raining, the kind of low, gray, sticky rain that western Pennsylvania does better than anywhere else in the country. Not a storm. Just hours of wet, humid gray gross the whole way up.
You take 22 to 99, but to us olds it’s 22 to 220, to 322, better known as Atherton Street. They finished the highway years ago and gave it the I-99 status, but nobody I know has ever called it that. It’s 220. It’ll always be 220. Some things don’t update just because the sign did.
Jamie and I are remarried, and between us we have four daughters. Sarah is mine. Ashley is mine too, twenty now, just out of special effects makeup school. Emileigh and Jenna are Jamie’s twins, both, along with Sarah, just out of high school this spring. All of them are moving into the next chapter of their lives within a few months of each other, just at different speeds. Em and Sarah head off to their own schools this fall. Jenna’s the one who started early. Summer session, Penn State, July.
Jenna and Em left the house earlier that morning with their mom, riding up in Jamie’s Monster Truck Jeep, which was packed with everything Jenna needed for the summer. I followed separately because I’d be the one driving Em back home that night once the move-in was done. Em didn’t need to be there. She has her own freshman orientation waiting for her in the fall, at her own school. But she wasn’t going to let her sister do this without her. If you’ve spent any time around twins, you already understand why. There’s a bond there that doesn’t really translate to people who haven’t seen it up close, and Em wasn’t letting her sister go through this one alone.
So, I drove up by myself. One hour and fifty minutes, just me, the wipers, and whatever Spotify wanted to throw at me. Two hours alone in a car is either torture or a gift depending on what’s going on in your head that day. This day was a gift. I had time to think about all of it; Jenna, this place, and what I was about to feel walking back onto that campus for the first time in years for a reason like this one.
Two hours in the car for a freshman summer session move-in. Centre County. Penn State.
My alma mater. And now, the place where Jenna is about to start her own story.
Trailer Trash, Right on Cue
Somewhere along 220 I had Spotify going, not really paying attention to what was queued up next, just letting it run while I drove and thought.
Then the Centre County line sign came up out of the rain, and at almost the exact same second, Modest Mouse’s “Trailer Trash” came on.
I found Modest Mouse at Penn State, working at the college radio station, WKPS. That job put records in front of me that I never would have found on my own. Built to Spill came from the same place. Tom, whom I lived with at the time and who would later become the drummer in Down on Jane, had wildly different tastes than I did, and he’s the one who handed me the Afghan Whigs and Hum. I gave him Modest Mouse and Built to Spill back, once WKPS handed them to me. That’s how it worked between us. We traded records like currency, and neither of us came out the loser.
So there I am, alone in the car, crossing into the county and heading to the place that built half my musical brain. That song comes on at that exact mile marker. I’m not going to stand here and tell you it means something. Not sure I really believe in signs, but the hair on my arms stood up for a second anyway. It was just a weird thing at a weird time, and sometimes weird is enough to make you pause and reflect for a minute. I let myself sit with it; nineteen or twenty-some years old again, sitting in a radio station, hearing a song for the first time that I’d still be thinking about decades later, alone in a car, driving my own kid to that same campus.
Tom’s Roommate
I was Tom’s roommate at Penn State before Tom was the drummer in Down on Jane; before there was a Down on Jane to drum for. We had pretty different tastes in music, but neither of us was precious about it. We just shared what we had and gave each other’s records an honest listen, no eye-rolling, no skipping ahead. That’s rarer than it sounds. Most people just wait for their turn to play what they already like. We actually listened.
Everything that came out of that apartment, every CD he handed me, every burned disc I handed back, ended up somewhere in me. It’s in the guitar lines I still write. It’s in the way I think a song should build. Built to Spill taught me that a song could meander and still arrive somewhere. The Afghan Whigs taught me that you could write about your own damage without flinching. Hum taught me that heavy and pretty aren’t opposites. Modest Mouse taught me that you didn’t need to resolve anything to make a song feel finished.
More Than a Stop Along the Way
I’ve always thought of my time at Penn State as just that, time. Well, since we’re being honest… A Good Time. A stop along the way before the rest of my life started. I wasn’t much of a student in the traditional sense; classes and exams were never really my thing. What I actually learned came from running that radio station with almost no budget, figuring out how to convince advertisers to buy airtime so we’d have a budget, and getting professors to pass me in classes I’d barely shown up for. Nobody handed me a textbook on sales or negotiation. I learned it because the station needed money, and I needed to pass.
The band came out of it, sure. The music came out of it too, but I never let myself think of the place itself as one of the things that made me who I am. Not until moving Jenna into her dorm.
It wasn’t just the band or life skills, either. I met my ex-wife there too, Ashley and Sarah’s mom. Without that place, I don’t have those two kids, full stop. So, when I say I don’t know who I’d be without Penn State, I mean all of it. Not just the songs I write, the way I hear a chord change, or music in general. The actual shape of my life. My kids exist because I went to a school two hours from home a long time ago.
The Overflow Lot
By the time I got there, Jamie had already pulled the Jeep up to the dorm with Jenna and Em, since that’s where Jenna’s things actually were. I parked in the overflow lot, the way you do at Penn State for anything involving move-in day, and walked over to meet them.
When I got out of the car, there it was. The Penn State logo on Beaver Stadium, sitting up high in the gray sky facing Mount Nittany.
Walking that campus again with the three of them, in the rain, hit different than I expected. I knew it would feel like something. I didn’t know it would hit me this hard. For me, it was emotional and bittersweet, a passing of the torch. To Jenna, it felt like a prison sentence.
“It Feels Like I’m Going to Prison”
At some point, standing outside her building with everything finally unloaded and the actual goodbye getting closer, Jenna looked at me and said it felt like she was going off to prison. Ironically, her dorm room is about a ten-foot by ten-foot cell with painted concrete walls and a window overlooking a courtyard.
I smiled and gave her a hug, held on for a second longer than usual. I told her I loved her, that she was going to be just fine. No one there knew anyone either, I said. Everyone moving into that dorm was standing in the exact same kind of scared. She wasn’t alone in it, even if it felt that way right then.
Internally, I wasn’t really standing in that dorm room anymore. I was eighteen again, somewhere on that same campus, terrified in almost the exact same way. Not because anything was wrong, but because everything was about to change, and there was no way yet to know what it would make of me.
I wanted to tell her that. Four years from now, she’ll look back and see the person she was that day and be amazed by the person she’s become. But you can’t actually hand someone that. It doesn’t work coming from a parent in a dorm room. She has to go live it, get lost in it a little, and find it out for herself, the same way I did.
Watching the Next Chapter Start
I spent a long time on this blog writing about the bands that built me, the gear that got me through it, the version of myself that came out of a college apartment in State College carrying a stack of records that would shape everything from there forward.
Now I get to watch Jenna start her own version of that. Different school year, different dorm, probably a completely different soundtrack. I have no idea what she’s going to find up there, what’s going to end up shaping her the way Modest Mouse and the Whigs and Hum shaped me. That’s not really for me to know. That’s hers to find.
But I drove away from that overflow lot in the rain, the Penn State logo still up there on Beaver Stadium facing Mount Nittany, leaving my kid on the same ground that made me. I thought about how strange and good it is that the place gets to do it again. Different kid. Same campus. Probably still raining.
We’ll see what comes back down 322 to 220 to 22 in four years.
