In late October of 1885 Johannes Brahms, in a town in central Germany, introduced his deeply allusive Symphony No. 4 to the world for the first time. At the same time, the Mayor of Tacoma, Jacob Robert Weisbach, his police force, and the Noble and Holy Knights of Labor decided that all the Chinese in town had to go. These European immigrants (the mayor had recently immigrated from Germany, according to The Ledger) said “the Chinese must go.”

So there I was, driving south late on this rainy Friday night. I was about 8 miles north of Tacoma when, flipping the radio, Brahms’ 3rd movement of his 4th symphony comes belting out. My head slipped sideways; the juxtaposition of what was here that fall of 1885 and what Brahms was trying to do with his 4th set off a sort of interior historical image and sensation slide that feels a bit like having multiple theaters running different films simultaneously from inside my head. I know where I am, but when is here exactly?

Of course part of my response was because I was really pretty tired my then and my imaginative filters begin to degrade under certain circumstances. It was dark, and the river of red light running up ahead of me felt, in that moment, as if it were organic, a huge powerful living thing – living in such a way that my requiem might be sung sooner than planned.

I don’t suppose a river of receding cars counts as a mob but I suppose it could feel that way if your life was threated by the power of its current and I did feel threatened. I was tired enough to know I had to stop driving soon. I wonder what the Chinese of late fall 1885 felt being herded out and forced to leave for Portland?  (And what the people in Portland felt upon receiving them.) There was talk of just killing them and thereby ending “the Chinese problem” and I suppose there were many unsolved Chinese murders during those years.

I found myself wandering through the historical and cultural landscapes so oddly intertwined by the advent of Brahms on the road past Tacoma. I was wondering if the Mayor had ever heard Brahms. Perhaps seen him at the market one day?  Did he come from the same region in Germany? Wasn’t Albert Einstein  already born then? Do beauty and civilized behaviour ever join hands? Wasn’t that the time Germany was colonizing Africa? How many people in Arizona want to end “the Mexican problem”? Did the anyone in Tacoma get the irony that their expulsion of unwanted immigrants came only a few years after the then president decided to deal with the “Indian problem” by the Indian Appropriations Act? Did they ever get that they were uninvited, unwanted immigrants? Is Starbucks still open?

Then there was this bad accident, slow traffic and Brahms ended. Starbucks was not open, my head returned to more or less normal-tired, and once past the accident scene, I drove the last 15 minutes to my friend’s house, and, in just a few minutes, will crash on her couch.

Night.