POST-MORMON STORIES

The Falcon and the Snowman and Me

Sometimes another person’s life offers a glimpse down the corridors of an alternate life avoided. That’s the case for me with convicted traitor Christopher Boyce.

Summer 1987, on the road from Bonners Ferry, Idaho, to Libby, Montana. I swear I picked that empty beer bottle up from the side of the road. (From the author’s collection.)

This essay was written in 2015.

In 1985, I was a far bigger fan of jazz guitarist Pat Metheny than just about any other musician. The album that infected me was 1982’s Offramp, which sounded unlike anything else I’d ever heard. I became a hardcore consumer of any and all vinyl featuring either Metheny or his compositional partner in the Pat Metheny Group, pianist Lyle Mays. (My friends and I could and did spend hours debating the meaning of the 20-minute title track from As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls. Yes, we were not normal.)

Kids, this is … hell, you probably know better than I do what vinyl is.

Thus it was inevitable, thirty years ago, that I would buy the new album from the Pat Metheny Group as soon as it appeared, even if it was the soundtrack to a movie I had not seen. I had a vague understanding of the true-life espionage case behind The Falcon and the Snowman (based on the book by Robert Lindsey)…