There’s something about long winter drives that feels almost monastic. No small errands, no quick exits. Just distance, weather, and the low, steady obligation of keeping the car between the lines. Five and a half hours is enough time for your thoughts to stop performing and start telling the truth.

Driving along the Fleuve and then into the mountains, everything felt load-bearing. Frozen lakes that can hold trucks and prop planes. Air sharp enough to feel intentional. Roads washed white with sleet, that distinctly Canadian kind of cold where you don’t need a temperature reading to know it’s frigid.

Your body understands before your brain does. Hands tighten slightly on the wheel. Jaw sets. There’s a quiet agreement between you and the landscape: pay attention or don’t come through.

Somewhere in that long stretch, Goodbye Horses came on.

Instant recognition. Those opening notes arrive already complete, like they’ve been playing just outside your awareness and finally stepped forward. The song carries a faint sense of menace because of its cultural afterlife, but listening alone in the car, it felt less sinister than suspended. Held in place.

What cut through was her voice.

Steady. Unadorned. Almost unnervingly calm. For years I thought it was a man singing. I’m still not entirely sure why that assumption settled so easily. Maybe it’s the depth of her range, maybe the restraint, maybe the way the voice refuses to signal femininity or masculinity in expected ways. It doesn’t reach out or explain itself. It simply occupies space.

There’s something quietly radical about that kind of presence. A voice that isn’t trying to be read correctly.

At some point I remembered, without being able to verify it in the moment, that she drove a taxi. That while this song took on its strange, luminous afterlife, she was moving through the city behind a steering wheel, ferrying strangers from one place to another. Singing a song about transcendence, about leaving the animal body behind, and then returning to a job built entirely around bodies in motion. Weight. Distance. Arrival.

That detail landed differently because I was driving too. Enclosed in my own moving capsule, alone but not untethered. There was something grounding in the parallel. One perfect song echoing through time, and a woman watching the city slide past, unrecognized, unbothered.

Because I was driving, I couldn’t look anything up. No trivia, no confirmation, no smoothing the edges with certainty. All I could do was listen and drive. Listen and think.

That limitation felt important. The song wasn’t competing with information. It hovered in the cabin while the world outside did its own kind of erasure. White fields. White roads. Ice holding weight. Everything solid choosing, for now, to remain that way.

The title kept circling in my head. Goodbye Horses. Horses as instinct, power, the animal self. Saying goodbye to them doesn’t feel triumphant. It feels provisional. Like an attempt at transcendence that knows it may only ever be partial. You can want to rise above the body while still being deeply inside it.

The song doesn’t build toward release. It loops. It holds. No crescendo, no payoff. And driving through winter, that felt exactly right. Winter isn’t about resolution. It’s about maintenance. About staying steady. About respecting limits.

By the time the track ended, I still hadn’t looked anything up. I didn’t want to. The not-knowing felt right for the road, for the cold, for the way winter asks you to stay with what’s in front of you. Eyes forward. Hands steady.

The song faded.
The road didn’t.