Morgan Wallace continues her contemplative tour diary, on and off the road as saxophonist in Fat Dog.

Finland (14.06.26) and Croatia (22.06.26) and the game of chance

The Start

We’re stood in Heathrow Terminal 3, staring forwards. We just got off the train. “Where do we go now ?”

Last weekend we were in an airport checking in, the weekend before that we were in an airport checking in. But for some reason the path won’t reveal itself this time like it normally does.

“First day on earth” says Dillon. It does feel like it.

We wander towards the lifts, and the path forwards feels a little vaguer than normal. Further in, past security, I can still feel ‘where do we go now’ hanging in the air. 

‘Animal Relief Area’ presents itself to us on a sign, so we follow that. A little diagram of a dog reappearing around every corner. “Do you think the animals are the ones providing relief to us ?”

I joke, but don’t take a guess at what the area actually is, a vague un-actualised place filled with dogs and grass. ‘Oh wait’, he realises it first, after we’ve been following the signs for a few minutes. We keep going anyway. 

I open the door hoping a dog will be there. A ridiculously sized driveway stretches away from us, the tiny shitting area in the far distance. It is office style, with a white picket fence. It’s empty.

We emerge back into the travelators aimless once more. But something new presents itself straight away. ‘It’s that guy!’ That guy is American talk show host Conan O’Brien. I didn’t see his face and now I want to see it, just for the novelty. We start walking behind him, waiting for him to turn his head. He is very tall and I don’t think I have watched his show. It takes longer than I imagined. I start to wonder how long we can follow before it’s weird.  

The corridor opens into a wider space and Conan is stood amongst a crowd of gingers now. Unclear if they are family or fans. A very American woman turns to us:

”That’s not even his family, they’re all just redheads!”

I nod. She continues, “And so I says to the dad, I says ‘he’s the real dad!”

She cackles in New York. 

Plane

The plane is a big one. It feels transatlantic. TV screens and sudoku and 3 aisles. I’ve never been on Finnair before, they have moomin milk on the menu. “I fucking hate moomins” says Joe. 

”The whole plane goes silent and the propellors stop”, says Chris

I can see it happening too, Joe said it quite loud. That’s how you get a life ban from Finnair. But the air hostesses keep walking past and the plane keeps bustling for now. 

Just as we’re taking off ‘Wuthering Heights’ comes on in my headphones. It is the perfect take-off song. I’m glued to the window. The glossiness intensifies and the light is hitting golden on every corner. England looks flat and green and reassuring in the fact that we are flying away. An exhale, watching from below as we climb further from it. I didn’t realise how many lakes there were around Heathrow.

Outside the window everything is water and light hitting on the diagonals, the plane wing too. A painting made of straight lines. The lines rise and fall as we turn, blinking the sunlight through in glimpses. And ‘Wuthering Heights’ does the same, intersecting itself, clashing and the letting the strings through in glimmers as we get higher and higher.

I dig my heels into the carpet in front of me. I am the one driving this. All sound and vision. I am the one making the turns. 

Nightwatch

According to the internet there is a 1–5% chance we will see a moose. It is pissing it down with rain and dark when we emerge from the terminal in Helsinki. We sprint towards the two taxis, and as the drive commences so does the moose-watch. “I’ll be pissed off if we see Conan O’Brien and not a moose.”

It’s true, in the grand scheme of probability the moose should be more in our favour. The road is long and open, and I only have a vague idea of where we are heading. It’s a waking 2am, for this is not my 2am, and the 2 hour time difference brings a strange alertness to this darkness. A stowaway in someone else’s nighttime.

Silence and forests lie outside the window, but inside I am watching. I feel like a predator. Every silhouette I see becomes a moose. Shapes shift in the trees in the dark, but I can’t tell if I am the one shifting, the perspective of the driving car causing objects to overtake each other from our moving viewpoint. I keep trying to look further into the trees but the three dimensions won’t let me in. All I can see is the 2D dark outline, a false wall of black. 

The others are on moose watch too, but the drive passes quickly and with little success.

Croatia (one week later)

This whole thing is like going fishing. The luck of the draw. I never really got into it with Chris but now I can see the appeal.

A week later in Zagreb we’re walking onto the water bridge while Maddy is making a phone call. I stay back by the lakeside, I can hear the frogs. I have a small audio recorder with me and I’m trying to get snippets. These frogs are good, louder than the ones in the forest earlier. You always hear the sound before you press record. An impossible game of chance, trying to anticipate something before it happens. 

I can see how people get superstitious, feeling it in your bones that something is about to happen.

In Croatia with Maddy it’s the day after the gig. I stayed on for a few days. Last night, the gig night, I was at the same lake but it was a different place then. We were watching the lightning and trying to catch it. Trying to get it in the long exposure on the camera. “It’s every three and a half minutes” I had said. But all that meant was it comes after what feels like 3 and a half minutes to me. Unmeasured, no way of knowing if I am accurate. A circuitous way of feeling it in your bones. 

We chased the lightning away from KT Tunstall, across the water bridge, and back down to the swimming lake. There was a swan sleeping there, warm in the half dark. There was more lighting on that side of the lake, the three and a half minute timer gone out the window. 

The camera had a shutter sound effect every time you pressed it, the sound coming in like a punchline each time we missed the lightning by a millisecond. We tried and tried, and got snippets of it once or twice, but it didn’t look the same as it did in front of us anyway.

“Let’s go back now” I said. He heard me, stood still, and took another picture. Which is what I meant too. Because of course that would be the moment the best lightning would come, just as I told us to leave. That should have been the one, but we never did fully catch it. 

Being back at the festival for a second night feels odd, driving in seeing the lake and the sign. It’s one of the only times I’ve been back the next day. Sometimes it feels like these places only exist for a pocket of time, something you have to catch at the right moment, just passing in the current. But the following day it’s not the same place, not really. The sky is different and I’m thinking about different things making different colours stand out. 

I couldn’t catch the sound of the frogs whilst Maddy made her phone call, but I get the sound of footsteps on the water bridge. I walk around the rim of the lake and sit down by myself. There are bubbles coming up to the surface, or dropping in from above, I can’t tell. It’s dark and warm and green, but after sundown so all the green is in greyscale. But I still know it’s there.

All the lights and sound from the festival ricochet around me, out across the water and back in. I watch it the lights and the kick drum bounce off the bank on the other side of the lake.

Finnish Festival

“I like that they just have to find a lump of cheddar wherever you are” says Joe. We are rooting around the fridge. It’s quite impressive. The rider specifies it, of course.

They have pipe liquorice here too – I pocket that and save it till later, 11pm at the pub watching Netherlands vs Japan. It’s still light outside. It wasn’t light the day before when we flew into Helsinki, it was pitch black at 11:30 when we were driving out. Maybe it’s one day closer to the solstice. Or one drive further west. But it seems absurd, that much difference in the sky. Like someone has forgotten to switch something. It stays light at the top of the hill even when we walk back from the pub. We must be right on the brink. 

Driving back to the airport in the morning, which is maybe still connected to the day before, there is one final moose watch. Trees and cows and horses reveal themselves, a jolt and then a realisation, leaning back into the seat in defeat. The cows are the ones that keep getting me. And on the flight back to London I listen to YHWH Nailgun. I am bored of listening to songs addressed to someone. I want something broader. I turn it up through the turbulence and it doesn’t bother me this time.