I am no stranger to sublime moments where The Road and The Right Song coalesce into something more poignant than the mind can fathom, something larger than its individual parts. Actually, I’m quite a devotee to — disciple of — these ephemeral moments. No matter your spiritual disposition, the highway can certainly take you to high places.

The beckoning of a long-overdue family visit sent me hurtling west (though I tend to believe every Road leads West) over concrete in a shocking display of determination.The journey would take me from Houston, TX to Sacramento, CA in just a matter of days, something like 2,000 miles of roadway depending on how willing you are to let yourself stray from the interstate (I, for the record, insist upon it).

I only recently seized for myself one of those now-ubiquitous iPhones. Before I get the blog all steamy about how much I love 3G (let me count the ways), allow me to explain that I had yet to experience this modern phenomenon called mobile Internet access. So there’s my disclaimer; now I’ll clarify how my life was changed.

Prior to leaving, I armed myself with enough music to save entire nations of the unenlightened. Among my armaments were CDs with brilliantly melodramatic playlists bestowed upon me by friends (many from prior roadtrips) and a hard drive that (to the best of my knowledge) holds every song I’ve ever owned. And then the heavy, state-of-the-art, still-experimental artillery: streaming radio on the iPhone via the Pandora and Wolfgang’s Vault apps. What I felt over the next few days, traveling a steady and almost entirely legal ~85mph through the southwest, must’ve been akin to what the observers of the first atomic bomb detonation over the Alamogordo Test Range felt: something between a sacred awe and teenage-boyish ecstasy; something between “What hath God wrought?” and “Holy crap, that was sweet!” I spend most of my waking hours listening to music, much of it from the Concert Vault these days, but often I’m tethered to a wall in a featureless strip mall. Now, instead, I had the Wolfgang’s Vault app on my dashboard, a totem of Freedom, a new way of life. Mississippi John Hurt told me about God, and Mance Lipscomb rode in my passenger seat:

“I got a key to the highway, and I’m billed out and bound to go. Got to leave here runnin’, walkin’ got too doggone slow…”

And this is only the beginning…

[ON THE ROAD (with the Vault) Part I is a post in From the Vault - The Wolfgang's Vault blog.]