the old-school guestbook archives
my amazon wish list... my favorite astrologer... my favorite artist... yerba mate revolution! erowid: a travel guide for interior journeys... no more war: MoveOn.org United for Peace and Justice True Majority seek the truth: Common Dreams Unamerican Activities The Nation people I adore, diaries I read: rev.raikes ariana cubiclegirl epiphany glitter333 laurakay wammo the music: the asylum street spankers backyard tire fire blue highway bill camplin wendy colonna freedom tribe joules graves guy forsyth band hamsa lila hanuman libby kirkpatrick leftover salmon pamela means medeski martin & wood the motet the nice outfit nickel creek open road rose polenzani railroad earth south austin jug band string cheese incident taarka tha musemeant the devil makes three tim o'brien band trolley wild sage keller williams yonder mountain string band |
high sierra dreams, part two... ~ July 5, 2003 - 9:47 p.m. high sierra. the story begins here. ...high sierra becomes its own world. it's a reality we construct together. one day, stoned and silly, I went off on a philosophical tangent about how the wristbands we wore were a tangible symbol of the agreed-upon reality we were mutually constructing. we all have wristbands. one color for regular festival-goers, one for vendors, one for musicians, one for security. and different codes, too. ours will be wrecked by the time the festival is through, crinkled and bleached, all the printing worn away. I have a special job. for the past two years, I have been in charge of the catering for the staff. my day starts at 7:30 in the morning. somehow, I always wake up on time, even if I've been out dancing and only got to bed three hours before. somehow, I am always able to wake up with relative grace, even puffy-eyed and still stoned from the night before. I roll out of my tent, and the early morning sounds of the festival. only a few in our camp are stirring at this hour. I drink some water, splash some on my face, head across the field to the nearest bathroom, picking my way through the campsites. this gets more difficult as friday comes, and we are all packed in as tightly as possible. maybe I smoke before my shift and maybe I do not. most often I like to clear my head in the morning. you get somewhat saturated with pot smoke during the festival. it's part of what makes the non-stop endurance contest possible. if you can't sit down, at least you can take away the pain, infect yourself with a silly grin while you chop vegetables. often I stop at the coffee booth for a quadruple-iced-espresso before I get to our booth. the coffee people are a little crazy. they've built their whole business on it. they have disco lights, and a go-go cage. they party well into the night, jamming loud disco. in the morning they are surly. I take my iced coffee to the booth, where all I do is poke my head in and say good morning to mongo. my first job is out at the gazebo, but I know that he needs to know that I'm awake and on the job. mongo and I have arrived at a kind of synergy over the years. he's a big man, and gruff, with a tender heart wrapped in a cranky exterior. he's been to hell and back. he's a recovering addict, with twelve years' sobriety. he did crazy things back in the day. mongo's recovery is his gift. with all the work he's done to get a grip on himself, he is intensely self-aware, and understands more about other people than anyone gives him credit for. like most chefs, he has a bad temper, but over the years I've seen him work his way to an incredible level of self-control. I've seen him turn beet red and known that he was dying to lose it on someone. but mostly, these days, he doesn't. he likes me because I'm smart, and I understand the way he works. I know the ropes, so he can yell things at me and know I'll take care of them. I understand the way his mind works, how he copes by compartmentalizing things. he needs things clear, and organized. mongo is also diabetic, and sometimes his blood sugar gets too low when we are working crazy. I check in with him the way I do with my diabetic father-- do you need to eat something? he also suffers from excruciating pain in his feet, which he is on for long hours for the duration of the festival. no one knows why his feet hurt. his masseuse says they are full of dark energy. she couldn't even touch them for the longest time. he figures it's his karma from the past, and he shrugs, as if painful feet is only what he can expect after what he's done. so, I check in with mongo. then I go to the gazebo in the center of the food court, where we serve the catering meals for the staff. I light the sterno cans that go under the chafing trays and in the hot box, where we keep trays of food warm until they're ready to serve. I stock the gazebo with plates, plasticware, napkins and condiments. when the food is ready, I start shuttling it out to the hot box. on a good day, we're ready to serve breakfast on time, although there's usually a line of the big, beefy security guys already waiting by the time we're ready to open. most of them are former football players, and chafe at serving restrictions and no-seconds-'til-everyone's-eaten rules. most are pretty good-natured, though, and they're getting to know me. I've been serving them three meals a day for two years in a row now. and this is a privelige of mine, to have this special job. I feed the guys who check the wristbands, so the whole festival is open to me. late night shows cost extra, but I never need tickets. especially since the guys have noticed that late-night is the only time I get out to play. everyone on our crew works too long, and too hard. we're not making that much hourly, but we'll come out of this with a chunk of cash in sheer quantity. I generally make between six and seven hundred dollars for this week's work. and it's fun. I've got my regulars, the ones who've gotten to know me over the years. doug and dorie, the folks who run the shower trailer, are absolute sweethearts. one guy, steve, gifted me with my own radio headphones so that I could tune in the festival radio broadcast and catch the music on different stages while I'm working. between serving meals, I catch a break, take my dishes back to the dish area, and start prepping for the next meal. most of the food is made for me, but if there are rolls, I heat them up. make the salad, mix the powdered drinks, that kind of thing. I make salad dressing, ten gallons of cole slaw. somehow, even if it doesn't seem like much, I am always scrambling just before a meal. I have a meltdown one day, on a bad day where everyone on the crew is having a meltdown at one time or another. it's five minutes to dinner and I burst into tears, overwhelmed by everything that needs to happen in the next five minutes. mongo gets me calmed down, assigns someone to help me. I tell my dinner line about my meltdown as I get into the swing, and I get several hugs. people are sweet to me. sometimes I get gifts, nugs or CDs, the headphones from steve. my days pass in a blur like this. my feet hurt until I forget what they're supposed to feel like and stop noticing. likewise, my body hurts all the time until it starts to feel normal. I smoke a lot, I laugh a lot. I work, and work, and work. after work I am always exhausted, but most nights I manage to drag myself out to play, and at some point I catch my second wind. there is always one night where I do not make it out at all, where my body just cannot do it, and I crash until it's time to get up again in the morning. there's usually one night where I do not sleep at all. most nights, I sleep three or four hours before I get up to work yet another fifteen hour day. you can do that, for a week. I remember one time last year, the night yonder mountain played late night. I took a catnap under a tree, and then headed to the show. I danced, and danced and danced. I love yonder mountain. they are the only ones who have come close to the place ThaMuseMeant occupied in my heart before they broke up. and the beautiful thing about late-night is that it often goes on until dawn. at yonder mountain, I danced all night, and yonder played the sun into the sky. then I went and caught a shower, and worked another fifteen hour day. you can do that, when the energy's right. nights at high sierra are magical. it took me three years just to understand how the whole festival is laid out, because I only ever had time to run around in the dark, at night, stoned to the eyeballs. during the day, I'm mostly trapped in my little circle of booth, gazebo, dish room and back. sometimes at night I get completely lost, and wander around and around looking for my camp, with no sense of where I am. sometimes I happen upon magical events, strange beings, gypsy tribes who take me in. sometimes sunrise finds me with a family I've collected in the night, smoking a good-morning bowl and reciting poetry to the sun and passers-by. high sierra becomes your whole world, and it's so hard to believe that this reality we've created together will soon come to an end. it does, though, and it happens so suddenly. tear-down is the hardest part. the last night is just like any other night, although some people have already left, getting the jump on end-of-fourth-of-july-weekend-traffic and heading back for jobs and lives out in the world. but in the morning, everything changes. everyone left is packing up camp and disappearing. the whole thing disintegrates as fast as it arose. we serve breakfast, that last morning, but only out of the booth, and we run out of things as we go along. those of us serving watch everything coming apart around us as the crew packs away everything we're not using. and then it's over. when we've run out of food, we call breakfast to an end, and we pack everything away. we scrub down all the equipment, which is unbelievably dirty. when the tents come down, we are in sunlight, and steven is standing on the lip of the ryder truck, calling for certain items to be brought to him. he packs the ryder like a father for a summer road trip. when he's finished, there will be one six-inch space left, and one object just that size to fit into it. it's like magic. we are exhausted and filthy when we're done, and the fairgrounds are mostly empty, the whole world we've been living in for the past week in ashes around our feet. we break down what's left of our camp, quietly. maybe get a shower. pile into our rides home. I make sure steven stays awake behind the wheel of the ryder truck as darkness falls. he uses old dead-tour tricks, keeping his window rolled down and splashing water on his face. when he looks really bad, I make him stop and take a nap. we get home late, our bodies finally feeling the toll of what we've been through. I crash out hard, sleep late. when I get up in the morning, I realize that I'm still wearing my wristband, and it's like something from another world, something carried into reality from deep within a dream.
(((rings))) |