Guess what Pigpen got into down at the Farm???
While I’m showing pictures, say hello to the new fishtank, storing George the ropefish, Dallas the shark, Mr. Pootytater the catfish (coming in from the other fishtank), Gabe Jrs. 1, 4, and 5 (Gabe Jr. 2 and 3 were apparently eaten by Syrup, who doesn’t play well with others, and is now in the old fishtank by her lonesome), and a suckerfish that I don’t think has been named.
And Steve the bubble T-Rex.
I’m kinda daunted trying to write a post about the weird and the strange times I had up there, now that I’m back home sitting on my couch. True, I did do some moblogging up there, but I don’t even feel like I scratched the surface of conveying what I intended to, because I was ususally moving while I was typing, and because its really a bitch to do a post on my phone. I figured, at the time, that I’d be able to sit in front of a computer and just pour it all out, but it seems to have gotten stuck in there, so I’m trying to work at it with a spoon.
Thursday:
Buy the ticket, take the ride:
I was amazed at how close Manchester is. I mean, I’ve always envied places where music festivals were, Glastonbury and Redding, or Leeds, in the UK, or Arizona, Seattle, Chicago. It never really occurred to me how close to home Bonnaroo is, tho, until Nodbob and I loaded down the ‘Nox and drove that sucker up there. It was a shorter drive to Manchester, from the Blueberry Farm, that it was back to Oak Ridge! I spent the whole weekend being told how lucky I am by strangers that drove hours and hours to get here, just for living in Tennessee.
I never would have agreed with them, but during the past 2 or 3 years, I’ve been starting to feel a lot of roots in this backwards state, so this is just another reason for me to agree.
However, close don’t mean squat when there are 80,000 folks driving to the same place. I wrote this post after stopping by the fireworks store to pick up a 12 pack of beer for a friend of Nodbobs, who was a vendor and already in the camp, and we were moving briskly at the time. The Bonnaroo exits were 111, 112, and 110 (I think), and by the time we got to 132 (20 miles to go) there were cars lined up on the shoulder. The signs all indicated to stay in the right lane, however, so Nodbob and I kept trucking. We figured that the shoulder was for cars getting off at another exit, and that maybe the highway patrol folks were load-balancing the exits or something.
We kept rolling, and the line kept being there. Finally, because Nodbob said he felt like an ‘asshole’ driving by all these people waiting to go to the same place, and because it was becoming obvious that there were no other exits, we pulled over onto the shoulder in the first space we could find.
Welcome to Bonnaroo. 15 miles to go, moving about 5 miles an hour. The next 3 hours weren’t bad, tho. Nodbob and I entertained ourselves by walking around in the grass off the shoulder, and then jumping on the side of the ‘Nox and hanging onto the luggage rack when the cars started moving. We’d sit still for 5 minutes, then move a 10th of a mile forward at about 20 MPH all of a sudden. We had no idea how long the line was.
We eventually got some friends pulled in in front of us, Nodbob’s girlfriend’s brother and his friend, who wound up camping with us for the weekend. Seems like it was shortly after that that we finally pulled off the interstate, into pandemonium. We got off on a makeshift exit, made just for Bonnaroo, into a big ass’d field chock full of cars pointing toward some tollbooths. It looked like a border crossing, albeit one in the middle of nowhere. We were about 6 back from the booth in the line we chose, and waited for maybe 20 minutes before we got to the front. The guys in front of us (Nodbob’s friends) moved through first, and we followed. I was affixed with a bright red shiny Bonnaroo 2007 wristband, which was tightened a little too tight, and given a guide book, map, and card for $20 of free iTunes downloads. Woot for free stuff. There wasn’t going to be much of THAT going around this weekend…
Camp Lando Calrissian:
We drove through the line, following Droo and Bonnaroo Ben (Nodbob’s friends, as they shall henceforth be known), and we broke from the pack, who were all traveling down the main drag. There was a smaller line moving north, up into the camps, and we got in with them. Almost immediately, we were getting funneled into what we later found out was the mighty and mysterious camp Lando Calrissian. I moseyed off to try to find us some land in the Tent Only section, but, as I reported, the place was chock full. From what I heard from some friends who managed to score some land there, it filled up about 8 AM that morning. Last year there was 4 times the tent-only space, and apparently it was unused. Bummer.
Still, Lando was taking care of us. There were two entrances into the Centeroo area, which is where everything was (except for the camps, some porto-johns, and some vendors). One entrance, the main one with the big Bonnaroo arch, led directly into the main stage area, and was a hike from Lando. The other one, however, which led into the section of Centeroo nearest the smaller stages, vendors, cinema, fountains, and good stuff, was just a block down and over from the mighty AT campsite.
And that freakin’ worked. We were closer than 90% of Bonnaroo to the festival itself, which was more than I could have hoped for when planning.
My first walk around the camping area was amazing. I’d never seen that much space full of so many people, all wandering around, talking, sitting, looking, doing their thing. The cars driving to the campsites threw dust up into the air 20 feet, and I was shortly covered in a thin layer of dirt, it covered up my glasses, it got in my mouth, it turned my clothes and hat grey. It was omnipresent. It never went away. I could walk into the fountains, get soaking wet, and I’d still be covered in dirt. I’d wipe myself down with baby wipes, and damned if that dirt wouldn’t still be there. It covered everything I owned. I drank it, ate it, and breathed it all weekend. It was a constant.
I grew to love it, but that first day, the heat, dirt, noise, and crush of people was a bit overwhelming, and I scored me a migraine by the time camp was set up (and good God, we looked like a bunch of morons trying to set up the gazebo we used… it took 4 of us 30 minutes and several beers to get that bastard up, and only then after ripping the side of it).
Nodbob had to drop off that case of beer to his friend, somebody he knows from college. We set off in search of her camp, only to find out that it was way, way, way back in the ass end of the lot. Evidently they started letting people in early, 8 PM on Wednesday, but they stuck them in the nosebleed section, in a satellite camp that was a 30 or 45 minute walk from the main camp. This was the only long walk through the camps I experienced at Bonnaroo, and it did it for me.
However, that day I saw what was probably the most amazing thing. I described it a bit, the ‘tent twister’, and theres some video at YouTube with one from last year, but seeing the damn thing, right in front of you, was amazing. It was the first time I’d ever seen nature personally screw people over, and then introduce itself to you. I stood there in the lane, t
ransfixed, as it crossed the road, a ghostly brown, noisy, vortex of faint activity, with about 6 or 7 people behind me. It wrecked some havoc on the Lando Calrissian side of the road first, about 70 feet west of our camp, crossed the road, and took its business to the Camp Det. John Taggert side of the road, where the handicapped accessible camping section was.
It was amazing. What I saw was much closer and more real than what you see in the YouTube video, and it was one of the damnedest things I’ll ever see. And I was stone-cold sober, which is something for a Bonnaroo moment…
AT Wimps Out:
So, I got into the festival area, solo, after dropping off my dangerous weapons at the tent. There weren’t any bands playing yet, and the only one playing on Thursday night that I’d heard of was Clutch, which I remembered as a Filter’ish hardcore kinda rock show, or something, that I had a tape of back in like ‘94 or so. Lewis Black was doing a show at the comedy tent, but the line stretched back about 100 yards for it, and I was in no mood for that kind of waiting after waiting in traffic all day. I sat down in the grass near the tent, close enough to hear most of his act.
My head was raging. I hadn’t applied any sunscreen, and had me a nice left-arm sunburn from the driving. I didn’t put much water in me driving up, and I figured that contributed to my state, and the fact that I jumped into 2 beers before drinking any water probably didn’t help. The migraine was rapidly blooming into a total meltdown, I was starting to get wigged out by the people around me, and rapidly thinking that I had made a pretty crucial error in judgement. I wandered back to camp early (about 9 PM CST) and went to bed.
I slept like a baby. The tent is wide opened at the top, and I looked out at the Bonnaroo sky, big balloons denoting the Vendor/Bathroom areas hanging in the sky like multi-colored moons out of some crazy Boris Vallejo painting, while the happy sounds of Bonnaroo all around me just floated me right off to sleep.
I was at Bonnaroo, and from that point on, it was damn near the best time of my life.
What gives?
Two weeks ago the washing machine went kerpootz, now the drier won’t heat. It runs and runs and puffs and puffs, but there’s no fire in it’s belly. Perhaps it just can’t live without the old washing machine.
I’ve got a repair book coming from the library. We’ll see what happens. I hope I can at least read my fortune off its entrails.
