A Clam before the Storm

So, I made a stealth update the other day, buried below others. It's a few posts down, or here if you like clicking things.

In it, I lay out a rough itinerary that will either guide my next few posts, or, more likely, fade into the sands of the internet like a statue of Ozymandias, taunting me all the while with the fact that I failed to live up to its promises.

I am finally recovered from what my ex-girlfriend mockingly called my "once-a-year vacation into manual labor," and have had a couple days of inactivity to make my muscles forget that they exist. In it, I have spent practically no time at all looking back on the tangle of awesome that was Folk Festival, and nearly all of it looking forward at the last few days before I am swept back to school by tides of necessity.

That said, some of you may be curious, so, without further ado:

For me, Folk Festival is an opportunity to feel good about working hard, see people who I don't get to see anywhere else, perhaps engage in some light partying, and did I mention working really hard? Did I mention that I pay the Folk Song Society for the privilege of working really hard? It's truly an amazing deal.

To continue on the bullet train summary: I work on the Lighting and Electric crew. We handle everything even slightly to do with electricity. When we arrive at the site, weeks before the festival itself, it is several fields and some woodlands covered in permanent and temporary buildings that were nailed together by even more hardcore volunteers of the Grounds crew. They have pagan rituals and totems, and you shall know them by their bells.

In any case, it is our job to turn this collection of buildings and fields into a place where people can see at night, watch concerts, prepare food and be pampered in air conditioned trailers. This requires running a lot of cables. Every year, we get a little smarter and find another couple places where we can leave things installed all year, and every year some random punk kids come along and destroy a few of our installations.

We also truck in various generators, put up street lights, dig trenches and nail things together. There is a fair amount of sweat, as it tends to be hot outside as August rolls around.

As festival draws near, we assemble mighty scaffolds and hang high the lights of the stage, trimming them with the most colorful of gels and tweaking their aim to perfection. We beseech the machine spirit of the boards not to fail, and we bribe the tiny robots that inhabit the moving lights with cubes of energon.

And then the Festival itself is upon us, and the hippies blot out the sun. More about this stage will probably make its way into another post someday, but suffice it to say that everyone suddenly wants more lightbulbs, crafters always manage to trip their circuit breakers somehow, and the campgrounds fill up incredibly quickly and start looking like something out of a postapocalyptic film on day two.

Festival lasts from (arguably) Thursday night through Sunday evening.

Sunday night, we begin working immediately after the concert to tear down the lights.

And on Monday morning, on whatever hours of sleep remain to us, we begin the teardown. In one day, we disassemble everything we have created over the past six weeks or so. It is thoughtless work at its purest. This year I rode around for approximately nine hours in the back of a pickup truck, in pouring rain and bitingly cold wind, and accomplished many tasks. I disassembled things with a hammer, vigorously. I hauled and coiled wires, and packed and unpacked the machinery necessary for such.

I was tangentially helpful in nearly dropping a heavy light assembly on the head of one of my co-workers, and narrowly missed killing the lad. As it is, he'll have bruises and a story, both impressive.

The details of the incident are... difficult to summarize, annoying, and could perhaps be, in some parallel universe, litigious. Suffice it to say that it wasn't my fault, and that apparently in no one else's universe does shouting "Woah woah woah woah!" as loud as you possibly can indicate that heavy things are falling and everyone should flee and/or dive for cover. I wish I had been capable of doing more than that, in the instant I had to act, but that was the sum of my contribution.

By the end of the day I was exhausted, soaked, shivering and guilty.

It was still my favorite day of the Festival by far.

As a self-professed lazy man, it worries me sometimes how much I enjoy really working.