Michfest, Day 2

Comedy? or Tragedy?

This morning I spent riding around on the back of farm trucks through a cool fern lined forest. A hawk flies over the truck, always a sign of good luck. Everything is named here; this morning we took Elle out for a ride and visited Oliver, the big red barn that I had barely noticed on the way in the day before. Behind the barn is a sprawling field of Christmas trees that leads up to a denser patch of forest. I crane my neck to look up at the top of the white silo behind us. The gaping maw of an open door spews forth barn swallows. I watch their tipped wings bend into the sunshine.

Behind door number one is a rectangular room filled from floor to ceiling with plywood. The tarped ceiling is caving in, dropping bat guano and mouse droppings on to the pile of wood. It smells musty in here, dank. We cover our noses. I take a look at the stacks of ply and think, sure, we can move all this in a week an a half. No problem.

But my body doesn't understand yet how to work with wood. Rock, I know how to touch. But wood? Pull, slide, lift. Tip? Or bounce? Each piece seems to want to tip slide right out of my hands. Charles, Justin, and Dustin are showing the ropes to the rookie, and I'm trying my best, but my body doesn't know what to do with all this wood. We fill Elle to the brim with ply, then ride back through the forest to an empty field and stack the wood all over again. The ply that we bring will become the stage floor that every performer on the land will stand on. For now, we leave it, stack it, tarp it. Repeat the process again and again until my back is on fire.

Inside I feel small. I've never worked before, I'm not privy to the festival lore and stories from previous years. I search for a point of commonality with my co-workers, but fall to silence staring into the forest. One of them notices that I'm quiet, and I muster up my best smile. 'Just wait. Give me a couple of days, and you won't be able to shut me up.' I feel like I'm speaking the truth, but I'm not so sure. I have an idea of what I'll become after a few days of acclimating in the same way that I know the ply will transform into a place for dancing in a few days. We both just need a little time.

That evening my Lace crew lead the first community meeting. To keep things lively, we directed a book making exercise. Our task was to tell, in one sentence, the story of our day. In honor of Shakespeare, we were told to write either a comedy or a tragedy. My storybook was a run-on sentence complete with pictures and stick figure drawings that read something like this:

'Today I wanted to see as much of the land as possible, so I rode on the back of a farm truck with my new friends Justin and Charles and Justin and we rode through the forest to a big red barn full of wood". I looked back on the day, even in it's difficulty, and grinned. No tragedy in a day well spent.