Michfest, Day 6

What the Thunder Said~

I am such a mess. At dinner I sit down at the Belly Bowl table and receive stares and sympathy from the womyn around me. My right forearm is one giant bruise from the afternoon I spent stake throwing in Howard’s barn. Both of my hands are covered in tape. In an attempt to compensate for yesterday’s blisters, I’ve acquired more in various parts of my palm and thumb, not to mention the myriad of bruises on my thighs from the numerous times when I rested a piece of ply against my leg.

But I can’t stop grinning. Sleep is a wonderful thing. Yesterday I absolutely could not figure out how to sledge. I slept on it, and somehow my brain synapses made the necessary connections over night. I spent the day with Liz, Lizzie, and Dix and we put up so many tents between the four of us. Today the sledgehammer felt like an extension of my body and oh, how satisfying it was to pound in the stakes downtown, at acoustic stage, at Dart!

About half of the sledges are named, each identity marked clearly on the handle in black sharpie. There was a ten-pound hammer that I was particularly fond of named Thunder. Me and thunder, we had a good thing going on. Thunder said, Pound! and I did. I sledged my little heart out. I found a rhythm and posture and grip that worked for me and I went with it. My palms were raw and tender, but I didn’t care. I re-taped my hands over and over and kept right on sledging until my paws were tattered.

The four of us were a little cracked out by the end of the day. Something about that kind of repetitive hard work and the additional effort it took to really pay attention to the geometry and tension necessary to set up a tent correctly had left us brain fried. Salvation came in the form of a package of graham crackers from the Belly Bowl. Liz Singer devoured half the package, then complained through a mouth full of crackers about how dry they were and that they needed some fucking butter. I laughed so hard that I started crying.

We started putting up tent sides and unrolled one in particular that smelled especially dank, like it had been wet when it was stored. As we hung the sides up, we were searching for the precise words for this musty plastic-y smell and Lizzie found it for us. ‘I’d say it’s foosty,’ she said in her thick Scottish brogue. To better illustrate its definition, Lizzie used the word for me in a sentence. ‘You know, you wouldn’t want someone to tell you you had a foosty fanny. It would mean that no one had been there for ages.’

Recommence laughter.

And at the end of a long hard day, we still had the energy to join around the Dart fire for a party with friends. Time for a sweet moment on a neatly tarped pile of ply. Time to sit for a spell in the Night Stage bowl and enjoy the stars.