Campfyre Stories

It only took me a week to have the time to blog, but here I finally am.  I still don’t think I’ve recovered from the combination of 5 days at FRFF plus starting a new job immediately, but what are you gonna do?

I arrived at the festival on Wednesday evening, my mother and RC2 had already set up our camp, so all that was left was for Spawn to pitch his tent and set up, which he did willingly and happily.  Once that was done, we headed off to grab some food and meet up with people we hadn’t seen for a year.

The food at FRFF is always good.  At least the breakfasts and lunches are.  Dinners tend to be hard for me because, while they are all vegetarian, they often have peppers in them, and I’m allergic, so I wind up spending a lot of time at the salad bar, which is usually very well stocked.  It’s generally light fare and, in the heat and sun, that’s a very good thing.  My clothes were a little too big when I got back, I think I lost about 5-10 lbs. there.

The first night, Wednesday, is a volunteer-only day before the festival kicks off.  There’s a volunteer open mic (some are good, most are mediocre) and a lot of time spent trying to find old friends, the other early arrivers.  I found a handful - quite a few whose names I had forgotten.  my crew chief tells me (and I’ve seen this to be true) that there’s a three-year rule.  You have to see someone three years in a row before their name finally sinks in.  It’s all good, though, because all the volunteers wear name tags - so that helps.

From the moment I arrived, I found that people I didn’t know were waving at me and shouting hello.  Some of them, it turned out, were people who Spawn and I had taught Cosmic Wimpout (our standard festival game) in years past, but quite a few were just friendly folks who I hadn’t met before, so I made a point to do so and I feel like I expanded my family/community.

Whenever we all first arrive, the standard greeting is "welcome home", because it is like a second home…  it’s an alternate reality.  Mom, RC2 and I all have second families there, but they’re not the same family.  Spawn is finally starting to develop his own as well, but his tendency toward solitude at the festival keeps him from really getting into it.  Even though there are a lot of people I only see once a year, I look forward to seeing them and get really excited to catch up and find out what’s all going on with everyone.

It’s interesting to me.  I tend, in real life, to gravitate toward men.  My friends are predominantly male and my female friends (with one exception) all live far away, so we mostly talk on the phone, but at the festival, I spend time with a majority of women - most of whom are older than me.  The older than me part isn’t surprising - I tend to fit better with people a generation or so ahead of me, but it’s nice to spend time with women who are completely down-to-earth, don’t play petty competitive games and have a feisty independent streak.  It’s very comfortable and comforting.  i did find myself spending more time this year with guys my age than I have in years past.  I really connected with 2 - one who I had met years before, but who hadn’t come for a couple of years, and one who knew a creator of Cosmic Wimpout, and so we bonded over that.  It was good.

This is what the festival is for me.  While I enjoy the music and everything, I go for the people and the escape from reality.  My crew is t-shirts and our sales tent is right next to the stage, so I usually just schedule my shifts so I can listen to what I want to hear, I rarely make a point to view the concerts.  Of all the performances, the one I really look forward to is the Sunday Morning Gospel Wake Up Call.  Spiritual music on the last day of the festival is a wonderful way to start the last day.  it’s inspiring in a non-denominational way for me.  I just love gospel music anyway…  and these folks do it beautifully.

But what is a festival recap without a discussion on the weather?  Every year it rains at Falcon Ridge, but we never know if it will be light sprinkles, mostly threats or monsoons.  Since we were in a new location, we also didn’t know what the end result would be…  what a rain we got.

Friday night was grey and overcast, it rained a little then and Saturday morning, so the teen crew spread around some hay to make things less hazardous, but the threats in the sky were not going away.  Saturday afternoon the sky opened up like a monsoon and the flooding was beyond belief.  In the t-shirt tent, we wound up with several inches of water, well over our feet and the entire site was pretty bad.  The ‘accessible" camping was completely flooded, I saw several tents with water lines that reached 2-4 inches up the side.  As I headed back to our camp, I was dismayed to see a river sprung up in the road in front of our tents - it was a good 4 feet wide by about 10 feet long and the wee ones were up to their knees sending foam lily pads with frogs on them down this temporary river in races.  Imagine my relief when I checked our tent and we were not flooded at all.  Spawn, unfortunately, did not fare so well and wound up leaving Saturday night (since he had a ride who had come for the day).

The mud was thick and slippery and everywhere.  I took my shoes, wrapped them in a bag and stuck them in my pocket (even I have limits, and there, my limit was the porta potty - that was the only time I put my shoes on for the rest of the festival).  There were mired wheelchairs *everywhere* and a large majority of folks were running around barefoot.  I went and grabbed the Child of Chaos and the two of us danced off into the mud saying "squish squish" with every step and then splashing in the puddles.  I love the rain and I figure, we have two choices - we can laugh or we can cry, but neither one is going to change the situation, so why be miserable?  We weren’t.

Sunday is always the hardest day for me.  I’m burnt out, I’m sore from sleeping on the ground, I’m grimy and muddy and TIRED (since I probably average about 5 hours of sleep), so I was ready to leave pretty early.  We didn’t leave as early as I wanted, though, so I spent a lot of extra time in the hot sun, kind of dozing off or playing in the (still there) mud.

It was nice to note, this year, after coming home and taking my shower, that I was more tan than grime.  That’s an unusual occurrence for me, but I’m still a pasty white girl, less tan than a lot of people in the winter - heh.  But I know I’m tan and can see the difference.

But then I went straight to the new job and I haven’t really caught up.  I think I’m still burnt out from the festival and everything else is factoring in.

At least entry is one thing to cross off my list.  In another day or two I’ll catch up with the "in other news" kinds of things, like the man with the frogs and the Mexican…  but for now, I just want to, well, not do ANYTHING.