Given the Bell Curve that represents the quality of an event in relation to the qualities of the people attending, BSC could be categorized as containing only the upper 3% and the lowest 3% of the spectrum of observable and experiential phenomena. There were stunning and amazing moments that represented the very best of what the summer had to offer; there were some of the most heinous and vile of experiences that no human being (or any other species for that matter) should ever have to be in the presence of anywhere anytime. There were brilliant and inspiring people doing good well, and there were some of the stupidest and most idiotic creatures inhabiting human skin.
And that was just a bit of it. Really. And while I intend to get into more of that in a bit, I do want to spend a moment of your reading time discoursing on one of the tragedies that became apparent over the weekend. One of the “thangs” I do at these events is to develop, organize, produce, and present series of play-shops that cover a vast and wide variety of activities and topics. I invite speakers, artists, performance arts instructors, crafters, poets, songwriters, activists, et al (an entire spectrum of people) to offer the attendees opportunities to engage in something other than being spectators of music. At the BSC I had the chance to offer eco-hikes and cave-tours of the more than 380-acre site located along the Sinking Creek fork of the Current River in the heart of the Ozarks. For guides I contacted some local enthusiasts, a couple of whom are among the nation’s elite as spelunkers, as well as several naturalists (along with being some of the Midwest’s finest age group mountain bike racers). We didn’t expect too many of the 6000+ folks to want to engage in this sort of actual physical activity, and the caving aspects were more limited to climbing and walking into cliff-sides, the deepest of which was perhaps 200’. We did expect that some people would enjoy the chance to be out of the high heat and humidity, and that since so many of the important spots were along the river, there was always the opportunity to cool down.
By the Friday afternoon scheduled hike/tour, more than 150 people had shown up to participate. The numbers were staggering, in that we used only the program guide, six (well placed I might add) information kiosk signs, and a couple of announcements over the localized festival radio to let people know. By the end of the festival more than 500 folks had taken the tours and availed themselves of the experience. So why do I call this all a tragedy??? Well, in debriefing the tour guides and talking with participants I discovered that a vast majority (close to 90%) was taking the tours to become better informed about their local environment. People literally begged to be told about various species of flora, fauna, and fungi. They were clueless about the imminent and most dangerous threats that literally lurked throughout the site: rattlesnakes (a 44 inch one was killed on the road that previous Monday), copperheads (two were killed over the weekend, one nearly 30 inches long) and cottonmouths (we kept the people off the section of the site in which the swampy land was located). Some people showed up for the 1.5 hour hikes on hundred degree (and 100% humidity) days without water some thought bringing cans of beer would be good), and wearing flip-flops; completely oblivious to what the concept of the term “nature hike” might entail. Others, when told that they would be expected to wade across the river (not all that deep, but with some sizeable holes) acknowledged that even though they didn’t know how to swim, they thought it a grand idea to make the effort.
While this was going on, I was also producing a series of social-enviro-economic justice playshops that were very well attended. It became readily apparent that those choosing to attend were doing so because they desperately wanted specific online and textual references that covered a diverse spectrum of activism and critical information. Some came to find out about the global climate crises; some came to learn about their legal rights regarding use of psychoactive substances and what was happening throughout the country; some came to learn about ecotopias, intentional communities, and permaculture; and still more needed information on food safety, water and air quality, and healthy living. Why oh why did these young people not have this information???
Well, one aspect became apparent the moment you stepped out of the tour bus on the site. Everybody in Missouri smokes cigarettes! Okay, not everybody, but such a vast huge majority that there was not one place I put my foot down (and sadly that included the river) that I did not find a cigarette butt or remnant thereof. There are no smoking laws/ordinances in Missouri; voted down by those Missouri rebels fraught with the desperate desire to be unregulated in every manner of their lives. Thus the vast majority of 6000 people smoked, and did so with zero regard for the health and quality of air of others. Most of the time, the only place we left coasters could escape the presence of constant smoke (and hell we were outdoors for gawd’s sake) was in the backstage zones and our own buses and RVs. It was really awful. At times I discovered myself quite literally surrounded by smokers all of whom were more than happy to stand real close and blow smoke in each other’s faces, as well as mine. It was as if the west/left coast of the US was a foreign country wherein the residents live completely different cultural lives.
However the real issue for me, for those that attended the playshops, was the glaring lack of reliable and intelligent internet access most of them have in their lives. If they did grow up with it, and many did not, they were only connecting through dialup services. Now, as someone who is old enough to know better, even I get tweaked when I am not in an environment that has high-speed/broadband connectivity; I have been observed this summer demonstrating tube-speed rage, cursing the vile and nefarious dialup demons who make accessing many important and useful sites quite impotent and useless. So I could sympathize to some degree with those who can’t possibly conceive that they could load whole pages full of multi-media windows in less than a second or two. But that wasn’t the core problem from my perspective; no, from my perspective the issue resolved around the somewhat intentional restriction of information access to the rural masses in the US.
Keep in mind that most everyone in the US, no matter how remote they live, has relatively unlimited access to AM radio and particularly to dozens of Christian programs and a daily handful of conservative talk radio programming. If you have been raised in these environs, and only have very limited dialup access to the world outside of these regions, you would view the behaviors of your fellow citizens, their government, and their nation in relation to the world quite differently. If the only information sources were all selling the same messages over and over (and those xTian and talk-radio realms most certainly do) you might come to believe: that there is no such thing as a global climate crisis, that the US is winning the war on terror and that Iraq was responsible for 9/11, that evil homosexuals are taking over the cities and destroying the country, and that only the GOP is good and can save us all. I wish I were joking about this, but in conversation after conversation with folks in the “hinterlands” I realized that the ones to whom I spoke were desperately trying to find source material to disprove these claims. The problem didn’t vanish when the kids (yes it is a pejorative term, that I use to refer to the thousands of people I encounter in the summer who are more than half as young as i) were able to go off to universities and colleges. The semi-rural realms of Midwestern universities were shown to be quite insular, particularly with regard to encouraging students to use the now really powerful internets to reach out and see what is really going on. Unless a student was mentored or advised to investigate some of the claims on their own, most did not “know” what to look for in terms of counter information to the AM talk radio and conservative local newspapers of their upbringings.
I was constantly bombarded to provide actual URLs for sites (including this one I proudly mentioned, especially because I think those who contribute hereon are really valuable resources) across the spectrum of social, environmental, economic, and health-based justice. We (those that read this site for example) are most accustomed to quickly mentally referencing a dozen or so sites from which we choose to examine the critical issues of our day. These sites are nearly commonplace references, yet when I mentioned a handful or so to dozens and dozens of folks, I was returned blank stares and literally begged for the “exact URL, please.” Heaven forbid (and there are those I am sure who beseech their gods to forbid it) that some of these folks (kids) would read blogs or review source materials on the internets. I could only imagine that for many of the parents of the attendees watchingamerica.com must be perceived as the most evil and communist (Stalin and Mao rolled into one) of sites, daring to present anti-US propaganda from furren gummints. I particularly remember a couple of students from Ole Miss in Oxford, MS, and a half dozen from Lawrence, KS University of Kansas, all of whom stopped me over the course of the weekend (even at two in the morning in two cases) to get more references.
I will not mention their names (protecting the cognitive liberties and all that), but I will offer one anecdotal referent. The Kansas contingent was led by a young woman graduate student, who had grown up in Missouri, but had been able to attend a prestigious East Coast university (in Massachusetts). She had graduated with a degree in environmental studies-permaculture, and then spent the next two years living within two different intentional communities (in two different states) that practiced permaculture and commercial organic farming. She had returned to graduate school because she felt passionate about being able to disseminate to broader audiences her avocation and vision for how to survive into the future. The crew that had come to Camp Zoe with her (interestingly all guys, and yes she was a very beautiful young woman), and who had volunteered (with perhaps another dozen) to participate in the nasty work of developing, implementing, and completing a massive recycling effort (as not yet previously undertaken in that festival space—seriously they didn’t “do” recycling nor know much about it), could at best be described as naïve about issues of ecosystems, watersheds, and long term global climate crisis. She encouraged me to talk with all of them about my perceptions of the problems and to provide numerous resources for internet links. Although clearly a leader among them, it appeared to me that her femininity was still an issue for the males with respect to her “authenticity and authority” on these matters (sad, sad and tragic). My elder male status (my gawd how awkward that was given my background and experience) seemed to be something that empowered her (and that just sucks {more of the tragedy of it all} given her intellect and maturity to have to be subsumed into an ass-backward, provincial Midwestern anti-feminist environment, even in a graduate program at a university) to open up publicly about her own background and work (hopefully she will become a great teacher and leader and given the respect she richly deserves from males as well as females). As she spoke up and offered insights and asked many good questions, other young women felt safer to do so as well.
It was as shocking and surprising to me, as the cigarettes and lack of awareness of what is happening in the world, to discover that middle-amurka is still (or perhaps re-becoming) a patriarchal anti-feminist realm. It may be the AM radio, it may be the 91 churches (and big-ass ones at that) in a county with a population of under 20,000, or it may be that stubborn conservative GOP electorate really can’t let go of the 1950’s. Whatever it is, it is a serious problem and a tragedy for this nation. As Van Jones pointed out early in the Summer at the Harmony Festival, we (the environmental activist community and those for whom those views are considered important) comprise only 20% of the country at this point. And now, having actually ventured into that middle of the rural realm, I have come to understand just what he meant when he said, we haven’t got a chance until “they wake up, too.”
Now I know this is getting long in the tooth, and I could go on and on, boringly and tirelessly just to describe those three days (casual Lucinda Williams referent), but I will try to shrink wrap some of it into a few tidbits more of anecdotal sentences about the top and bottom of the bell curve. Well, there is the food of Missouri; and thank all the glorious spirits of luck and good fortune that encouraged the moneyed interests to hire a backstage caterer from Denver who knew how to make healthy amazingly excellent meals. You can only eat barbequed pork, chicken, and beef so many different greasy fatty ways; hell you can only prepare it so many ways, and yet they serve it three, four, or five times a day to each other—with cigarettes of course. We stopped at one of the only restaurants (an actual roadhouse) we could find open between the festival and the “other world,” and discovered much to our dismay that every single item on the menu was fried. Stunning how in one sense how diverse the fried material could incorporate, given a typical Midwestern farm (not a lot of green leafy stuff out there, and to them the only type of lettuce is head/iceberg), it was somewhat understandable that the roadhouse would offer fried tubers of various sorts (yes rutabagas and turnips were on the list). Breakfasts were to be avoided at all costs (sausage, eggs, bacon, gravy, biscuits, ham, repeat), with most everything cooked in lard, and lunch was not much better.
Counter that with a fresh water river, fed by artesian springs pouring out of the porous limestone hills, whose temperature was immaculately perfect, that allowed you to choose any sort of comfortable position you chose to enjoy the water—whether it be head-deep pools, soft sandy shallow sloping beach, natural rock chaises across different depths, multi-layered flowing rapid currents to massage the aches, and so much more. Then, late at night, under the appropriately named Echo Bluffs (a hundred foot limestone face with a slightly concave, erosion-sculpted surface) five hundred people could stand or lay, in or out of the water, and watch HD-DVD videos projected across more than 50’ (and without much damaging distortion, MVP), and listen to a stereo sound-system that had been intentionally placed and tweaked to create full surround sound using the limestone surface. Looking up you could see the trees at the top of the bluffs, then the stars, then the moon and realize that you were experiencing the best drive-in movie experience ever!!!
Or take the absolute mindlessness of attendees who constantly ignored how packed the amphitheater was for the shows, while choosing to launch all manner of fireworks off from the middle of the crowd (and without any conscious thought about where they ended up). Given that less than a couple of hours away the “ the US capital of supermarkets of fireworks” was open 24/7 to happily sell any conceivable type of incendiary and explosive devise to any and all takers, the sorts of releases from the audience were quite large and powerful. If that weren’t enough, a few truly stunningly stupid folks decided that fire dancing, with poi and wands and staffs, was also an appropriate thing to do in the middle of hundreds of people. That only one poor soul was lit on fire by the idiocy could be considered a miracle, seeming to be beyond the pale in terms of human disregard of others and complete lack of conscious will to care for anything.
If that isn’t sufficient to prove the bottom end of the curve, consider the following. While cruising around one mid-day, I was stopped by a patron demanding that I use my “authority” (as if being an old guy, with a radio and golf cart had authority—and there were at least a half dozen of us who fit that description), to stop two young, urban black men from selling heroin and cocaine in the campground. Since the person expressing this problem to me was a young white male (and I was in Missouri where confederate flags fly all over the damn place) I wasn’t particularly alarmed by the request. It also wasn’t my role to interdict anyway, since we had paid for a security company to come in from Kansas City to do that (and they were a huge part of the problem as well—what a goon squad of former collegiate and professional football players bent on shaking down the clientele and selling the drugs and alcohol back to them at night), but I drove over to see how obvious the two sellers were. I found them, more obvious than they needed to be, mentioned that if I was getting a complaint, then others were as well, and that maybe they needed to either leave or close up their enterprise. They were quite nice about it, and relatively soft spoken (though I later learned they were popped by the security boys, who swore that the two were East St Louis gang-bangers yada yada), and agreed to lay low. But that wasn’t the real problem. That they were selling heroin and cocaine (and mollys) at a rather remote rural music festival represented the existence of a market among our nation’s youth, and one that was already becoming prevalent and costly. There had been some OD’s and deaths at music festivals this summer from mixing of opiates and other pharmacology. Not more than three hours after I had talked to these two, a young white woman was found unconscious in the river. She responded to anti-OD drug therapy, and was revived; she was also subsequently arrested. In trying to discern her identity, it was discovered that her backpack contained more than an ounce of high grade black-tar heroin, a large supply of small zip-lock baggies, a digital scale, and nearly $2000 in cash. Forsaking the rule of all dealers, she was obviously strung-out on her own inventory, and had seriously misjudged the quality. And she was not the only one; two other OD’s occurred, both white males, both in their early 20’s. The only obvious junkies I observed all weekend were young, white, apparently affluent youth, male and female. It was clearly apparent to me that the two, urban-street, black males were at a competitive disadvantage in this downer market space; it belonged to the white “hippy” kids.
As tragic and sad as that was for me, the other end of the curve was just as amazing and exhilarating. Following the Saturday night main-stage set and a day of great performances by musical legends, the owner of this wonderful site, led a large contingent of drummers in a quite well performed drum circle gathering. This took place next to a huge bonfire and was graced by three stunning women (two from Africa) who led those willing in the most inspiring of tribal dances. The joy and wonder that was on the faces, and in the minds, of the four or five hundred people assembled was awesome. It was a rare and beautiful moment, rich in connections to all of our primitive tribal roots, no matter what our genetic heritages, and to have had that moment over the weekend was a thrill and high for me. It got even better when the host then began to tell stories around the fire, encouraging others to do so, and that continued well into the night. WOW.
Or consider that members of bands, who had traveled all over the world over many years, were awe struck by the reception they received in this very out of the way, lost in the Ozarks, world. The trumpet player of the Wailers, wandering around in the throng being thanked by folks for coming to their world and playing for them, smiling hugely as he walked along the banks of the beautiful river late at night to discover the film theater.
Del McCoury and his band, a decidedly classical bluegrass group, enjoying the reception they received from people who were dancing at the rave scene, a contretemps moment made whole by the discovery that a world renowned DJ could quickly mix some of Del’s music right into the trance-zen-house flow he had going. Not often do you get that sort of awareness and shared acknowledgement in this business along the backroads of Amurka.
I was also mesmerized by the Kaivalya Hoop Dancers ({http://www.myspace.com/kaivalyahoops} from Boulder, Colorado); a group we had brought in to teach basic and advanced modern hoop dancing (up to but not including fire hoop dancing). To watch three or four classic farm kids, males and females, learn to dance quite skillfully with mylar-lasered, day-glo & glittered, large dance hoops (new style hula-hoops) over the course of the weekend was really special. Even the more athletic types, two swimmers from University of Missouri, got into the serious dance study, and ended up buying hoops to travel with over the course of the next swim season. It is the little moments and promise of things to happen in the future that made the weekend great.
