These two guys, both shirtless, one with an archipelago of acne along the top of his back and a tightly bandannaed head, the other with what looks like a Korn t-shirt hanging from the oversized pocket of his giant denim shorts and clutching a water bottle, walk astride our car for the next three hours or so. The heat sort of repeatedly clubs everyone with each grossly scorching gust, which gusts are frequent and carry none of the usual relief associated with breezes. These guys’ home-car, I imagine, is about twenty ahead of ours, and every time they get within eye shot of the AC and libations and company therein, the row pulls forward. The cars move sort of jerkily, stopping for seemingly long periods, then going great lengths in spurts that start to feel like free-falls off high mountains compared to the prolonged intervals of stasis. So the two guys aren’t really next to us the whole time or anything, but after a couple minutes of stillness following an exhilarating descent, they’ll again overtake us, telling us that ultimately we’re going the speed of these hunched and fatigued pedestrians, if not slower, but also telling us that they cannot ever catch up to the probable Freon and cold beverages of their home-vehicle, so we’re not, like, getting nowhere.
Surprisingly few cold water bottles are sold from the coolers strapped to the locals’ four-wheelers via bungee cords, especially given the excruciating heat and the amount of dehydrating liquids being consumed all around us. This water-bottle-sales business seems like it would be an insanely lucrative pursuit, even on a car-by-car basis, but during the whole interval I sit here, I see exactly zero takers. Four-wheelers and three-wheelers constantly buzz alongside the row of cars and trucks, and the locals seem to have territorial agreements concerning which areas of overheated passengers would entail their available customers. Their local meeting, which I picture as a circle of quads around a bonfire at dusk, must not have been too arduous or taxing given the extremely low population density in this area. People also sell hot dogs and other fried entrees off the steaming grills in their front yards, and again they are rounding up very little business. It becomes clear that this row of pilgrims is relatively well-stocked, provision-wise. I myself am shoveling as much salsa into my mouth per Tostito as possible to ensure completion of the salsa by the time we reach the gates, since no glass products are allowed on the premises.
At one corner, which seems to be the last commercial intersection before the long stretch to the venue, a group of officers stands and enacts selective blindness concerning the ubiquitous open alcohol containers. I hear one of them say, “saw someone with a tattoo on his” before I continue on, free-falling.
Things go slowly but they also go quickly. We drive quickly past a house in front of which twelve people are imbibing courageously from funnels—obviously not on their way to the spectacle, but residents—and hooting at the passers-by, telling them how far away they are from the venue in tenths of miles and contemplating out loud how many minutes that might translate into. People sell handmade quilts off their clothes-lines and there is a lot of old church memorabilia rusting away in everyone’s backyard. There are very few mobile homes on our trek that are devoid of an oxidizing crucifix or sign or steeple-post or frame for decorative glass. It’s like when a new church is built, everyone just takes a piece of the old one home with them and plants it in their backyard. It occurs to me that this may not be far from the truth.
Once we near the gate, everything happens a lot faster. The single line we’ve been in for the past four hours turns into eleven lines, one run by the police, who randomly, and perhaps disastrously, have people remove all their their vehicles’ contents onto the ground surrounding. The line we get on moves fairly briskly until the sudden and devastating downpour, which, coupled with the two inches of rain the area received yesterday, causes mud instantly to form, and most of the sedans struggle to get through and need to be pushed, not to mention the Volkswagen buses and the heavily Hendrix bumper-stickered station wagons, whose tires spin hopelessly until people get out and push.
The myriad flag people flanking each road ostensibly are there to make the ride in easy and stress-free, but for the most part these folks, young and probably volunteer, stand in the rain and blankly stare, their bright orange flags waving with the intensity and authority of heifers’ tails.
The rain subsides before we reach our parking spot, the flaggers at this end of the procession a bit more intense, probably due to the distraction of the drivers with whom they’re trying to communicate and the ever-increasing crowds of barely-clothed walkers swarming all around them, lunging desperately toward the Portable Toilets. The sun pours its lava down again, instantly beginning the evaporation process and filling the air with aa flows of humidity.
Settlement on Camp Clark Griswald, as I will later find out it’s called, is unrelenting and unexpectedly nasty. We’re flagged into a space aside a Mercury Sable with NJ plates. Before we even think about exiting the vehicle, a Ford F-550 or something as large parks next to us. One of its passengers, already positioned in the pickup’s bed before they park, in what I see as a sort of sneaky-veteran move, tosses tents and tarps and other enclosure-type materials onto the space behind their pickup. This alarms us. Larger than they appear, I see the two young guys on our right, maybe 18 and just having driven from NJ, pitching their two-person tent, leaving very little room. We are thoroughly flanked. Here we are, the suckers in territorial free-for-all.
I pop the trunk, unload our tent, and my collaborator and I pitch it with haste and high levels of stress, though of a different kind than the stress I’d just driven 774 miles to escape. We manage to fit our tent (which admittedly is a little overlarge for the two of us) between the two-man on one side and the small city on the other. These pickup people, with their OK-issued plates, are shaping up to be the kind of pushy self-important space-hogs you hate to sit next to on airplanes or get behind on buffet lines. A distorted sense of their own size or importance perhaps. Though I did not think drawing borders with pushy, offensively non-Hippie-type people would be part of this trip, here we were.
So we get the tent up, but part of it overlaps one of OK’s, who claim there’s no room on their other side even though I can see that there’s at least two feet between their tent and the van beyond. I try not to let this drive me completely bonkers even though this situation is high-stress and unprepared for. The NJ guys accommodate and nudge their tent dangerously close to the road to help us fit. I’m stricken with the inaccuracy and overall futility of trying to judge people’s attitudes or demeanors based on where they’re from. The whole thing feels a bit like some nineteenth-century scene in which the government has just opened up a bunch of free land to a large number of landless peasants, who, though comrades, instantly find themselves pitted against one another.
I suppose this is all part of the festival experience. I’ve never experienced a festival before. I’m trying to discover the spirit of the festival, which I thought on the way down would be vitally important, but now seems convoluted and fleeting and crass. So far my general expectations of utter personal freedom and zero-conflict have been challenged: the police-searches, the apathetic staff, the high-tension land rush.
Stress-inducing hubbub aside, our tent is pitched, our land is claimed, and now, finally, we can settle into our new home.
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