Michfest

It's definitely no longer summer, but I never did get around to posting about the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, so here it is. I have this account for this post, and in subsequent posts will share my other adventures from the summer and fall, and they will have pictures.

I didn't take any pictures at the festival, mostly because I broke my camera the day before I left, but also because it's difficult to take a picture there that doesn't have topless women in it. The festival is 6 days long and it takes place on a parcel of woodland on the west side of Michigan. It is run and attended entirely by women. I don't have figures, but I believe this year there were something like 400 workers and 3,000 festivalgoers.

To get there, I got up at 4 in the morning and drove to a park n ride in Thornton, north of Denver, where I caught a bus to the airport. I did this because I'd booked a flight that was too early to allow me to leave on the bus from my house. I did that because I didn't want to pay for airport parking. When I got on the airport bus I saw it wasn't like the airport buses that I'd been on before, when I took the bus from home. There was no place to put luggage. It was all seats. And airport employees sleeping in the seats. The bus driver was confused by my trying to pay the fare. I don't think he'd ever had anyone do that before.

Once on the plane I flew to Phoenix, then to Chicago. I did this because a flight that connected in Phoenix was cheaper than Southwest's other options. I stood in the terminal at Sky Harbor looking out on the palm trees and wondered if maybe I shouldn't just have paid $40 more to sleep in, take the real airport bus, and spend 2 hours in the air instead of 6.

But, money is not what I have a lot of. Time is what I have a lot of.

Did you know that Chicago is enormous? Completely overwhelming. I've spent a lot of time in Manhattan and was never overwhelmed by it, so I don't know what it is about Chicago, but this doesn't appear to be an uncommon experience. As I took the light rail in from the airport, the city was mounded on the horizon in a cakelike symmetrical way that did not at all approximate Manhattan. Perhaps what made the city seem so overwhelming is that the light rail comes in at about the height of the second or third story of the buildings, letting you see a lot more than you could as a pedestrian. Your perspective is not limited to the concrete in front of you. The buildings go up and up and the canyons between them go on and on.

I got off the train... somewhere in the city... and met Kris, who'd gotten there before me to attend a bachelorette party. We were very happy to see each other and went to another train station to wait for another train. There was a concession stand in the train station that served margaritas and hot dogs, but it was closed.

Another hour on that train brought us to a suburb of Chicago, where a couple of Kris's friends from St. Louis picked us up. We drove and drove, on past dark, around the south end of Lake Michigan and up along its eastern shore. Then onto dirt roads, up into the woods. We began to pass cars that were parked on the side of the road. They were lined up to enter the festival, which wouldn't open until 1PM the next day. They were lined up on the left side of the road. At some point, the cops came and told us we could line up on the right, and each of the 100+ cars was started and moved a few feet. I didn't completely understand this ritual.

Kris and I set up hammocks in the woods. The next day, as the opening time approached, we walked to the head of the line and, when the festival opened, went in on foot. I didn't have a ticket because mine had never arrived in the mail, so I had to buy a new ticket, the price of which would be refunded after the festival if my original ticket didn't get used by someone else. This is a distressing system for the purchaser -- what if my original ticket was stolen and sold on ebay? -- but I understand why it would be the best option for an organization that cannot afford a lot of overhead.

And what a lovely place, the eastern woods. This is one of the things I miss most in Denver; being in a deciduous forest, where there's actually green and shade. I don't like these forests around Denver, which have only one kind of tree, some dry dark-green conifer that goes up without spreading out much, providing little shade. When you hike in a forest here you spend much of the hike in half to full sun. And the sun is so strong here! I live 5,000 feet above and some degrees south of where I grew up, and the air is so much clearer here, it makes the sun feel like an enemy rather than a friend too much of the time. But in Michgan the summer became a pleasant temperature again, and if I was ever hot I could just get in some shade, anytime I felt like it.

One of our friends from Denver was working the festival and had arrived ahead of time. She had set up our stuff for us, somewhere in the square mile of land the festival is held on. Somewhere my tent and pillow were waiting for me. Somewhere, our friend who knew where my tent and pillow were was working. This brings me to what is simultaneously one of the coolest and most frustrating things about Michfest, which is that there's no cell phone service there.

It's a blissful thing to not be surrounded by people talking loudly to their mothers or having cell-phone fights with their girlfriends while you're trying to watch a comedy act, but it's a bit frustrating to not be able to physically locate the people you care about and want to spend time with, which happened with some frequency throughout the week.

We did run into our friend and she described to us how to find our campsite, in one of the many camping areas on the property. We were quite near the kitchens, which also proved to be the best place to find people. Your friends may or may not be at concerts, or take showers at predictable times or places, or even come home at night, but everyone has to eat. The best way to find anyone was to wait for them to show up at lunch or dinner.

The kitchens were to me the most impressive operation at Michfest. Your ticket buys you three vegetarian meals a day, and cooking three meals a day for thousands of women in the middle of the woods. Partly this is managed with volunteers. Everyone who comes to the festival has to sign up for two four-hour shifts helping out somewhere. I did both of mine in the kitchen, plus helping out an extra shift when they were short-handed, so that might be where I developed my fascination for the machine.

There were two refrigerated trucks, a massive white tent, and some kind of assembly of wood-burning ovens that I did not get to see closely. It was either the Army or the National Guard who came once to learn how the women cooked for so many on wood-burning ovens, so they could adapt the technique to their own operations afield. Volunteers' shifts were staggered so that all through the day, while I was chopping tomatoes or eating or simply walking past on my way to somewhere, every couple of hours there was a new group of people putting on white aprons and listening to an instructory speech from a kitchen staff member standing on an upended white bucket.

After hours straight of slicing tomatoes at a high table with five other women, just slicing and talking, I thought, This is what so much of history has been like for women... sitting around the home with other women, preparing food. For hours and hours of every day. In Africa, in the Amazon, our ancestors spent a lot of time grinding corn or cassava.

When it was time to eat we lined up and filed under another tent to be served salad or burritos from great bins. Mealtimes were made simpler by the requirement that everyone bring, and wash, their own plate and silverware. A rack with hooks between the kitchen and the dishwashing station held hundreds of meal kits in mesh bags between meals.

And what was there to do when I wasn't in the kitchen? At any given time, there might be five different workshops going on, latin dance, writing, car repair, meditation, and improving your communication in relationships. There were three stages and a movie screen, and spoken word performances, independent films, comedy acts, and of course music played through the afternoon and evening. At night there were parades and firepits and parties and dance parties with a DJ, and a coffee shop under a tent with books and games and hay bales for seats, so that at any time between 8AM and 2AM the festival was quite like a city, with any number of places to go and things to do at any moment.

You could hop on the tractor for a ride across town to listen to the drummers at the Triangle firepit. The tractors are all driven by women. They are maintained by women; women also set up the stages and the sound systems, the outdoor open-air showers, the great tents that house the child care and the health care stations.

A composite day for me:

8AM - Wake up, no matter how tired I am or what time I got to bed the night before, because the crazy people with African drums have started playing already, and musicians are already rehearsing on one of the stages, full-blast.

8:30 - Go eat, because I am starving. Having food available at only three discrete mealtimes during the day means I have to employ the sort of forethought I never have to apply to food at home. After the first starving day, Kris and I began hoarding fruit and chunks of bread from breakfast in our backpacks.

9AM - Go to a workshop to learn salsa, merengue and bachata.

12PM - Eat lunch, because I am starving. Possibly eat a second lunch.

1-2:30 - Stand around outside the kitchen tent talking with friends and hoping that my crush will wander through.

2:30 - Go to a workshop to learn sex things.

4PM - Go back to my hammock and try to take a nap. End up spending the whole time talking with lovely neighbors from Madison.

5PM - Eat lunch because I am starving. Stop at "porta-Jane" on the way and read the latest postings which are now covering the inside of the plastic structure with notices about workshops, advertisements for sex toy shops in Chicago, and invitations to theme parties at the Twilight Zone camping area. Take an hour to eat because I put so much food on my plate, hopefully enough to last through tomorrow morning, that it literally takes an hour to get it all chewed and swallowed.

6PM - Find my friends at the acoustic stage, where a performance is winding down.

7PM - Spend an hour walking around the forest trying unsuccessfully to find Kris.

8PM - Go to Night Stage, where everyone goes for the big-name performers each night.

10PM - Leave Night Stage because I am not that interested in the performers, and wander around with some other people looking for things that look cool, like parties, or campfires. Spend the last half-hour wandering around in the dark by myself before going to sleep.

Many people I know who have been to Michfest remarked that it was the safest they had ever felt in their life. Not only is your person safe, but your belongings are too. Kris and I would leave our backpacks anywhere, for hours, and come back to find them untouched. It's also a very friendly environment. You could grab anyone if you needed help with anything.

Also, people followed rules. I have never seen so many people following rules at once in my life. About how short your chair must be to use at concerts, about not making noise, or not playing any music that had men's voices in it. But it's an odd kind of music festival. It attracts people who believe in particular ideals, rather than people who just want to get stoned and party and have sex (though I'm sure there was plenty of all that too).

I was told that about 90% of the attendees are queer, which makes it a neat reversal of real life. All of the dating- or relationship- related things I went to just assumed that you were gay. Also, it's really nice to be out and about and not have to wonder, Is she or isn't she? Which is just a thing that straight people take for granted. By and large, if you meet a cute girl at a pub, you're not going to be agonizing inside your head, "God, do you think she's straight??"

One of the things I found most interesting about the festival was that it devoted great thought and resources to four particular minority groups: deaf women, disabled women, women in recovery from substances, and women of color. The first three had their own camping areas: I walked through the deaf women's area once late at night, and was nearly blinded by the high-powered lanterns that enabled them to see each other signing. Their were sign language interpreters for every performance.

Forest paths were made wheelchair- and scooter-friendly by being covered in strips of carpet turned upside-down, the woven backing on top. There were buses to take those with mobility issues from one venue to another. There was another whole camping area for the women in recovery, with all kinds of 12-step meetings all day, and the concert areas had sections for substance-free seating. The women of color had their own gathering tent and firepit, where--unlike the other kinds of areas mentioned above--only they were allowed to enter, and they had many events of their own throughout the week.

Here is a photo one of our friends took of me and Kris, at the night stage. We were there just over a week, but it felt like a month. I came back from it a very different person -- something about being surrounded by 3,000 friends and potential friends, and so much acceptance and caring. I felt much softer and more open. This proved impossible to maintain once I returned to real life. The loneliness for a few weeks after coming back was terrible... it makes me wonder anew at our modern age, where I live alone in a box, and each of my friends is in their own box miles away from me. It was so different.

Wonder Woman all day long

Since my last entry, I've been to the mountains, to a glacier, to Utah and Michigan, as well as having fun in Denver. Here are some photos!

 

Friends play volleyball in Denver's Wash Park at Dusk.

St. Mary's glacier... yes, it still has snow. That's what makes it a glacier.

Some photos from Denver Pridefest...

I believe that once upon a time, gay pride was about being visible, speaking out against oppression, and celebrating culture. Now it appears to be mostly about selling things, often through the use of terrible puns.

The country tent was disappointingly empty this year... here, Kris and I dance all alone.

And Cori and I...

And Kris and Cori.

Below, an amusing still from one of my videos.

The Denver Dyke March. I was walking in this by accident. I was supposed to be volunteering for it, but they didn't seem to need my help.

Then I had a birthday party. It was Lesbian Laser Tag. We had a long lull in between the two games you get for a birthday party, and I guess you're supposed to have ordered pizza so you can eat it then, but I did not order pizza. So my friends all drifted over to the liquor store just outside and then stood around drinking out of paper bags. Below are my friends from book club... we're very classy.

One day I got up at 5 AM and drove up into the mountains and hiked a long way so that I could photograph wildflowers in the morning light. So here are lots of pictures of wildflowers.

Abby and I had a white board we would use to let each other know our schedules... I came home one evening to find this on it.

Then I went to Utah. Not because of that, just because I wanted to. Paleontologist Randy Irmis was doing some research in Dinosaur National Monument, and I wanted to visit him and also my boss from last summer when I worked in the park. I arrived about sunset time.

It brought back a lot of memories to see the storm cloud forming over Blue Mountain... many evenings from the employee housing area I watched the exact same show as it got dark.

Dan Chure, the park paleontologist, unrolled a cast that had been made of the track site I discovered last year. This is a good way to preserve and study the 200-million year old tracks, which were in a not-very-accessible location in the backcountry.

Here's a photo of me with the actual tracks, from last year.

I suppose it isn't very easy to tell what you're looking at on the cast, but there are some left and right footprints made by a small mammal-like reptile walking diagonally up a dune face. (The tracksite is very exciting, as it also contains footprints made by spiders and scorpions.)

I was well cared-for during my time there, as Randy's group had a mess tent with all manner of food and alcohol that I was allowed full access to in return for volunteering my labor.

Prospecting for fossils in the park.

Excavating the ichthyosaur I discovered last year...

It turns out that one of the park's interns this summer was a fellow student from URI.

I collected invertebrate fossils outside the park to give to friends.

And I finally got to see the quarry visitor center, which had been undergoing reconstruction the previous summer. The huge wall of bones is now attended by new interpretive signs.

I took that picture on the sign! The caption says, "Removing small fossilized animals from the rocks formed in lakes and ponds is delicate work." Except that's not what my former boss and his fellow researcher are doing. They're just kneeling on the ground pretending to look at things with hand lenses, because the exhibit design team needed a photo for the sign.

The wall of bones itself is as magnificent as ever.

The morning I left, I went back to the ichthyosaur site to see if they had uncovered anything else. Here are some bones that look hairy because the roots of surface plants have grown into them... bones, or fossilized bones, contain minerals not in the soil, so plants seek them out.

Vertebrae with roots.

I spent a couple hours shoveling in the hot sun. Not quite as glamorous as Jurassic Park.

Abby's going away pool party was not long after I got back. Abby has now started law school in San Francisco and I miss her!

And then I went to the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival. I meant to talk about it in this blog entry, but it's taken way too long to get it finished and uploaded, so this is all there is until next time. But more adventures soon.

We are on fire

All of a sudden, the mountains and the medians are yellow again, just like all of a sudden earlier this year then were green. I guess spring is over. No doubt Colorado's been in the news a lot because of all the wildfires (I don't read or watch the news, so I will have to assume), but all of them are far enough from me that I can't even smell them. I did see some smoke from the one outside Boulder last night.

Last week I joined Kris & friends for a backpacking trip in Rocky Mountain National Park, which turned out to be good timing as it hit over 100 degrees in Denver while we were away. Kris had planned the whole thing, and as we rode up to the park I was unaware that we were supposed to be rock climbing the first day.

We climbed into the mountains on the edge of the park to reach these crags, on which several folks were already climbing.

Find the climber's hand above.

I didn't have any climbing gear, so I went to take a nap and read in my hammock. When I came back a few hours later my friends were still climbing, and they convinced me to borrow a harness and try to scale the wall in my gigantic backpacking boots.

I got pretty far up, but not all the way.

After the rock climbing, we drove into the park, where we were car camping for the first night, and where we found they'd instituted a fire ban a couple hours before we arrived. How were we going to cook our hot dogs now? We set up one of our backpacking stoves, and as it was so windy--it'd been blowing like heck all day, maybe 50-mph gusts--made a makeshift windscreen for it out of aluminum foil that wrapped all the way around both stove and canister. Everyone set up tents. I didn't feel like getting up so I sat at the table pretending to watch the hot dogs, occasionally trying to flip one over with a miniature spatula.

At some point I noticed the flame had gone out.

"Did you turn this off?" I asked Kris. (I really wasn't paying very much attention.)

Kris hadn't turned it off. We tried for a while to get it to start up again, with no luck. We unscrewed the burner mechanism from the fuel cartridge and shook it vigorously, with no luck. We attached my burner to the cartridge. Still no luck. Fuel was still sloshing inside it, so it clearly wasn't empty. It seemed that nothing was coming out.

"We can use my stove," I said.

"No," said Cori, "Look at your cute little canister. We should save that for backpacking. It's lighter than the others."

So we set up Kris's stove on a new canister, and set up the windscreen around it.

A minute later, it was ON FIRE.

It is difficult to know what to do when one's explosive canister of compressed butane is on fire. Kris risked her fingers and managed to turn the stove off. We debated what to do. We decided to try again.

Within seconds, the stove was ON FIRE AGAIN. There was some freaking out. One of us got the stove turned off again, and once it was cool-ish someone unscrewed it from the canister.

The canister was hissing. Gas was coming out of it. This wasn't supposed to happen. You were supposed to have to screw on a Snow Peak Giga Power burner element, its plunger delicately depressing the valve on the canister and its O-ring sealing securely, and turn the stove on, before any gas would come out. But there was the canister hissing like a snake. The whole campsite suddenly smelled like butane.

Someone picked up the canister and threw it about 15 feet away, where it stopped hissing unless one of us walked over and kicked it.

We sat and talked. Every once in a while, we got another whiff of butane. Not all of the hot dogs were cooked yet. A couple people were frightened to start another stove when we could smell butane in the air. I did not think we could possibly light the ambient butane on fire and eventually set up my own, with its cute little canister. I did not use the makeshift foil windscreen. I had an Official Snow Peak Giga Power Titanium Windscreen that enclosed only the burner, and I have a feeling that was why my stove lasted the rest of the night and through breakfast the next morning without puttering out, catching on fire, or any other thing.

The next morning, we had another problem. When we went to get our backpacking permit, the ranger told us there had been a bear sighting at our second campsite, and that bears had been pulling down bear bags--the only thing that would do was putting all food and toiletries into bear canisters at night. We had bear canisters, but we weren't sure we had enough room for everything. So we took the only logical course, which was to strew our stuff all over the parking lot as we practiced stuffing the canisters.

It didn't fit. We ended up driving out of the park and into town, where we rented a third canister. (The makers of the Bear Vault Solo advertise that it will hold 1 person's stuff for 4 days, or 2 people's stuff for 2 days, but it's a challenge to get even half of that inside of it. Just sayin'.)

After that we drove for approximately 2 hours through construction zones in the park to get to the trailhead. A large chunk of this time was due to a construction worker who apparently didn't know he was supposed to let those with backpacking permits through, and kept yelling at us and waving us back to the line of cars creeping back toward where we came from. So we got back in line, waited for the pilot car to lead us to the edge of the construction, then turned around and got in another line, and waited for the pilot car to lead us back to the construction worker, who insisted we turn right and wait in another line of cars until the pilot car came back, when we were led forward far enough to explain ourselves more thoroughly to him.

He wouldn't let us through.

We detoured up the hill to a visitor's center and found a ranger, who walked all the way down the hill to talk to the construction worker, who eventually let us through. So here we are at the trailhead.

Lunch. We all had tuna. What can I say? Foil tuna packets are lightweight and nutritious!

Most of the snow on the trail had melted, but there were still some sections to cross.

We came to a planned "day hike," a little trip up to an alpine lake that didn't have much of a trail (certainly not an official one), but did have more snowfields. I was not the first to try to slide down one...

...but I will claim to be the most stylish, going down on my belly like a penguin. (I managed to turn around before I hit the rocks at the bottom with my face.)

A few of us climbed all the way up to a pair of alpine lakes at about 11,000 feet. Here, marmots wandered back and forth, without much apparent fear of us. (Photo below courtesy of Nancy.)

The lakes were so clear and beautiful, we had to go swimming. For about 3 seconds, until the 32 degree water drove us out. But it was refreshing, and after getting out we put our boots back on and took some photos. As I wandered around the edge of the lake I spotted a marmot investigating my clothing, and I chased it away.

I had wandered round to this side of the lake, opposite my clothes, to get a shot looking back, when I heard a commotion. The marmot had taken my shirt in its mouth and was scampering away with it. My friends, still in nothing but their boots, were chasing the marmot down the mountain, yelling.

Life had not prepared me for this situation. In lieu of an appropriate response I began trying to document the incident photographically (I didn't get any good shots). My friends got my shirt back when the marmot eventually dropped it. I felt eerily like I'd been transplanted into a Chevy Chase movie.

We hiked onward toward our campsite.

All through the trip we were comparing gear. Three of my friends had those plastic "origami" folding plates that are all the rage right now. We discussed the pros and cons. I don't know what to think about a brand of plasticware that is best cleaned by tongue.

The next morning, I was down at the river filtering water. I was down there quite a while. (We had two water filters, but the one that pumped faster than agonizingly slow kept getting a tiny rock stuck in it.) When I came back to camp I was told that a chipmunk had gotten into my pack, eaten part of my trail mix, and refused to get out even when the pack was picked up and shaken vigorously. I was not allowed to eat any more trail mix. The entire bag was placed into our trash, and I mooched food off everyone else for the rest of the trip.

We took another little side-hike up to Odessa Lake, where Kris attempted to fish with a bit of line and a lure...

And beyond, into the trailless woods where we came across a large bull elk grazing and mostly ignoring us.

When I turned back, I could see a billow of smoke from the High Park fire outside Fort Collins, CO.

When we returned after an hour or so of exploring, Kris and Mary were still sitting on their boulder on the lakeshore without having so much as seen a fish. But as we headed back to the trail, where the lake emptied into a stream we saw many trout. This incited a kind of creative frenzy in Kris, who tied her lure onto a hiking pole and proceeded to fish for a bit with the same total lack of success as before.

Mary and Kris use the hiking poles for "trail pictionary."

Some overexposed columbines by a waterfall.

On our last evening we camped at the meadow where a bear had been seen the previous week. At the time I was told that the copious scratches on the aspen trees all around us were made by bear, but further research shows them to be from elk eating the bark. However, bears do claw aspen to mark their territory.

A bird!

Yoga on our final morning. For some reason the entire meadow was overrun by ants, but where else are you going to do yoga when you're camping? So we did yoga, stopping constantly to brush ants off our bodies. But I really was trying to pay attention to the lesson, which is probably why at one point I felt ants biting me simultaneously on my lip and just below my eye. I'm afraid I killed one of them in trying to get them to stop. If you kill animals while doing yoga, does the good & bad karma cancel out?

That afternoon we took a scenic drive before leaving the park. My final picture, below: I do not look starved, ant-bitten, or marmot-harassed. You might think I enjoyed myself.