Earthdance 2008
December 6, 2009
If I lay my head back to rest, the contents of my lungs rapidly seek outlet, and I find myself hacking loudly in the otherwise still house I share with my wife and our baby girl. It will not do to wake them, so here I sit, typing at 5:28 AM, Sunday, December 6, 2009. I will write of my experience at Earthdance in the summer of 2008.
Earthdance is an outdoor event. Vendors and artists from all over the western United States converge on a ranch just a few miles north of Laytonville, California, where they set up shop under awnings or in billowing tents. There are multiple stages, and at almost any time one hears music and other performances all about him. It’s bewildering, in a way, but not displeasing, a sort of sonic confetti that tells the listener “you are here, you are part of this”. The music continues late into the night, and the parties never stop.
Attendees arrive in carloads, many having hitched hundreds of miles for the event. Tickets are not cheap, and many people are willing to try to take advantage of the long perimeter to sneak in for free. The Chef and I have been charged with wandering that perimeter and keeping them out.
The Chef is so called because that’s what he is, a chef. He’s run restaurants before, popular ones in distant cities with glamorous sounding names, but the economy finally drove his clientele back to their personal kitchens. So here we are, an unemployed chef and an equally unemployed physicist, wandering up a dry river bed, hoping against hope to find nobody and nothing.
We encounter, over our three days and nights of patrol, a few “volunteer” campsites, hidden in clusters of undergrowth or just over the property line. Those off property are safe from our hands, but those illegally tucked into the brush are removed, all contents stored at the security station for retrieval by the offender, should he or she care to look. We find one gate crasher sunbathing nude on a rock behind the vendor camp ground. She offers us a badly faked entry bracelet as proof of her right to be there, and we instruct her that she must go purchase a valid pass. She’s not within the event perimeter, so we can’t throw her out, but we do tell her that her bracelet is too poorly made to get her in. She laughs and says the night watch is too busy to care. We wish her a good day.
One camp seems to be far enough from the event to be a non-issue, but we call it in anyway. The voice from security command tells us it’s not a priority for us, and directs us closer to the event’s center. We comply. One individual, camped in the families area, has gotten incredibly drunk and begun threatening all around him. His situation gets messy fast, and, sadly, somebody decides to throw him to the cops. I wish him luck.
Later that night, the head of security calls us in to command, where we are given charge of two young men to be escorted off the property, something to do with thieving and fighting. We are instructed to escort them to their illegal camp, see it torn down, and walk them to the road. They mumble continually, cursing and threatening us, but the Chef, retired military, has his charge in an interesting arm lock, and mine has noticed that I understand that a good flashlight is weapon as well as a light source, so all we get is noise.
The camp site turns out to be the one we called in that wasn’t a priority. It also turns out to be light enough for the two crashers to move together. Walking the two burdened youth back toward the road, I relax my grip on my Maglite. They’re carting too much to carry out their earlier threats of violence against the Chef and I, though if they dump their goods and run… no, I can see that they’re tired. Noisy as they might be, the fight’s gone out of them for the time being. I’ll never see them again.
The decongestant and cough syrup are working now. I think I might listen to the rain and sleep. Good morning.
