A couple of weeks ago, Kerrville Newfolk Finalists all got an email from a guy named Lindsey Lee. He was getting to the Folk Festival early for “Land Rush” and was offering us all the opportunity to camp in his area, trade some music for breakfast every day. Apparently this is a long-running tradition. Heather and I thought about it for a bit, and said yes.
Thank God we did.
When we first exited onto route 16 from I-10, Kerrville looks to be a collection of gas stations and fast food restaurants. It slowly unfolds, and you find yourself in a pleasant enough, if tiny, dusty town. The Guadelupe River runs through town, there’s a couple of beautiful spots that one spots as one travels through town at a fiercely enforced 35mph.
The campground is “9 miles past the town of Kerrville”. That’s 9 miles of scenic Texan vistas being viewed in the last hours of sunset. Not-quite desert glows red and gold and white and you have time to think about what you’re headed into. Tiny signs point to the Festival Entrance, we pass cows and a camper for sale. Bales of hay – both round and square. (?)
And then you start seeing the tents. Packed against the fence line of Quiet Valley Ranch, hundreds of tents. We’re stopped at the gates and get identified and ushered in with almost zero direction by red-shirted dreadlocked staff and we advance up a dusty driveway and through the bleached wooden gates and we enter – chaos with dirt roads.
I can’t even express the intensity of tents and teepees and campers and school busses and tour busses and Volkswagon busses all pressed against one another in the Texas dust. People are wandering everywhere, and the occasional car is edging its way up the paths. One in three people seems to be carrying a guitar, and you can already hear music floating towards you in a chaotic menagerie of sound that pushes into you from all directions.
Rolling the windows back up, we breathed our last moments of air-conditioned air. It’s 95 as the shadows get longer.
It takes us a while to find Lindsey’s camp. In the process we’re turned around, redirected – and finally we find ourselves with a plot of ground all to our own, hedged in by a tent on one side, a tarp on another, a truck on another side and fire ants on the other.
Good a spot as any.
As darkness falls, we park the car and return to our camp. Heather’s put up our ilyAIMY poster (which allows David Morrealle to find us, wondering at first if we were over-zealous fans) and we wander over to meet our neighbours.
It took me a while to understand the concept of the individual “camps” within Kerrville. Though we were officially guests of the Rouse camp., next door to us was Camp Kantigree, and we ended up spending most of our time with them. The Rouse Camp (I’m sort of informally naming that from what I heard people saying to one another, unlike most of the ill-defined territories, this one didn’t have an identifying sign that I spotted – though Heather probably saw something) had been the creation and tradition of Bruce Rouse who had passed away earier this past year. Lindsey and his wife had stepped in to carry on Bruce’s tradition of trying to make Newfolk first-timers welcome, acting as the “Ellis Island of Kerrville”.
In any case, we spent most of the night jamming under Camp Kantigree’s tarp, trading songs in a rough circle centred around a plastic wading pool filled with plastic frogs. We eventually wandered around to find the main stage, explored the vendors there and then made our way back to Casa ilyAIMY and bedded down for the night.
Tried to.
The hippies kept us up for hours. I remember someone screaming “KILL THE EARTH KILL THE EARTH!!!! LOVE YER FRIENDS!!!!” over and over again. There was a fiddler that never stopped and then the didgeridoo player laid in. The only thing that shut up the over-exuberant world was the storm that hit us at 4 or 5am. I was horrified at the prospect of not getting ANY sleep before competing the next day, and the rain, and the noise, and then water IN the tent, and the flash of lightning, and the ferocity of thunder. eventually the storm died away, and the hippies never came back out. I think many of their number were drowned.
On to….
