Illusions of Invincibility

Day 6, Midweek

I can’t recall which year I bought these rubber boots. It was one of the wet festivals, or at least the first week was wet. Javier called from camp before I left Austin and told me I’d better come prepared. My co-worker Kristi, who lives in the country near Geronimo Creek, knew what I needed. A pair of basic black rubbers like the ones her whole family keeps in their mud room. “They have shelves of them at Academy right now,” she told me. I picked up a pair on my way out of town. Best $12 I ever spent.

Rubber boots are quite the style at this year’s fest. Everybody’s wearing them. Amazin’ Walter’s are red. Laurie has a yellow pair. Some people have pink, striped or patterned. My plain black ones are fine with me. They’re way better than the duck boots I used to have, the ones I got cheap at some yard sale, which never really fit. They were a pain to walk in, always sucking socks down past my heel. The bottom part was indeed waterproof, but if it rained hard enough, the lace holes leaked.

My current boots don’t have those problems. No laces, you just pull 'em on. They’re comfortable if I wear hiking socks. When I’m ready to sleep, I just slip them off and tuck comparatively clean feet into bed. If I have to go out during the night -- I nearly always do -- I quickly slip them on again. Yeah, they’re a little extra weight to drag around, and kind of sweaty. I do get tired of wearing them when the rain goes on for days, as it has this week. But oh, the advantages! With my boots on, I can stride right through those muddy ruts in the road, not stopping to pick my path. I can tromp across a swampy Meadow without worrying about where I step, what I’m not seeing in the dark, or what flows downhill. I can even go wading in Sudden Creek, which I did two mornings ago. The boots come almost to my knees. I splashed around in the water and came out with dry socks.

With my boots on, I don’t need to worry about the fire ants that keep building new mounds on the surface of the saturated ground. Step on an ant mound wearing sandals, or stand still within two feet of one for a minute or two, and they’ll be all over you. I’m not saying fire ants couldn’t climb the slippery sides of these knee-high boots, crawl over the edge and down inside and bite me on the leg. I wouldn’t put it past them. But hopefully before they got that far, I would notice I was standing in an ant mound and take evasive measures.

So it was that last Friday, when I felt a twinge of pain in my left boot, I shrugged my shoulders and told myself it wasn’t happening.
I was tending to online business at Camp Inertia, and probably munching on a snack. My hands were clean. I didn’t want to mess with my feet just then. It kind of felt like an ant was in my boot, but I thought over my recent travels and didn’t see how one could have gotten there. So it was most likely a piece of speargrass, or a beggar’s-lice burr left in my sock from a previous washing, or nothing at all, just a case of aging neurons. I’d check it out later. At the moment, I had better things to do.

An hour or so after that, I walked up to the sink to wash a plate and knife. I was headed back to camp when I felt it on my shin. A sting too intense to ignore; it stopped me in my tracks. No more procrastinating, I had to deal with this right now. I pulled off my boot, right there in the muddy road, and looked at my leg. Not an ant. Not a wasp. It was a brown, many-legged thing about an inch across, and IT WAS STILL ON ME. I screamed.

Before the shriek was all the way out, I saw the curled tail. Not a spider, as I’d first thought, but a scorpion. Not good, but better than it might be. I’d been stung by scorpions before, and knew it wouldn’t kill me.

Peter and Debbie, whose RVs face each other across a shared social area, were coming to get me. “Come here and sit down,” Debbie said, getting an arm around and pulling me along as I protested that I’d be fine, really. Somebody got my plate and knife, and I must have flicked the scorpion off with my hand, because my index finger was hurting, too. I peeled back my sock -- yes, the critter stung me through a wool sock! Peter applied a venom extractor and gave me some painkilling ointment to put on the spot. They thouroughly examined both my boots. I felt silly.

A while back, I was talking with a person who moved here from some other part of the country. She commented on the way Texans always turn their boots upside down and shake them before we put them on. Well, of course we do, I told her. I thought it was funny that she found it funny. This state is full of things, as they say, that stick, stab and sting. You never know what might be lurking in a boot, and it’s best to find out before you put your foot in.

I know this. I was born and reared in Texas. Reviewing my day, I remember I took a nap that afternoon and left the boots standing by the bed. I know to shake out my boots, expecially when I’m camping, but I guess I thought an hour in mid-afternoon didn’t count. Or maybe I just thought those rubber boots made me invincible.

Soggy Saturday

Evening of day 3, and it’s raining.

It is not misting, drizzling, spitting or sprinkling. It’s raining. Pouring. Pounding so hard you can’t carry on a conversation, here under Camp Inertia’s canopy. That roof is not exactly keeping me dry; rain keeps blowing in sideways. It’s dripping off the prayer flags that hang from the eaves. Most of the camp chairs are at least sort of wet. Droplets glitter on my laptop screen and I”m thinking I should find a drier place to sit and write. But I'm not sure where that would be.

It rained so much today, they called off tonight’s concert. This was the night Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell were supposed to play, but Turtle Creek is over the road and Highway 16 is closed, so people can’t get to the ranch. Just like it was in 1987. I hear Emmylou and Rodney are going to do an impromptu acoustic show at the YO Hotel in town. But Javier and I are parked here at the ranch.

Just as I did when this happened in’87, I’m worried that I don’t have enough food to survive a siege. I’d planned to go to town today to get peanut butter, cheese and more tortillas. I didn’t go because it was raining. I kept thinking I’d wait until it stopped.

It stopped for a while after the first gullywasher, the one that hit shortly after breakfast. Javier was napping when the second one came along, but before he crashed he took the precaution of dropping the sheets of plastic that curtain off the bed. I’m not sure it ever quit raining from that point on, but it did let up for maybe half an hour. By that time the floor of our tipi was a puddle pretty much all the way across, and I was glad (again) that we keep our bed up on blocks. We crawled out to check on neighbors, check the fire in the BBQ pit. Someone came by and said Sudden Creek was rising, so I went behind Inertia to check. It’s running faster and muddier than it was yesterday. I found the little girls swimming by the bridge, supervised by parents, and the girls wouldn’t let me pass until I stated my name and purpose.

Another wall of water arrived shortly after that stroll, accompanied by thunder and lightning. So here we are. I shouldn’t worry about food. I live next door to Camp Inertia, and they won’t let anybody starve. Besides, I just heard that the food booths at Main Stage are open, even though there isn't a show. They already had food fixed to sell, and I guess the people who work the booths can't eat it all by themselves.

Settling In

Another Kerrville Season has begun! Readers can find me here over the next two weeks, sharing thoughts and inspirations.

Day 2 - May 22

I can honestly say I got here for Day 1. It was 11:05 p.m. when I came through the gate. Only five acts were on the program, and I figured I’d missed the official concert. But when I’d unloaded my stuff and parked my car in the parking lot, I heard Milkdrive was still on stage, so I went into the theater and listened for awhile.

It’s Friday morning now. A drfiting mist moved in last night, sometime after I arrived, and stayed through the night except for a brief spell of actual rain in the pre-dawn hours. The grass is wet. Condensation is dripping from awnings and canopies. Hawk Mountain is gently wrapped in gray moisture, and the mountains on the other side of the highway are almost invisible. The Eastside Flash stopped by the BBQ pit a moment ago, wearing rainboots, and said the dampness was getting a little old. People who stayed through Land Rush tell me there was a big storm on Wednesday night; Ken Gaines heard 4 or 5 inches of rain. If that’s true, I’m surprised the Muddow isn’t muddier than it is.

Sudden Creek is running like a real creek, burbling merrily through the woods, coursing under bridges, with tents pitched right up on the bank as if people didn’t expect it to go out of control. It’s running clear, which makes me suspect it’s been running for a while and not just carrying runoff from the most recent storm. Out of the woods and into the Meadow, it slides through a channel of bending grasses. The road going down to the Lower Meadow is okay; I guess the ranch built it up at some point and put it culverts to let it go under.

Looking upstream from that crossing, someone has parked two stone-sculpture turtles in the waterway; half submerged in the running stream. I found a family putting up a geodesic space frame on the far bank, and a bunch of little kids in swimsuits, jumping off the plank footbridge and splashing in the water. “Wow,” I said, “you have your own beach.”

“Yep,” quipped the dad, “we won’t have to go to the river this year.”

Chances are nobody’s going to the river today, anyway. The canoe trip got called off; it seems the Guadalupe is running too high. And I wouldn’t even be tempted by our swimming hole on the Medina when the air is this cool. We put an extra blanket on our bed last night. It’s late May. What an unusual spring we’re having.

***

Somewhere around mid-afternoon, I went down for a nap. Woke up around 5:30 p.m. and the sun is shining. Rather than a uniform grey like it was this morning, the sky is blue and white like the side of our tipi, with a lot of fluffy clouds. Birds are singing. The grass looks greener, and I can see the hills across the road just fine. Hello Mudda, Hello Fadda! Time to get ready for tonight’s show.

Generations

Day 17 - June 7

All-star lineup on Main Stage Saturday night...

Billy Jonas, who used to be half of a quirky duo called The Billys, which sprung from one of those magical chance meetings at a Kerrville music circle. Eliza Gilkyson, then Jimmy LaFave, then Albert & Gage to close the set.

Jonas has his own act now, with a guitar player named Sherman and a girl singer named Ashley. He has traveled to many parts of the planet. His show is still big on crowd participation, and he’s still making percussion instruments out of recycled materials and putting them to brilliant use.

For the past decade or so, I’ve admired Eliza Gilkyson’s fearlessness. She went through some life changes and came out the other side fierce and outspoken. As if she reached an age and a point in her career where she couldn’t be silenced, because she didn’t have that much left to lose. So it set me back some when Eliza introduced a song that she said she wrote to quell her middle-of-the-night worries, and started listing all the things she worried about. It bore an uncanny resemblance to MY list of worries. Who knew?

How does that saying go? Courage isn’t an absence of fear; it’s the will to keep going in spite of it.

Jimmy LaFave rocked. Halfway through his set he brought Christine Albert on stage to sing a couple songs with him. What a cool idea, I thought: they both have sort of smoky voices; they’ll sound good together. Then he called out David Amram, who wasn’t on the program until Sunday night, but had arrived and was hanging out backstage. Amram walked on with a backpack, dropped it alongside his mic stand and started putting flutes together.

“We’re not hitchhiking to Lubbock, David, It’s just one song,” Jimmy laughed. And added, “He’s the only guy who can make me look young.”

I thought about that and realized something. Every performer on this night’s program is familiar to me; they’re people I’ve been following and listening to for years. But they aren’t the ones I think of as “the old guard.” Not the generation of Peter Yarrow, Tom Paxton, Carolyn Hester, and yes, David Amram. We’ve had some of those on other nights. But the people on stage this Day 17 were rising stars, fresh new voices, when I got to know them. Jimmy LaFave was a New Folk contestant. Eliza Gilkyson was once better known as the daughter of a songwriter. I remember the first time I saw Christine Albert hosting a Ballad Tree session, long before she partnered up with Chris Gage; before she gave birth to a son who is now a man with his own musical career.

“I worry about what kind of world we’re leaving for our grandchildren,” Eliza said during her set. Grandchildren. Yes, we have some of those in our folk community. In the three weeks we’ve been camped here, two young women who grew up as Kerr-kids bore babies of their own. Not here on the ranch -- to the best of my knowledge, we haven’t yet had an on-site birth at the Folk Festival. But a couple of moms have come close. And quite a few younger Kerrverts are pushing strollers and wagons occupied by kids born in the past year or two.

If the memorial tributes to Rod Kennedy and all our other recently departed friends haven’t given me a sense of time passing, tonight’s concert sure does.

The Ballad Tree

Day 16 - June 6

Here’s a bittersweet memory...

The Ballad Tree rises from Chapel Hill, a majestic live oak whose spreading green canopy shades nearly half the hill’s flattish summit. It is older than Texas, older than the most venerable musician who ever played the Kerrville Folk Festival, older by far than the rustic wooden altar that nestles under its sheltering branches.

There are bells on the hill: a tuned pipe wind chime of monumental size, suspended from a strong oak limb. Across the way, a brush arbor shades several rows of plank benches.

From Hot Jams & Cold Showers, © 2000 Dyanne Fry Cortez

We still have Ballad Tree sessions at 3 o’clock on weekend afternoons, but the tree itself is long gone.

When my book rolled off the press in 2000, the big oak was already in trouble. A lightning strike in 1993 sheared off a massive side limb, exposing heartwood in the main trunk. When it came crashing down, the limb smashed the altar and a section of brush arbor. And the wind chime went tumbling.

Kerrverts saved the wind chime and built a new redwood altar. Tom Frost agreed to underwrite a restoration effort. A plan was made and a crew of volunteers, headed by Nancylee Kennedy, went to work to try and save what was left of the tree.

... and found themselves battling not only the injury, but also the disease known as oak wilt, which was spreading across the Hill Country. Kerr County was one of the hardest hit. Staff worked through the summer, dragging hoses up the hill to supply water and nutrients to the Ballad Tree. Ranch maintenance nursed it along for years, shifting song circles and church services to different parts of the hill to avoid trampling the root zone and give the tree some breathing space.

I’m not sure when they gave it up as a lost cause. But one day I climbed the hill and found nothing but a dead, grey stump where the Ballad Tree used to be.

It’s an impressive stump, to be sure. A couple of feet across, maybe 15 feet tall, chopped off just above the point where it started to divide and form a crown. On the left side I can see a stretch of white plaster where the big limb came off, where a tree surgeon tried to patch the trunk back together. The grove of smaller oaks on the downhill side of the altar, where they hung the wind chime after the lightning strike, isn’t looking too good either. Oak wilt is bad stuff, and drought has done its damage, too. What used to be the coolest, shadiest part of the campground, that zone along Sudden Creek that I called The Grove, is now called the Argon Forest, because those giant oaks, too, Are Gone.

On Chapel Hill, time has moved on. The ranch hosted a Sustainable Building Colloquium here in 2003. Participants built several interesting structures, including a small stage up here with a whimsical living roof held up by limbs of old trees. A new arbor has gradually taken shape, with wooden benches and smoothed-off sitting stumps. It looks nice, but to me it never feels as cool and shady as the old arbor did. I find it difficult to stay through a whole ballad tree session in the heat of the afternoon. Even the Sunday morning services can get awfully sweaty.

Maybe it’s just me. Maybe I don’t take heat as well as I used to. Maybe it really does get hotter than it used to: we've had several record-breaking summers in Texas this past decade. All that may be true, but I also suspect the old Ballad Tree to some extent made its own weather. Trees are great natural air conditioners, better than any shade structure humans can build. I think it gets hotter on this hill because that giant oak is no longer here.

There’s a new tree growing between the stage and the seating arbor. A chinkapin oak, planted several years ago. I came up for a ballad tree the first weekend of this festival, and noticed how all the singers stood under that tree and ignored the stage. Clearly, this oak is the new Ballad Tree. It’s already taller than the leftover stump of the old one, but it’s got a long way to go before it can change the weather on this hill.

It’s fun to wonder if people will still be playing and singing under that tree when it’s big enough to throw a major patch of shade.

Throwback Thursdays

A week ago, at the Thursday evening concert, Rex Foster and Mike Williams were on stage together for the space of a song. I wish I'd had the camera: if I had, I would have taken a picture and put it up next to this one:

Mike Williams (left) and Rex Foster at Kamp Cuisine, with Tamie Stewart in background.
From Hot Jams & Cold Showers. Photo by Jack Wellman

That was "then." As I didn't have the foresight to carry a camera last Thursday, I'll just have to say they don't look like that now.

Since I don't have a "now" picture of Mike and Rex, I'll share a throwback photo of Rex's daughter Rachel, with Mike Elwood's daughter Liana. I haven't spotted either of these gals at the festival this year, but I see them now and then. Like the guys in the above photo, they look quite different now!

Tipi girls making mud pies in the Meadow. From Hot Jams & Cold Showers.
Photo by Javier Cortez

Festival Style

A couple weeks ago, I was organizing clothes to take to Kerrville. It’s a process that requires some thought. I usually start several days before departure, allowing time to consider possibilities and combinations. And I get amused imagining what my mom — or any other non-Kerrvert — might think if she were to observe the process.

“Excuse me,” she might say, “I thought this was a campout?”

“This has nothing to do with camping!” our late, great photographer Ken Schmidt once said, in response to a similar question. I couldn’t quite agree with him, then or now. We sleep in tents, cook outside, socialize under portable awnings, and stargaze from canvas chairs at night. Of course we’re camping! But I can’t say we’re “roughing it.” I think that’s what Schmidty really meant.

Yes, the Folk Festival is a campout. It’s also an 18-day party. A party where we spend time with a great many people we care about, including some that we look up to and may want to impress. A place where we mourn the departed and celebrate weddings, birthdays and anniversaries. Kerrverts will dress for those sorts of things. Also — as I learned in 1985 — even if you’re not on the program, you never know when you’ll wind up performing on Main Stage. And I guess it goes without saying that you need to be prepared for a wide range of weather conditions, because the Hill Country is like that in May and June.

So I picked out my wardrobe. Three pairs of shorts (red, white and khaki), a pair of capris, and one pair of full-length jeans. Four T-shirts. A small assortment of tank tops and cool, gauzy shirts for the really hot days. Two button-up shirts with sleeves, to be worn alone or layered over other things for sun protection. Three dresses and a short denim skirt. We’re talking casual dresses here; no stockings or high heels, but I did throw in a shawl that goes with the black dress, in case I want to get fancy. For campfires on cool nights, the red-striped playera that I “adopted” from Javier’s closet many festivals ago. (It fits me better anyway, and has a kangaroo pocket where I can stash bassoon reeds.) Rain jacket, of course. A few bandannas. After getting all that lined up, I focused on picking out jewelry.

“JEWELRY?” says the hypothetical mom who's watching me pack. Well, yes. Didn’t I just point out that this is a party? Besides, my husband is a bead artist. How would it look if I went around like a plain-jane not wearing any ornaments? After some winnowing, I settled on three necklaces and six sets of earrings. I avoid taking my most favorite earrings, because I have been known to lose them in the weeds and dirt.

Oh yes, footwear. My Teva sandals, which I’ll probably wear most of the time, but also sneakers and a few pairs of socks in case the feet need more protection. I have a pair of knee-high mud boots that have proved useful at past festivals, but decided not to bother taking them this year. I figured it couldn’t possibly rain that much.

.. which proves that even after three decades of experience, I can still miscalculate.