Some tales are so absurd that they can’t really be told. “You had to be there” is not just a cliché; it’s a truth. Expand it to “you had to be there … inside my head” and maybe you’d be able to understand why I am at a loss to try to explain the events of Thursday night in a way that conveys their very ridiculousness and surreality.
So I biff off toward Nashville Thursday morning, thinking Amber’s flight is going to land at 3:30. I’m near Dickson or so when she calls and tells me that her flight’s delayed and they’re not going to get in ’til after 7. No problem, I think. I’ve still got a couple of errands to iron out before we can head to the campsite, so I knock those out. I drive out to Manchester to pick up my media credentials. I drive back to Nashville and park my ass at baggage claim to wait.
Amber’s dad meets us at the airport and we put the tent he’s lending us into the car, right after a quick verbal demonstration of how the tent goes together. (He also relayed this information to me while we waited on Amber to come down the escalator.) We pretended that we had any clue what he was talking about, bid him adieu, and headed toward Murfreesboro to pick up the rest of the camping supplies her mom was to lend us. A quick visit and we were on the road toward Manchester. Not sure of what the traffic would entail, I detoured through Manchester proper and hopped across the interstate toward the farm. Our wait to get inside was about an hour, which was WAY WAY WAY better than the eight hours some people had endured earlier in the day.
We cranked up The Knife and MGMT and clucked like hens while we waited. Some random girl tapped on the car window and asked for our bracelet clippings. I examined my bracelet and decided that I wanted to keep it intact because that’s how it was designed to look (honestly!), so she got all offended and called me square. So we rolled up the window and made fun of her mercilessly, because, really? Getting pissed at people because they won’t give you bracelet clippings so your friend can get in for free and compete for the space that everyone else paid $250 for access to? Really?
Once we were told where to turn and given a choice — left or right — of campground, we chose right (on my gut instinct) and parked the car and hopped out and proceeded to try to make camp in the dark with nothing but our headlights to guide us.
And we were so completely overwhelmed with the newness of it all that it felt like we were watching everyone around us set up camp in extreme time-lapse speed. Like, this tiny tent city just popped up everywhere around us while we stared stupidly at the box containing what was meant to be our shelter. I felt especially useless because I have never ever pitched a tent before. Never really been camping (we “camped” in our back yard a couple of times when I was a kid). So just seeing a pile of metal rods lying beside a pile of plastic or vinyl or whatever kind of made my head hurt a little. We didn’t even really know how to start. So we asked our neighbors, whose tent had materialized out of nothing in what seemed like mere seconds.
One dude took a look at our tent and made a sound like he was an anthropologist who’d just unearthed an amusing but useless relic from his childhood. He tried to make sense of the color-coded metal bits and we spent something like half an hour assembling things the way he thought they should go (I’ll just quietly point out that he ignored me when I told him the poles with the handcuff-looking bits were for the middle), until some girl from his group kept coming over and tentblocking Amber and me by making the dude and his other dudely companion feel incompetent. (“THIS TENT IS A SHITSHOW!” she proclaimed. “A SHITSHOW!” She was smiling but she was drunk so she was sniping hardcore. I bit a hole in my tongue only because I felt too sheepish in my own ineptitude to argue with her.) We finally assured the dudes — who concluded that we didn’t have the correct metal bits to assemble the tent — that they could go on to Centeroo and see some shows and we’d take care of the tent. I kept saying, as a means of pacifying everyone involved, that we could sleep in the car, but I realize now that such a proclamation only sounded like repeated surrender. And Amber — a fucking trooper if ever there was one — was determined to get that goddamned tent up come hell or high water.
So she called her dad and had him walk us through — step by step — how to get that damn tent up. It involved a lot of assembling, disassembling, and reassembling metal poles. We got to the part where we realized we needed more people (the tent was quite large for two people to handle), and we went and solicited more neighborly help. We still couldn’t get it to stand, at which point we realized we hadn’t staked down two of the four sides.
WE’RE NOT PROFESSIONAL CAMPERS, JEEZ.
So those neighborly helpers sauntered away while I watched Amber hammer stakes into the damp ground, our spirits in frazzled but hopeful shambles. We were so close. Sooooo close. All staked, the second set of neighborly helpers happened to come back to check on us and, lo and behold, with enough hands, that damn tent stood on its own. Then the sky ruptured and dumped out buckets and buckets of rain and Amber and I sat in the car and let the shower wash away our anxiety. Our beautiful tent — a labor of love and confusion and temporary embarrassment — stood through the wind gusts. When the rain ended (at 2 a.m. or so), we inspected the damage. Apart from a couple of puddles inside, which we mopped up with towels, it was all clear. We loaded our stuff into the tent and decided it was time to find the nearest bathroom options.
I’m not even sure how I can adequately express how much mindfuckery is involved when you try to make your first trek on the farm in the dark with absolutely no idea where you are or where you should be going. It’s not like they have people greet you at your campsite and tell you where you are in relation to everything else. No. They may have people saunter through and offer to sell you any kind of weed or psychotropic drug you can imagine, but they certainly don’t have a welcoming committee telling you were you can go take a piss.
So we just started walking. A Grateful Dead flag flying proudly over a nearby campsite became our frame of reference, secondary only to the giant blinking tower that made its home in our area. We trudged along the damn earth around corners and past tents and RVs and stumbling festival-goers until we found a bank of port-a-johns. I had to pee but I decided to just let it sweat out rather than try to navigate a plastic toilet in the dark.
Miraculously, we found our way back to our tent, and set about trying to go to sleep for the night. Didn’t happen for me, and I lied awake all night and listened to people shuffle back to the campsite after shows, most of them drunk and excited about the weekend. It was a little like Christmas; I was too excited (and maybe too uncomfortable since we couldn’t get my air mattress to inflate) to sleep. There would be random contagious bursts of yelling — “Bonnarrrrrrooooooo!” — that would ignite and spread over the area. And of course there was the everpresent sound of acoustic guitars and fleshy drumbeats. Yes, apparently no silence is allowed at a music festival.
So the sun rose Friday morning and this is what I saw come into view:
Turns out our “shitshow” tent actually puts off some soothing light and colors in the breezy morning. SUCK IT, TENTBLOCK GIRL.
Friday would prove to be worth the lack of sleep.
I feel your pain. The husband and I tried to put up a brand new tent in the dark once. It was awful. We realized we didn’t bring a mallet so we had to leave and buy one. Then I hit him in the head with the car door. Not good times.
Glad it worked out for you too though! The tent looked nice.
The last time we went camping with a group, they have a tradition of yelling “newbie erection” and then everyone gathers around with a fresh beer and chairs to watch the show and yell directions and opinions on how to put the tent together. It was a nerve wracking gauntlet and test.