sonora2sonoma

A COUPLE OF WEEKS AGO, Facebook presented me with a photo someone took of me six years ago, along with the comments people made when it was posted. One of those comments was made by Wesley Robertson, a dear person and good friend from my Strawberry days who left us (way too soon) a few years back.

Reading Wesley’s words filled me with nostalgia and made me yearn to be back in those old times and, especially, to be able to somehow experience his endearing “Wesleyness” once again, if only for a moment.

While in Sonora for a few days last month, Michelle and I had a day to spend in the mountains. We decided to drive up to Camp Mather and see if we could get permission to walk around camp a bit and take some photos. After obtaining permission from someone in authority, we wandered around the camp for the better part of two hours.

The Music Meadow looked much like it used to, absent the poles that formerly supported the Strawberry stage. Both the meadow and the area around the lake were well maintained, but the rest of the camp was devoid of the meticulous grooming Mitch Third and his crew used to perform in the weeks preceding each festival. One can hope this was only on account of the camp’s having been closed this season due to the pandemic.

While on our stroll through Camp Mather, we re-traced our all too familiar route from our festival days, yet much of it—between fire damage, warming climate-enabled insect damage and the logging that followed—appeared not that familiar at all any more.

Past Rock in the Road, we walked around our old Camp Remember haunts, then headed out toward the upper meadow, after which we swung right and began angling over to where the Pigout folks used to set up camp.

As we surveyed the area, trying to ascertain its location—many trees were missing, as was true in a good deal of the place—I pictured the old Pigout headquarters, with Wesley, Mark, Chip, Kim, Mike, Jay, Mary, Ron, Melissa, Nick, Brock, Carol, Vaughan and the rest of the gang holding court as they gathered around the Rhino Bar, welcoming us in for a drink, a smoke, and most of all, great company.

But, as my life experiences repeatedly inform me, you can’t go home, whether it’s back to that special place you used to know, or, more lately, to life in general!

WALKING THROUGH CAMP MATHER the other day, I felt a growing awareness that I would never be attending another festival there. The camp, like everything else in the world, had changed so much that going back, like turning back the clock, would be impossible. Some things just can’t be undone!

At one point, I turned to Michelle and said “I think this is the last time I will be visiting this place.”

The times in which we are living are times of momentous change. Between a warming climate, the fires, floods and superstorms, the pandemic and the passage of time itself, we are on the cusp of something that’s been building just a ways up around the bend for a while now, something that we can’t yet quite fix in our viewfinders but something that we know for certain won’t be anything like what we’ve been accustomed to in our lives up ‘til now.

Whatever we do and however we proceed from here is a deeply personal decision whose impact will be collectively felt by all. But remember, pining for what used to be is of no more use than bemoaning what might have been, and no more an option than unseeing something. The time for that, if ever it was, has passed.

Or, in festival-speak, once that beer’s been opened, you have to either drink it or throw it away!

And time, at least for now, runs only forward.

“Fate leads the willing,” said the Roman philosopher/statesman Seneca, “while the unwilling get dragged.” Will you choose to go kicking and screaming, or will you proceed by reading the currents and negotiating the flow in an informed manner, with an eye toward making the best of a challenging situation? The choice, as noted above, is one we each must decide for ourselves.

Whatever you decide, one huge inflection point is coming up very soon! Please make your voices heard and exercise your right to vote!

Tim Konrad

October 3, 2020