Richard Preston recognized a very good story when he heard about Steve Sillett, ninja climbs and the quest for the tallest tree. He told the story effectively in "Climbing the Redwoods", written for the New Yorker (ninja version here), and republished in Best American Science Writing 2006. He has managed to write it again, even better, as a full book, The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring.
Vancouver Island was good. It must be one of the large folk festivals in Western Canada, with enough sponsors, grants and fan support to be able to get the performers that attract more fans. The Comox Valley Fairground is a good venue, with enough room for half a dozen stages, and camping. The camping is close to the performing area. It seemed quiet to me, but apparently some campers arrived with a sense that they could drink and party all night, which made security a minor challenge. The infrastructure was good. They had lots of portable privies, which were cleaned frequently. The camping was in an open paddock, which seems to have good drainage, and they kept lanes open for people to walk to their camps.
There was lots of music. During the day, if one stage wasn't entertaining, there were other options. The weather was good. I enjoyed the sun, or found shade when the sun was too intense. The temperatures didn't get above the mid 20's, the sun was often broken by light cloud, and there were good breezes. I could take or leave some of the headliners. The last couple of main stage acts are for dancing and excitement, and I chose sleep.
Sunday evening, July 8, 2007, I heard Don McLean and his band perform American Pie at the Vancouver Island Musicfest (aka Folk Festival). McLean, like Joan Armatrading, Los Lobos, and Bedouin Soundclash, was a headliner, who played one set during the evening concert at the main stage. The performance was professional and competent. McLean's songs, apart from his version of Roy Orbison's "Crying", and his own song "Vincent" ("Starry Starry Night) were probably not that well known.
It is Gordon Lightfoot's week. November 5 - the anniversary of the Last Spike in the CPR, the inspiration for the Canadian Railroad Trilogy. Today, (November 10) the anniversary of the sinking of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald, which inspired The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. As the riots in the French urban suburbs continued, a fleeting thought for Black Day in July. A video clip on the CBC Web site - some US radio stations refused to play that song when it was first released.
Winnipeg Folk Festival, Sunday July 10, 2005. Another hot sunny day, carrying a forecast of possible severe thunderstorms. The storms seemed to arrive around 9:45 PM with strong winds, sending the mainstage crowd surging for the exits. The wind died down, we had some light showers, and made it through the rest of the evening. Many of the patrons who had retired to the campground came back. The crowd was smaller, probably only a couple of thousand people stayed to the end. It started to rain after midnight.
Winnipeg Folk Festival, Bird's Hill Park, Saturday July 9. There isn't much to report. It was a sunny windy day, 32 degrees, humidex in the 40's. I stayed home, visited my parents, shopped, cut the grass because it wasn't raining and I was mainly in the shade, and didn't visit the Festival until after 8:00 PM. I didn't go backstage. I saw that the entrance path across Snowberry Field had dried up at one end, where the asphalt ends as the trail emerges onto the field, but there was still a bog where the trail goes into trees again. There was a lot of mud and standing water on the path towards Shady Grove and the backstage.
By the time I left for the site, the forecast had shifted to include a chance of a severe thunderstorm. When I got home this morning, I checked the radar again. There were storms that seemed to form over the corner of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and North Dakota and track northeast over the lakes, missing Winnipeg and Bird's Hill. So far Sunday has been hot, cloudy and windy but the rain has stayed away.
I spent my free time at the Bur Oak stage, reading and then went on shift at Site West. There was still standing water in spots around the Bluestem stage, but it had dried out a lot. There was mud in the record tent and the family tent.
I spent my shift around the Firefly Palace which is the nighttime use of the family entertainment stage. During the day there are games, including hula hoops, juggling with clubs and plates, frisbees, soccer balls etc. The Family area crew had stored gear under a tarp but the evening patrons had hula hoops and juggling articles and were using them. There were some steel pegs in the field to secure some log stumps. I don't know the daytime use but the logs and spikes were hazards in the dark. Fence-jumpers, damages fences drunks, lost kids/parents (usually can't navigate back from the port-a-potties in the dark. Lots of activity, not boring. One of the shows was music played by a VJ against a Bollywood film for a video dance party.
Didn't hear any other music, had a good time.
Friday July 8, 2005. Weather, site, a little music, mainly a rant about the way Festival management deals with the site.
Thursday July 7, 2005, Winnipeg Folk Festival. My report on weather, site, music and whatever else I want to blog about.
The Winnipeg Folk Festival starts today. I am again a volunteer on the Site Security crew. I have gone to the orientation meeting and to the T-Shirt evening. I have my pass and my schedule.
The Festival has become a personal event, perhaps a ritual of summer for me and for the majority of fans. It is a multi-layered event, bringing people into contact for a few days. I have come to believe that the music has become subordinate to the event - there is certainly none of the silence and reverent focus on the performer and the music that is found in concert settings.
The weather appears to be very good, generally sunny and hot, although the forecast for today includes possible thundershowers.
The site is soggy. Southern Manitoba has been pounded by rain and heavy rain last Wednesday basically led to huge surface flooding in many areas, as the saturated ground refused to take and more, and drainages were overwhelmed. The Festival site in Bird's Hill Park is high and dry, on a sandy esker but the silty clay topsoil that holds down the grass on the festival site has been saturated. In other years, I have seen it turn to gumbo after a half hour of rain, but dry in a day.
I haven't paid a lot of attention to the line-up; I trust that I will be entertained, and I look forward to some moments of joy and insight.
The Wpg Folk Festival site security volunteer crew seems to be well organized. I received a letter in the mail inviting me back, with appropriate email contact addresses to confirm my plans. I replied, they replied and it's falling into place. I have been through it once and I have figured out the basics. It's a good way to see the festival, it's mostly fun, and there are good people to work with.
The 2005 line-up of performers isn't catching my fancy.
Several years ago Phillie Marcowicz, one of the hosts of one of CBC Radio's folk, roots and world programs was on the Main Stage at the Winnipeg Folk Festival. She asked the audience if anyone had experienced a musical epiphany that weekend.
In the summer of 1995, I bought a copy of James Keelaghan's album "A Recent Future" at the bookstore at Lake Louise junction, and I was immediately caught by the ballad "Cold Missouri Waters." Keelaghan had won the Juno for Roots and Traditional Album for his previous album "My Skies" in 1994 and was not nominated again in 1995 but the song is one of his best and has earned critical, artistic and popular support.
Keelaghan has since won the USA Songwriting Competition in 2002, in the Folk category for this song. It was covered by Richard Shindell, Dar Williams and Lucy Kaplansky on their joint album "Cry, Cry, Cry". The song has also taken on an interesting life of its own. Keelaghan met relatives of the dead firefighters, and his song has a following among firefighters and park rangers. He rewrote a line in the song (originally he sang "North Montana" and corrected it "West Montana" in deference to how the people of the area see their land. Keelaghan recorded the slightly revised version of the song on his 2004 retrospective album "Then Again."
In 1995 and 1996 I was posting regularly to a mailing list devoted to Canadian folk music with a special emphasis on the songs of life of Stan Rogers. In the fall of 1996 I followed up Keelaghan's liner notes by reading Norman Maclean's "Young Men and Fire" and I published a set of posts summarizing the book and relating it to the song. I have brought those posts together and edited them into one piece:
The forecast for Saturday night and Sunday had been for rain. It didn't rain. It was a cloudy, cool day but the sun came out and it warmed up enough for me to put my fleece away during the afternoon.
I started my day with a session that I will remember for a long time. The session leader was Brian McNeill, and the other participants were the new Quebecois group Genticorum, and John Reischman and the Jaybirds.
It was cold and cloudy all day, but it did not rain. Claire and I arrived around 10:00 AM, a short time after the gates opened but well before the first sessions of the day. I had a good day, and enjoyed several acts. I wanted to see Ron Kavana and Brian McNeill, singer-songwriters from Ireland and Scotland. I have read about their music, but I haven't seen them perform. McNeill's discography is rather thin for such an accomplished and experienced writer and performer, and not very accessible in Canada.
On Friday, the Edmonton Folk Festival offers sessions (at some other festivals these would be called workshops) on 4 stages from 6:00 to 9:00 PM and three acts on the mainstage. The weather was warm, but not hot in the late afternoon and it was cloudy. There was a forecast threat of evening rain, but it did not rain during the evening. It cooled gradually.
Claire and I stayed in Canmore on Tuesday after the Canmore Folk Festival, and drove to Edmonton on Wednesday.
We had planned to try some hiking and camping those days but we adapted to necessity. We had the car in a garage in Canmore to look at a transmission fluid leak, and managed to get it looked at very inexpensively, but we had to wait for the work. We spent the time with camping stuff - taking care of camp, cooking meals, walking, reading. We went directly to my friend Randy's house in Edmonton and I had the car looked at again to deal with a problem I had noticed in Canmore which had not been addressed at the garage in Canmore.
We arrived at the Edmonton Folk Festival site in Gallagher Park in time to exchange our tickets for the weekend wristband passes and to pitch a tarp halfway up the hill.
This counted as one of my better days, among many good days at summer folk festivals. It was sunny warm day, with moderate winds and I was able to leave the cold weather gear in the dry sack.
We started with the Canmore Pancake breakfast - pancakes and sausages served outdoors in front of the Legion Hall, no charge, donations for the Bow Valley Food Bank taken with thanks, with local amateur musicians playing rock and blues standards. We went to line up at the main gate to buy our day pass, and we had a spot of luck. The main gate wasn't supposed to open until 10:00 AM and meanwhile people with weekend passes would be admitted through the other gate at 9:30. However the ticket sellers at the main gate came out and sold passes at 9:15 and we were able to enter and to get a spot in the first ring of trees by the main stage. We had warm sunshine during the first part of the morning and shade during most of the afternoon.
After being delayed by car trouble, Claire and I drove to Canmore Sunday morning August 1, set up camp at a campground in Bow Valley Provincial Park and drove to Canmore. We had missed the Saturday evening concert, but we were in time for the rest of the Festival, except for the first half hour of the daytime workshops on Sunday.
It was a cool day. It had rained early in the morning, but the rain held off for the rest of the day. In fact, when the wind gusted, dust clouds blew across the festival site and we got quite dusty and dirty. It was good to be back in Canmore, even on a cool, cloudy and windy day. I have good memories of other festivals there, and there is something about sitting at the workshop stages in the open field, looking at the mountains on each side of the valley, and the crowd, and listening to beloved performers...
My experience as a Folk Festival volunteer was good. It takes a lot of people to run this event - I heard that there were 1750 volunteers involved this year.
The volunteers are treated well. Perhaps I should say that we take care our ourselves and each other. A volunteer gets a free festival pass, meals, water/juice/coffee/tea etc, and backstage access. There are sections of the festival devoted to the care of the volunteers - a large backstage kitchen for instance to provide the beverages and meals.
The fourth day of the 2004 Winnipeg Folk Festival was sunny and hot with moderate breezes. There was rain, but it arrived overnight long after the Finale.
I arrived in time to sit in the shade outside of the Shady Grove, apply sunscreen, have a cup of coffee, and listen to a workshop with Utah Phillips, Ember Swift, Paul Thorn and Joel Kroeker.
The rain stayed away. It was sunny, and it was humid at first. A reasonably steady breeze kept things moderately cool as the temperature climbed into the higher 20's.
The ground outside and through the main gate was well trampled and starting to smell of rotten things, and there were some wet spots in the parking lot but the site stayed in good condition.
The rain stopped, the clouds broke up and the sun came out by about 1:00 PM. There was a steady breeze. The sunshine and wind helped to dry out the festival site, which returned to a pretty good condition. There were some areas of the parking lot, including the area leading to the main gate that were wet and muddy but the working site was good.
My volunteer assignment was fence patrol at Site West, which involved watching sunbathers, kite-flyers, and frisbee players. I was able to get some of the music at Big Bluestem and the Green Ash Hollow. There were a variety of workshops at Big Bluestem. The Winnipeg bands the Duhks and the Mammals had a good crowd and good energy level. There was a workshop called Tortiere et Gumbo with Quebecois and Cajun music from Les Batinses, Genticorum and Granger & Dugas.
Forecasts and opinion polls seem to be pretty much equally unreliable.
It was cloudy when the gates opened and when the Winnipeg Festival started, but a light rain started around 7:30 PM and kept up all evening. The ground began to get wet, although I did not see any accumulations of standing water in my travels. The site supervisor responded by shutting down the carts and ATVS. No vehicular traffic. It was a sensible strategy. The mild impressions made by vehicles passing over dry ground in the preceding days became visible in the wet grass, and more traffic under wet conditions would have created ruts, puddles and mudholes.
The countdown is over. It's Thursday. I've read my manuals and practiced radio speak and I'm ready to face life as blue vest volunteer at 8:00 PM.
The campground opened yesterday, the main gate opens today and the opening night mainstage concert starts at 6:00 PM with the Perpetrators followed by Spirt of the West, Tegan and Sara and Taj Mahal. The idea seems to be to give each performer a generous opportunity. Taj Mahal is scheduled for around 10:30. I should be able to see almost everything, as my floating security crew is assigned to support the mainstage tonight from 8:00 to midnight.
The weather forecast has changed for the better. The forecast for rain on Thursday has been changed to mixed sun and clouds, high of 24. It will probably be cool later in the evening, but a dry day guarantees that the site will not be turned to mud on the first night. The forecast for Friday has changed to mixed sun and clouds, high 28, with a risk of showers. The mosquito situation has improved in Winnipeg. The number of mosquitos in the City entomologist's traps has fallen drastically after very cool nights on the past weekend. The City has been fogging, but that isn't why the bugs are gone. I live in an unfogged neighbourhood, and bugs are gone here too. The media have not reported the explanation for the drop. It hasn't been cool enough to kill them, and there is a suggestion that many bugs have gone dormant with the cool temps and haven't come back yet. I'd like to think that many bugs have died off and that larvicide programs have abated the new hatch, but I don't know.
Two more days to the Winnipeg Folk Festival.
On June 21, I spent a couple of hours being oriented and instructed in the duties of the Site Security volunteer crew. On June 30 I went to the T-shirt meeting to get my volunteer's pass, T-shirt and Festival program.
The weather has been reasonable. There has been a little more rain over the last few weeks but nothing to adversely affect site conditions. The forecast for the next couple of days and the weekend is reasonably good. Friday and Saturday are forecast as sunny with temperatures in the mid-twenties (C) which is good. It will be warm enough but not deadly hot, although the steady sunshine will still require people to take care to avoid sunburn and overheating.
There is a forecast of clouds with a chance of rain on Thursday. Rain on opening night has been known to turn the main stage area into a bog that endures for the whole weekend. If the festival site is spared and the rest of the forecast comes to pass, the conditions should be very good.
There have been a few changes to the site. It would seem from the map that there is a large new shelter or tent in the area previously used as Stage 2, and that this area has become the children's tent by day, now named the Chickadee Big Top. This area doubles as nighttime cabaret called the Firefly Palace, which is a new idea. The stage near the First Aid tent, which was the Children's stage last year, has reverted to being a regular performance stage.
Most of the stages, formerly known as Stages 1, 2, 3 and 4 and the Children's stage or Family area, have been renamed Bur Oak, Big Bluestem, Snowberry Field, Green Ash and Chickadee Big Top.
Since I call my Web site and this blog "A Sea of Flowers" I should applaud naming a stage "Big Bluestem" for one of the grasses of the tall grass prairie, but a couple of the names are just too cute for my taste.
The Winnipeg Folk Festival is only 3 weeks away, Thursday July 8 to Sunday July 11.
This year, I asked to be a Folk Festival Volunteer. I volunteered to become more actively engaged in the Festival, to try to avoid drowning in memories of attending as a happily married husband and father, and to meet new people. My application seemed to go into limbo for a while. I was told that the coordinators need to check with past volunteers on their crews, and to give priority to returning volunteers.
I got the call yesterday. I'm on Site Security, which is divided into a number of crews. I am joining the collateral crew which has some shifts supporting the Main stage crew, and some shifts supporting the Site West (Daytime stages) crew. I expect to walk and to use sunscreen and bug repellent, answer questions, rescue lost kids and capture fence jumpers.
The Winnipeg Folk Festival has released its brochure and updated its Web site with information about performers hired for the 2004 Festival.
Festivals are continuously tinkering with descriptive names to classify performers and inform fans. This year Winnipeg is grouping perfomers as Folk Legends, Sounds from Around the World, Singing the Blues, Contemporary Voices, Masters of their Instruments, Songwriters and En Francais.
The Legends group is Earl Scruggs, Dick Gaughan, Utah Phillips and Martin Carthy, and all of them are worthy of the label. I'm looking forward to Gaughan, a great guitarist and vocal interpreter with a crusty and realistic take on modern life. He was an interpreter of traditional music, but in the more recent part of his career, he tends to interpret more modern songs by a variety of writers. He does great versions of Ruby Tuesday, Townes Van Zandt's Lefty & Pancho, and several Brian McNeill songs.
There are a few Legends, in my view, included in other categories, like Taj Mahal, David Lindley, Spirit of the West. Spirit of the West have been superb since they started 20 years ago.
The World group includes a couple of Scots groups. There doesn't seem to be a lot for fans of Celtic or Canadian Maritime/Celtic although J.P. Cormier turns up in the instrumental group.
I'm looking forward to Martyn Joseph, a songwriter from Wales who started to tour in Canada a few years ago. He is a dynamic performer, with a great gift for words, progressive political sensibility, and a strong ethical line in his songs.
Canadian Folk musicians spend a lot of time driving long distances between the communities where they perform. In the late 1970's Stan Rogers and his band (his brother Garnet Rogers and a small series of other performers) did their time on the road.
On reaching the prairies, Stan Rogers visualized himself as the "tardiest explorer" in the tradition of Franklin, Mackenzie and David Thompson. In his song Northwest Passage, he describes his own journey across the prairie:
"Three centuries thereafter, I take passage overland,
In the footsteps of brave Kelso, where his sea of flowers began"
While the narrative is anchored in the inner vision of the singer dreaming while he drives, the vision itself is heroic, claiming the vision of the first European explorers of the prairies, plains, rivers and mountains of the Canadian Northwest:
"Ah for just one time, I would take the Northwest Passage,
To find the hand of Franklin reaching for the Beaufort Sea,
Tracing one warm line in a land so wide and savage,
And make a Northwest Passage to the sea"
Most of the names in the song are familiar to Canadians, or easy to identify. Mackenzie is Alexander Mackenzie, a fur trader and explorer who navigated the river that bears his name to the Arctic Ocean in 1789 and then, in 1793 crossed the Rockies and descended to the Pacific - the first European Canadian to reach the Pacific overland, a full decade before Lewis and Clark. David Thompson was a great explorer and cartographer. Franklin is Sir John Franklin, the British naval officer who was lost in the Arctic in the 1840's.
Kelso was Henry Kelsey who joined the service of the Hudson's Bay Company at age 17 in 1688 and rose to become a governor of the Company. At the time, and for centuries, the Company set itself up in forts on Hudson's Bay and let the Canadian First Nations bring the furs down to the Bay for trade. Very occasionally, a Bay man would explore inland. In 1690 young Henry Kelsey joined a group of First Nations travelling into what must have been the Canadian heart of darkness. His journals were preserved in the Company archives and rediscovered in the 20th century. He is believed to have travelled southwest from the Bay to the Grand Rapids of the Saskatchewan River, near the modern town of The Pas, and then west and south onto the prairie. He is believed to have been the first European Canadian to reach the prairie from the Bay.
Stan Rogers discussed the process of writing Northwest Passage in a radio interview in 1982 and admitted that he had been unsure of Kelsey's name and had guessed Kelso while recording the song. He never said if he believed that Kelsey himself had described the prairie as a "sea of flowers" or what brought that image to his mind - since he would himself have only seen the farmlands that the prairies have become.
Kelsey kept a journal, and his only descriptive references to the prairie are as a bleak heath of short round grasses. This indicates that he saw the short sere grasses of the high plains, rather than the tall grass prairies of more fertile regions. It is also not untypical of 17th century aesthetic sensibilities toward nature. It was only in the late 18th and the 19th centuries, through the Romantic movement, that Europeans and European Americans began to see nature as beautiful in itself.
The image of the prairie as a sea or ocean of grass and flowers was employed by the American poet William Cullen Bryant to describe the edge of the plains in southwest Illinois in the early 19th century, and adopted by many later poets and writers, including the 19th century Canadian poet and essayist Charles Mair. The engineer and inventor Sanford Fleming described the prairies that way on arriving at the edge of Red River Valley near the modern town of Ste. Anne, along the Dawson Road from Lake of the Woods in 1870. Fleming and Mair were in the last generation to see the prairies that way, before the slaughter of the last great herds of bison and the breaking of the prairie to agriculture.
In reaching for the beautiful and true meaning of exploration, Rogers transcended geographical and historical accuracy to take us off the asphalt road and into the sea of flowers.
