Only thirty-nine miles from home

Wednesday morning, we left not long after dawn for the short jaunt down some two-lane Tennessee highways for our destination in village of groove.

According to Yahoo Maps, the Bonnaroo festival site is only thirty-nine miles from my home. Of course, one could travel 390 miles in any other direction and not find a place as foreign yet familiar to the Tennessee fields as this. For a few days every June, the beautiful and bizarre Bonnaroo nation lives by its own amalgamation of extremes.

And here lies the Bonnaroo charm: it’s a lovely chasm away from reality—yet fully realized in the here and now with all the paradox that the present reality provides. We’ve found ourselves working as volunteer teachers and organizers in a place called Planet Roo, running arts classes and environmental workshops in the tent called The Academy. Because of the music, I want to be at Bonnaroo so badly, and I’m blessed to be with a team of eleven volunteers who will share the duties of keeping The Academy afloat.

Thrilled by the opportunity yet overwhelmed by the organized chaos, we settled into to our temporary and remarkably shaded enclave in the back corner of the Guest Camping compound. Snakes and even a little poison ivy, and it’s still a perfect place this rockstar Eden. If we kept our purple, pink, or rose-colored shades on at all times, we could get lost living in this bastard descendent of the Woodstock family, with Joni Mitchell stanzas about the garden rewinding in our heads. But the profitable Bonnaroo is not the reckless Woodstock, and some of the revolutionary spirit may have been sidetracked.

The revolution will not be sponsored by Citibank or AT&T, and so early on, I listened to my friends rant against the corporate culture and determined that the ‘roo was counter-revolutionary. But of course, it’s more complicated than that. Listening to the radical purist, I never would have visited and discovered the vision within. But fellow travelers come anyway—from Mountain Justice Summer to the Sequatchie Valley Institute (SVI). (My photos from today are inside the temporary straw-cob house built by the SVI crew.)

People who want to protect the planet are here—even as we pay a price to the planet just to get so many people here. And granted, we’re a node of sanity in a mode of insanity. We can’t yet get most attendees to simply “leave no trace,” much less trace their desires for festive indulgence to a place that feeds radical resistance to consumerism. Radical at Bonnaroo is a form of consumerism. And when the best music in the world is the commodity, we are still buying.

Several things lure us here: primarily the opportunity to participate in the erection of a temporary city and share in its inherently communal and cultural exchange created by rubbing shoulders and sharing the dusty dance-floor with thousands of your best friends.

And then, at the end of the day and well into the night and the next morning, the music draws us in. The armchair critic and passionate volunteer collapse into the unabashed fan, dancing to the beats without cessation, without fear, without apology. For my second year, thirty-nine miles from home is home.