Not All Who Wander Are Lost

Dodd's Farm: new FRFF Folk Fest site, new home away from home.

An explosion of recurrence today, starting with an in-and-out prep of the camper, immediately followed by shopping for low-backed chairs, plastic dishes, and campsite furnishings for our annual pilgrimage to Falcon Ridge Folk Festival.

This is our seventh year so preparing, and though the site has changed (see above), by now we know what we want to build, how we prefer to frame our summer's peak. Darcie said it pretty clearly: she goes to these festivals to plan and then build the campsite -- she lives, in other words, to be the camp Mama, just as I live 51 weeks each year to arrive at an empty hayfield a week before the gates officially open, feel a community build around me, and then to live it out while it lasts with all my heart and body.

Supper we tested the camper grill -- hamburgers and a wonderful potato gratin thing Darcie learned from her papa, all foil-steamed and bleu-cheesed up. Even the fridge is working after three years out of the running.

The oddness of universal cyclicality struck again after supper with a familiar horror when the baby got her finger stuck in the shower drain this evening, just like her Sister did back in March:

Tonight out of the din that is two kids and company one of those present-tense parenting moments: a sudden screaming around the corner and I'm sprinting around the kitchen island like slow motion and into the bathroom and there in the shower my little girl is standing shaking shrieking all alone behind the frosted glass and honey what's the matter O my god she's (Darcie!) bleeding really badly o my god o baby (Darcie! Come quick!) oh baby it's going to be okay and Daddy I was stuck in the DRAIN...

Luckily, Mama was in the shower with the kid this time around, and was quick enough to pour shampoo on, lubrication enough to get her free with a minimum of finger fleshtearing.

It's bad-looking nonetheless, and no less so for the much younger self and much smaller finger that suffered this time around. But she's resilient and independent kid, that little one; she wouldn't take anyone but daddy, stopped crying in less than ten minutes, and pulled off every bandage and wrap we tried just for the sheer mobility of it.

After the kids went to bed I tried downloading some music, but the hard drive was full, so I went about digging through the old files, looking for trashables. Came across my inbox archive from my last year of college, and have now spent a delightful hour marvelng at what was on my mind a decade ago.

Revolting how careless I was in my online writing back then. But then, astounding to see how much my online voice, my online self have evolved. Surely the two are related, the lack of care given to the language a function of both discomfort and lack of practice, two sides of the online persona coin.

Good bookfodder, that. Gels well with the intro to John Seabrook's Deeper: My Two Year Oddysey in Cyberspace, published in the same year, 1997, back when the Internet was new, and not yet mutually symbiotic with our meatspace, and not yet so much a part of us:

An on-line home, on the other hand, seemed more like a little hole you drilled in a wall of your real home to let the world in....an online home built for solitude didn't quite make sense, maybe because people tended to be alone while they sat in front of their screens. In going on-line, you made some of your personal space available to other people.

Ah yes. Back when the online world was built for solitude. Back when the space of the web was borrowed personal space, not yet a public entity in and of itself. And of course what was true for the culture was true for the individual; Neil Postman (The Medium Is The Mind), and before him Marshall McLuhan (The Medium Is The Message), would have had it no differently. But we can rebuild it; we have the technology, indeed.