A Pilgrim and a Stranger

A few years ago while serving in AmeriCorps, my friend Benji and I tried to explain MerleFest to one of our fellow Corpses. After failing for several days to convey the significance of the event, we found a metaphor that felt right: MerleFest was a pilgrimage that we felt compelled to make to celebrate music. Our friend continued to be baffled by our zeal for what, as far as she could tell, was just another music festival out in Appalachia.

photo credit: ridersinblack1970

I grew up with MerleFest in my back yard. I remember someone sneaking me across the river onto the grounds years before the crowds swelled to 80,000. I saw Doc Watson play there before they built a stage with his name on it, and long before that stage bore a Holly Farms, Tyson, or Lowe’s logo. Festival performers came to my high school to play for an afternoon assembly and the faculty seemed surprised when the students (me not included) took to the gym floor to dance.

One of the many revelations I had when I went to college was that my backyard music festival was an internationally renowned phenomenon. In many ways I had lived in a very small bubble up to that point. As far as I knew, bluegrass was just what music sounded like in my hometown, a little twangy just like the way we talked. And like most everything about home, my mom hated it and my dad loved it.

On this one score, I sided with Dad. I was raised on bluegrass and country music, most likely to my mother’s chagrin. I can’t remember not knowing the words to “Rocky Top” and “I Walk the Line,” and I have it on good authority that as a child I may have attempted to dance with my aunt on Saturday nights when my grandparents took me up into the mountains in their camper. This last is as baffling to me as it will be to anyone who knows me now. It must have been back before the drummer in my head grew so loud and offbeat as to render all other attempts at syncopation futile.

Then, as now, I’m no good in a crowd. It’s one of the first things people ask me when they learn how much I love MerleFest: how do I handle the crowd? To this I offer two responses.

First, the festival happens at Wilkes Community College, with 14 different stages on a sprawling campus. And I’ve grown up with the festival, so I’ve been able to learn the ninja shortcuts and tricks, including how to bypass most of the early morning crush for good lawn position, and how never, ever, ever, to attend if Dolly Parton is playing on a Friday night.

Second, I wasn’t kidding when I called my annual visit to MerleFest a pilgrimage. It’s always felt like something important for my soul, or whatever you want to call the warm, gooey parts of me you can’t prod with corporeal instruments. The truth is, when I sit on a blanket those springtime evenings surrounded by thousands of people who’ve come together for music, I am at peace. Getting to and from my blanket might always be a challenge, but once I’ve made it onto my little oasis, I float there in reverence for those simple vibrations of strings we’ve all come to hear. It’s as close as I get to church.

Even though the festival has become rather a commodity, and priced itself well out of my budget, I still go when I can. So when Dad called this year to offer me a free pass, I didn’t turn it down.

It’s been a long time since I spent a weekend with just my father. When I visit, he’s often out fishing or hunting, or otherwise engaged with his family, friends, and community in ways that I envy and admire. It was a treat to spend that Saturday and Sunday with him.

Neither of us talk much. When I was a kid it always struck me as peculiar how Dad and his brothers could stand around the yard, hardly speaking, for hours at a time. There were a few hard years when it felt like all of his infrequent conversations with me came as warnings or criticisms, when my objective became to render myself unnoteworthy enough to escape whatever well-meaning advice was on offer. These days I seem to have inherited more of that from him, and I think I understand his silences better for it.

I am distant enough from the place I grew up, now, to be curious about it, and Dad is full of stories. So I heard all the local drama on the way to the festival, and all the latest fishing stories on the way back. On the festival grounds, I watched him stop to catch up with an old friend every few hours, then ask me if I remembered them. More often than I want to admit, I don’t recall. Dad is so much a part of the town, and everything in it is so clearly dear to him, it feels like I’m letting him down every time I have to be reminded of someone I knew twenty years ago and haven’t seen in a decade. I can only hope to be so well remembered.

He asked about my old friends, both from high school and in Asheville. He seemed worried that I don’t see enough of them now that I live so far from them. This is a man who just got his first e-mail address this year, and who anyway has never lived as closely with written words as I have. It’s easy to shrug off his concerns as those of a different age, but the disquiet in his voice makes me want to reassure him. He knows me well enough, though, to know how few new friends I have made in my newly adopted home.

On Sunday morning MerleFest turns to gospel music by the river. I have long joked that if the church of my youth sounded like Alison Krauss, or Gillian Welch, or Eddie from Ohio, then attempts at indoctrination might have taken. My father used to drive me to church, drop me off in the parking lot, and drive back home. But the man I sat beside last weekend, listening to Doc Watson tear up talking about his own salvation, has become quietly devout. I don’t know when or why, but I am grateful to him for not pushing that on me. It still wouldn’t take.

I think we both enjoyed ourselves at MerleFest. I suppose it’s inescapable, the feeling that you’re still a child in the presence of your parents. Though mine have always let me find my own way, the more I look back the more I see that their counsel has been both gentle and wise. I hope they know I was listening. I still am.