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How do you start off the story of a three-day cross border weekend adventure (the kind typically referred to, in my group of friends, as a gong show) so it doesn’t sound like every other trip of its kind? It’s hard, when they all start the same: Friday after work, like herding cats, we all manage to get ourselves in one place, pile our possessions in the back of someone’s poor car, and head south (or sometimes north) out of the city’s slow-moving rush hour traffic, our windows rolled down, arms thrown out in accompaniment to shouts of “Wooooooh!!!!”
And they all end the same too: rolling back home on a Sunday night, grubby and sun or wind-burned with piles of laundry.
But the stuff in the middle, the meat and cheese of the city-getaway sandwich, is never the same.
I look forward to these getaways, whether to Whistler or Seattle or Oregon or the Rockies, like a prisoner of war looks forward to his daily potato. This particular steaming hot potato involved an epic Friday night drive across the border and into Washington’s badlands, destination: The Gorge for The Sasquatch Music Festival.
The drive up: eight people piled into Allyson’s newly-acquired van, known in the UBC days as the Funkmobile, now dubbed Bubba. We consumed mass-amounts of junk food and Miller High Life (left over from the previous weekend's surfing trip to Oregon, to which I was excluded due to work), and by the time we were over the border (each border crossing inevitably involves the re-telling of every terrifying and hilarious customs experience each of us has ever experienced), the mass beer consumption necessitated a million pee breaks.
Each stop was an excuse to interact with the other two cars in the convoy and bust rowdily into an unsuspecting Shell gas station or hotel lobby and pile three at a time into single-occupancy toilets. The drunker we got (minus, of course, the three drivers), the funnier each pee stop got. The highlight, other than Keith and Cheryl’s discovery of “snausages” (pretzels rolled around cheese, indistinguishable from dog snacks) and Keith’s and my discovery of a beer we dubbed “Angry Penguin Beer” (made in Canada but exported directly out of the country to be sold at gas stations for $2.50 US for a six pack, or $4.89 US for a twelve), was Gunner’s breathtaking wipe-out in a gas station just outside of who-knows-where Washington.
It went something like this: Erin and Gunner’s kidneys were officially exploding. Mine weren’t far behind. We pulled into a lonely gas station and the sliding door was open before Ally had fully come to a stop. Erin did a rolling jump out (it would have made Steven Segal’s stunt double proud) and made a run for it. Gunner came next, hot on her heels, and I followed. We got into the convenience store and rounded corner number one (a sharp right behind the Bugles and Sun Chips). Erin made it around and was nearing corner number two (a sharp left down the bathroom hallway) when Gunner, still rounding corner number one and wearing flip-flops with a scarce amount of tread, went down like a speed skater on his last lap with an Olympic gold in his sights. He went down hard, flat on his front and did a little skid into the slurpy machine (or was it a rack of road maps?).
Erin turned around briefly at the commotion and did a hysterical skipping prance while unbuckling her belt, and I went down into the Excalibur position (on one knee), knowing that peeing my pants now would be a waste, given how close I was to the washroom. Gunner moaned an “Ow,” pulled himself up and kept going to the men’s washroom. I rounded the corner myself, buckled over giggling, and could hear Erin, now behind the closed women’s washroom door, in paroxysms of laughter on the toilet. And she remained that way, red faced and laughing, trying to tell the story of Gunner’s fall through giggles when we finally made it out to our friends standing at the gas pump.
(Rossy Interlude: "All I remember from the Great Gunner wipeout is coming around the corner and seeing mass hysteria. As I was trying to get the info out of an out of control Kristen who was pulling me towards the bathroom door to hear the mad cackling from behind it, a stonefaced and silent Keith had grabbed my other hand and was pulling me towards the wall or something. Drunken and confused, my mind couldn't gather what was going on as my head was being pressed against the women's bathroom door, and my left hand was being used as a middleman fondling mechanism for Keith, whom I hadn't really gotten to know yet. It turns out Keith had just wanted me to touch the brail. That is what I remember from the Great Gunner wipeout.")
We continued the ultra hilarious A to Z car game, moving on from “discharge” to the topic of “body cavity searches at the border crossing.” “Ribbed” was the highlight, other than maybe McFarlane’s, “What was that, R? What comes after R? U! Umm… UGANDA!!”
There was also the famous stop at Haggen for food and booze. We were nearly in the parking lot when someone with a quick eye noticed that the Krispy Kreme on the other side of the parking lot had its doughnut light on, which meant that a fresh batch had just been pulled from the oven and samples were being given out for free. (Last time we tried to hit up Krispy Kreme it was closed, although that didn’t stop Diga from trying to place an order at the drive-thru anyway). Ally did a doughnut, excuse t
he pun, in the parking lot, and b-lined it to Krispy Kreme, pulling through the drive-thru and asking the little squeaking box,
“Hey, so, doughnuts! Um, word on the street is that you’re giving them away for free or something?”
To which the little box responded, “That’s right. If you park and come in you get a free doughnut.”
The car immediately erupted into an earth-shattering celebratory roar, sixteen arms shooting up in the air, and as we peeled out we distinctly heard laughing from the squawk box.
We parked the car on the other side of the shop and exploded out of every door like a breaking geyser, empty beer cans spilling all over the parking lot in a cacophony of clanking metal, and we ran in for our free doughnuts. We left twelve seconds later, two of us wearing paper Krispy Kreme hats. It was my first Krispy Kreme, and will most likely be my last. After one bite I had handed it over to Gunner who had already inhaled his own.
Haggen was an in-out operation. We played Price is Right with the bill, making sure to include the cashier, Christine, in the game. Deanna won this time with “$102, Bob.”
We finally arrived at the campground sometime after 1:00 a.m. There was no rhyme or reason to the parking/camping situation, and the cold, tired people in navy blue Sasquatch windbreakers and flashlights who took our camping ticket had no idea what was going on, so we drove aimlessly through the darkness, weaving through small hoards of meandering campers and divisions of the seemingly endless sea of tents, looking for a congregation of port-o-potties with a big number 22 painted on a piece of plywood. There we were to find Anna, who had reserved a spot for us near her tent. It was spookily easy how quickly we found her, or she found us, and we pulled in and began setting up our tents, shivering in the black Washington night.
Once the tents were up everyone plopped into their sleeping bags, Ally, Dom, Cheryl, Keith and I, not ready to call it a night yet, sat up in Bubba, who was now being called “The Ranch on Wheels,” or “The Mobile Ranch” (in honour of Dom and Ally’s house, which is called The Ranch), and we drank in the dark and played more A to Z until it was finally time for us to tent-it-up ourselves.
I fell asleep to the sound of Dominic discussing how fun it is to say the word “snausage.”
It down-poured all night long. The heavens opened up and flushed their toilets on the poor inhabitants of tentland, hunkered down in a giant cow field and trying to get some sleep in preparation for twelve straight hours of concerting scheduled for the next day. Every single person in tentland who had drank too much and had to pee in the middle of the night (I estimate that to be about seventy percent of the community) lay there in agony in their sleeping bags, cursing the freezing plops of rain on the roofs of their tents and the distance they would have to travel to the nearest port-o-pottie for a terrifying pitch-black wazz. I lay there somewhere between an hour and a half to two hours until I saw the crack of dawn squeeze through the grey roof of my tent, and sucked it up, now sure I had done some permanent internal damage, put on some flip flops and grabbed an umbrella, and trudged through the cold, miserable, sopping grass to the dirtiest port-o-pottie I have ever had the pleasure of utilizing.
When I got back I saw the little heads of Rossy and Deanna poking out of their tent.
“Good morning sunshines,” I happily saluted them, for, even though I was cold and wet and hadn’t slept a wink, I no longer had to pee, and was looking forward to my warm sleeping bag.
Deanna responded to my chipper greeting with, “Are you wearing a nightie?”
“Yes,” I said, looking down at the skirt I had put on so as to not get the cuffs of my only pair of sweat pants wet, “I always go camping in a nightie.”
Which is when Erin came scurrying over from the van, informing me that the tent she, Deanna and Rossy had been sleeping in had flooded, and they were moving camp into smelly Bubba. I wished them luck and zipped myself back into my cozy tent and went back to sleep, lulled by the melodic snores of Keith.
(Rossy Interlude #2 : "As Deanna, Erin and myself awoke that morning to wet pillows and sleeping bags, we couldn't help but laugh at the stupidness of the situation. Our poor little tent had simply given up the will to protect us from the elements and was now in a pre-death collapse as rain dripped on us from the sides and the roof, and water moved in like a silent menacing snake. A we giggled and dissed our tent, frustration slightly grew as someone exclaimed, "Who the hell uses napkins as flies on tents? " Damp, cold, and hungover, Erin decided to take first action and brave the rains outside to get the keys from a sleeping Ally so that she could move into the comforts of the van. However in doing so, she awoke the Water Beast, which allowed all the water that was being held at bay by the flimsy sides of our little-tent-that-couldn't to rush forth, causing squeals, laughter and exclamations of "stop moving Erin, you are waking the Water Beast." Sadly, Deanna and I had had to abandon our little tent as well, leaving it standing there in the rain like the that sad little lamp form that IKEA commercial a few years back. But it will be a great summer tent.")
We woke up around 9:00 and unzipped our tents when the rain subsided to a less threatening pitter pat on our tent walls. As we shook the sleep from our eyes and unlocked Bubba to get at the juice, water and Erin’s cinnamon buns, we got our first glimpse of the landscape we had driven through in the dark the night before.
We were a million tents deep into a sprawling city of dripping nylon and wet cars, in a huge expanse of field that stretched for miles in either direction. To our left and behind us the land was flat and grassy, but to our right, and straight ahead, lay rolling green, brown and yellow hills topped with layers of heavy low-lying charcoal clouds interspersed with bright white fluffy clouds. Behind the dense, looming sky that threatened thunder and lightning and crisp May rain were splatterings of bright blue sky. The sky looked both menacing and inviting, and cast huge dappled shadows on the hills.
It was beautiful. The whole sight was beautiful, even with the dilapidated, rain-drenched tents, clusters of port-o-potties, and the bits of sun sparkling off the chrome of several thousand bumpers and license plates boasting state and provincial mottos from regions as close as Alberta and Oregon, and as far away as Michigan and Alabama. It was both pristine and filthy, orderly and ramshackle, dry and wet, sunny and overcast, quiet and noisy, energetic and groggy, happy and hung over – this converted cow field where tractors were still making their rounds through rows of tents and piles of discarded beer cans, and spiders picked their way through long blades of grass into the sunshine (and eventually into my tent).
The people who were sleeping beside us had been given, by mistake, a kitchen tent instead of a regular tent, and had spent a miserable night getting rained on through the screen walls. They got up early and drove to Seattle to buy a real tent for the next night. We took advantage of the empty tent and its plethora of seating options (chairs, air mattress, coolers) to create a socializing area just as the rain returned. We gleefully accepted compliments by passers-by who admired the arrangement, announcing with pride that we commandeered the tent and all its possessions, including the ripped poncho I was sporting, while the owners were who knows where.
(Rossy Interlude #3: "Not only did we commandeer their tent and poncho, but also their chairs, cooler, air mattress, and if time had allowed us to do so, we probably would have polished off their milk and premade burgers while curled up in their blankets. Hell we probably would've packed up the tent of they had never returned by the time we were ready to leave.")
We also made friends with a Colombian whose name I’m still not sure of, since everyone immediately gave him a nickname. Out of the following names he was called by my friends: Javier, Juarez, Juan, Joaquin, and Joaquin Phoenix, one of them is likely to by correct. He had rescued a stranger the night before when the poor guy, hammered and disco
mbobulated, had lost his friends and couldn’t find his way back to his tent, and was sleeping in a blanket in the rain. “Juan” invited him into his tent and saved him from certain death from exposure.
After a breakfast of left-over Haggen sandwiches and salads and a few glasses of juice, we cracked open the beer, and from 9:30 onwards drank in and out of our commandeered tent, in the sunshine and rain, until we were all good and tanked and ultra elated with life.
On one of my many, many, MANY trips back from the terrifying port-o-pottie #22 base, I took a wipe out on a loose rope on Aiden’s tent. Juan came running up to me with concern. I pulled myself up and examined the damage: a muddy knee.
“Nev
er mind the TENT!!” Juan exclaimed as he lugged me to my feet, “Are YOU okay?!!!!”
I laughed, slightly embarrassed. He was relieved, and then said to me, “Here, come join my new group of friends,” ushering me forwards and pointing to everyone drinking in lawn chairs. Juan ran off, happy to have given me some new friends.
The sun officially came out around noon, and we left tent land for the twenty minute walk to the Gorge at around 3:00. Erin took a fabulous slow-mo bail into a ditch while mimicking the Excalibur pose I went into when Gunner wiped out. The fabulousness just wouldn’t end. We also allocated buddies to make sure no one person got permanently lost from the group. I was buddied with Gunner and Erin. The buddy system, not surprisingly, quickly broke down. We have yet to find a system that works. The closest we’ve ever come was our fluorescent t-shirt Arts County Fair. But even that was full of flaws.
(Rossy Interlude #4: "Aiden and I were buddies and we had no break down in our buddy system, except for when it came for Aiden and I to fend off the hail under our own blanket. I needed the extra body to create more cover and Aiden wanted to take the hail like a man. "Aiden get under the blanket and work with me!!!" He didn't and I fled.")
Iron and Wine were on stage when we arrived, and we got ourselves a beer and a spot on the grass at the top of the hill and marveled at the view.
Halfway between Seattle and Spokane, the Gorge is in George, Washington, and it’s an absolutely incredible venue. At the bottom of the hill was an open stage. Behind the stage was the Columbia River (which, incidentally, runs through Trail), and behind the river was Washington’s badlands: a grassy desert peppered with low-lying shrubs and coyotes (well… at least ONE coyote). Then a wall of cliffs rose straight up in a semi-circle around the valley, carved into steps like a mini version of the Grand Canyon. The river snaked through the valley and around the cliffs towards the horizon, and clouds, flat and dark grey on the bottom, and white and fluffy on top, hovered over the scene, trying to obscure our view of a bright blue sky that peeked through and brought with it sunshine. Heavy grey clouds loomed in the distance where the river met the horizon. We could have been anywhere. We could have been in Alberta, or New Mexico, or Arizona.
We baked in the heat, listening to the bands like background music while we waited for 5:40 to roll around so we could join the throngs of people at the bottom of the hill when The Tragically Hip came out. We baked and applied sun screen, and baked some more, eyeing the blackening clouds in the distance and trying to calculate whether the wind was going to blow them on top of us, or past us. When it started to thunder everyone cheered like idiots cheering a fight at a hockey game. Little did we know what the thunder would bring. Had we known, we might not have been so enthusiastic.
We were all so busy looking east, at those damn black clouds, all 22,000 of us, that we didn’t see the ones coming from the north. The wind changed direction and in a matter of seconds the sun was gone and a cold wind was picking up, dropping plops of thick, juicy, ice-cold rain on us. We turned our heads to the sky, welcoming the refreshing water on our hot skin, when the plops suddenly got bigger, and colder, and mighty harder.
The hail came down in a sudden fury, and everyone fled in every direction. McFarlane, Deanna, Rossy and I, taken by surprise and expecting the sudden dump to be fleeting, hid under the big green blanket, shrieking and madly laughing, being pelted with spheres of ice the size of chick-peas. When we realized the hail wasn’t letting up and we were getting absolutely drenched (and pummeled), we peeked out from the blanket to see if there was room under the roof of the hot dog stand up the hill. No go. And then we caught a glimpse of the mayhem on the hill. About a third of the crowd was left, hiding pitifully under blankets and being mercilessly assaulted from the heavens. Hail was gathering around us in piles of snow, the band had fled in terror, and the sky was black like the apocalypse. From under nearby blankets were muffled cries of, “What the FUCK?!”, while braver people scurried about frantically. Bags, beer, blankets and girlfriends were abandoned in the madness. (Cheryl quote from later in the day: “Dom abandoned me and fled like a little girl.” Dom unapologetically agreed with this assessment).
The four of us decided to stand up, and Aiden, braving the onslaught like the Fumanshu cowboy he is, helped us to our feet. Now the four of us were standing in a huddle under the blanket which came to our ankles, trying to formulate a plan. In the process of strategizing someone spotted, through the slot of visibility under our blanket, two giant Ziploc bags of Triscuits abandoned on the grass a few feet away. We were now distracted by abandoned food. Something else to commandeer.
We shimmied over, hidden under big green, in attempt to lower the blanket another few inches to the ground, obscuring the bag of Triscuits and sucking them up undetected, then shimmying onwards to consume the crackers unbeknownst to the Triscuits’ rightful owners. Kind of like a big green octopus.
We must have looked like one of those creeping bushes in the cartoons, when someone is trying to covertly infiltrate some sort of situation and camouflages themselves as a tip-toeing bush or garbage bin. As we tip-toed I pictured that sneaky high-key piano music playing in my head. Doop doop doop doop doop…
The owners (merely a pair of feet from our vantage point), who happened to be standing right next to the Triscuits, quickly put a kibosh on that plan, immediately detecting our intent, and we shimmied onwards giggling madly.
When the hail finally subsided about twenty minutes later everyone was soaked to the underwear. People came out from their hiding spots and the crowd erupted into applause and cheers, not so much at the dispersal of the storm but at the hardiness of everyone who had braved it. We were cheering ourselves more than anything else, and cheering the utter madness of the situation. In fifteen minutes I went from sitting in a tank top boiling to death, getting a sun burn on my bare arms, to wiping out down a hill on snow and slush. Aiden immediately belly-slid down the hill, taking out people like bowling pins ("or like a drunken penguin who had misjudged the steepness of the hill and the speed at which he travelled - Rossy"). He donated his toque to one of his victims as consolation.
The hail caused more havoc than just freezing and soaking everyone. It flooded the Wookie stage, rendering it unusable, and forcing the acts who were supposed to appear on that stage to cancel. Good-bye to Sam Roberts and Matt Costa.
It also delayed the main stage by over an hour, and we had to wait until nearly 7:00 for the Hip to come out.
We headed down the hill into the crowd, more for warmth than anything else, and double-fisted our $10 cans of American beer figuring, if we had to suck it up and be cold and wet and miserable for the rest of the day, better to be drunk and numb to that fact than hyper aware and grumpy. And better to make friends with everyone around us in the crowd.
We initiated a loud, raucous singing of Oh Canada (in the pre-Hip concert tradition for which I have grown quite fond, and for which the Americans around us were not remotely impressed), and then initiated a butt-slapping train in the crowd worthy of a baseball park wave.
A million cold, long, suspenseful years later The Hip came out and put on a great 50-minute show. Beach balls with the design of the Canadian flag painted on them bounced through the crowd in front of a backdrop of pink and yellow clouds and Grand Canyon cliffs.
With the loss of Sam Roberts and Matt Costa we went for a beer and food run after the Kingston band left, ran into people we knew, lost them, ran into more, lost them too, and came back to the Main Stage in time for The Shins. Erin spent the time harassing people at the port-o-potties near the pizza, going up to people, asking them if they were Canadian, and if they were, announcing, "Funk you, Tron!" They had no chance.
Post-shins: While waiting for Ben Harper to come out the crowd around us broke out into a spontaneous “Let’s go Oilers!” chant. The Americans were very confused, one of them turning to Erin and asking her what an Oiler was. Ben Harper finally came out and put on an amazing show, most of which I couldn’t see because I either had gigantic Mathieu in front of me (no matter how much he tried to have me in front of him), or a wookie of a woman with a wall of hair obstructing not only my view of the ENTIRE stage, but also BOTH jumbo screens. Didn’t matter. All I needed was the music. (Best song of the night, With My Own Two Hands, no doubt about it - Rossy)
I had no energy to stay to see the Flaming Lips, so when Ben was over I fled home fatigued and freezing, taking a tortuous half-hour walk through ice-cold mud back to the campsite. I shivered in my tent all night long and fell asleep sometime before pneumonia set in.
We were packed up and on the road by 9:30 the next morning. Had a breakfast of stale croissants and warm juice while listening to the pick up stories (one of which involved Gunner bringing a lady friend back to the van). I gave up my shotgun in the van and moved into the caddy for the ride home, giving a little more space to the people squished in Bubba, and enjoying the backseat of Dom’s spacious 1977 Cadillac, a boat of a car with a saggy memory-foam ceiling and a backseat like a bed (not to mention a trunk that closes in and hugs itself tightly, as Erin almost learned in her near death experience of being closed in the trunk). To top it all off it came with two Roger Whitaker A-tracks.
We put on Ben Harper and watched the beautiful countryside roll by, enjoying finally being warm, dry and comfy, and didn’t hit rain again until we were back in the familiar Washington mountains.
We were back in Vancouver by 5:00, and after Dom drove off with my backpack still in his trunk (I didn’t care – all I needed were keys to get into my house so I could shower the smell of cheap beer, snausages and dill-hole potato chips off my skin), I crashed on the couch and waited for my roomy to get home so we could re-discuss every second of the weekend.
Check 'er oot: http://www.sasquatchfestival.com/
So my guilt and I went for a long swim, and then had breakfast in a cafe, where I read all about new discoveries in the dinosaur world - seriously, dinosaurs are so rad!! Then went off to find the Victoria Art Gallery, tucked away in a little corner of town near Craigdarroch Castle.
I spent an hour in the practically empty gallery, alone with an amazing collection of Rodin sculptures (and I fully admit that I checked out the naked ones. Anyone who says they don't is a liar). There's nothing like being alone in a gallery, where you can take your time and go back and forth between pieces again and again. And what's amazing about Rodins is that they seem to have been designed with the purpose of being seen from every angle, as if each view is the main view. It boggles me how he could create forms that are at one time so muscular and commanding and strong, yet at the same time fluid and graceful and sensual. The busts were so incredibly life-like that I fully expected them to blink. But they never did, and so I moved on.
