The Great Blue Heron Festival
As I exit adolescence into adulthood, a stark reality bears down upon me: much of the world is full of negative experiences. Most Americans wake up to unpleasant sounding alarms, put on uncomfortable clothes, drive to work in thoroughly uninteresting cars, work many hours a day at a job they rarely enjoy, only to come home to a family they barely speak to, and finally retire to the same bed to repeat the process. We tend to drive ourselves towards normality, the enthalpic organization of our lives. We compartmentalize, we bicker, but most of all, we forget how to have actual fun. This is why it was such a great relief and such an amazing experience to attend the Great Blue Heron Music Festival in Sherman, New York.
Surrounded by the rolling hills of the New York Amish countryside, our three-hour pilgrimage north left us in a line of cars queued up to enter the festival. For a few minutes, you could see nothing but the cars in front of you, but as we slowly waited in line, a young and very pretty girl walked up to our window. She asked us if this was our first ‘Heron’ and we informed her that it was. She ran over the parking instructions, asked how we intended on staying the weekend. We didn’t have a very solid plan laid down, so we asked for her opinion. She said that staying in the tent camping was nothing short of “Amazing.”, but alas, we had packed for the trip with the anticipation of living out of our vehicles, and didn’t have the proper supplies to sleep in the forest. She reassured us that we’d still have the greatest weekend. She penciled in a letter on our windshields and we continued in the line.
Once we got to the end of the line, we were directed into a steady, well-organized pull-off where we received our wrist-bands, parking passes and instructions. Because of our dependence on the vehicles, we chose to stay in the ‘quiet-camping’ area, up on the other side of the hill. Climbing that hill with our vehicles, we were stunned with the overlooking view of the festival. We hadn’t even gotten out of the trucks, but already the festival’s vibrant energy overtook us. You could hear both stages booming with music and excited spectators, you could see the colorful flags of the vendors and smell the assortment of different foods. You could see thousands of people, all of them smiling.
We chose a campsite at our discretion and began to unpack. Parking the two trucks back to back, we were able to convert our tailgate areas into a sort of back porch that involved tarp overhangs and a hammock strung between the two latches. We threw up a tent to keep our supplies in, unpacked the perishables, arranged the coolers, grabbed a beer and sat down and observed the festival from afar for a little.
We had barely gotten camp set up when the neighboring campsite yelled to us “Hey! You guys play beer pong?” We accepted the challenge and were introduced to Patrick, Jessie and Jessica. Patrick, a man in his late twenties, worked for the Post Journal, a local newspaper, and was enjoying his first Heron as well. Jessie worked with him at the Journal and her friend Jessie had come along for the ride. I’ll never forget ‘Patrick’s Sexy Dance’, a celebratory dance which was practiced upon winning a cup at beer pong. The dance involved him getting low to the ground, rhythmically humping the air above him with one hand waiving in victory. We played a few rounds of very poor beer pong, enjoyed each other’s company for a little, and then parted ways and decided it was time to go over to the festival.
We were dawned in fairly appropriate attire, me sporting a vintage T-shirt and my handmade bell-bottoms, the others in their equally period dress. We headed down the hill, and began to absorb what was around us. The main path down to festival was littered with every single example of counter-culture you can imagine, from the old ladies in their tie-dye shirts to the teenage stoners, and everyone in between.
The farm that the festival is held on is a 300+ acre plot of land, which used to be a campground and now simply grew some Shiitake mushrooms in a distant field somewhere. Our understanding from various conversations was that the owner, Jean makes the festival her full time job, and uses her land every year for exclusively this festival. The open fields are used to house kid’s play areas, the concert stage and the massive amounts of vehicle camping and parking. However, the majority of the land is under a wooded forest where the previous campground paths still exist. Most of the weekend visitors to the festival stay in the wood trails, and friends, seeing these trails was one of the greatest experiences of my life:
The trials were inhabited by mostly kids in my age range, though there were some families and older generations camping there too. As no vehicles were allowed in the trails, everything that we saw around us was brought in on foot or cart. We guessed that around 2-3 thousand people were staying here in the woods, and the expansive miles of trails weren’t enough to dilute them. Every inch of forest you could see was covered in tents, tapestries, people playing guitars, artists, wanderers… people of every flavor. We spend the first hours at the festival walking these trails and meeting people. After the first hours of our festival time had elapsed, we had met far too many people to remember and had met people from as far away from us as California and as close to us as Penn Hills. Everyone on these trails was having a good time, they were all smiling, all exuberant about the festival. The scenes from my memory of that first walk through the tent sites will be forever etched into my brain, because it was the first time I could ever recall when I had ever seen so many people be happy. There wasn’t mortgages, there weren’t jobs and parking tickets and divorces. There were just thousands of people meeting each other, embracing the event and casting off so much energy, you could damn near feel it giving you a sunburn.
After some recovery time from that event, we stopped back at the campsite for some cleanup and met our new neighbors from New York. They were on a trip from Brooklyn to see the festival and Niagara falls.
Finally, we went and listened to some music. There were dozens of bands that occupied the two stages of the festival. I spent all of my time at the main stage. These were all bands I’ve never heard of, but now will never forget, because the incredible stage energy of these bands was nothing like the Nickelback concerts we are used to. These bands played for the love of the music. One band, the Town Pants, was a sort of Celtic-Punk casserole, which sounded like a much-more authentic and high energy version of the Dropkick Murphy’s. There were so many other acts that I can’t even begin to recall all of their acts, but bands like Entrain, Donna the Buffalo and the Town Pants are reason enough to pay the admission charge to the festival.
After a night of dancing hard in front of the stage for hours, we took another short walk through the forest to try to gather more sensory perception from the thousands of crazy people back there, and then decided it was time to go to bed. We went to sleep fast, excited to wake up the next day.
By 10am, we were already up and cleaned-up. After a few minutes of talking with Paisley, Gene, Ray, Mindy and their gang, we wound up down at the festival. We spent a few hours in the kid’s field, where we all tried our hands at Crystal Stix, a game where you use two batons to try to keep a third stick from hitting the ground. I spent less time than the others at this game, as I was intrigued by a set of tom-tom’s laying in the grass. I picked them up and spent a little while reacquainting myself with some technique, and then began rocking out for what seemed like hours. At a festival like this, playing music just felt so good.
Later in the day, we took a few rounds around the woods again, meeting people like Michael, who dressed in only gray shorts and had a fake lion’s tale drooping behind him, or Marly who danced with us at the stage and we couldn’t quite tell if she was fond of any of us or just liked to drift in between people. We also met Chris and Lynn, who were 17 year veterans of the festival, and always make sure to get the same camp site every year. Yes, we have pictures of most of these people.
But before long, the music picked up and we spent most of the rest of the night dancing and jumping around with the other thousands of people crowded around the stage. This was the second night of the festival, and you could tell that everyone wasn’t going to waste it. I stood there in amazement as old people took their clothes offs, adults casually passed joints around to each other, and a toddler was running in between all these legs dancing to the music. It was a harmony. Every race, age and gender was blending as the music made us all dance and smile for hours.
That night ended with pizza rolls and beer as we discussed the events of the day around the campfire with our neighbors. One last morning left before we had to return to the real world.
We woke up in the same fashion, early and anxious. We did a great deal of cleaning the camp, took our usual cold-water wash-off, saw our neighbors off on their journey, and then headed to the festival one last time.
Some of the bands from the past few days were playing entire encore sets; the vibe was a little different than the past few days. It was obvious that no one wanted to go home, and I don’t just mean us four. The entire festival seemed a little upset about having to leave. My new favorite band, Entrain took the stage and I stayed for the entire set front row. I felt really good about it all.
We finally packed up, spent a while trying to get out of town, and eventually made it to the highway. The entire way home, we talked about how much the trip changed our lives and out outlook. For some of us, it was a saving grace for faith in humanity, for others, it was a three-day party, but we all took positive things home and we can’t wait to go back next year. We are forever ‘Heron Heads’ and for once, we saw what life was supposed to be like.
