Green River Festival

Last weekend Esti and her friend Rosi and I drove out to Green River Festival in Greenfield, MA.

On the way out we picked up a hitchhiker named Eli. I was pretty excited to finally see one and was kind of hoping for a crazy story, but it turned out he was a pretty boring guy: "no offense," he told me, but the first rule of hitchhiking is you can't look like a dirty hippie. He was a high school teacher from Florida who hitchhiked every summer for the love of the game and said his goal was to inspire faith in humanity. At the moment he was on his way to a jam band festival in New Hampshire. Frankly, ours sounded more fun than his! We took him about 50 miles on route 2.

I'm still glad we met him though. I put on Crosby, Stills & Nash and he sang along, and we talked about growing up in the suburbs, his philosophy curriculum, and his thoughts on religion (vehemently opposed to it). And anyway, I figured picking up a hitchhiker would be good karma: Esti and I didn't have a place to sleep lined up for Saturday night and were hoping to pitch a tent on the yard of some good Samaritan in Greenfield.

I met a couple different people who offered to find some space for us, but we ended up staying on the on-site camping plot of two lovely people from New York City. One of them was wearing a Main Era hat, so we started talking and it turned out they had extra space next to their tent. I think needing somewhere to stay ended up being a good thing - Esti and I chatted with them for a couple hours at the campsite before bed and it was one of the best parts of the weekend. Safe to say the hitchhiker karma paid off - thanks Eli :)

There were other wonderful people at the festival too. Our new campsite friends told us about how cool the campground coordinator was, so I came over to meet her the next morning and ended up doing some odd jobs for her around camp before the music kicked off. Shoutout Lynne! She really was awesome - we ended up having dinner together later, and it turns out she writes young adult fiction and manages bluegrass bands when she's not helping orchestrate music festivals.

I also spent a lot of time with a group of friends who knew each other from college: we started throwing a frisbee around on Saturday morning and I ended up tagging along with them for much of the weekend, playing cards and hacky sacking and so on. I almost waited with them at the barricade for Wednesday and Geese, but got tired after a couple hours and went to catch some other sets. The music was great too, by the way. It just seems less important than the people right now.

The whole weekend felt pretty magical.