The Forty-Minute Drive Was the Right Call

April ninth. It is a Thursday, and everything outside is the particular quiet that April 2020 has decided to be, and I spent some time this morning going through photos from exactly one year ago and found these.

April 2019. I drove forty minutes each way, which for me is a real commitment, I am a person who calculates whether things are worth it in very specific units, to stand in a field outside the city and watch a band I have loved for about six years play a set that lasted, I would estimate, forty-three minutes before the PA cut out twice and they called it. The sky was doing something cinematic the whole time. The ground was damp from the night before. I wore the wrong boots, meaning the right boots for how I wanted to look and the wrong boots for standing in a field for three hours, and I made my peace with that.

Mid-laugh, unposed, muddy boots. The full picture.

I went alone, which I did not plan to do and then did anyway, and which turned out to be the correct decision. There is a version of a live event that only happens when you are not coordinating with anyone, when you are free to stand exactly where you want, move when you want, leave the crowd for ten minutes to get something fried on a stick without apologizing to anyone. Someone took these photos for me, a woman who was very generous with my phone for about ninety seconds and then handed it back and disappeared into the crowd. I don't know her name. I am grateful to her.

I have been thinking about live things lately, for obvious reasons, the particular texture of being in a room, or a field, with people who all showed up for the same reason. I did not know last April that this year there would be no fields. I am glad I drove the forty minutes. I am glad the PA cut out. I am glad I wore the wrong boots and stood in the mud and it did not matter at all.