Notes from the Field 12
Was it for this my life I sought?
Was it for this my life I sought?
Somewhere in the Deer Creek lot on Sunday afternoon, before the third installation of a 3-night Phish run, two strangers with a microphone asked me and my 11-year-old niece how the weekend was treating us and what we thought was coming that night. Without giving it much thought I told them the following, “Night One was for our Spirits. Night Two was for our Souls. Night Three is going to be for our Future.” I said it with conviction. Not as a prediction or hypothesis. But what did I know? I was just a fan in a field who’d had two really good nights and an out of left field premonition. What I didn’t know was that I’d just called the score for the two weeks my life was about to have. And that the band, three nights running, was going to play along.
The first night set the shape for all three: a big, claimed patch of lawn, held down by my friend Kristel, her husband, and a motley crew of their people from all over the country. It had that invite-only, cool-kids’-corner feeling I hadn’t been on the right side of in a long, long time, and getting folded into it was its own kind of medicine before the band played a note. They opened on Blaze On, which has never been my jam. And yet, folded into that lawn on the front edge of a stretch that was about to ask everything of me, a song that just tells you to keep going and let it burn, hit different than it ever had. Sometimes the one you’ve skipped for years is the one you finally need. And then we started Bouncing Around the Room: thirty-some years, hundreds of plays, always run straight, and that night, for the first time ever, cracked open and jammed. If you want a thesis for a spirit that’s been told it’s too late to become something new, there it is, in the last song anyone expected to carry one. The rest of the night was illuminated by hugs from old friends, and the strangers who stopped being strangers by setbreak.
The second night, Stephen was with us on the lawn. They played 555, a song I’d never let myself fall all the way into before, and that night’s jam was a spectacular place to finally do it. The number’s always been mine anyway: the one that finds me on clocks and old addresses, the one my next Perimeditation session is named around. And they played Most Events Aren’t Planned. I’ll let the title sit there, because within the next 2 weeks life would prove it on me directly, in a way I’ll keep to myself for now. The song got there first, and it knew. Set two opened on Everything’s Right, which is the “Love-and-Light” flavor of Phish I’ve never fully developed a taste for, and then, thank God, it got dark and dirty. My Friend, My Friend, which I, consummate Phish Professional that I am, greeted by audibly shouting “Guyute!” the second it started. Led Zeppelin’s No Quarter was a welcome gut punch with Page’s vocals carrying a Black Sabbath Ozzy vibe. Then Carini. My oldest Phish friend Emily and I have a standing question, “will you hold my hand during Carini?”, because I like my Phish scary. And after all of it, they set us down easy on A Life Beyond the Dream. The soul night scored what was to come before it happened.
The third night I brought my niece, eleven years old, which is the only correct way to watch the future unfold, and Deer Creek handed her an ironically spot-on first show.
As the first notes played, she did something I have never once done. There’s a strip between the pavilion and the lawn, the Moat, or what I call the Wook Walkway, where people dance like no one’s watching, which is a lie, because they are as much fun to watch as the music is to hear. I’ve never had the nerve to do more than travel through that zone; I need my own square of ground. Matilda walked herself down there, and owned the whole damn thing. Arms out, eyes closed, not a care in the world, dancing among 25,000 people with total abandon in a patchwork dress I sewed with my own hands in 1998. The future, right in front of me, wearing something out of my past. Matilda is my late sister Katy’s girl. Katy doesn’t get to see this. I do. I stood up on the lawn and watched my sister’s daughter turn into a young woman I’m going to spend the rest of my life in awe of; awe and ache in the same breath, which is its own kind of practice.
It was just about the perfect first show: Upbeat the whole way through. Call-and-response she could shout back before she knew a single word; the glow-stick war, when the whole place starts hurling light at itself; Wilson in the encore, a field full of people chanting a name at the sky. The songs pointed forward too; Evolve second in, Mountains in the Mist and Stash to close the first set, and deep in the second, Also Sprach Zarathustra, the 2001 dawn-of-man music. The future, scored. The only thing missing was the Meatstick she was hoping to catch.
I don’t think the band was reading my mail. Four men from Vermont did not tune a three-night run to the private weather of my July. But that isn’t how meaning works, and it isn’t what has kept me coming back to Phish for the last 30 years. You bring the arc; the music hands you the language for it; and every so often the timing lands close enough to knock the wind out of you. I named it in a field before I had any right to. Spirits. Souls. Future. And then my life went and filled in all three.
Which brings me back to the question at the top. It’s the opening line of Stash, which they played that third night, first set. The band answers its own question two words later. If you know, you know. If you don’t, go find it. Better yet, go stand in a field and let them ask you in person. TLDR? The answer is “Maybe so, maybe not”.
One more thing, since we’re on the subject of the future. I came home from the run with an upper respiratory infection, the lot crud, aka Wook Flu that landed the following Tuesday and took both my voice and every last scrap of will remaining to finish anything I was working on at the time. A rude trick to play on a woman whose next release is a spoken Perimeditation session. But Vesper; the heart, the one about mercy, is finally landing mid-week. And mercy turns out to be the whole point of that last night on the lawn, too: I get to watch Katy’s daughter dance into a future my sister doesn’t get, and the actual practice; the hard one, is receiving that as a gift instead of a debt. That’s the session. Turns out the future I called from the lot was closer than I thought. I just had to get my voice back first.
-erin