I listened to Music While The World Caught Fire: Why A Festival Like Pickathon Truly Matters

I’ve felt quite a bit off-center, as of late.  If it’s not entirely noticeable on the outside or in the manner in which I continue moving, know that my insides are a little worse for wear.  Under the hood, I’m shook.

At 8:39am on Saturday, August 3rd, we were making our way down a trail from our campsite, taking our son to the little Trackers Earth setup that had been constructed temporarily on the Pendarvis family’s 80-acre organic farm in Happy Valley, Oregon.  The outdoors and wilderness program is one of the amenities made available, free of charge, for youth who attend the annual Pickathon music Festival.  On this particular day, we had signed our son, Ronin, up to join some “guild” where he would take part in ninja-related activities, which he later informed us involved him throwing “real” “metal” shurikens at a target.  Apparently, another kid hit the target “in the penis;” no doubt, the highlight of his entire day.  By the time that we dropped him off with his group, some white supremacist wingnut in El Paso had already murdered 22 Walmart shoppers and injured 2 dozen more in a hail of bullets.  That night, as we watched the Houston trio, Khruangbin perform in a clearing in the woods on a majestically lit stage made of branches, a similar massacre was taking place in Dayton, Ohio.

I have to be completely honest and admit that, being 3 days deep into a music festival, the news didn’t really penetrate us on a very tangible level, although we did hear about the shootings in passing.  I’m not exactly sure what this says about us, or our society, other than the fact that horrific acts of terrorism have become commonplace.  I wonder if we would have reacted differently if the kid wasn’t with us, this time.  It’s definitely not an issue that I felt like delving into too much while he was around, and something I knew would be waiting for me and that I could deal with when we got home.  I actually approach festival reviews in a similar way.  While many sites do daily updates from the field, I really try and immerse myself in the experience, first and foremost, choosing to do post-fest write-ups, rather than risk missing aspects and/or musical sets during these weekends, due to editing photos, posting about something I’d already witnessed, or even conducting interviews while on site.  Unfortunately, when I got home and would have typically jumped right into it, there was already more soul-shattering news for us to wade through.

The last time that we brought Ro to Pickathon, he was just shy of 2 years old.  Right now, he’ll be turning 8 in less than a month.  There are a few reasons why he hasn’t returned sooner.  One is that we tend to go pretty hard at this festival, often 14 hours a day and crashing out at around 3 am.  For us to bring our son, my GFF (girlfriend forever), Kim would be forced to turn back to camp early, once it got late, since I’m still the primary reviewer/photographer for our coverage.  It’s also the one weekend that we really take for ourselves each year and a situation where we work together intensely, as I’m not sure that we could adequately get the coverage that we need without her there shooting additional shots, helping to work out the schedule and covering the elements that I, so often, miss or overlook.  We’ve been doing this as a duo since 2013 and locked somewhat of a system down that way.  Another thing is that the environment, with its heat and dusty terrain, can become grueling for us, let alone for a young child who’s taking twice as many steps with his little legs.  What changed our perspective was that Pickathon is always overrun with children and activities for them to participate in.  Along with Trackers, there is a childrens stage, a Waldorf school, and numerous other opportunities to engage with music, as well as arts and crafts.  Another unavoidable aspect are the child buskers, or kids on other hustles, who are selling items like handmade jewelry, or even offering services like “misfortune telling.”  It’s a safe environment where they can team up with friends or meet new ones and run free throughout the premises.  The childrens amenities are more than an afterthought, they’ve become a valuable component of the festival itself and one that we’ve, unfortunately, never addressed to any thorough extent with our coverage in years past.

As promised (to the boy), we took a detour to Portland after the festival, rather than heading directly home to Seattle.  The plan was to get a hotel with a pool and rejuvenate ourselves for a day or so, before sifting through the handwritten notes and the stack of SD cards we’d filled up during our stay in the woods.  Fresh home and with the last bit of dirt barely cleared from my sinuses, I received a text, while I was at the grocery store. “Yo David Berman is Dead.”

This is the news that has really done me in the most, as of late.  I’d been looking forward to catching David with his Purple Mountains project, next month, after waiting a full decade for him to reappear with any sort of new musical output he was willing to offer.  This was a tremendous and hopeful return to form.  I haven’t really written much about my feelings on his passing, as I’ve already seen such an outpour from so many others, in so many other places, on so many other platforms, but this loss is a tough one.  Berman‘s work as a lyricist with Silver Jews and as a poet, as featured in his book Actual Air, is some of my favorite art in any medium.  One of the most difficult things about attempting to scrawl something of poignancy regarding him being gone is that anything any of us could ever dream of posting would, ultimately, fall short of his memory.  He was the man with the words.  He was the best of them.  I would imagine that the most effective way to truly understand who he was is to read his work and listen to his songs.  He told you everything you’d ever need to know about him or the world around us.  He even told us plenty about ourselves.  All of the tributes have been beautiful and many include anecdotes that may provide insight into added dimensions of his personality, but the best way to understand what he meant to those of us who loved him from a distance is to take in the work and feel it for yourself. The loss would be more painful if it didn’t still seem unreal, if I, like so many others, wasn’t still frozen like carbonite in disbelief.  This situation is so confusing to process that, rather than post a more straightforward tribute, I’ve clearly opted to tuck my feelings here, into whatever sort of piece this could be considered.

The very next day, on Thursday the 8th, another notable pair of deaths occurred  One of the defining aspects of Pickathon is the magnificent canopy of interwoven fabric that shades the mainstage area of the festival.  A brilliant example of form and functionality, the massive white covering is a sculptural wonder that not only limits direct exposure to the heat but becomes an awe-inspiring backdrop for the hypnotic stage lighting once the sun goes down.  Behind the fabrication and installation is a local Portland company called GuildWorks, which has been in business for two-and-a-half decades and, much like the music festival itself, has a strong dedication to sustainability.  During the breakdown, 2 members of the GuildWorks crew plummeted 40ft to their death, while operating from a boom lift that tilted and fell.  Pickathon takes on a tremendous amount of volunteers each year, but GuildWorks are contract workers.  Still, in an official statement, festival organizers offered their condolences by saying, “All involved in Pickathon are like members of a family to us.”  To those of us who have become regulars, sentiments like this can be read as 100% heartfelt and authentic, as opposed to some hollow PR soundbite.

While David Berman‘s passing remains a constant, penetrating, and somber fog threatening to chloroform my productivity, the tragic death of the GuildWorks arborists is even more unavoidable, in its own way.  These harrowing incidents, along with the shooting massacres and a massive ICE raid of 680 immigrant poultry workers — this also occurred on Wednesday, leaving an endless number of innocent and terrified children irreparably damaged, after discovering they were without parents, once their school day ended — can make a music festival feel like an incredibly trivial subject to focus on.  And even if you can manage to move beyond that reality, the Pickathon deaths create a whole different obstacle to work around, while attempting to craft a review.  How could we ever possibly consider providing any sort of write-up without addressing the tragedy connected to it and, if we do, how do we casually thread something like that in between content about food options, kids hunting for berries, or raucous post-punk sets in a sweaty barn?  This is all so incredibly heavy.  If I wait and mention it in the end, the subject is hovering until we get there.  If I lead with it… where do you go from there?  This murky storm cloud has been hovering in my mind until it finally occurred to me that these obstacles and a Pickathon review don’t necessarily conflict with one another quite as much as were feeling they might.

For me, going through Portland is a reminder of a good friend of mine who passed away from a stroke earlier this year.  The same night that I heard the news of his death, I was, effectively, forced to scrap an all-expense paid trip to Thailand that had been offered to me by another friend, due to some shady internal “family” issues — a shocking lack of consideration, or recognition of our basic human value, has left me avoiding certain people indefinitely.  Less than a month later, I spent my birthday in the emergency room with gallstones.  This led to invasive surgery and my inability to even sit up by myself for a while.  I later found myself in the emergency room again with an injury so gory that I’d rather not reference it in this article, for fear that it would derail the focus to a place we’d never return from.  Mere days before heading to Pickathon, I had a tooth cavity filled.  The doctor was unable to fully numb my mouth, so I felt it.

Aside from the now canceled Purple Mountains tour, the one thing that I’ve really been looking forward to through all of this is Pickathon.  We trudge through the bullshit with our eyes zeroed in on reaching this checkpoint.  It’s the one weekend that so many of the faithful wait for each and every year.  It’s a time of release.  It’s why founder, Zale Schoenborn can be found on the premises with a huge smile on his face throughout the entire weekend; he plans and waits for it just like the rest of us, and probably more so.  He’s drinking beer and eating ice cream (I’m assuming), and he’s in the mix in the crowds at the shows. There were even photos of him crowd surfing last year. When life is throwing roundhouse kicks to your sternum, Pickathon is the light at the end of the tunnel for the regular attendees. Schoenborn‘s passion is to share this world that he envisioned and has witnessed evolve over the last 21 years. It’s become a community and one that the founders take responsibility and ownership in maintaining. It’s also why I know that these fatalities on the property wound them on a deeply personal level far beyond any PR concerns. It’s a tragedy and one that brings hurt and suffering. It’s the antithesis of everything that the festival works so hard to embody. And even if they aren’t truly accountable for what happened during the breakdown, I have no doubt that they will be taking on the responsibility of helping to pick up the pieces and provide any possible solace to those that need it in the aftermath.

I took thousands of photographs last weekend and, as usual, I have a lot to share about my experiences on the farm. So, while we may have encountered a slight delay, you can still expect to read my accounts of things like the 3-hour Phil Lesh set in the woods, or how the frontman from Viagra Boys puked into a bucket on stage in the Galaxy barn. That’s on the way. Even with this drawn-out post that is, without a doubt, longer than 95% of any other review you’re likely to encounter about the festival — aside from my own, of course — I still put in a lot of work with my shots and notes that I want to share via the more “review” style approach that I had initially intended. That being said, please know that all that we’ve ever been trying to relay through any of our reviews about Pickathon in the past is what it means for people who make the annual trek to attend it. I can lavish you with the details later, but for now, this is the core of what it means… this is the point. Beyond the names on the lineup, the interactive visual art, the cutting-edge focus on sustainability, or even the beautiful landscape, there is something more. This is much different than the standard corporate blueprint that the music festival world is dominated by; this is a festival for people who hate festivals. As cheesy as it sounds, the Pendarvis farm feels like a little taste of utopia, a glimpse into possibilities of goodness and greatness, both for the world around us, as well as within ourselves. It’s simultaneously a place to inspire hope, as well as an oasis to heal from the disappointments that we’re already stumbling through and recovering from.

It’s hard not to question how we can sing and dance while the world burns around us, but this is the nature of the planet we exist on and the human experience. A better question might be to ask how we could do anything else. Much of the music that we came to see was created in that very spirit to celebrate and appreciate what we hold dear and/or to cope with what threatens it. Those who arrived at Pickathon for the early Thursday entry had the opportunity to see Phil Lesh perform on Jerry Garcia‘s birthday, dedicating his set to the memory of his lost friend and bandmate. On two different occasions during the weekend, Australia‘s Julia Jacklin sang beautifully affecting songs of heartache from her most recent release. Portland noise punk trio, HELP, put on a whirlwind performance, using all-out aggression to address social topics like class war. The Richard Swift Hex Band was an all-star collaboration formed to pay tribute to the late musician/producer who was close to the festival and worked professionally with a number of the performers. Meanwhile, Jupiter & Okwess hail from the Congo where they’ve endured the turmoil of a violent civil war only to push through and provide some of the most uplifting, infectious, and inspiring performances you could locate anywhere. Without the struggle, there would be no foundation for this art. Pickathon provides the ideal backdrop to embrace and process all of it, to absorb and release, before reentering your lives more centered. It’s a healthy space where you can step away from feeling positive about yourself and, perhaps, even bring a clearer mindset with you than you came in with. Sure, you can let loose by getting twisted at some corporate festival packed with frat boys and Pepsi logos plastered all over everything, but I can’t imagine most people coming away from a place like that wishing that their everyday lives were filled with more overpriced, high sodium “foods;” $18 Coors tallboys; and an increased risk of drunken belligerence, date rape, or your car windows getting busted out.

What it all comes down to is that, with is so much senselessness out there in the world, if there’s one thing that isn’t senseless it’s an event that gathers thousands of people together to celebrate the beautiful things, rejoicing in art and music without the feeling of some devious corporate entity looming overhead with their hands digging in your pockets for your currency reels. It’s an absolute tragedy that those men from GuildWorks fell during the breakdown, but what they were doing really was more than just some menial task. What they do has meaning. That canopy has become somewhat of a trademark for Pickathon, which means that it’s also become a symbol of what the festival represents. And it represents a lot to so many people. They’ve been stringing a particular type of magic between those trees all of these years. But, perhaps, the greatest magic of all is to get someone as cynical and jaded as myself to actually believe in something like this. In these times, we need festivals like Pickathon, more than ever. The question is if there even are any other festivals like Pickathon. My guess is, not exactly, but I’d like to believe that more options closer to this vein are popping up out of necessity and because people are tired of the bullshit. I’ve heard similar positive sentiments expressed about Doe Bay Fest, as far as the setup and environment, as well as it being a place that has formed a community of regular attendees that return year after year for it. Whatever it is, find your thing and run head first into it, unapologetic for finding a way to smile in these trying times. If you can’t find one, then create your own. And if you can make it to the Portland area the first week of August, there’s a farm there where you can go and make like an 8-bit Kid Icarus in a rejuvenation pool, each and every year. As for us, we’re already marking our calendar for the next one. If the universe is going to keep throwing the type of horrific garbage at us as it has been — and I imagine it will — then we’re going to need it