My adventures throughout the years have always been interesting, even if sometimes they can be stressful, dangerous or just plain uncomfortable at the time I was living them. Anything is worth a good story has always been a motto that has stuck with me as a little push in everything I do to go a little further into the realm of uncertainty, and sometimes it hasn’t always worked out as I planned them.
There are also times, often much more rare than my daily strife or random endeavours, which posses a strangely dreamlike or cinematic quality where logistics fall ridiculously into place, interactions with fellow humans incessantly warm and seamlessly interesting and stimulating, and experience is nearly euphoric for a long period of time. This past weekend was one of these times.
I’m struggling to find the words to describe how my weekend was at Eaux Claires 2016. I feel anything I say will sell it short of how wonderful it actually was, but I feel silence about it is something I just can’t bear.
The year before was nothing short of amazing as well, so my hopes were set up high to begin with. The main difference was I was now going to have the full-immersion experience, if you will, camping instead of retreating to the comfort of my house back at Eau Claire’s student ghetto. After being offered to camp with some friends I had met the year before, I couldn’t pass up the offer.
After said friends had arrived, we packed three cars full of tents, food, beer and faces familiar and new, setting on our way to the Whispering Pines campground where security let me bring in my tiki torch fluid as long as I promised not to drink it. The campground was definitely better than the field behind which the later arrival would be shuffled into, as we had tree cover and a pond and a willow tree next to us, which gave it the sort of aesthetic legitimacy to call it a campground.
A festival campground is one of those sort of surreal landscapes which might first appear like some glorified and pleasant version of a refugee camp, as tents and bodies are packed ridiculously close together. I had estimated that the population density of the grounds at that time might be more than that of Shanghai, but my friend quickly reminded me that Shanghi did in fact have high rises, which might outperform the efficiency of even the Pines' tiny camp plots. It seemed that 90 percent of the people camping were young and nearly all of that 90 percent also beautiful, but in the kind of way which was inviting rather than intimidating. Yard games like cornhole, giant Jenga and morning Tai Chi sessions occupied the clearing at the middle of the campground.
Each morning would consist of waking woozy-eyed, eating, and quickly proceeding to day drinking. Our campsite consisted of three or four together (I could never tell where any campsite started or began) which were all friends of mine, friends of friends, or friends of friends of friends, all of which just became more simply friends by the end of the festival. In our drunken nights, morning and afternoons, I got to know people from around Wisconsin and the country whom seemed to share both my taste in music, my taste in beer and my taste on life. Very rarely have connections been so quickly made.
It also seemed like this was a part of the festival with strangers. My friend buying coffee for someone standing in line who didn’t realize it was cash only and ice getting bought for my friends by someone else seemed to make sense there and then, as if part of the festival experience was to remember how important the life of a stranger was, how it was so much like your own even though you didn’t know it at all.
Arriving each day at the festival was a bit disorienting, the two main stages loomed on each side of your vision with a crowd always accumulating at either one. I felt a little lost, mostly blindly following someone with an intense passion to see a certain artist. I was never disappointed. Each stage we went to seemed to offer their own sound.
Vince Staples hit me hard in the chest with the bass and his with hypnotizing background screen which caused me to be in a lyric-infused trance. I danced slow before raising my arms with the crowd and letting my body move with the verses being spit up on the stage.
On Friday it rained throughout the day into the night, but it did little to dampen spirits. LNZNDRF played a set up the hill, a music that seemed to accelerate steadily throughout the song until it was resounding with an intensity which forced us to create a dance circle and brew a “dance juice” with our miming dance moves which I suspected, when drunk, would of made another dance so hard they might collapse after they flailed their body and pulled a few muscles. I thought it was good we didn’t feed this invisible justice to anyone for safety reasons.
The drizzle proceeded through James Blake, who guided us through electronic beats which juxtaposed his smooth, ambient voice in a way which left me at conflict between swaying softly or swinging my arms to the beat drop.
The drizzle slowed before stopping before Bon Iver, who played his new album, "22, A Million." Even with our legs buckling with fatigue did we get chills, feeling out of body and out of mind with a music and a voice which always seemed to hit in a way which forced contemplation and long glances into the sky.
On Saturday the sky remained clear. Moses Sumney delivered a soothing mix of beats he looped after spitting them into the microphone, laughing about how it was hard to connect with anyone, which seemed strange at the moment when he performed “Plastic”, a soft melody which made me think of clouds and connected with me the way that few music does.
Time seemed to move differently at the festival grounds, moving from gig to gig, losing and finding friends, getting funky over Grateful Dead covers and Erykah Badu, exploring eerie art pieces in the forest or just lounging in the shade all seemed to operate outside of interference of worries or rules. At Eaux Claires the world seemed to be there, and at those moments the world that was there seemed relentlessly friendly, fun, young, interesting and dreamy. If it only lasted a weekend, I would be there from dawn till dusk.
One of the last performances of the night on Saturday, Beach House, was nothing less of a religious experience for me. The haunting melodies possessed me as I mindlessly swayed side to side, Victoria Legrand head-banging while she sang my soul to a deep, humbled sleep. As soon as the guitar riff for “Space Song” shook the air with its ethereal prowess, I felt lifted from my body, completely aware of my surroundings and forgetting I existed in a mortal body at all.
Rumors of Chance The Rapper’s appearance circulated throughout the festival the entire day, and so when we caught a glimpse of him on the side stage to the final event of the evening, Francis and the Lights, we were giddy with anticipation. Francis flailed madly around to his fresh, jaunty music, where he seemed to be having the most fun out of anyone at the festival simply because I thought that any moment he might keel over from the sheer amount of excitement his body must be enduring at that moment.
And, as if all stars aligned, Chance appeared on stage to perform a song before Francis returned with Justin Vernon to finish of the festival with “Friends”, the only song that could truly make the festival feel like it had finally finished.
In the disarray of people leaving the festival the rest of our campsite was reunited, and we made a quick stop at the chime poles before heading down the hill to the bus. I picked up a stick and began to join the noise. We hammered on the steel without any intention of making anything but racket, but for those few seconds I felt our random hammering seemed to fit into some odd metronome, as if despite our efforts to create chaos, a beautiful melody shook the festival grounds as the last word on a magical time in our lives.
