I’m right in the middle of the festival from hell. And I was so prepared this time. I had every reasonable thing done: all the garlic was cleaned and sorted and weighed and bagged, and some braided; the honey was jarred and the labels on, and the comb honey cut and boxed, all looking good. I even had beautiful small jars of pickled white garlic shining under their new canning lids. Washed, rubbed down like Mario used to do his wine glasses.

 

I had observed, with caution, the deteriorating long-term forecasts becoming ever shorter-term forecasts right up until the point of my departure. 

 

Here’s how it shook out. (And is still shaking.) 

 

I set my phone alarm for six. Up on time. Clothes all laid out for the darkness, made coffee. Because it’s raining, each box of garlic must be wrapped in a contractors’ big garbage bag to keep the garlic dry, the back of my blue Tacoma being uncapped. OK, fine, I scheduled an hour for that and for the final loading of the truck. “What am I forgetting? Got that, tablecloths, spoons for samples, jug of water for the used spoons, check, check, check, let’s go. I know there’s something.”

 

First, it was my phone, but I was only at the end of the driveway. I was loading a pumpkin when I remembered that my phone is on the wooden windowsill at the bottom of the stairs. I make a subconscious point of putting my phone only in certain places, so I just have to remember the right place. I take a pumpkin to the festival as pathetic decoration against the crass materialism of the cut-throat festival-is-real-life crowd. I will put the pumpkin on a bale of hay, or something, or stick it near a leg of my booth. It’s orange and orange is such a strange condition. I turned back up the driveway, got the phone, exactly at the bottom of the stairs, and said goodbye to the dog, again.

 

 About halfway to New Paltz, while thinking “Why did the picnic basket look so empty when I put the money box in there?” Well, it’s because I forgot to bring any plastic bags. Just as well, the organizers hate plastic bags and I have a few paper bags, some I bought from the cashier at Hannaford, “Hey, give me twenty large paper bags at five cents each, that will be one dollar, thank you.”  Most festival goers bring their own bags these years, a noticeable, real improvement in societal ways. Slight, but real. “We’ll just have to work it out. I have those small paper bags for singles,” I comforted myself.

 

Then, of course, I began to think there might be something wrong with me because I forgot to bring a chair. Most of the time I stand and use the chair to hold the picnic basket, sort of as a field office. But my foot hurts. My foot is killing me. The unpronounceable, plantar fasciitis (can you believe poems have been written about this affliction?) has me crippled. I was looking forward to sitting down around three in the afternoon. The metal lawn chair is on the brick patio near the front door, where I left it with a slight touch of my hand to remember to bungee strap it on at the end of loading. I loaded the garbage bag wrapped banana boxes of garlic one-pounders and braids in the dark, the rain misting like spit. But not the chair.

 

By the time I got to Cantine Field in Saugerties, I was three minutes late and had two hours to complete my set-up. Not bad. On the way to my booth, it is a fine feeling to drive through the brisk fairway past the eager vendors, each in a different stage of preparedness, and I look at them out of the corner of my eye, driving slowly, to see what they have and what they have not.

 

The wind is showing what it will soon become in a more sustained statement and the rain falls like shot from a twelve gauge and then ends, and then another flamboyance of pellets.

 

I know my spot, if not the number, and as I began unloading (get that tent off first), coming up the goat path, or whatever it is, two guys on a golfcart are transporting bales of hay, six high, and as they got to within an arm’s length, I yelled at them like a deranged old man, “Hey! Where ya’ goin’ with that? Give me one of those bales!” 

 

They stopped in their tracks. “Let me have one of those haybales.” I said, again, to their startled workman faces, more gently this time, as I could see they would acquiesce to my seniority, “I forgot my chair and will need something to sit on. Give me a dry one. Thanks.”

 

I was kinda laughing, as they were so serious, and, in their hearts, I knew they wanted to do well as volunteers. Oddly, late in the afternoon another vendor, across the aisle, asked where I got the hay, how did I get it, did I know someone? “No,” I said, “I simply asked.”

 

She said, “I know. I watched the whole thing.” She was OK. She offered to bring me a hot coffee. I declined. I think she was selling spiced garlic scapes, among other jars of products, and she brought me a sample, unprovoked, on a small wooden sample spoon and it was loaded with Indian spices like her husband with the turban and it was good, just I was not in the market. I’m never in the market for anything. But I was thinking, where can I get a baked potato on the way home, very hot?

 

I had put pieces of blue painter’s tape on my plastic bags of garlic, naming what was in each wrapped box, but the wind and the rain and my high speed on the Interstate had erased my notetaking. I never did figure out what was where. I was so disorganized. The wind blew like the speed of starlight, and bouts of rain lashed across my jars of honey and pickled garlic scapes as if scheming to melt everything into soil amendments for human less planet. 

 

I had a new tarp. Gigantic. I kept asking myself, why did I buy one so big? I had done calculations in my head, but when I opened it up, it seemed so excessive. That feeling didn’t last long. I wrapped it around the two windward sides of my booth’s canopy frame and tied it the best I could. (Don’t forget to bring more baler twine tomorrow.) For hours, I stood holding down the tent, literally, as other tents blew away, and the golf cart that had been carrying the hay was now transporting mangled canopy frames to the festival’s recycling booth. 

 

That was today. Now, on to tomorrow…