Sunday night in North Egremont, I walked into the opening night concert for the Berkshire Summer Strings, a new week of music jams and workshops and children’s programs. The instructors held a concert, and I learned that several of them teach at Maine Fiddle Camp — that camp has inspired Erika Ludwig to launch this new festival. I’ve been there and fallen in love with it, and seeing the beginnings of it here is elating. This is what it was like. (I wrote this in August 2007, when I came home.)
For the last three days I have been back here, sleeping in clean sheets, wearing dry socks, sitting on the grass completely entirely alone. If you want a sense of how much you take for granted, spend six hours in the woods in the rain in a damp sweater, wondering whether your bedding will be dry at the end of the day. Because climbing into your sleeping bag later and feeling yourself thaw — that slow building warmth comforts to the marrow.
And getting yourself out of the dining hall in the afternoon, listening to the fiddles and drums ripping through reels under a yellow tent in the rain — getting yourself to pick up the whistle and work out a note, maybe a run, maybe a key, until they start on a tune you know and you can actually play it that fast when there’s a rhythm behind you, and who cares that over six fiddles and four drums you can’t even hear yourself, because you can feel yourself and the music in your hands — let me tell you, that turns a body on.
I went alone. That wasn’t in the plan; the friends who brought me last year could not come at the last minute, for the kind of reason no one can plan for and no one can do anything about except to be where they have to. So Sunday afternoon, I drove up the coast, just me and a borrowed tent and my grandmother’s old sleeping pads, a notebook and a couple of books, and three recorders, and a pint of honey roasted peanut butter. And I pitched my mint green tent in a circle of white pine, all by myself mind, and went off to hear the first staff concert.
So for five days I lived with 150 fiddlers, button box and drum and mandolin players, banjo pickers, guitars, cellos, pianists, joueurs de contrebasse, step dancers, Quebeçois singers… and whistlers. We had youths on their own, picking up songs on the first pass and following the staff around, and the staff themselves, about my age and kindly and intimidating, and families playing together, and toddlers building sand castles along the stage. We ate, talked and breathed music.
And every night, while the light between the clean-lined trees softened into clear summer rose, we listened to the teachers play. Deep and quick and low, fiddle with clipping feet, cello and chanting, folk ballads, syncopated waltzes on three guitars, Kentucky harmonies: Hey Blue — you can come too. I would sit looking out where the lake used to be and feel thankful, aware of thanks so intensely that I wanted to hand them on, to keep them alive. There’s so much in this world I am in love with.
So I wrote a tune. My first ever. I wanted to to talk to the friends who gave the place to me, who are a part of it. The idea came to me the first evening. Last year, I played solo on stage for the first time; it’s a good place for firsts. Monday morning, I walked down to where the lake had been. Water still moved in mid-channel, and the dark mud and brilliant weed and strands of pickerel in flower looked like lake bottom. Someone had opened the gate in the dam, we heard, and it had gotten wedged, and no one wanted to unwedge it in the dry season.
Meantime, I wandered by a fleet of confused-looking ducks and played phrases over again and tried to remember what I’d just played. Tuesday afternoon, in the break, I wrote them down until I had enough of them for a reel. And Thursday I played them at one of the camper concerts, with the camp director on piano.
It was an amazing thing, to hear that weird high and low whistle gather a beat and a body of chords and fly. It’s in E minor. I sat in with a piano class one morning, to hear an old-time Maine fiddler play the Optimist’s polka and tell stories about Canadian fiddle contests fifty years ago, and I learned how to find relative minors. Turned out the C naturals I’d wanted to put in really belonged there.
Every morning, I spent two hours with the whistles. We had everyone: old and young, old and new, people who could finger a note, people who could play for dances, people who could dance a slip jig. Some I knew from last year. One played the alto, and I got out my tenor and sweet-talked my right hand into playing dance tempo (it’s a stretch hitting the lower notes. The tenor’s nearly three feet long.)
One of our younger members, also one of the best, marched around the cabin porch playing the huntsman’s chorus. Another taught us the words to Mari’s Wedding. The teacher began arranging simple harmonies so that we could all play the same tunes, and they wouldn’t all be Old Joe Clark.
Afternoons, I sat in with Quebeçois fiddlers and picked up tunes as they went over them. Quebeçois music has a pattering, off-beat whimsey, quick triplets and clear beats and no pauses, an air of laughing behind the strings. One afternoon, the lead fiddler taught a workshop on call and response French songs: Ce sont les Filles de Ste Julie — ah! qu’elles sont belles! Lovers with comically giant appetites at dinner and a wink in the chorus.
Evenings after the concert, people danced fox trots to a bugler, the fast jam played in the kitchen, volunteer cooks finished the whipped cream, and wakeful folk played for each other at a late concert that ended in lullabyes. Sometimes I did too. And sometimes I went back to my tent and read a few drowsy lines and listened to the drums and the swing of a dozen bows across the wood.
A flageolet, by the way, is a wooden flute. And the world has at least one Quebeçois piper in it, because I’ve heard him. Not in the flesh, not yet, but I took his music home with me.
