Elderberry Jam

This was where I should have been headed, this JAM upon a hill. I don't quite know what the chunk of plastic drainage pipe was for--that twilight wormhole to alternate realities?

https://threatqualitypress.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/altered-states-4.jpg 

Here's the situation.  I'd heard of Elderberry Jam, from Graham, and had looked up just enough to decide I'd plop down the 25 dollar Saturday admission.  That seemed a little steep, but I was curious enough to go.  I'd had not such a successful experience going to the Blue Note for a "country" band (sometime, I'll write about that and show you the shoes that shaped that event).  For the Elderberry Jam, I expected, not the Testicle Festival, not Art in the Park, maybe something like the Hartsburg Pumpkin Festival, just focused on a smaller and less orange agricultural product.  All wrong.

Graham had texted me google-map directions.  I looked.  I really did. Head down 63 South, daydream about my highway tree project, the need for high speed subway/rail from Columbia to Jeff City, be irritated at that "parkway"/industrial park, whatever it is. Turn off through Ashland, following Route M out of town, east and south, and look for Jemerson Road on the left.  Simple.

And it's a pleasant scene, where I would have stopped to take pics of scenery, had someone not been following too close on those windy roads.  Cattle wading in a clear pond, hay rolls out in fields, caught between an image Keats might have used and something quite alien.  Whole landscapes that could be gathered, and put into minor commodification as postcards.  Not that I'd ever be able to make money with postcards of Missouri fields and hills, but I've always been fascinated by how that simple piece of hard paper can shape our sense of beauty, our sense of exotic place.  And more cynically, image at this speed is about all the attention most people have to give these days.  How does one get involved in the vast postcard industry?

Oh, and I passed this yard proudly flying its own Confederate Flag. I'd liked to have been able to stop and chat, find out more there. Sometime.

And I passed a "castle," a huge structure on a hill with its own French turret, and passed several houses with 10 or 12 acres of straight-mowed lawns, the kind that require high-grade mowers and either local serfs or captive sons to maintain.  Maintain--to impress us?  To keep a sense of "civilization" out here a good ways from any good coffee shop?  Or, are we really, really in Little Dixie down here...

I kept going.  No Jemerson Road.  When I got to that big plunge, the way the roads always suddenly announce that we're getting closer to the river, the air changes, the view shifts...you know, River ahead, I started wondering.  Still, I kept going until I reached the official town line of Wilton.  And I didn't remember Wilton on the map.  So I stopped, got lucky that I still had a few bars of phone service, and dialed out that map to way local scale.  Oops.  That other road, not Jemerson, that connects with M.  

So, back up the hill.  Past the castles and plantation lawns.  Past the Stars and Bars.  Until I found Cedar.  Which led to Jemerson.

Ok.  Several miles, winding through the woods.  Jemerson was asphalt for 30 foot, then white gravel.  No festival signs.

 

I did stop, lean out the Jeep, and ask two women in a pickup if I was headed the right way.  They laughed.  "Yeah, up there on the left.  Keep goin'."  I passed barefoot people in the creek, crossed those not-bridges, those concrete bits of road that would be underwater in even a hard mist, passed lots of "Flood area" signs... 

Saw some tents and not much else, till Jemerson decided to dead end at Hart Road.  And with only a few more backtrack turns, found a place offering to take my 25 dollars and vague directions where to park.  I've arrived.

I parked between two rows of elderberries and walked up to the hill.

With a pretty quick survey of the place...tents...

...find-a-spot-camping (not my plan)...a few vendors...

 

The requisite hand-made jewelry and display bones...

 

One tent for readings, spiritual, though I didn't catch what persuasion...

But to my intense dismay, on this 90 degree and climbing mid-afternoon, no beer!  Oh, folks had their own coolers, but not as Graham suggested, anyone selling beer.  A different inflection here, though not my taste...

Well, a few more vendors... 

 

Sweating pretty well by then, not shifted into the shirtless mode of most guys there, I got the 4 dollar shaved ice, blue raspberry.  I expected a regular slushy, but no, this just mostly ice with a little syrup a quarter way down.  I almost went back to complain, then had that rural light bulb moment, and realized that a cup of sweet ice would be just fine, with a good pour of peach brandy on it.

So I just settled down on the grass to look around at the people, waiting for Graham's band to play at 5, which seemed an awful long ways away.

 

I did investigate the actual elderberries-in-production...

 

and harvested a few.  Not bad.  But although there was one booth from an elderberry farm in North Carolina, this isn't at all a summery harvest festival.  I went back to sweating, sitting on the ground, not tie-dyed at all, feeling more than a little out of place.

But then, Sam wandered by.  He's the guy who'll be able to ramble off a book when he's 80--my D&D friend from Lupus.  And Sam was camping for the weekend with a huge icy cooler of Pabst.  All good again.

That's Sam, posing by the poster up on the hill above the stage.  We hung out, watched people...

 

This, by the way, not a bear, but a hairy guy coming up through the rows of elderberries...

 

 

 

I got us some food, the veggie Thai noodles, which Sam rightly critiqued as needing some more spices, some vinegar, eh, more...

And after a lot of trips back, some riblets.  Which also needed some oomph...

 

More tents during a beer refill...

And we ran into a guy who was showing off his silver neck-pieces, made he said from silver grain.  He's tried to get a sales deal here in Columbia with Good Nature, right up here in Alley A, but said they wanted a 50% consignment fee.  I urged him to try some of the places further down 9th.

A friend of Sam...

And finally, Graham's band, Don't Mind Dyin'...

BC, of Klik's, the main singer.  Graham is back there in the blue shirt on the bass.

More folks there...

 

Bubbles on the hill...          

Ok, I like bubbles...

And other folks conserving their energy, for unlike me, most people there were camping, and had a long night of festivity ahead...

I do want to write more about festivals someday.  Seems like I once had some theory about how festivals worked as a kind of attenuation, a way to live inside hyperobjects, the particular take that Tim Morton gives to speculative realism.  I had been thinking of festivals in terms of both size and self-conscious performance, but that got lost in some whirl of grading or travel.  

In any case, I need to build up my "festival bank," my realm experiences here in mid-Missouri, before I'll figure anything out. Back to the Rose for more Don't Mind Dyin' on Friday?  Or, same time, Soren's band, Big Muddy, at D&D?  I think we're set to to the Talking Horse theater on Saturday.  And next week, there's the Ashland Rodeo.  I could maybe go to cage fighting at that country bar on Paris, the Wild whatever.  The State Fair in Sedalia?  The October Sufi Camp?  Back to Lupus for the Chili Fest on Oct. 3?

So much to do.

later, bob