Wolfe Island Festival
by Justin Ridgeway
“If we get lost (which would be impossible) we’ll meet up at the truck,” Jake says. He saunters off .
I want to see Sarah Harmer. Tonight she is doing a reunion with the band she first set out with. Sarah is uniquely elegant in a skirt that shows off her knobby knees and though it’s not the pretty summer dress from the I Am Aglow video, it’s her through and through.
I like Sarah . I like her a lot. She sings to raise awareness about the Niagara Escarpment where both of us grew up and she looks like the genuinely friendly waitress at a country inn who recently fled a scandalous past in the vein of Jane Eyre.
I am surrounded by strangers, many of which appear quite familiar in a vaguely reflexive manner. I write the first of what will be many texts to my girlfriend who lives in New York and feels to me very far away at this particular moment.
Weeping Tile leaves the stage and I make a break for a nearby field behind the perimeter of whirring generators bounding like a buck over the neat harrows of turned hay to find a tree. I return to the truck and Jake isn’t there.
The stage nears as I meander the mine field of blankets on the grass, couples leaning up against each other like lawn chairs. Apostle of Hustle is on “National Anthem of Nowhere” is the song I am waiting to hear, and when it comes that time I notice that the stage lights have subsumed daylight. Faces in the crowd become indistinct . Behind me the crowd narrows and above their heads are the lights of the concession stands and beyond that the scouring clouds scratching the enamel of a reluctant but inevitable nightfall under the vigil of car headlights.
When Holy Fuck takes the stage I am back at the truck, waiting to see if Jake will turn up. Aaron makes a brief stop on his four-wheel ATV. He drops of bags of ice for the cooler, salutes a wave, then sprays gravel as he returns from wherever he came. I am left there listening to the music from a distance while across the way porch fronts sit idly, lights out for the night.
The last band is Wolf Parade. There is an acute sense of finality to the evening. They are energetic and as rowdy as last call on a Kingston night, but there is the underlying desire to just get this over with. We are older now, Jake and I, and those final ditch efforts to make something special in the dying hours would seem all the more desperate. It’s been a long week of work for Jake and me, and maybe he has already passed out in a ditch and maybe I will stand in the middle, just off second base, as the crowd parts around me emptying onto the streets of Marysville, heading back to the ferry to the mainland or to a sleeping bag stowed in their tent. It is a slow, quiet, almost sombre procession as the masses push out towards the gates. I begin walking with them, but then I find one last beer ticket. The concession stand is shut down for the evening, though . The track and field path are as alone as the last day of school when I begin heading back to the truck.
“Well, look what we have here.” I’m not sure if Jake is referring to me
“Where have you been all night?” .
There’s only a look of mischief in response as Jake produces a lighter from his pocket. I hear the crack of explosion before the jettison of spit fire, Jake burning delinquently down the street, running the intruders from the island. He disappears where the street narrows, into the black of an unlit corner and I understand that there is still more left in this night.
