🐟🚐🎶🏕️📸✌🏻

For one psychedelic weekend in 1997, I lived near the largest city in Maine. 

There were advertisements for it on the radio, mall posters, and fliers flapping underneath windshield wipers in every parking lot in The County. It was going to be a concert like no other and my father just had to be there. 

My mother said the tickets were not in their budget. 

Lucky for him, my dad knew a guy for everything. The very next day, he secured two vendor passes from the bottle recycling guy with a promise to work a few hours during the festival. My mother couldn’t say no. 

On the day before the band arrived, my parents packed a bag, dropped me off with my grandparents, and merged into the flood of RVs, VW vans, and rusty Skylarks all migrating northward up Route 11 like a school of barefooted salmon. 

Their destination? Loring Air Force Base. 

Their reason? Undetermined. 

Their life’s purpose? Phish. 

Two days.

Seven sets.

One abandoned tarmac at the edge of the earth.

A city of tents lit by glow sticks.

Grilled cheese.

Pine trees.

Moose.

Aster.

Late summer sun and cool August nights.

65,000 fans.

The Great Went. 

Meanwhile, I enjoyed three uninterrupted days of spoiling. My grandparents waited on me hand and foot. I was eating candies out of a crystal dish while my parents were sweating in the back of a hot van sorting sticky glass bottles into cardboard boxes.

While I was served chocolate milk and tucked into fresh lavender-scented sheets, my parents were zipping into a cold tent on a hard bed of pine needles.

And while I watched unlimited PBS the next day, my parents were watching long improv sets with repetitive lines like, “The tires are the things on your car that make contact with the road.” My mother still quotes that line to this day as a testament to what she endured for the man she loves. 

Just as quickly as that city was built, it was a ghost town by Monday. Children treated the exodus with the thrill of an Independence Day parade. Some locals sold hot meals to exhausted attendees beginning a long trek home wherever that happened to be. Businesses were left with full cash drawers and bare shelves. A handful of volunteers stayed behind to clean up the remnants of the weekend.

My parents returned to work. I started the second grade a few weeks later. After school, my mother stopped at Rite Aid to pick up envelopes of film she’d sent away to have developed a few weeks prior. Then we stopped at my grandparents’ place to visit. 

As I was busy selecting a candy from the crystal dish in the kitchen, my mother sat on the floor between her parents in the living room passing around photos of my swim meet in July, our vegetable garden, and Phish. 

Grandma was in her recliner, holding a cigarette delicately between her first two fingers as she pinched each photo between her thumb and pinky finger to look at before handing them over to Grandpa on the couch.

I’d been to the swim meet and I’d watched the garden grow—that was old news. However, I was rather keen to get a peek at the concert pictures, but my mother was screening each one like a bouncer outside a private club. Some were passed around, some merely flashed quickly with a smirk, and others got immediately shuffled to the back of the pile. 

Suddenly, my mother doubled over giggling. Apparently, the next image came with a backstory.  

Early on the second day of the festival, a real photographer—Spencer Tunick—had gathered a crowd of more than a thousand people and directed them to lay shoulder-to-shoulder, head-to-toe on the tarmac. 

Naked.

The official photo was taken from high up in a crane and it was one of the more memorable happenings of the whole festival. Many believe it was an attempt to break a world record. The image became an iconic installment of the photographer’s 50 states nude project. 

Mom slid over the photo. I was still loitering by the candy dish, craning my neck to try and catch a glimpse.

“Everyone is too far away to make out anything in the picture,” she prefaced. Allegedly, my dad had heard about this world record photo opportunity on Phish’s Bunny Radio and, as soon as he saw naked people, he grabbed his wife’s hand and followed them. Knowing my mom, her soul probably left her body as soon as she realized where they were going. 

“We. Are. Not. Getting. Naked,” she had asserted. Multiple times.  

“Shh. Act natural. We’re just going to watch,” he reassured her. Flashing their vendor bracelets, my father waltzed into the VIP area of the production with the confidence of a man who knew a guy. He bluffed that he was with security and the red tape lifted. My dad is the kind of man who could smooth-talk a police officer into paying him a fine.

According to my mother, they had just enough time to whip out a disposable camera and take a few pictures of the crowd before somebody who actually was security noticed. They were promptly ushered out of the area. Part of me still wonders if that’s what really happened, or just the version of the story she chose to tell her parents.

While I eavesdropped on my mother telling this story, I shifted my gaze to the corner of the living room, where my grandfather had quietly scooted closer to the table lamp. His bifocals were slid to the tip of his nose and his teeth dangled in his shirt pocket. He was gleefully hunched over the photo, cackling.  

In his other hand was a magnifying glass.