My First Pennsic
Saturday evening we returned from Pennsic, and I'm almost caught up with life again.
The Evil Vortex of Youngstown
Getting there was a pain. First we dawdled about getting ready and ended up deciding to head out on Sunday instead of Saturday as we'd originally planned. No big deal there. Saturday night was fun. But then we made the mistake of trying to take a more direct route than the official directions suggested; since the place is nearly due east of Akron on the other side of the Pennsylvania border, a lot of the locals here take more direct surface roads instead of the interstates. Without going into the gory details, I'll just say that I never ever want to try to drive through Youngstown again. Between confusing roads, poor signage, and an insufficient map, it took us over three hours to make a trip that should have taken less than two. But we did get there. In daylight even.
Overcoming Culture Shock
This was my first Pennsic. Pennsic is basically a huge SCA festival -- 10,000 people in medieval garb taking over a campground for a couple weeks (most people go only for the second week). I'm not in the SCA, and have no medieval persona, though over the past six years nontacitare has taken me to enough Ohio SCA events that I'm pretty familiar with the SCA by now. But this was a new experience for me.
My closest point of reference was Pagan Spirit Gathering, but that's less than a tenth the size and has a fairly different culture (though there's certainly some overlap). For me the most immediately noticable difference, besides the size, was clothing; at PSG (like many pagan festivals) nobody cares what you wear or even whether you wear anything at all, while at Pennsic the expectation is that you'll at least make an attempt to wear period clothing. So at first I was a bit frustrated at feeling like I couldn't leave the tent without getting my all my garb on properly, but I soon found that nobody cared that much about propriety, especially around the camp site. It was also easier after I bought myself a simple cloth belt pouch, so I wouldn't need to rely on my decidedly non-period pockets. And seeing lots of women wearing bellydancing garb all week certainly helped. :-)
Our camp site was beautiful, right among the willow trees on the Cooper's Lake campground's namesake lake; the only things between our tent and the lake edge were three willows and the kitchen canopy we shared with the two other people at our site. Right next to that was a propane-heated shower our neighbors had set up and allowed us to use (since someone from our group helped set it up); this meant I never experienced the legendarily cold Pennsic showers.
A Detour East
Once I moved beyond our camp site, Pennsic for me took a somewhat middle-eastern turn. I'm more accustomed to seeing western and northern European culture represented in the SCA (and just about everywhere else, for that matter), so I had some rare opportunities here. We were camped near a mideast-themed encampment, "Orluk Oasis", which had a pavilion set up for various events throughout the week; the first time I went by there was what appeared to be a belly-dancing performance, there was a "hafla" there one night, and every day at noon they had beginning drum classes there. As I started planning my days by looking at the available workshops, I noticed a series of Arabic classes (taught by someone from Columbus, I later discovered), and I figured that might be something fun and different to try. Partly because these were two-hour classes, I ended up only making it to one of them, about recognizing Arabic letters. I now know about as much Arabic as Russian: that is, I can distinguish the letters and can even guess what a few of them sound like.
I also went to a "Middle Eastern Dance For Manly Men" class (mantra: "Project strength with the arms," though I'm still not entirely clear on how), taking the opportunity to take nontacitare up on her previous statements that she'd only take a bellydancing class if I would. So now it's her turn. :-) Next to find her some clothes for it.....
Mid-week I bought a drum, a dumbek with an 8.5" plastic head (no need to worry about weather effects) and a 15" long aluminum body, for only $40. So after that I went to the remaining two noon drum classes and learned some middle eastern rhythms and techniques, as well as finding out about further resources. (Mantra: Dum-tek-ka.)
With all the middle-eastern culture around, I couldn't help contrasting the experience with the currently common views of the mideast in the "mundane world". There, the middle east is seen as an endless source of violence and unrest, and all-too-common views include nuking the whole area or Islam being an inherently evil religion. It was a relief to be around positive views of middle-eastern culture.
Anyway... I did take one performance class without a middle eastern theme: I took a beginning juggling class. I can't really juggle yet, but at least I know the method so it's just a matter of practice if I want to be able to juggle. (Mantra: Catching doesn't matter. Throwing is all that matters.)
"Where's the ark?"
Wednesday night the skies opened up, complete with thunder and lightning, and this first rain of the week lasted about twelve hours. Impressive, but not too big a deal at first. I was more worried about a tree branch falling on our tent than anything else, and that didn't seem too likely with willows. Things got more exciting around noon Thursday when a storm went right over Pennsic and lightning struck the central area of the campground. (I wasn't in those areas at the time, but apparently some people got minor shocks but nobody was really hurt.) I waited until the lightning passed before going up to the drum class that day. :-)
That night we went to a bardic circle at an encampment called "Bard's Haven". There were two particularly notable things about it for me. First, the short walk there was the first time that week I experienced truly excessive mud. Second, this was the first bardic circle I'd ever seen where some people showed up, sang their song(s), and left, without staying to hear others. These people and others were also notable for insisting on multiple songs in a row, rather than letting others have a turn before taking a second turn. (One positive thing about this was that it avoided the all-too-common bardic circle problem of having only two or three people actually willing to perform. And yes, I tend to be part of the problem in those situations.) Most of the people there were wonderful, and our hosts were incredibly generous and hospitable.
Friday was when things really got interesting. Things got off to a good start: I went to the finale show of "Coxcomb Academy", the performers' group that held classes throughout the week on performing. (They gave the juggling class.) nontacitare spent much of the week with Coxcomb, and she (or actually kateryndraper, I suppose) performed twice in this show, first telling a fun story, then later doing a magic trick. I liked her magic act better, possibly because I'd heard the story many times before while her magic act was new. A lot of the other performances were fun too.
As the show was winding down, the rain started to come down again, and I remembered that we had some clothes hanging out to dry. So I ran all the way back to the campsite (getting briefly lost on the way) to take them in. I got drenched, but somehow the hanging clothes were mostly dry. I stayed inside the tent reading (Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon) for a while until the rain died down again; by that time the ground under one corner of the tent was starting to get pretty marshy, and I noticed that the best place for it to drain was blocked by a pile of dirt. So I did a bit of minor trenching work, which I probably should have asked permission for first, but part of it turned out to be useful later, and permission ended up being irrelevant....
Not long after nontacitare returned from the Coxcomb cast party, the rain started once again. At first I thought it was nice having the rain tapping the tent while the two of us stayed dry inside, but it's also nice for the rain to quit occasionally. It didn't quit; it just kept pounding harder. And harder. And harder. We decided that it might be best to stay in that evening. We noticed a couple places where water was slowly leaking into the tent, and we threw towels where we could. Then it got to the point that almost every staked-down point on the tent was leaking, plus one or two places on the roof. The rain was still pounding hard. This was a stressful situation to say the least, and it didn't help that the rain had kept us from getting any dinner.
Finally we ventured outside to the kitchen canopy, discovering along the way that the entire area was thick with water flowing down from the hill (the, uh, downside of being right on the lake), making my attempted trench look laughable (though one part of it did seem to be helping a bit). The kitchen area had one small section where the ground wasn't underwater, and we faked a dinner of whatever we could grab and eat without getting totally soaked, while we watched the lake rise and the massive amounts of water hitting it. The amount of water coming down was incredible, as was the fact that it just kept going. I also noticed that the reason the staked points on the tent were leaking was that those points were all now underwater; we were just lucky they weren't leaking more. (The roof leaks came from window edges in the rain fly.) At this point I just wanted to be home (only two hours away!), but that thought was tempered by the catch-22 that it would be impossible to pack up in the downpour, while if the rain stopped then my need to get home ASAP would be gone.
We decided that the best thing to do was to secure as much as possible in the tent against water, dam up the floor leaks with towels and dirty clothes, and rearrange our bedstack to
protect us from any water getting to the bed. (The nice soft absorbent blankets went away, and we got inside the sleeping bags with the water-resistant nylon shell.)
I think the rain finally stopped around 6 or 8 in the morning. When we got up, we found that our cloth dams had mostly protected us, but enough water got in that it was good we'd taken the other precautions. Nothing was damaged, and we were insulated from the water under the bed. When we went outside we saw that the water had subsided from the immediate ground, though it was still muddy everywhere, and deep in some areas. We started hearing about other people who'd literally had 6-12" rivers of water going directly through their tents, and even entire campsites that had to evacuate because of deep water. So ultimately we were pretty lucky.
Aftermath
As we started packing up, I noticed that it was actually hurting for me to kneel down, rolling things up and all. I figured that all the extra walking over the week was finally getting to me (earlier in the week I had noticed some leg muscles letting me know that they weren't accustomed to this much work), or maybe that the bedding had been a little too hard on my body. It got so bad that I simply could not kneel anymore, and had to put more of the work than I liked onto nontacitare and one of our campmates (who's probably two decades older than me, so I really felt bad).
We managed to get the car out of the muddy parking lot without getting stuck too badly, and then I made countless trips up and down the hill packing up the car. (Meanwhile I watched as some guy got his Saturn stuck on the side of the road. Twice. Paying attention to gravity, drive wheels, and traction can be useful.) By the time the car was packed, I was seriously ready to get out of there, get some food, and get home. But I also was noticing my pained knees.
By the time we got home (skipping Youngstown entirely, and finding the house mercifully dry), I realized that it wasn't just my knees; pretty much all my joints were sore. I added the process of loading the car (lug something up the hill, go back down the hill, repeat ad infinitum) to the possible causes. I took a long shower and bath, went to bed, and realized that I felt slightly chilled and might have a fever.
Well, the fever seems to be gone by now, but the sore joints remain. It's very odd since I don't really have any other symptoms -- no nausea or headache or anything -- so that would seem to rule out all the diseases Google found for me. I suppose I should go see a doctor soon; I'm a bit too young for chronic joint pain, and this seemed to come on rather rapidly anyway.
The Evil Vortex of Youngstown
Getting there was a pain. First we dawdled about getting ready and ended up deciding to head out on Sunday instead of Saturday as we'd originally planned. No big deal there. Saturday night was fun. But then we made the mistake of trying to take a more direct route than the official directions suggested; since the place is nearly due east of Akron on the other side of the Pennsylvania border, a lot of the locals here take more direct surface roads instead of the interstates. Without going into the gory details, I'll just say that I never ever want to try to drive through Youngstown again. Between confusing roads, poor signage, and an insufficient map, it took us over three hours to make a trip that should have taken less than two. But we did get there. In daylight even.
Overcoming Culture Shock
This was my first Pennsic. Pennsic is basically a huge SCA festival -- 10,000 people in medieval garb taking over a campground for a couple weeks (most people go only for the second week). I'm not in the SCA, and have no medieval persona, though over the past six years nontacitare has taken me to enough Ohio SCA events that I'm pretty familiar with the SCA by now. But this was a new experience for me.
My closest point of reference was Pagan Spirit Gathering, but that's less than a tenth the size and has a fairly different culture (though there's certainly some overlap). For me the most immediately noticable difference, besides the size, was clothing; at PSG (like many pagan festivals) nobody cares what you wear or even whether you wear anything at all, while at Pennsic the expectation is that you'll at least make an attempt to wear period clothing. So at first I was a bit frustrated at feeling like I couldn't leave the tent without getting my all my garb on properly, but I soon found that nobody cared that much about propriety, especially around the camp site. It was also easier after I bought myself a simple cloth belt pouch, so I wouldn't need to rely on my decidedly non-period pockets. And seeing lots of women wearing bellydancing garb all week certainly helped. :-)
Our camp site was beautiful, right among the willow trees on the Cooper's Lake campground's namesake lake; the only things between our tent and the lake edge were three willows and the kitchen canopy we shared with the two other people at our site. Right next to that was a propane-heated shower our neighbors had set up and allowed us to use (since someone from our group helped set it up); this meant I never experienced the legendarily cold Pennsic showers.
A Detour East
Once I moved beyond our camp site, Pennsic for me took a somewhat middle-eastern turn. I'm more accustomed to seeing western and northern European culture represented in the SCA (and just about everywhere else, for that matter), so I had some rare opportunities here. We were camped near a mideast-themed encampment, "Orluk Oasis", which had a pavilion set up for various events throughout the week; the first time I went by there was what appeared to be a belly-dancing performance, there was a "hafla" there one night, and every day at noon they had beginning drum classes there. As I started planning my days by looking at the available workshops, I noticed a series of Arabic classes (taught by someone from Columbus, I later discovered), and I figured that might be something fun and different to try. Partly because these were two-hour classes, I ended up only making it to one of them, about recognizing Arabic letters. I now know about as much Arabic as Russian: that is, I can distinguish the letters and can even guess what a few of them sound like.
I also went to a "Middle Eastern Dance For Manly Men" class (mantra: "Project strength with the arms," though I'm still not entirely clear on how), taking the opportunity to take nontacitare up on her previous statements that she'd only take a bellydancing class if I would. So now it's her turn. :-) Next to find her some clothes for it.....
Mid-week I bought a drum, a dumbek with an 8.5" plastic head (no need to worry about weather effects) and a 15" long aluminum body, for only $40. So after that I went to the remaining two noon drum classes and learned some middle eastern rhythms and techniques, as well as finding out about further resources. (Mantra: Dum-tek-ka.)
With all the middle-eastern culture around, I couldn't help contrasting the experience with the currently common views of the mideast in the "mundane world". There, the middle east is seen as an endless source of violence and unrest, and all-too-common views include nuking the whole area or Islam being an inherently evil religion. It was a relief to be around positive views of middle-eastern culture.
Anyway... I did take one performance class without a middle eastern theme: I took a beginning juggling class. I can't really juggle yet, but at least I know the method so it's just a matter of practice if I want to be able to juggle. (Mantra: Catching doesn't matter. Throwing is all that matters.)
"Where's the ark?"
Wednesday night the skies opened up, complete with thunder and lightning, and this first rain of the week lasted about twelve hours. Impressive, but not too big a deal at first. I was more worried about a tree branch falling on our tent than anything else, and that didn't seem too likely with willows. Things got more exciting around noon Thursday when a storm went right over Pennsic and lightning struck the central area of the campground. (I wasn't in those areas at the time, but apparently some people got minor shocks but nobody was really hurt.) I waited until the lightning passed before going up to the drum class that day. :-)
That night we went to a bardic circle at an encampment called "Bard's Haven". There were two particularly notable things about it for me. First, the short walk there was the first time that week I experienced truly excessive mud. Second, this was the first bardic circle I'd ever seen where some people showed up, sang their song(s), and left, without staying to hear others. These people and others were also notable for insisting on multiple songs in a row, rather than letting others have a turn before taking a second turn. (One positive thing about this was that it avoided the all-too-common bardic circle problem of having only two or three people actually willing to perform. And yes, I tend to be part of the problem in those situations.) Most of the people there were wonderful, and our hosts were incredibly generous and hospitable.
Friday was when things really got interesting. Things got off to a good start: I went to the finale show of "Coxcomb Academy", the performers' group that held classes throughout the week on performing. (They gave the juggling class.) nontacitare spent much of the week with Coxcomb, and she (or actually kateryndraper, I suppose) performed twice in this show, first telling a fun story, then later doing a magic trick. I liked her magic act better, possibly because I'd heard the story many times before while her magic act was new. A lot of the other performances were fun too.
As the show was winding down, the rain started to come down again, and I remembered that we had some clothes hanging out to dry. So I ran all the way back to the campsite (getting briefly lost on the way) to take them in. I got drenched, but somehow the hanging clothes were mostly dry. I stayed inside the tent reading (Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon) for a while until the rain died down again; by that time the ground under one corner of the tent was starting to get pretty marshy, and I noticed that the best place for it to drain was blocked by a pile of dirt. So I did a bit of minor trenching work, which I probably should have asked permission for first, but part of it turned out to be useful later, and permission ended up being irrelevant....
Not long after nontacitare returned from the Coxcomb cast party, the rain started once again. At first I thought it was nice having the rain tapping the tent while the two of us stayed dry inside, but it's also nice for the rain to quit occasionally. It didn't quit; it just kept pounding harder. And harder. And harder. We decided that it might be best to stay in that evening. We noticed a couple places where water was slowly leaking into the tent, and we threw towels where we could. Then it got to the point that almost every staked-down point on the tent was leaking, plus one or two places on the roof. The rain was still pounding hard. This was a stressful situation to say the least, and it didn't help that the rain had kept us from getting any dinner.
Finally we ventured outside to the kitchen canopy, discovering along the way that the entire area was thick with water flowing down from the hill (the, uh, downside of being right on the lake), making my attempted trench look laughable (though one part of it did seem to be helping a bit). The kitchen area had one small section where the ground wasn't underwater, and we faked a dinner of whatever we could grab and eat without getting totally soaked, while we watched the lake rise and the massive amounts of water hitting it. The amount of water coming down was incredible, as was the fact that it just kept going. I also noticed that the reason the staked points on the tent were leaking was that those points were all now underwater; we were just lucky they weren't leaking more. (The roof leaks came from window edges in the rain fly.) At this point I just wanted to be home (only two hours away!), but that thought was tempered by the catch-22 that it would be impossible to pack up in the downpour, while if the rain stopped then my need to get home ASAP would be gone.
We decided that the best thing to do was to secure as much as possible in the tent against water, dam up the floor leaks with towels and dirty clothes, and rearrange our bedstack to
protect us from any water getting to the bed. (The nice soft absorbent blankets went away, and we got inside the sleeping bags with the water-resistant nylon shell.)
I think the rain finally stopped around 6 or 8 in the morning. When we got up, we found that our cloth dams had mostly protected us, but enough water got in that it was good we'd taken the other precautions. Nothing was damaged, and we were insulated from the water under the bed. When we went outside we saw that the water had subsided from the immediate ground, though it was still muddy everywhere, and deep in some areas. We started hearing about other people who'd literally had 6-12" rivers of water going directly through their tents, and even entire campsites that had to evacuate because of deep water. So ultimately we were pretty lucky.
Aftermath
As we started packing up, I noticed that it was actually hurting for me to kneel down, rolling things up and all. I figured that all the extra walking over the week was finally getting to me (earlier in the week I had noticed some leg muscles letting me know that they weren't accustomed to this much work), or maybe that the bedding had been a little too hard on my body. It got so bad that I simply could not kneel anymore, and had to put more of the work than I liked onto nontacitare and one of our campmates (who's probably two decades older than me, so I really felt bad).
We managed to get the car out of the muddy parking lot without getting stuck too badly, and then I made countless trips up and down the hill packing up the car. (Meanwhile I watched as some guy got his Saturn stuck on the side of the road. Twice. Paying attention to gravity, drive wheels, and traction can be useful.) By the time the car was packed, I was seriously ready to get out of there, get some food, and get home. But I also was noticing my pained knees.
By the time we got home (skipping Youngstown entirely, and finding the house mercifully dry), I realized that it wasn't just my knees; pretty much all my joints were sore. I added the process of loading the car (lug something up the hill, go back down the hill, repeat ad infinitum) to the possible causes. I took a long shower and bath, went to bed, and realized that I felt slightly chilled and might have a fever.
Well, the fever seems to be gone by now, but the sore joints remain. It's very odd since I don't really have any other symptoms -- no nausea or headache or anything -- so that would seem to rule out all the diseases Google found for me. I suppose I should go see a doctor soon; I'm a bit too young for chronic joint pain, and this seemed to come on rather rapidly anyway.