Olive and her Human take Vacations

On July 13 I packed up my car with camping supplies, enough clothing for a week, and of course my fiddle to attend Northern Fiddle and Dance Week at Ashokan in the Catskills. Olive was taken to Candlewick for the week, then after a quick last stop at home I headed out.

The quilt temporarily hung from the balcony.

When I arrived, I chose my usual camping spot and set up my tent. The weather was pleasant at that point. After setting up my tent I attended the opening supper and contra dance.  Jay Unger, the camp director, spotted me and told me that the quilt my friend Laurie made from my old camp T-shirts and donated to the Ashokan Foundation had been found after missing for a few years. Temporarily hung from the balcony over the dance hall, it will be permanently displayed somewhere in the main building. I was pleased to hear this and sent an email to Laurie.

Sunday was relatively unstructured. I had a pancake breakfast, caught up with some friends, and spent most of the day relaxing in my tent for the busy week ahead. At 3:00 the orientation and welcome activities began, followed by a pasta supper, an evening dance, and some jamming.

This year I decided to do things a bit differently from past years. David Kaynor, a superb fiddler and dance caller, has been a fixture at camp since its beginning. Last Fall I learned that he has been diagnosed with ALS, aka Lou Gehrig’s disease. The last time I had seen him was in February at the Dance Flurry festival. He was talking slow, though his fiddling was in top form. When I greeted him at the camp it was immediately clear that his voice was now completely gone. At the orientation he used an electronic device with a keyboard to communicate. He would type what he wanted to say, and the words would come through a loudspeaker in an artificial voice. The system is not perfect, but David was able to communicate in that manner. I resolved to take as many of the workshops he was offering as I could.

It turned out that he was teaching a beginner’s fiddle class that would have been pointless for me to take and two sessions that were basically jam sessions. One featured easy New England tunes while the other focused on more complex and difficult tunes with long traditions, some dating to the early 1800s (called “chestnuts” by folk music aficionados). I took both of those plus a class on Swedish style fiddling, taught by two excellent musicians from Sweden.

I settled into the rhythm of the camp life. Breakfast, the New England tunes session, a break (while other classes were going on), the Swedish class, lunch, the chestnut session, another break, then a popular French-Canadian jam session, followed by supper. After supper was a Scandinavian jam session, followed by the evening dance, followed by the late-night snack at eleven.

In past years I have tended to wear leather sandals around camp, made by a fellow named Alan Block who was a popular fiddler as well as a superb leather-worker. This year one of the straps broke, so I was forced to resort to a pair of sneakers and a cheap pair of bargain store sandals I brought because they are easy to slip on and off for late night treks from my tent to the bathroom. I also have taken with me an old TV tray to use as a night table in my tent. This time the plastic clips that hold the tray to the stand broke (three of them), so I was unable to use it. So that was two items that failed this year. Don’t things usually happen in threes? Well, I thought, what else could go wrong?

So it went until Wednesday. It seems that around 2:30, while I was in the chestnut session, there was quite a rain and wind storm. It has stopped before the session ended, so I trekked over to my tent to check that everything was ok. I noticed right away that something was not right. At first look I thought that one of my metal tent-poles had been displaced. As I worked to correct the problem it became clear that the pole had cleanly broken in two, rendering the tent useless. As I started to move things from the tent into my car, we were hit by another intense rain storm. Everything got soaked.

I got an ok to move into the bunk house. Everything, however, was such a soggy mess that I decided I needed some space to sort things out and spread some things out to dry. I reluctantly decided to get a room at a Super-8 motel in Kingston, the nearest large town about a half hour away. Fortunately, a room was available, so I tried to spread things out as much as I could to dry then drove back to the camp.

I got there just as supper was finishing up. Wednesday night is traditionally ice cream night there, so I grabbed a bowl. That night my supper consisted of a banana and a bowl of vanilla ice cream. Not a healthy supper, but better than nothing and it held me until the late night snack when I was able to put together a sandwich.

After driving back to Kingston, it seemed that nothing was drying very well. The hotel has a guest laundry room, but it was closed from 8:00 PM to 8:00 AM. The night clerk would not make an exception and let me use it for an hour to dry some things, so I had to live with the floor covered with wet things, including my sleeping bag and tent.

On Thursday morning I made it to the camp in time for breakfast. I followed the normal routine, though it was strange to not have my tent to read, rest, or nap in. I tried napping in my car with little success. A jigsaw puzzle that was a community effort in the main hall ended up taking a good portion of my break time. I remembered why I avoid doing such puzzles at home: I have a very difficult time pulling myself away from them. Being very tired I left the camp for Kingston shortly after the Scandinavian jam. I might as well have stayed for the dance and late snack, as I could not get to sleep in the hotel room.

Friday was the last full day of camp. On Friday night each class usually does something for the Friday night review. My Swedish fiddle class played a waltz. The chestnut class played “Petronella”, a very old Scottish dance tune and traditional contra dance. One of the session participants, Paul Rosenburg, is a popular and highly experienced contra caller. He called the dance for a sizable group that wanted to dance it. The dance is still somewhat popular, though called rarely these days at modern contra dances.

After the last late snack, I said my goodbyes to some friends and drove back to Kingston. I decided to forgo the Saturday breakfast in that it would add an extra hour to my trip back home. I would have to drive back to Kingston to pick up I-87. In the morning I packed up my car with things that were still damp or wet. The hotel supposedly included a continental breakfast. The coffee was cold and the cereal stale. I forwent the “free” breakfast and hit the road, stopping at a diner that I knew for a vegetable omelet, toast, potatoes, and hot coffee. A far better breakfast than what was offered at the Super 8.

My usual routine is to stop in Danbury Connecticut for lunch at a large shopping mall just off the highway. Since this mall has an LL Bean store, I decided to do something about my three “fails”. It turned out that the LL Bean store could order a replacement pole for my tent. Much cheaper than buying a new tent. I also picked up a pair of good quality sandals and a camp table that folds up into a surprisingly compact package to replace the TV tray. I then headed to an Italian restaurant nearby for grilled salmon with vegetables and a glass of Pinot Grigio. While the food at camp is quite good, somehow the salmon lunch (the tangy sauce served over the salmon was excellent) with wine struck me as something I needed. For dessert I stopped at an ice cream stand and had a scoop of “bourbon vanilla bean truffle” ice cream. It topped off the salmon nicely, but they charged enough to buy a full gallon of ice cream at a supermarket.

Finally, I headed home, arriving around 6:00. The arrangement with Candlewick was that I would pick her up at noon on Sunday after she had a bath. I got there on time Sunday and Olive was ready. She greeted me as if I had hardly been away, smelling fresh from her bath. The groomer added a note that said “Olive is absolute perfection!” Well, of course. As soon as we got home, she showed her appreciation for the bath by rolling on grass. I was relieved that there was no poop involved. She is sleeping near me as I am writing this, back to normal.