Fawnda Mithrush
Uh, Guys? Guys! Isn’t That A Little Dangerous? |Oh please, this is Alberta. Who hasn’t tried to light a gasoline-doused fire with a firecracker?
ASHLEY ANDEL
Once upon a time (that is to say, a few weekends ago), I fell flat off the wagon and got run right over like an ass. I dressed up as an überfop, and after a few too many at the Fringe beer tent, proceeded to this precious café that was hosting a little music show. With Jekyll having turned fully into Hyde, I couldn’t find any amusement in singing, so instead I tried my drunkass hardest to piss off the band, and later opted to playfully wrestle with some of the patrons in the adjoining rock garden.
Now I definitely got carried away, and I sincerely apologize for my trespass. Of course I now have to live with these mysterious pictures someone took on my camera of me literally being carried away laughing like a jackass by a couple of guys dressed up as MSTRKRFT... The jackass jackanape was me.
KATHLEEN BELL
I have asthma, but normally it’s not hard to keep it under control. Unfortunately, in the dark of Pemberton’s late-night traffic jam, I happily walked into my own personal deathtrap and set up camp. The light of day revealed that the festival site was a mown hayfield. Indeed, I am allergic to hay. Grass or wood chips I can handle… why did it have to be hay?
I caught the first band, Monte Negro, and they encouraged the crowd to jump. I couldn’t. I couldn’t even cheer without gasping for breath. Before Metric hit the stage, I was in the main medical tent — the plastic, air-conditioned, non-organic, non-green medical tent. According to the staff, breathing complaints were second only to drug- and alcohol-related issues.
They upped my meds. I tried to enjoy the festival again, but couldn’t even make it through Nine Inch Nails. As I wandered in the night, contributing to my own demise with every laboured breath and every dusty step, “Survivalism” became the soundtrack to yet another trip to the makeshift emergency room. I went home the next day. When you can’t breathe, nothing else matters… not even NIN.
FISH GRIWKOWSKY
As stunning as it is to me that anyone couldn’t manage a total gonzo-adventure/party at Pemberton, find the glowing Chris Isaak at the end of the Folk Fest anus, or just casually capitalize on what, for any mobile Albertan, should’ve been easily the best swimming-hole summer on record — I still sympathize with the angst.
It’s the scale of things that’s been gnawing at me lately: the idea that this crowded traincar’s walls will appear to shrink by another 10 per cent annually. That’s not anything against any one of you newly arrived — I just fucking hate you as a combined unit. Longer lineups, shithead drivers of giant oil-money F-series Fords, sprawling, cancerous ’burbs. You savages are killing Edmonton in the least imaginative way possible. But it’s really the ongoing arena “debate” that proved to me we’re really no better than you... that we deserve, ultimately, to die with “Ordinary Day” played at the cocksucking funeral.
SCOTT LINGLEY
We’d been on the road more than a week and had made it as far as The Chutes Provincial Park between Sault Ste. Marie and Sudbury, Ont. Our tent was muddy and a touch smelly from several consecutive nights of rain, but as we pulled into our secluded campsite near the rushing rapids for which the park was named, we felt confident that we might enjoy our first night away without precipitation.
Grilled salmon, asparagus, and some kind of pasta in a pouch were on the menu, a bottle of shiraz from an Ontario winery sat uncorked on the picnic table, the orange-and-violet clouds of dusk were few and fluffy.
But as the light seeped out of the sky, the air around us began to boil with winged insects — mosquitoes, gnats, chiggers, moths, and probably a few species science has yet to name. Dousing ourselves with Deep Woods Off didn’t seem to discourage the bloodthirsty little bastards and by the light of our insect-encrusted lantern we could see that roughly a million of them were stuck and twitching on our meals. We scraped the bugs off the food as best we could and dug in, chewing amid the relentless pelting of their wings against our faces and standing periodically to try to elude the ones flying straight into our ears.
Despite the warm, clear night and the $6 bag of firewood we were dying to burn, we couldn’t bear the harassment anymore and resigned ourselves to an early night in the tent. The next morning we struck camp in the regularly scheduled chilly downpour and kept moving east.
FAWNDA MITHRUSH
“One of the wonderful things about growing up in Cuba,” our guest said with a dramatic pause, “...is that you develop a very strong immune system.” I should have known the story was bound to end badly. Or at least with a little bit of hypochondria. Maybe it was an intentional poke at our anxiety-prone Canadian cohorts. Considering we were eating pretty much raw Maple Leaf bacon from a pan nestled in a fading campfire, with absolutely no awareness of the outside world and the listeria hysteria that was soaking the press that day, we didn’t think much of it. (It’s all smoked anyway, right? I mean, they were tossing this stuff on the audience at Pig earlier this summer, and everyone was fine.)
Then, of course, we turned on the CBC to get the lowdown on the Olympics. What ensued was a twitching, psychosomatic mess of nausea and panic. (The hangovers probably didn’t help.) To distract ourselves, we dropped $70 on fireworks. The Big One — an intimidating black cube complete with skull and crossbones sticker boasting 56 shots — was placed a generous 20 metres away, smack in the middle of the pier. The fuse was lit, and the first cracker shot off with such gusto that it pitched the box right into the stinking lake. Fuck.
As if our manifested symptoms weren’t bad enough, we just lost $40 — and it’s still there, soaking up the stench of oil-recovering Wabamun. And the nausea gets a little worse. Considering there’s a week of potential “incubation period” remaining, I admit I’m still freaking the hell out over it.
ANDREW PAUL
The police pulled up beside us as we were laughing drunkenly about our car having been broken into. We had driven 16 hours from Lethbridge to Vancouver in a last attempt to unwind after semester’s end and get ready for our respective internships in the bustling media business.
The trip had been full of snags. The officers in the vehicle laughed at us as we explained that the crackheads had smashed the driver’s side window and stolen nothing more than a Ziploc bag of pizza and two cans of beer (the two items we had come to get in the first place).
It seemed funny at the time, but the next morning, as we stood hungover in the auto body shop listening to the clerk tell us that it would cost $400 and take a few days to fix the car the ugly, reality sunk in. Essentially it meant we would be forking out another couple hundred bucks for two more nights of accommodations, booze, and food. Our bank accounts where effectively crippled. My classmate was left without rent money for her place in Lethbridge, and I was going to be stranded in Calgary with no cash to get back to Edmonton.
That was three months back, and I’m still feeling the effect on my wallet. Essentially it was the poor fucking the poor; why couldn’t those hopped-up freaks have attacked a Lexus instead?
YURI WUENSCH
I’ve been referring to the inaugural Pemberton Music Festival, which ran from July 25-27, as my bar mitzvah — the weekend I became a man. As a grownup, I have come to realize that I demand adult experiences — and Pemberton wasn’t one. Not by a long shot.
Admittedly, I let youthful exuberance get the best of me when I saw the fest’s seductive slate of acts: Wolfmother, Nine Inch Nails, Tom Petty . . . the list went on and on. And since the whole shebang was put on by LiveNation, the world’s pre-eminent concert promoter, I expected better — first year jitters be damned. While the performances were great, the logistics were a total shitshow: huge lineups both inside and outside the venue, no visible recycling, garbage everywhere (the fault of both meatheads and the promoters), gouges on booze . . . the list went on and on.
P.S.: to the kind E-town crew who took me in: it’s not you, it’s me. Sorry I was such a bitch.
