August 3, 2022 — Nothing but Blue Skies?
Returning after three years to a landscape as familiar as my backyard, all was as it has always been. The Milky Way blanket of stars glittered above as they never do in the city; the same toe-stubbing rocks jutted from irregular slopes which I could navigate through the thick darkness without need of illumination. So many familiar faces — what was her name again? How did that couple spend the past three years? — happily, or did they encounter their own unforeseen personal traumas?
I scribbled down that paragraph on the weekend during a memoir writing workshop at Blue Skies Music Festival, held in the bush north of Sharbot Lake in Frontenac County, Ontario. It was, due to the pandemic, the first in-person edition of the festival since 2019. I camped with my son Henry and his friend Oliver; our shaded and well-tarped space in the “Sleepy Hollow” area, containing tents and kitchen spaces for four families, was a short stroll from the main stage (described on the festival website, “a spectacular natural amphitheatre surrounded by pristine wilderness”).
Entirely volunteer-led, Blue Skies is much more a state of mind and an experience than a typical corporate music festival. Only made-on-site-in-the-cookshack food, fifty cent popsicles, ice, t-shirts and music are sold on site; deposits from the (copious) beer and liquor empties are collected to benefit local charitable organization Guatemala Stove Project, which works to relieve poverty and improve the well-being of disadvantaged peoples in Central America. Until quite recently, the lineup wasn’t even announced in advance — details on performers were provided only in the paper program shared by the friendly and potentially-substance-enhanced volunteers at the ramshackle gatehouse. (When my friend Gray was in charge of organizing key parking volunteers, his pre-festival instructions casually suggested “no obvious intoxication.”) This year, in a nod to the ongoing reality of COVID-19, attendees were offered, along with the customary multi-coloured woven cloth wristbands, new festival bling — a choice of pin-on buttons which identified wearers as either a cheerful bear, arms outstretched and announcing “I’m Ready for Hugs,” or a less touchy-feely porcupine “Sending Love from a Distance.”
The midday workshop, held on the grass on the slope overlooking the main meadow, and led by Wakefield-based non-fiction author Laurie Gough, addressed the concept of memoir writing as a journey and transformation. The literary form can be viewed as a form of personal therapy, perhaps, and a means of building connection and community — “to bring oneself to others makes the whole planet less lonely” is how Syracuse University literature professor Mary Karr described it, in her 2015 book The Art of Memoirs.
Personally, I record experiences to preserve them, like insects in amber; otherwise, life just continually flashes by and blurs together, especially during this weird pandemic interregnum (if, indeed, that’s what it will ultimately prove to be), which has both stretched and altered our shared senses of how we’ve always experienced the passage of time. (Case in point: it seemed impossible that it had been three years since I’d been at the festival site. I know, I know — multiple, lockdowns, capacity restrictions, successive waves, holidays cancelled, (lucky enough to be) indefinitely working from home… but still, where did all those months go?)
Fathomable or not, given that so much time has undeniably slipped by, how great it was that, throughout the weekend, the weather could not have been more perfect. Of course, as always, there were also several fantastic new musical discoveries: Moskitto Bar, Kate Weekes, The Peptides, and Tragedy Ann all turned in memorable performances. Overall, superficially at least, it all seemed a slice of much-needed normalcy — a widely-appreciated “profoundness of ordinariness” (to borrow a phrase from a memoir workshop attendee), for those who had attended the event many times in the past (every year from 2004 through 2019, in my case).
But even the idyllic and magical realm of Blue Skies is not immune from a degree of pandemic upheaval. There were noticeably fewer (15% less, perhaps?) tents on site than in previous years — a reflection of the fact that not everyone is yet comfortable with gathering in large numbers, even in an outdoor setting. (The festival webpage states “if, in order to feel safe enough to attend, you need a guarantee that no one at the festival will have COVID-19, please don’t come to the festival. Give this year a pass.”) At the planning meetings held in the months prior to the event, there had been wide-ranging and at times acrimonious debates about whether to go beyond the provincial health and safety guidelines, which at this point — as is the case in all Canadian jurisdictions — are only recommendations rather than actual restrictions or mask mandates.
“The pandemic is not over. I want to be clear about that. And we are very far from that,” asserted Giorgia Sulis, a postdoctoral researcher in infectious-disease epidemiology at McGill University, in a Globe and Mail article by Wendy Leung which appeared the day after I returned home. “If Canadians stay the current course,” writes Leung, “with few public-health requirements and few people willing to receive additional vaccine doses, Dr. Sulis believes COVID-19 infections will continue to happen at rates that disrupt the functioning of hospitals.”
It is absolutely unconscionable that some political figures are trying to argue that, from a public health perspective, the threat posed by the pandemic is behind us — there were 253 COVID-19 deaths during a single week in late-July (total Canadian fatalities are now approaching 43,000, with 2022 the deadliest year of the pandemic to date), plus almost 300 individuals in intensive care, and over 5,000 total COVID-19 patients in Canada’s hospitals. But as Globe and Mail health reporter Andre Picard astutely noted this week, “we are in that cognitively dissonant time now when COVID-19 is still very much a medical threat, but has been deemed to be over, politically, and socially.”
So given this context, as autumn approaches there is one overriding question: how and when does this pandemic end? Will it be nothing but blue skies, or will the COVID-19 storm clouds associated with highly-transmissible variant X or infection wave Y continue to coalesce, bringing further disruption and upheaval and yet another spike in hospitalizations?
