Settled in at the Walnut Valley going solo

A jam session from last year.

I’ve been at the Walnut Valley Festival for three days now, and I am pretty well settled in.

There are a lot of camps—groups of people that set up together—and there are dozens, if not hundreds, of them. Some are very imaginative, and it’s a good thing to see. It does create a slight disadvantage for individual campers like me, though. It’s just human nature that people congregate with folks they know. I am not a very outgoing person, so I can end up a bit alone even in a sea of hundreds of campers.

It does force me to reach out, and being outside my comfort zone is a good thing, so I try to roll with it.

The music helps with that more than conversation does. I’ve been walking the campground after dark and stopping where the jams are already going—porch lights, a circle of chairs, someone calling a tune. I don’t sit down with an instrument yet. I stand at the edge and listen. That’s enough for now. You can tell which circles want company and which ones are a closed conversation. The good ones don’t mind an extra pair of ears. A fiddle cut through one camp last night, then a guitar found the same pocket, and for a few minutes I wasn’t an individual camper standing by himself. I was just another person facing the same song.

I’ll get a guitar out when it feels less like interrupting. Watching first is its own kind of reaching out.

I have also spent two nights working the gate overnight. That seemed to be a need they had, so I signed up for that when I registered to work. Volunteering is a great way to meet people. You can pay for your ticket and for your camping with only a few shifts. Working the gate is very boring work, and that’s a good thing. When you are working security, the more boring it is the better job you are doing. We don’t want things to get interesting. People are generally great about following the rules. At the gate, we only check that people have wristbands and parking passes.

Doing these kinds of jobs also helps one to feel like they are really a part of things. So does standing at the edge of a jam until the night air and the tunes start to feel familiar.

The weather has settled down after a wet start. Summer is back and in full force. Hot and clear is still better than wet anything at a music festival.

I’ve been coming to the festival for twenty-plus years, and camping for five. It’s a lot hotter than it used to be. The jams still start the same way they always did. The heat just hangs on later into the night.