You can choose

Since moving to Massachusetts, I have not been camping, apart from field trips with my class. Studying traditional fiddle music changed that, beginning with the Annual Harry Smith Frolic in Greenfield. At this event, well over one hundred Old Time musicians came together for a weekend of camping and open jamming, including a reenactment of all the tunes on the Harry Smith anthology around the campfire at midnight. Most of the participants seemed to be long-time veterans of the event and all had enough endurance to put an Ironman triathlete to shame. One older fiddler remained in the same seat for the entire three days, perhaps not even leaving for sleep or food (at least when I was watching). He became enshrouded in a faint cloud of rosin from his bow, which began to accumulate on his trousers as a light dusting of snow. All the same, his reserve of memorized tunes to lead in the jam outlasted the three-day Frolic.

The second camping adventure was Rustic Roots, a music camp run by Andy Reiner, which, as the website warns, “is not for the faint-hearted.” At Rustic Roots, about twenty students and five teachers gathered together on a pond in Connecticut for a weekend party of workshops, communal cooking, and late-night jams around the campfire. The primitive latrines were a hot topic of conversation throughout the weekend and bodily functions were encouraged by the director. The group was eclectic—ranging from a 20-something law student to an African-raised French percussionist perhaps in her 60s, philosophers, marijuana farmers, and sculptors—but we left the camp as one family, each member having taken enormous musical strides.

A fiddle class at Rustic Roots.

This weekend, a Rustic Roots friend, Theresa, and I were inspired to organize a final musical camping extravaganza….Rustic Roots: The After-Image. We reserved a campsite on a quiet pond in Georgetown and invited everyone we could think of. In the end, we recruited a third recovering Rustic Rootian, Theresa’s colleague, and a Harvard undergraduate, who would effortlessly school us all on fiddle, mando, and guitar.

This weekend, and in all of these events, a beginner faces the inevitable: advanced players calling tunes you’ve never heard of at speeds you will never keep up with. Many of my music friends have pointed out that you will always be around better players and you can choose to feel bad about yourself or you can choose to be inspired. Last night, around the campfire in Georgetown, I struggled to pick up phrases of unfamiliar tunes and to keep up with tunes I knew. Sometimes it feels like an impossible battle, but it is always in those fresh hours of the morning that we see yesterday’s trials through lenses tinted with empowerment. And so I sat on a rock at the edge of the pond before the others had risen and added my own song to that of the Canadian Geese and, at least to me, my battlefield fiddle and novice skills sounded beautiful.