Folk & Forage Retrospective
- Anaxyrus
- Nov 2, 2022
- 3 min read
Over the weekend, I went with my partner and my parents to take part in the Folk & Forage micro music festival, the fourth bi-annual event in a series put on by Kaela Fox and Austin Quattlebaum, a couple that I'm lucky enough to consider personal friends of mine and my family. The festival is pretty well explained by the title but it also expands a little past it, the focus is primarily on folk music and mushrooms.
Lots of mushrooms.
--Finding, uncovering, picking, eating, learning about, dressing up as, consuming, purchasing and creating art of, creating art with, wearing, there are a lot of mushrooms- the festival is set during the two fungi seasons of spring and fall. I was actually a bit confused, considering my personal experience and interest in terms of wild edibles are in the realm of plants, yet the focus there was almost entirely detritivorous, aside from the workshop that I heard about where the participants picked, fried, and ate maple leaves.
Speaking of, a very large part of the whole thing is the plethora of aforementioned workshops- I only went to two of the eight or so that took place over the days I was present, and those were the Basic Tree Identification workshop and the Songwriting workshop, the former I left early as I don't have much interest in identifying the species of conifers which seemed to be the main focus of the hour and I, having made the mistake of leaving my Adderall (along with all of my other meds) at home before leaving my residential state (California, not some metaphorical/metaphysical state of being), was antsy as hell. The Songwriting workshop I did stick around for, as it was being led by my friend and unattainable ideal songster Jenner Fox, the creator of some of my absolute favorite music of the year on his album "Good Luck Road."
There were several other workshops that I was interested in, such as the Mushroom Cultivation one or the Wild Foods of Autumn one or the Foray into Foraging one, which resulted in a gigantic variety of mushrooms amassed on one table near the main stage, that were identified, displayed, and entered into the various mushroom contests, as well as a big Nortwestern Salamander that my dad found; but other things distracted me, such as my own absolutely minuscule (temporarily) attention span or my astronomically talented group of family friends jamming in camp or even the fact that there were Rough-Skinned Newts swimming around in the pond oh my god holy shit.
It's also worth pointing out, on the skipping workshops front, that I slept absolutely horribly each of the four nights that I was there. This was not the fault of the festival, in fact our lodgings, compared to what my family is used to in music festival settings (i.e. a tent and a sleeping bag) were more than adequate, because the venue that Folk & Forage was using was the stomping grounds of a sleepaway camp, complete with cabins that the guests could (and did) pay to stay in. No, the main issue was that -at the risk of giving too much information- my intense night sweats locked me into a continual nightly ritual of waking up drenched, rolling out of the sleeping bag to towel off, rolling back into a wet and freezing bag, drifting off with difficulty, rinse (literally, unfortunately) and repeat. That... was not fun.
Music-wise, the performances were fantastic, though I was a bit too restless to enjoy them fully, oft preferring to play my own instrument back at camp. Highlights were Rainbow Girls, which excelled in every sense and every facet of their act; Two Runner, whose bluegrass excellence was palpable; Sam Chase and the Hot Hot Machine, a comedy act and a strings-based revelation; Buffalo Kin, with gorgeous harmonies and atmospheric rapture; and the Jenner Fox Band, my adoration for which I cannot effectively express. Seriously.
Back at my home, now, I have gained a few things. 1) Various mushroom-related paraphernalia; 2) band and festival merchandise; 3) a jar full of mud, water, and aquatic plants from the aforementioned pond; 4) a recipe for really good salad dressing -minced garlic, balsamic vinegar, good olive oil, and way more dijon mustard than you think you need; and 5) a rekindled motivation to play the hell out of my mandolin. If you haven't been to a music festival, do it. They're really fun. I know it's more complicated than that, and they're expensive, etc, but as long as my parents are buying me tickets, I will certainly partake, because for some reason the confluence of emotions that I feel at events like this is really, really worth a lot of inconvenience.
Images by Isabel Daigle
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