The Concert and Beyond

So the remainder of the concert went along without too much to report. We pushed our way to the front of the general admission area and took up a small patches of grass with a pretty good view of the stage. Most of my time was spent focusing on the concert and slowly bobbing my head, which was the practice for most of the concert goers. There was one leather-clad biker dude who stood up a lot and played wicked air guitar/drums to the songs that he deemed sufficiently jam-worthy. Soon after the concert started the shut down beer sales, which drove many in the crowd into a frothing frenzy. It was really an amazing lesson in general economics. Usually people would be in a frothing frenzy if you tried to charge them $5.00 for a single beer at Safeway, but stick them into a sweaty concert with 20,000 other people and soon they are tearing each other apart to find a beer PERIOD. To highlight the dilemma of the lack of alcohol, I will tell you the story of our own personal quest for booze. Hans decided during a lull in the concert to go get beer. I hand him ten bucks and tell him to get me as much beer as the ten will buy me. He comes back 20 minutes later with no beers, but he becons me up the hill to him. I reluctantly leave my spot which is immediately taken by another concert goer. "Did you get beer?" I ask, still clinging to hope. "No dude, but I got something BETTER." he says. The way he really stressed the "BETTER" I assumed he had found some sort of drug to ingest or inhale, and I was extatic. INSTEAD, Hans pulls out a tiny airline bottle of whiskey. "We traded a guy two cigarettes for this." The concert had forced us into a type of prison-yard currency where we were trading cigarettes for small amounts of booze. Normally if I had given Hans ten-dollars for booze and he came back with that small bottle, I would have stomped on his foot REALLY HARD. But, since the concert was too good to be getting stressed out, I shrugged and took a few sips of the delicious whiskey out of the tiny baby bottle.

After the show, we all filed back to the campsite and resumed the drinking process. Leif and Pete had managed to maintain their state of drunkeness throughout the concert. I was awed at these guys' ability to keep a mean drunk going for a solid six hours. At one point Leif stumbled over and started giving us a speech about how bullshit our college education was. I don't really remember what he said, but he kept repeating "You guys gotta wake up man." I finally had enough and told him that it was in fact he who needed to wake up as well, because the infinite nature of the universe meant that at some point in infinity he was me and I was he (can you follow that?) and so by telling me I needed to wake up, so did he. He got confused and then started to say something was coming out my ass and nose. I lost track of the conversation at that point. Later on, Pete started talking shit to Leif and saying he could wrestle him to the ground. Leif asked us who we thought would win the match. I noticed at that time that Leif had changed into a pair of navy sweatpants. "I think you would win, you have the sweatpants advantage." I said to him. Everyone else in my group laughed, but Leif looked confused and a few seconds later tackled Pete into a tent and they grappled on the ground until someone in their gang broke them up.

So bedtime is rolling around, and our time at the Gorge is coming to and end. The hippies come back around for a second time offering up mushrooms. Pete accepts, pays his $25, and eats the entire bag right then and there. Let me remind you that he was drunk when we arrived at 4:30pm, and he was still drunk when he ate the shrooms at 2:00am.

I woke at 4:30 in the morning to a sky full of glittering stars and the Beavis-like cackling of Pete in the distance. The old boy must have been having a time with those mushrooms, and I fell asleep with that laughter in my head. I didn't see him when we left in the morning. Perhaps his journey took him into the Columbia, which eventually will lead to the Bering Sea.