Growing up Michigan

I don’t remember my first festival. I was two. It’s easy to imagine what it looked like, now that I have taken my own two year old (now five years old) to Michigan. Dirt streaked, mostly naked, fully embodied, eating wood chips and digging in pea gravel. Of course, I have a collection of snapshot memories for my 27(ish) festivals.
I remember cold, cold showers, and being just tall enough that everyone’s bush was right in front of my face. The water hurt my head, and I fought it. I remember rain, big big rain, filling up my tent the first year I had my own and being trapped inside with a giant spider right next to the zipper. I remember fresh fruit available all day – a great novelty for this working class Midwestern girl with a nutritionally challenged mother – and the first time I got diarrhea from eating too much of it and was treated with mashed up bananas and carob powder at The Womb. Then in subsequent years, I intentionally gorged on fruit so I could get that delicious mushy chocolate-ish treat. I remember, once, the older girl I was hanging out with dropped her flashlight into the jane down the hill from Gaia, but I don’t recall how we resolved it. Did we get it back? Goddess, I hope not. I remember the pride of my first year as a Wanderer. I remember only one other kid from all my years at Gaia, but I wouldn’t recognize Shawn if I saw her.
I remember our first year working. Was I ten? Eleven? I made friends with Jo Stickwomon and some other grownups. Amber Jones and I became arch nemeses because she was jealous over my friendship with Leia LittleBit, and Mel had to mediate a conversation between us in a garden cart. Jones is now, of course, one of my best friends. We shared a hot red anger when the intern crew was formed – suddenly being told what we could and could not do with our time in the woods we knew better than anybody in charge. Not being allowed to work a full day. I had to hide to smoke cigarettes even though my mom was okay with it. I remember tripping on acid in the intern tent and making art. I remember Gretchen Phillips finding me, drunk, at the worker firepit, and telling me a surefire cure for hangovers. I remember dancing in the kitchen in the middle of the night countless times, and the accompanying joy. Explosive joy.
I remember feeling sexy for the first time, discovering glitter and slips and femininity, then going home to my boyfriend who was so mad at me for dressing like a slut. We broke up shortly after that because I didn’t like the new star wars movie. I remember falling in love with Tyler, over and over again, finally settling into the glorious friendship we have today. I remember standing across a table piled with tomatoes from a big, strong, butch telling me I had “come fuck me eyes”. It still makes me swoon, and I don’t care if it was inappropriate because however people would flirt with me, nobody would touch me. They would learn who my mom is and then avoid eye contact for the rest of the summer. And then when someone finally would touch me, the overheard scolding from my ‘uncles’ on our way out to the car at garbage camp. My first real time. I’ll remember that forever.
Before that, the first girl. I remember her, vaguely. She was much older than me, of course, and I was afraid of her body even though I had grown up around all the naked female bodies. Same for the second girl, and the third, and probably the fourth. I remember my first big love. And then our painful, ugly, public, fucked up breakup on The Land two years later. It was worth it. I think.
I remember my transition to LACE and Main Kitchen, with some stops at Land, Setup/Strike, Sprouts. Long days in the Belly Button with Maryasha that I will cherish for the rest of my life. The year I was pregnant, putting up electrical panels and then Buttoning with T Bair, then back on Gals for the first time in eight years. Working, sweating, loving every task with every cell – these are my most visceral memories.
Most of all, I remember the most beautiful freaks. So many beautiful freaks. Teaching me how to cook food, to breathe fire, to check my racism, to move broken furniture, to pound a stake, to dance, to recognize when my anger was out of control, to have fun, to tell a god damn story… teaching me everything of value that I know today (except molecular genetics).
I don’t know what life looks like without Michigan, and I will never have to. Even at home, now, most of the people I spend time with are people I met because of the festival. I moved to this city, and to every other place I have lived that is not Toledo, Ohio, because of people I know from the festival. My son has surrogate grandparents and aunts and uncles and brothers and sisters because of the festival. I have hope and ferocious confidence and deep love for other humans because of the festival. I don’t think I will be lost after festival ends, but I feel lost for the thousands of girls and women (both cis and trans*) who will never experience this.