August, 1997
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LESBOMANIA

Wet and Wild:

A Michigan Memoir

by Jorjet Harper

No matter what you've been told about the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival - IT'S ALL TRUE.

"This will be your first time at the Michigan Festival? Oh wow, you're going to absolutely love it!"

This was told to me years ago, by a friend of mine, before my first festival experience. "Even if you don't like camping - believe me, you'll love it!" she'd said.

We were at a party; it was just five days before I left for the woods with my little tent, my cookstove, my flashlight, my typewriter, my books, my teakettle, my Earl Grey tea bags ...

Well, I'm a city person. I like having all my stuff around me. "It's like nothing else you've ever experienced," her date added, as we'd stood around at the party sipping white wine.

SIX DAYS LATER: Well, Here I am at the infamous Michigan festival, up in the woods, sure enough, in my little tent. It's 10 p.m. and rain is pelting down so hard it sounds like I am going through an automatic car wash. About every 15 seconds an intense flash lights up the pitch black night and almost instantly ka-POW! Thunder blasts the earth.

"Once you get up there, it's a whole different world," my friend had said. I am desperately trying to blow up my cheap vinyl air mattress so I can put it under my sleeping bag before the growing puddles and rivulets of water on the tent floor engulf my bedding, my clothes, my books, and my typewriter.

I recall the party talk: "Imagine all these half-naked lesbians, and lots of women cavorting around with nothing on at all!"

"It's a fantastic place to meet women," someone else had said, nudging me with her arm. Hunched inside my little canvas bubble, I take deep breaths, trying to inflate the air mattress. A good place to meet women? I might as well be in a diving bell at fifty fathoms. I would have had far better luck meeting women if I'd just stayed in Chicago this weekend and gone to a lesbian bar.

"You'll meet so many lesbians you could just cream in your pants!" they'd said, giggling.

Indeed, I am totally wet - but not in any way I'd anticipated. "Anything can happen up there. You'll see." Every time another blast of lighting hits, the ground trembles. I contemplate my mortality. I can vividly imagine how it would feel if the tall tree right next to my tarp was struck by a bolt and fell directly on my flimsy little tent.

"I know you're shy. But go to the workshops - you'll meet lots of women there."

Next day. The rain is falling in sheets. All my clothes that aren't soaked through are damp, but I put on my rain poncho and venture out to the workshops.

The workshops are all held outdoors, of course. We sit in circles on the wet ground, under our ponchos, all of us drenched. We try to ignore the rain, but the sound of it is so loud that we have to shout to hear each other. Water drips from our hair and even from the tips of our noses as we attempt to discuss lesbian culture, lesbian sexuality, lesbian politics.

"You'll see - it's so different, being out there in nature with all those women au natural!!" my friend had assured me.

Right now I am also recalling something my mother used to say: "Some people don't have enough sense to come in out of the rain."

Women are leaving the land in droves this afternoon, but several roads are washed out. Cars, vans, trailers are getting stuck in the mud. It is approaching an emergency situation.

"Yeah. The first thing a lot of lesbians do when they find themselves in the woods with other lesbians, and no men around, is to take all their clothes off. Almost like shedding all their inhibitions. It's, like, very tribal."

I had told my friends at the party that I would be far too shy to take off my clothes, unless it was in the privacy of my own tent with somebody I'd invited in to join me.

"You may have no intention of taking your clothes off, but when you get up there, ha ha, it will seem different," they'd said, winking.

As the mud builds up at the festival, many women just give up trying to fight the weather. Dozens of them strip off whatever they have on and belly flop into the huge mud puddles. They attempt gymnastic maneuvers. They slip, slide, and fall over each other like lungfish in primeval ooze. Then, entirely encrusted with mud, they run, laughing, down the road to the showers. I am ready for a shower myself, from all the grit I've accumulated. But the line is long and the shower water is unbelievably cold.

"And be sure to check out the crafts area. The crafts are really fantastic." I slog through the ubiquitous mud to the crafts area. Here I happen to run into two lesbians I know at one of the booths. Neither one has a shirt on, and they carry on a conversation with me in the pelting rain just as if the sun was shining, and as if neither of them were naked from the waist up.

"Actually, you get used to seeing women with no clothes on pretty quickly." Tonight the stars are clear and sparkling above the damp field of thousands of women at the night stage. Then lightning flashes appear on the horizon, and fast-moving storm clouds roll in, till one by one the stars are obscured. It begins to pour again.

"Oh - and wait till you try taking one of those showers! Ha ha! There's no warm water at all. Ha ha!"

I am more wet than ever, and now very grungy too, so I try again to take a shower. It is two o'clock in the morning. At this hour, there are no long lines - just me and one other woman trying clumsily to negotiate the shower spigots by flashlight, crunching our feet awkwardly on the pebbles strewn around the shower area. The freezing water hits me like little spicules of ice.

"Something just come over you up there," my friends at the party had gone on. "You're away from your everyday routine, and you do things that you'd never dream of doing normally."

Lucky for me, it is a very warm night, so at least I will not get pneumonia from my shower. I am about to dry off with my damp towel and put my damp clothes back on when suddenly there is another heavy downpour and everything gets drenched. The rain water, I notice, is a lot warmer and more pleasant than the shower water.

My jeans are soaking wet, and it seems silly to put them on again. Under the circumstances, there doesn't seem to be any particular point in putting any of my clothes back on. Though it feels kind of weird to me, I being walking down the country road back to my tent wearing only my soggy sneakers that squish with each step.

The woods are filled with women's tents, pitched much closer to each other than I'd imagined they'd be. Some of the tents are lit up from the inside. All the way down the road, different colored tents glow softly, diffusely - orange, blue, green, red, purple, and khaki domes and triangles.

"Once you get up there, you might do something really WILD! Something you'd never imagined doing before!"

Walking down this country road in the dark woods, soaking wet and stark naked, carrying my wad of wet clothes under one arm, I begin to feel that my friends might have been right - this experience is kind of unique. Kind of freeing. Kind of wild.

Nowhere would I even consider doing something like this but on a private piece of women-only land.

Other women are walking up the road, some with ponchos on, some also naked. The beams of our flashlights cut through the dark, each one a bright cone of light ending a few feet above the ground, leaving everyone looking naked yet somehow strangely disembodied. We greet each other cheerfully as we pass.

I have walked about a mile in my squishing sneakers. It is now close to 3 a.m. I can hear the distant sounds of drumming. My sneakers squish to the rhythm. The rain has cleared again, and I can see the moon through the clouds. I turn off my flashlight, because it's light enough to dimly see the road without it.

Suddenly seized by some deep but obscure emotion, I start howling up at the moon, loud as I can.

I've never done anything like this before. I do it again. It feels absolutely marvelous.

Then I come to my senses, and realize I must be waking some campers up. I wait, expecting to hear yelling from the tents, people telling me to shut up, to keep quiet.

Instead, from out of the darkness, a few other women start howling back at me.

Aa-ooooo-oooooo. Yip yip. Aauuuuuwwwwwwrrrrrhhhh. I am still very wet, and I feel really good. Naked in the moonlight, I'm discovering for myself the primitive resonating magic of the age-old call of the wild.

The 1997 Michigan Womyn's Music Festival is Aug. 12-17.
Jorjet Harper is the author of Lesbomania and Tales from the Dyke Side. She can be reached at Dykewriter@aol.com.

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