Festival Verano

Yoho called my Colombian cell at 3:30pm and by 7:30pm Tom and I were waiting at the Estacion Norte bus terminal for our overnight ride to Necocli on the Caribbean coast. Between the time Yoho told me about the reggaetone and electronica music festival and the departure time of our bus, all I had to do was: convince Tom, (who hadn’t slept the night before), to join me on the adventure, buy a tent, gather food supplies and water, go the terminal to buy bus tickets, pack everything I had brought with me to Colombia, find a place to store my valuables, pay part of my tab at my hostel, and get back to the bus terminal. A calm four hours after a two hour sleep and plenty of socializing the night before.



The hassle of preparing for the Festival de Verano 2010 now seems negligible. We left Medellin at 8:30pm and arrived in the usually sleepy seaside town of Necocli 11 hours later after enduring a harrowing ride through switchback mountain passes at top speed in a full size bus that was passing every car and truck on the road around blind corners and along tiny, one lane “streets” running along deep crevasses and cliffs. The driver would wail on the horn as we careened around the corners, as if doing so would give the drivers coming down the mountain enough time to swerve off the road and at least die by their own accord and not in a head-on collision. I didn’t sleep a wink. I managed to force the fear of death deep enough inside to close my eyes at one point, but just at that moment (around 3am), the bus driver decided it was time to start bumping salsa and meringue music at full volume, a decision that provoked a collective groan from the Colombians and some fiery words of dismay and disbelief from Tom. Either way, I didn’t sleep. We stopped in the middle of the night at one of these anonymous restaurant/bar/bathroom/kiosk shops for about 15 minutes, during which the Paiso (man from Medellin) I’d befriended on the bus bought four Aguila beers (think Corona in a can), two for each of us, and proceeded to more or less force me to drink them with him one after the other.



Re-boarded the bus and headed deeper into the night, closer to the destination I knew nothing about, farther from the first-world, safe and modern feel of Medellin and its surroundings. We eventually arrived. The bus let us out onto a dusty street in a town that was waking up. A brown and white spotted horse galloped past us without a rider, as if in a rush to beat the morning commuters headed to imaginary jobs in some imaginary city somewhere to the east. We followed the horse after devouring an over-ripe mango and failing to juggle the Arsenal soccer ball (pelota) we’d brought along. It was about a ten minute walk to the polluted harbor, where the fishermen were loading the torn fishing nets and paddles and water into the tiny wooden vessels they’d spend the day in, alone out at sea. We looked at each other and decided that wherever we were, it wasn’t where we were supposed to be. We kept walking, ran into a guy who pointed us down a street, eventually entered a hotel where the owner refused us cups of coffee while drinking one of his own. We left, headed down the street in some direction Tom smelt out, and ended up by the cemetery.



As we headed toward the place of resting souls, full of overturned and moss covered headstones and tombs, Yoho, who’d arrived earlier in the morning, called. The only thing I was able to tell him was that I was at the cemetery. 30 seconds later we were on the back of a dirt-stained white pickup truck being steered by Pachu, an elderly and drunk man from the area who was apparently a distant relative of one of the guys in the cab of the truck. We veered left and right and came to a halt at El Mirador, the place where “it” was supposedly “going down”. We pitched our tents on a concrete roof overlooking a terrace that extended over the sea and a long stretch of beautiful beach. To the west we could see a large stage and speaker tower set up, out of place among the white caps and palm trees. Yoho, Jairo, Vince, Tom, Pachu and I went downstairs and ate a breakfast of pork back/fat, rice, beans, fried plantains and coffee, otherwise known as a bandeja. It was good and I felt like things were starting to come together.



Later on we played soccer on the beach with an elderly man and his family and then shared their fish and potato soup that they’d cooked over wood fire in a nearby palm grove. As we sat in that shaded place, watching the two sisters and their madre effortlessly shift their hips with the reggatone coming from El Mirador, I couldn’t help but have one of those moments that you sometimes have when traveling, when you step outside of yourself and think about where you are at that moment and where you’re from and smile because you know that it doesn’t matter and that all the things you see and have seen and all the people from your past and those that are in front of your face are all one, united by some force that is considered a trite and useless consideration in ‘the west” but still manages to persist and rotate with us on this Earth.



Nap in the hammock followed by a few beers and a rendezvous with Aguardiente Santa Clause and his gorgeous friends. “HO HO HO – you want shot Aguar gringo”?? We gathered our forces and hopped on the back of a pick-up truck headed into town after the sun had gone down. It had been transformed into a massive street party. The entire width of a small side street was covered in speakers and the dark women and men of Necocli and the surrounding towns were grinding and moving along the asphalt with broad smiles and knowledge of the primacy of the moment. A cock fight, party in the bull fighting ring and walk on the beach later and we were back at El Mirador, dancing with an aloof, sweat covered goddess and sharing another bottle of Aguardiente. Needless to say, I lost my sandals, my towel and my mind after a late night swim. We crashed before the sun came up, me in the tent on the concrete slab and Tom in the hammock by the sea.



Too many details and too many conversations later, I was playing beach soccer with Michel and Manuel, two 10 year old boys who could take most American men to school on the pitch. Marcela, Linda, Elba, the Stoic Indian, Ides, Mr. Anderson and the others soon joined in, some holding smoking joints and others toting hands covered in black ink. 6 on 6 turned into lunch by the back of the camp site, and that lunch birthed friendships and laughter that would last for the rest of the weekend and until even now, as I write from the apartment in Medellin. Marcela’s smile, the Stoic Indian’s flowing black locks, Elba’s dance moves; sacred images that came from nowhere to illuminate another sun-filled weekend in Colombia.
We cooked our meals as a family, in a cauldron hung between two branches over a fire made of palm leaves and wood from the surrounding forest. We ventured into town together and watched fire breathing madmen and jugglers and jewelry makers create a jubilant atmosphere. We shared bottles of Aguardiente and gave copitas to strangers and providers of the good energy we were breathing in. And we shared our lives with each other for that weekend, discovering that some of us had been traveling for 16 years across the continent with two children, while others were seeking a renewal of spirits and vibrancy, and still others a rebirth of imagination or a straight out rumba on the beach.



Life encompassed our camp site until one morning, while I sat watching Linda juggle her pins and Ides roll yet another massive joint, Jairo returned from a morning stroll along the shore. An 11 year old boy had been hit by a boat and had died upon impact. His father was on the shore and after a frantic sprint and swim he had managed to haul his son’s corpse through the rough surf and on to the sand as the sun rose. I sat on a wooden bench by my tent, unable to comprehend what had happened, unwilling to look death in the eye, feeling a wave of guilt sweep over me as I recalled the previous night’s debaucherous euphoria. A black boy had been hit in the head by a passing boat. He had died. He was dead.



I walked down the beach, looking through the infinite grains of sand, thinking only of death and not of renewal or of circular time or of karmic rebirth or of any comforting conceptions of innocence and youth exterminated. Red flames turned to green and I involuntarily stumbled toward the water and knelt there looking out at the horizon. Walt Whitman eventually came to me, teaching yet again about the sea’s memory and its appetite, its ability to consume and to reproduce and sustain. I still knelt, knowing the boy’s spirit had become part of the waves that crashed down upon me, along with souls long extinguished.



We boarded the bus that night after bidding farewell to Marcela, Stoicism and Black Palms and headed back to the City of Eternal Spring. Knowing what lay ahead, namely, certainty of a horrible death at high speeds along one of the winding switchbacks, I took a look at Tom and a deep breath and passed out. Nine hours later we we’d arrived to hear and watch and feel Medellin waking up, coming to its senses after a long weekend. The Black Sheep Hostel had a bed for Tom but not for me. I sat outside with Glen, an alcoholic Canadien ex-fugitive/homeless wanderer/oil rig worker and shared the morning’s first glass of Chilean wine with him. He asked about the weekend and I didn’t respond. He was satisfied and so was I. I swished the wine around and tasted my life as it unveiled itself once again.