Electric Forest is beautiful. This is an undeniable fact. Electric Forest is also a huge undertaking with mindblowing amounts of trash and leaves an enormous footprint.
Looking back over the past 6 days of living at the festival as a worker, I’m grateful that my first EF experience got to be equal parts awe and trash sorting.
Don’t get me wrong, I love being immersed in the worlds that most festivals create, but there’s a part of me that always wants to look behind the curtain, meet the wizard, find out what is real and what isn’t. With my EF experience I got to do just that.
GETTING THERE:
I decided to shuttle bus my way here from Chicago, and in hindsight I wish I had just spent the money on renting a car. With all the rain, how spread out everything is, and the fact that I’m here for weekend 1, Playthrough and Weekend 2, carrying everything I’d need for my time here was overambitous. It didn’t help that the shuttle bus dropped everyone off at the furthermost corner from the Check-in site, so after three hours of dragging luggage down country roads I eventually made it to my campsite.
One of the highlights of arrival day was Eugene and Roberta, a truly kind couple that live close to the campground for Work Exchange. Eugene saw me and my travel partner struggling down the road with our bags, and invited us to use his property as a shortcut, went and got us a cooler full of ice cold drinks, and his wife made us sandwiches and set us up at the picnic table in their backyard. Their kindness and generosity set the tone for what we would experience the rest of the first week at EF.
Getting into the Work Exchange campsite I immediately met Nick and Kaitie, the most magical couple from New England. They’re spending 6 months driving all over the country visiting festivals, and they became the ambassadors for our little camp family. Nick let me use some of their weatherproofing spray, which is probably the only reason I was able to stay mostly dry during my time in Michigan. Since we all worked different shifts, it was nice to come home every day and hang with a new configuration of campers, ultimately getting to know everyone.
WHEN IT RAINS:
On Wednesday/Thursday it poured. Torrential, thunder and lightning, code black shelter-in-place, downpour. The roads and stages quickly turned into mudpits, with regular entry campers getting their cars stuck (on Saturday there was still one lonesome abandoned Camry on the vendor camping side) and anything besides bare feet or rainboots being completely pointless. We all still went in and saw Space Jesus (!!!) , but it was a squelchy stinky muddy slippery experience.
The festival staff did their best to make roads passable, filling in much of The Hangar and Jubilee stages with wood chips, and the addition of sand at the entrances made it simpler to get in and around the Tripolee stage. It’s amazing how much work gets done every morning in preparation for gates opening…the crew out here works incredibly hard to make this festival happen.
TRASH PANDA:
Sidenote: we are definitely still living in a forest – one of my vendor friends came back to her tent to find 6 baby raccoons and their mama. All of her food was trashed, but the babies were cute.
My first two shifts were with Electricology; the first was handing out “eco points” to patrons that threw their trash in the correct trash cans, the second was behind the Ranch Stage sorting bags of trash. If you’re reading this, and you tend to mindlessly dump your trash because you’re on vacation and recycling is your vibe killer… please try harder next time. It takes only a few pieces of food waste to “contaminate” a bag of recycling (cans, bottles) and with the amount of waste coming through the festival it was sad to see huge bags of recycling have to go in the landfill dumpsters because they were also full of food waste. If all of us just take a second to be mindful about the mess we make, it could actually make an impact.
ALL THE DANCING:
Big Wild, Big Gigantic, Haywyre, Dillon Francis, Space Jesus and Liquid Stranger, Autograph, FKJ, The Floozies, Bassnectar…the list goes on and on and on. I feel so lucky to get to see so many talented people in four packed days. Big Wild was my top show and he always blows my mind, and this past weekend I stumbled upon an artist I’d never heard before and now love. Francis and the Lights was playing while I was grabbing dinner at the Sherwood Court stage and he sucked me right in. Eventually I was right at the front of the stage dancing my face off, the quest for nachos long forgotten.
EXPLORE THE FOREST:
Nothing can prepare you for the beauty that awaits you in the forest. Characters dressed up and ready to play, the beautiful structures, all the flowers and art… I spent four evenings exploring and barely scratched the surface. I was super excited to see the work of one of my favorite costume designers, @thelytecouture, and get to meet her in person. There were oracles, sleuths, fairies, aliens, and circus folk…so much to see and share!
ON TO WEEKEND 2:
Today everyone is leaving, and we’ll have a few days to work and reset the festival. I was going to work weekend 2, but decided against it after seeing how exhausted I was after weekend 1. This year EF has a playthrough ticket, essentially you work the reset week in between and get access to both weekends of music. I’m sure we’ll work hard this week, but it’ll be all worth it to spend the coming weekend neck deep in music and art and magic.
xoxo, FestieDeluxe