It wasn’t just the coolness factor that made me want to go; I had other urges that needed to be fed that this particular journey was sure to satisfy. Growing up as part of a white middle-class family in southern Connecticut—which is perhaps the whitest part of the country, not counting a few port cities lying along the coast that are more diversified as urban communities—was far from adventurous. Tack on a tiny prep school that similarly lacked ehtnic diversity made me feel culturally inadequate. I hadn’t travelled that much as a kid, other than our summers in Maine and Nova Scotia, spring breaks in Florida at my grandparents’ house in Florida, and one camping trip my sister and I took with my father to the American southwest just after my parents split up in the mid- nineties. As the third smallest state in the union (topped only by Delaware and neighboring Rhode Island), it was easy to feel trapped. Everything just felt so...small, like there were these walls surrounding me that I had to work my ass off to overcome. There was so much of America that I had yet to see, and this odyssey to the south had the potential of finally broadening my horizons beyond New England and its inherent quaintness. Some people long to escape from the hubbub and settle down in places like Connecticut; I was the complete opposite. I longed for the purple mountains and amber waves made famous by “America the Beautiful,” as my America didn’t extend beyond pretty fall foliage and Long Island Sound. Even my choice of college in New York City was still somewhat in my comfort zone, as I had frequented the Big Apple as a kid (it was only two hours away). This was my only opportunity to drive along Interstates with numbers that didn’t start with the number nine, to buy cheap cigarettes and try my first bowl of grits. And it was being offered to me on a silver platter.

I finally told Ben that I would go. After saying ‘yes’ and asking my dad for the funds (and if it was OK, as I was still technically a minor for a few more months), my attitude towards the whole endeavor changed from indifferent to ecstatic. I guess part of me wasn’t sure that even if I had agreed to go right away that it wouldn’t actually manifest, but as soon as those tickets arrived in the mail, I remember saying to myself: Holy shit, this is actually happening.

Our initial plan was for a large group of us to go in an RV. This had my father worried, because he was certain that no seventeen-year-old had any experience driving such a large-scale vehicle, especially for the fourteen hours it would take to get there from Connecticut. The thought had never crossed my mind; I had only gotten my driver’s license a year before and thought all vehicles were basically the same. My thought process started and ended with, well, how hard can it be?

Unfortunately, I never got the chance to find out if Daniel could actually pilot an RV. He didn’t end up getting a ticket to the festival, leaving Ben and I to fend for ourselves. Thankfully, we had a contingency plan: my big blue hand-me-down Honda Odyssey was long enough and wide enough for us to comfortably sleep in, as the second row of seats was removable and the back bench folded down nicely, leaving just enough room for a spare twin-size mattress to fit behind the driver and passenger seats. It was a tough squeeze, but we managed just fine. It took some convincing, but our parents agreed to let us go, just the two of us, a decision that was probably reached due to the fact that our tickets had already been purchased and were non-refundable, but I like to think that it was because they finally saw us as adults. We also agreed to stop once on the way there and once on the way back to break up the daunting two thousand-mile round-trip journey. This made everyone happy and gave the parents a little less to worry about.

Some Bonnaroovians.

In my younger days I never really saw myself as the music festival type. I grew up in a sleepy seaside Connecticut town, and my birth in the late ‘80s allowed me to enjoy a childhood before technology bit down our society to feed on every last scrap of attention span that has since dripped from the bloody mass our brains now resemble post- iPhone. Most of my time as a kid when I wasn’t at school was spent outside, either for Boy Scout camping trips, for pegging my older sister Erin with fresh snowballs, or for combating imaginary enemies with bamboo sticks in our family’s massive backyard. I also had quite the green thumb, which has now, unfortunately gone by the wayside. I used to know every flower and tree and weed that grew in our garden and in the woods that ran perimeter to our property in Essex. Kids would make fun of me in school for liking flowers, but the pros outweighed the cons, and the scoffs at my flagrant love for the first spring crocuses fell by the wayside, like fertilizer on a garden.

Even as a teenager in high school in the early ‘00s, much of my life was pursuing other, more interpersonal joys. I acted in school musicals. I read books. And when I was old enough to drive, I would spend hours navigating the back roads of my town and those that neighbored it, taking in the vibrant dance of each season through my windshield. Even though these roads were far from unfamiliar, each day brought a new experience: a new tint in a maple’s red-orange palette to appreciate, a new drop of rain to feel on my cheek as it bounced off the edge of the driver’s side window that never really closed all the way. In my more rebellious days, trying to give myself a little more of an appealing ‘edge,’ there was a kind of tacit pleasure I enjoyed while smoking cigarettes in the Wendy’s parking lot after school. Hey, at least I was outside.

By the time I was in high school, technology had started creeping its way into my regular activities. Nights were often spent tying up the phone line and chatting on AOL Instant Messenger—which was our version of text-messaging—but only for a little while, and only after all my homework was done—almost none of which required any use of the internet. Still, most of this time was spent having conversations, most of which revolved around future social plans that would require us to be away from our computers for hours, occasionally full days at a time. Scary, I know.

The day I got my first iPod, I felt a shift in the way I experienced the world. I remember pulling it out of the wrapping on that Christmas in 2003 and thinking, Well what the hell am I going to do with this? I had been burning mix CDs for years (and before that, making tapes off the radio), and now I was just supposed to abandon all that and use this...thing? I was skeptical.

But it soon became my favorite possession. The vast amount of music it could carry was astounding, which was probably about 10 GB, at most. To give you an idea of how much music of mine that would carry now, I’ll just say this: I currently own a 160 GB iPod, and I have to make sacrifices as to what I can fit on there. I loved it because I could play it off the cassette adapter that fit in the Odyssey’s tape deck and it would put my entire library on shuffle (which was probably about twenty, thirty albums at most) if I so desired, as I drove around my back roads, steering with my knees as I took hit after hit of Connecticut kind bud, staring at the trees.

I’ve always been a lover of music, mostly due to the influence of my parents, who exposed my sister and me to the music they loved. While my parents were still married there was always music on at the house. We shared long car rides to summer cottages in Maine and to my mother’s parents’ house in New Jersey, passing three to five bumper-to- bumper hours in Christmas traffic on the worst section of I-95 sifting through the vast library of classic rock CDs we kept in the car for such occasions. The Beatles. The Who. Janis Joplin. Edgar Winter. Taj Mahal. Jethro Tull. Pink Floyd. Elton John. Aretha Franklin. Led Zeppelin. Tom Petty. The Police. David Bowie. Patti Smith. These were the sounds of my youth, and they represent the seeds that would eventually bloom into the spectrum of my present eclectic tastes. And now I could hold them all in one place: this little white box that fit into the palm of my hand. If there’s one thing that technology has gotten right these past several years, it’s the portable mp3 player.

A dog-like cloud wafts over the Which Stage.

Before my first Bonnaroo, my experience with live music was limited. My very first show was a Jimmy Buffett show at the former Meadows Music Center in Hartford. The air was pungent with what my dad called—and still does to this day on occasion— “the sweetness” and the tie-dyed shirt I got for free from the head of catering there—the father of a childhood friend of mine my parents ended up befriending—was a common choice for a pajama shirt, as it was far too large for my ten-year-old frame to wear anywhere other than my bed or around the house on weekends. After that, though, it was many years before my next concert—a Sheryl Crow concert at Mohegan Sun my friend Beth took a few people to for her birthday one year—and then it would be another two years before I would see Rufus Wainwright, a longtime favorite of mine, at the Newport Folk Festival in 2004 (I guess technically, that would be my first festival, but I don’t really count it as such because I pretty much just went for that one set). To go from this handful of experiences to a sprawling, large-scale, long-term event such as Bonnaroo was quite a large step, but Bonnaroo is what made me fall in love with live music. Presently I have been to more shows than I can count, the number must be well into the triple digits by now. I now write about music professionally and review several shows a month. I don’t know if I would be on the career path that I’m on now if I hadn’t gone to Bonnaroo that year, and thankfully, I’ll never have to find out.

My first steps on this path took place on June 9th, 2005: the day I graduated from high school. It was a Thursday, and it was a little too warm to feel comfortable in the blue blazer, white button-down long-sleeved shirt, tie, and khakis that were the boys’ required dress for the occasion. I always sort of resented the fact that we weren’t provided the traditional caps and gowns that most graduates are adorned with, but paired with the white dresses the girls were required to wear, it made for a nice class portrait. On the other hand, the whole thing kind of felt like we were at some sort of grand-scale wedding, like those big cheesy affairs you read about in the style section of the New York Times in which twenty-five couples get married at the same time in Central Park.

After diplomas were conferred and portraits completed, we all trickled down the hill from the auditorium to the parking lot. My high school was very small and was situated on a small parcel of Connecticut College’s campus in New London, right across the street from the Coast Guard Academy. For the ceremony we borrowed one of Conn College’s spaces, as our own Performing Arts Center was far too small to hold all of the graduates and their various friends and family members.

As we reached the parking lot that sat next to our humble little prep school— which perhaps took up more property than the actual school itself—the clusters of my classmates and their parents began to scatter, giving one another final congratulations and goodbye kisses as the students started to seek out their various transports that would bring them to the graduation party taking place that evening. Various standardized parental warnings floated through the air behind them—the ever popular “be safe,” “don’t drive if you’re going to drink,” and “call me tomorrow” permeating most of the airspace around our ears—as our class disappeared behind closed car doors with fervent excitement. I distinctly remember an SUV full of my fellow graduates blaring Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out” as they pulled out of the parking lot, carefully watching their speed as they left until just outside of the watchful eye of the remaining adults standing on the pavement. I gazed after them with somewhat of an envious eye, half-wishing I would be there to celebrate with the rest of my classmates that night.

The feeling was only temporary, however, as I had far grander plans for my weekend.

To be continued...

The Journey Continues Tomorrow ... Stay Tuned