A Willow in the Wind

Natalie Green L-SAW 2006

That brave woman is dancing in front of the stage again, swaying to the music when no one else has the nerve to leave the comfort of their blankets and chairs. Each year she is the first to give in to the music. She moves like nobody is watching, swiveling her hips, bouncing around and joining hands with random children to form a circle that spins to the music. Nearly every summer of my life, I've spent the first weekend in August at the Northern Rockies Folk Festival eating corn on the cob, seeing old friends, and listening to hours upon hours of music. All of this while taking in the backdrop of a brilliant blue Idaho sky and the Northern Rocky Mountains themselves. By five o'clock on Friday, the entire city park is transformed into a patchwork of blankets, beach chairs, and food stands. It is an event that few people in the town of Hailey miss, but this is the first summer in quite a while that my entire family is home for the folk festival. My oldest brother Nate even took the greyhound up from Wyoming for the big event. While my two brothers, my dad and I are blending into the crowd, one woman is in front of the stage, twirling around to the sounds of a local band. That woman is my mom.

My mom was almost kicked out of Brigham Young University. In most colleges, it takes failing grades, cheating or drug abuse to get kicked out. What did my mom do? She wore overalls. Apparently, in the 1970's era Mormon mecca of Provo, Utah, my mom wore pants in public when the Church believed that girls should be wearing skirts. When she did wear a skirt, she hiked it up, showing her scandalous knees and garnering yet another warning from the authorities. A third offense could have resulted in BYU giving her the boot, but before she got the chance to get kicked out, my mom quit school along with the Mormon religion. This is when she began what she calls her "willow in the wind" stage.

That next June, my mom, her older sister Deannie and a few of their friends from their home town of Rupert decided to make the trip across Idaho to the Weiser National Oldtime Fiddle Festival. Not only does the festival attract the nation's best fiddlers as they compete for National Fiddle Champion, but for one week in June, the little town of Weiser is transformed into a buzzing city of camped out bluegrass players and music lovers. During the festival, random jam sessions take over the campgrounds until the early morning hours.

They pulled into Weiser at eleven o'clock at night, just in time for the much anticipated finals. Even though the finals were held in the high school auditorium, a rock concert atmosphere filled the room. People lined the walls and the crowd spilled out the back doors. When the champion was finally crowned, the audience erupted in cheers of admiration, as if John Lennon was standing before them instead of the overall wearing Dick Barret of Roundup, Montana. Amidst the mob of people outside of the Finals that night was my Dad. He was tall and skinny with a scruffy beard and hair in need of a trim. Earlier that day, he had used is pocket knife to turn his jeans into cutoffs, and the straggly edges hung down over his thighs.

Dad is sprawled out on an old blanket that my grandma probably made. His shirt is off, and his belly sticks up towards the sky. A bluegrass band from Colorado is playing now. Four young guys, one of them still in high school, impress the crowd with their passionate performance. A visor hat is covering my dad's face, but I can see his toes moving to the flow of the lively fiddle melody. He came to the festival right from the construction site. I asked him earlier how work is going, and he answered, "This job stuff is overrated." He was only partly kidding. This winter he spent four months traveling the world, a fifty-four year old vagabond with just a backpack and a couple of continents to explore. He started in Germany, but journeyed to places like Morocco and Hungary and went as far as Thailand and Cambodia. People that don't know my dad seem to think his middle-aged journey was unusual, but to me, it was almost expected. My dad grew up all over the world. His father was in the Air Force, so he has lived everywhere from Biloxi, Mississippi to Nagoya, Japan. Despite a shyness that I still see in him today, I know my dad figured out early on how to meet new people and adapt to his surroundings.

When he first saw my mom, my dad told a friend, "That's the girl I'm gonna marry." I don't know if it was her tiny hot pants or the way she moved to the music, but something caught my dad's eye that night. He ended up latching on to my mom and followed her everywhere she went. When my aunt and her friends decided to head back to a campsite on the other side of the lake, my dad told my mom, "Oh, I know where they're staying. I'll take you there later." He had no clue where they were. After wandering around the lake until the early morning hours, mom and dad finally crashed on a dock. An old quilt that my mom's mom had made covered them both.

After a few hours of sleep, they woke up to another world. It was as if the entire festival was never there. Except for a few empty beer cans, the entire camp was deserted. Hundreds of tents, trailers and motor homes were packed up and gone, and the constant sound of fiddle music, was replaced with an eerie silence. My aunt must have given up on finding my mom and left so she could be back for work on Monday. Rupert was about five hours away.

"I guess I can hitchhike back." My mom didn't have many options.

"I can go with you if you want," my dad wasn't about to let her get away that easily, "...But my friend and I were on our way to the World's Fair up in Spokane. You should come with us."

"Well...I've never been to Washington...", and like a willow in the wind, she agreed to the adventure. I like to think that in the same situation I too would've taken the chance and gone to Washington. Still, it's hard to imagine my mom, a woman who refused to use a microwave throughout my childhood for fear radioactivity, taking such a risk. Somehow though, with only the clothes she was wearing, cutoff shorts and a home made halter top, my mom was taking off with a stranger to uncharted territory. But first she called home to let her family know where she was.

My aunt's husband Jock answered the phone and my mom let him know that she was safe and that she was going to Spokane with a really nice guy. Unfortunately, Jock was so stoned that this important information was instantly lost. Deannie never got the message, and didn't know where her sister was until she received a letter from my mom two weeks later. So, as her family got increasingly nervous about her whereabouts, my mom ventured on with my dad to the World's Fair in Spokane and then on to Bellingham, Washington, a city on the Puget Sound with exotic rainforests and even more exotic people. It was like no place she had ever been. After growing up among rows and rows of the same old sugar beet crops and pew after pew of the same old boring faces, my mom was getting an education in the colorful outside world.

The sun is completely behind the mountains now. The first couple of stars are starting to appear, and as if on cue, the headlining band takes the stage. Tonight, the headliner is a band called the Subdudes, who play an amalgamation of blues, rock, and even zydeco. The Subdudes have five men, most of them with gray hair and beards to match, but it's soon obvious that these old men rock. With the first squeeze of the accordion, the sprawl of blankets and beach chairs throughout the park is deserted, and the majority of my home town has formed a dancing mob in front of the stage. This is what I always remember the most about the folk festival, these few hours when everyone turns into wild animals dancing under the moonlight. When I was in middle school, a more self-conscious, angsty version of myself, I would try to resist the dancing and stay glued to our blanket. But just as I do every year, I eventually gave in to the child within who dances like crazy without a care in the world. When I was small enough and my legs got tired, I loved to perch on my dad's shoulders where I could better observe the seemingly ordinary people of my town unleashing their inner selves. This year, standing on my own two legs, I can see my brother's fifth grade teacher getting down with a security guard, and the town librarian, usually so proper and quiet, is shaking her booty like a go-go dancer. It's a beautiful thing.

My dad owned an old school bus in Bellingham that became their home. It was painted a robin's egg blue, had a wood-stove and a table that turned into a bed. My mom even macraméd curtains for their little home on wheels. Sometimes they parked in front a house owned by a man named Skip. I don't really know how or why my dad knew Skip, but I do know that he was in and out of insane asylums and invited people he met in the mental hospital to stay at the house. One man was catatonic, and just sat in a corner of the house and stared. There was also a woman who incessantly scrubbed the floor with a toothbrush. Her newborn child had just been taken away from her, and as she sat sobbing and scrubbing the floor, her swollen breasts let out milk through the front of her shirt. These people had no friends, no family, nobody to love or to love them. My mom realized how lucky she was. After three months in Bellingham, she was ready to go home.

"I'll come with you," my dad said, but my mom was hesitant. For one, he smoked a pack of non-filtered camel cigarettes a day. She couldn't stand it, so he offered to quit. I don't know if there was something in my dad that my mom couldn't resist or if she just couldn't get rid of him, but before too long, they were headed in the blue bus across Washington, across Idaho, and back to my mom's home town of Rupert. They bathed in an irrigation canal outside Rupert in an attempt to look presentable at my grandma's house. Still, when she first met my dad, my grandma was not impressed. At that point, she had probably still harbored the hope that my mom would meet a nice Mormon boy and settle down. My dad was not the boy she had in mind. At some point, though, he grew on her, and the older she got the more she liked him. By the time Grandma was in her nineties, she would brag to anyone within earshot about her wonderful son-in-law.

In Rupert my parents worked in the wheat fields moving sprinkler pipe with Mexican immigrants. Over the next couple years, they continued their adventures across the west and worked everywhere from apple orchards to ski areas. They were married in the hills outside of Great Falls, Montana by a friend of theirs who also provided the keg. Mom had a crown of wildflowers on her head. Dad had the same scruffy beard as when they met, but mom had just cut his hair that morning. My brother Nate was born about five months later.

I used to have to get down from my dad's shoulders when the band played a slow song so my parents could dance in each others arms. Feeling invisible, I would run off in the crowd to find my friends. The Subdudes are playing a slow jazzy number now, and I am very aware of the fact that my parents aren't dancing together. In fact, they are on opposite sides of the crowd. Through the mass of people, I can see my dad flirting with that fifth grade teacher.

It's been about two years since my parents divorced. They were together for thirty years. My mom is cutting the hair of another man now, but continues to turn heads with her dance moves. My dad is adjusting to bachelorhood, and has been camping out for most of the summer, ready at any time to move on to a new adventure. In a few weeks, I'll be going back to the surreal world of college. My life without my parents is just beginning, and it's anybody's guess where I'm going or who I'll become. My mom would say I'm just a willow in the wind. The way I see it, the winds may come and go and its branches may bend and waver, but at its roots, the willow remains unchanged.