The Hackensaw Boys : Rob

Questions rhetorically posed to myself upon the realization that I will be away from home and hearth for no less than 32 days: How many miles have I traveled on this damn bus? What time do we play tommorrow night? Thirty years from now how will I feel when I review this portion of my life? Will I still be on this damn bus? And “Is the U.S. Ready for the Iraq Chaos” (actual headline).

Questions. The thing about questions is that they always beg the Future or provoke the Past. The Present has no room for questions because by the time you’ve stopped to ask about it, whatever it is, it’s gone. Assuming you’re a homo sapien, the first thing you probably ask, when given the chance, is Why? (Dogs are commonly known to be formulating the question “What”, cats “How”, birds “Who”, computers “When”, and so on up the evolutionary ladder).

“Why,” you may ask in true homo sapien fashion, “Did that thing just happen?”

“Goodbye and Hello, you silly homo sapien,” says the Present, “it’s too late.”

“Why?” you ask, having not learned a damn thing.

“Goodbye and Hello,” says the Present.

And so on.

“But . . . Why?” you ask sheepishly.

“Too late. Too early,” mocks the Present. “Goodbye and Hello.”

Too late and too early for me to wonder why is it raining so hard, or why are Shiner and Dante J. playing chess against a computer they can’t beat (they want to know “why” to make a particular move and the computer only needs to know “when” to make the move it knows to be best). Or, why does Salvagette choose to sit on the lap of Salvage? Or, why am I on this bus?

Ah, but it’s too late to ask. Or maybe I shouldn’t ask that question yet.

It’s definitely too late for Pee Paw who, as any fool can see, is forever doomed by the immense and rarely expressed passion he carries for life on the road. Publicly he makes great claims to the quiet life – the dream of a modest luthier’s shop (affectionately referred as Pee Paw’s Pickin’ Parlour) and perhaps a little vintage clothing store for Ruby Pearl on the side – but really he is never so animated, never so alive, in short, never so much like his father (the elusive RV king) as he is when setting off on a tour.

Now: The sun must be going down because the clouds are getting darker and we are engulfed in rain and interstate detrius. We are in SW Virginia driving southwest which is to say that we’re only a couple of miles from heaven. We are en-route to a festival known as Bonaroo. At last year’s version of this festival this writer spent three miserable days folding burritos in the blistering heat of a Tennessee summer. My one persisting memory of that Hellish weekend is of walking, exhausted, dirty and a little delirious through a crowd of reportedly 90,000 burning souls on my way from one burrito folding shift to another. Traversing a relatively open area of fine dust and scorched vegetation, I passed a pale kid, naked to the waist, holding up a weakly burning stick of weed, half-consiosly pleading with the medicated, dehydrated, overstimulated throng: “Won’t somebody smoke this joint with me? Anybody?”

As I said before, just a couple of miles from heaven.

This is the first in a series of short, more-or-less coherent journal entries describing the summer festival ramblings of the Hackensaw Boys. On this four week run to the West Coast and back there will be no less than four major festivals reviewed (insofar as is possible to do so from this writer’s limited perspective) as well as desultory details from the clubs, campgrounds and truck stops along the way. Hopefully the entries will both edify and entertain. If you don’t like them, I wholeheartedly encourage you to start your own traveling band and post your own journal entries on your own website.

Before closing this introduction I feel it necessary to apologize to the regular readers of this column for the increasing length and infrequency of the recent journal entries. As to the latter charge I plead insufficient motivation due to the lack of tangible reward. As to the former I plead the introduction of leisure time and the substitution of a word processor for typewriter during the draft phase of the task. Fans of brevity and regularity will no doubt approve of the editorial constraints attendant to my thrift-store model Smith-Corona manual portable now being employed.

Thank you,
Mahlon