How (not) to take cover during a storm

Vermont Edition

A half a mile up the hill from our house is Shelburne Museum. It has a bizarre mix of fine art and the largest miniature circus (hey oxymoron how ya doin?) in the northeast, or something. It has gardens and an olde time-y apothecary and a jailhouse where my kids ducked behind bars and I daydreamed about leaving them there, just for a little while, and sitting under a shade tree and pretending I lived in Electra Webb’s house on the grounds. The also has the last steam ship left in the water in America. Now it is the site of my first blush with claustrophobia. Metal engine room. Ducking. Crush of third graders. Terrifying.

Like this, I mean this IS it, but wrapped around an entire building. It’s a lot. But so little.

In the summer the museum hosts outdoor concerts. We go to them. There are food trucks.(I don’t exactly know why this post is reading like an outline gone horizontal but its Monday so let’s use that as an excuse.) This summer I only spent four weeks in Vermont and was pretty excited to see that the concert booked during my time there was Guster. I have loved Guster since High School and know Ryan well now so the evening was bound to be social and musical and, obviously, magical.

Perhaps there have been storms in your area this summer. Or droughts. Or heat. Or smoke filled air. Perhaps you have learned to check the AQI and stay away from skylights due to baseball sized hail. I have. The night of the Guster show was lightening-filled. So it was postponed to the next night. This is a small town thing. You can just move things a night, post it on IG and all the people will roll with it. I mean what else were we planning. Perhaps we intended to have an early night Friday to be ready for Saturday’s farmers market, but other than that we were free.

So night two of Guster’s one night stand had some grey clouds but nothing like the anger of the day before. We walked up the hill with our neighbors. I chatted with the second grader about landscaping as one does. Bumped into a friend at will call and headed to our “seats” in front of an area that had been reserved for band family members. We had some hearty hellos and some eye down avoidances. I ignored the Bread and Puppet show because I find them terrifying. Sort of the way people are afraid of clowns, but in a more paper mache-y way

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Then the storm came.

The person on stage told us to take shelter in our vehicles. We had walked. If you don’t have a vehicle here they invited us to shelter in the round barn. Because of course we were headed to a barn. It was crowded and hot so I sat at the edge of the opening and listened to the weather reports from 250 amateur meteorologists interpreting the same radar images differently. I gave my water bottle to small children and felt virtuous and thirsty.

You see why I had to share my water. I couldn’t let her dry into a husk to be stored in the barn for fall.

Then I got a text from family of Guster saying the band was planning to play in the parking lot so I headed out onto the gravel and straight into a cracked and crackling sky. It was more frightening than an engine room. The police were on bullhorns saying “you stupid assholes get out of the parking lot before you are charred like the kebabs in the food truck that didn’t show” or something. People were running and screaming. Most of them with excitement about the rain and a few sane and mature people with fear of our human fragility and mediocre ability to conduct electricity.

The band running from the cops who broke up the parking lot concert. It was super rainy and lightening-y but this picture shows none of it. You have to imagine.

Because it is Vermont one of the food trucks is owned by my former chef. So instead of the crowded barn Steve and I headed into the semi crowded food truck and ate amazing garlic herb fries (which no you can not get plain even though they add the garlic herbs afterwards because it may be a food truck but he is still a god damned chef and he knows best) and drank water. A lot of water. Even more fries.

Then we walked home in the rain, turned onto our street where the chalk drawings were running more quickly than the chickens who are clearly crossing the road to take shelter from the rain (you are welcome for solving that, will get to egg v. chicken next month)

As we toweled off I thought about the last time I wrote about taking shelter, when L’s school had its most recent shooting, and I realized how place can effect meaning as well as mood.