Hoefest 2015

For several weeks we've had nothing but blue skies, breezes, and low humidity in the Ohio Valley, and the ten-day forecast calls for more of the same. Our climate seems to be headed in a Mediterranean direction, with wetter than normal springs followed by high pressure ridges that persist through summer and fall. June and July in southern Indiana we rarely glimpsed the sun. Rather, the rivers flooded and stayed that way, stagnant shallow water breeding plagues of mosquitoes. The entire month prior to our annual "Hoefest" event at the farm, we were unable to drive to the nearby town of Verona and advertise at the bar without going 25 miles out of our way. I'm thinking about getting either horses or a boat, as the town itself is only four miles.

They built the highway in 1825, the first bridge in 1879 (a covered bridge that still stands today), and they haven't altered it much since. Nobody has ever bothered to elevate the highway even ten feet above the river banks which make an oxbow only a few paces to the south of the lowest dip.

Thanks to the installation of drainage pipes in pretty much every wet field in the entire watershed that extends for hundreds of miles, plus the acres of pavement and rooftops of the factories and strip malls in upriver cities, the silted-in river floods at the slightest suggestion of rain.

We got three inches the Monday night before our big Hoefest weekend, on top of the three we'd gotten two nights before. Frogs croaked and fornicated in the field where we planned to plant the stage. Tadpoles swam in the mud pit, one of our main attractions.

For the second year in a row, this broke ass hippie farm was without a tractor only days before the festival, with six-foot tall lambsquarters weeds flipping me off. My first tractor purchase, "Old Squawky," an early 1970's David Brown model, had turned out to be a learning experience, with a serious valve problem, amongst other ailments, and pooped just in the nick of time. Fortunately for the fate of Old Squawky, rain fell like a John Fogerty tune every night and day, and we had to use weedeaters, a tiller, and a riding lawn mower to frantically clear the field before Hoefest. There was no way to get a tractor out there, not even one that actually ran.

Friday night our local talent, James Lane, opened, followed by the Kenan Rainwater Band. After forty days and nights of precipitation, a rain dance might not have been necessary, but we let them play anyway. Rusty Bladen was supposed to go on at nine, but lightning flashed in the skies as we passed a bottle of moonshine and the sound guy, Dan Bent, decided to cover everything up. This was no passing shower, according to the radar on smart phones, so Rusty reluctantly went home.

"Let's just play in the house," we decided. The crowd wasn't too large, anyway, on account of the weather, so the Flatland Harmony Experiment played entirely unplugged in our front room while jovial, somewhat soaked folks got down in more like a hip/hop dance environment. Flatland has volumes of concerts posted on YouTube, so you can check these boys out but you've got to see them live. They might actually play on the west coast by the way. They've got this Three Stooges act going on along with their talent, and quite a few people have said that hearing them play Friday night kicked ass.

We had to totally give up on the stage that night, thanks to the thunderstorms, and I heard later that the White Lightning Boys set up some primitive amp equipment in the basement and jammed for a rowdy crowd.

"The White Lightning Boys didn't play, did they?" I asked in the morning when Kenan Rainwater walked into the bedroom to get paid, wearing nothing but a towel after a dip in our "redneck swimming pool," a rectangle of straw bales with a tarp laid between, where the sign on the side of the barn warned, "Swim at Your Own Risk — Clothing Optional."

"Oh, yeah--they played."

I tried to reach into my shorts, to grab some cash, but they were on backwards and not my own. No cash in any pockets, once I finally got them oriented. "The White Lightning Boys played?"

"Yeah," said my girlfriend, Jetta, rising up from slumber. "They played."

"I must've passed out, then."

"No, Spec, you were right there."

The Hoefest "Insecurity" team appeared through the curtain, into my bedroom. Not the whole team, but a couple of them, in the orange Insecurity T-shirts. They had my cash. They'd paid the Flatland Harmony Experiment for me, they said, because I was naked at the time, sitting on the basement stairs and flipping everyone off while the White Lightning Boys jammed.

After we settled the debts, I ventured outside, checking the place out. Most of it looked familiar. It was, after all, the MacQuayde homestead. It was Hoefest, too, I decided. I was pretty sure by then that I had a grip on what was happening. I needed to feed the pigs and goats and chickens, I may have thought.

I don't know. Maybe somebody else fed the chickens that morning. The pigs partied harder than anyone. I just let the animals run around. Our pigs feasted on campfire scraps, Doritos, corn chips, even pork-based hot dogs according to some horror stories I heard later. I just wanted pigs raging and pillaging tents to add to the Hoefest experience, once people had signed their waivers at the front gate.

Mud-wrestling might be our main attraction at Hoefest. The mud-pit was created originally by 200 years of pigs wallowing in the same place, as this farm was first cleared by settlers in about 1816. This is some classic muck, and I hired "Chief Yellowhand" from southwest Missouri to do the color announcing for the event. "Man, I've been practicing for weeks. I got it," he confided Thursday night before the big festival, when he arrived at three in the morning, actually. He blows glass and peddles wares, but somehow spontaneously two years ago took the microphone during our initial mud wrestling event and blew me away with his color commentary.

On our own part, Jetta and I studied videos of Andre the Giant, Hulk Hogan, the Lovely Elizabeth, and Randy Savage for months prior to Hoefest. We practiced all kinds of moves like choreography for a music video, but then I had to get naked in front the whole party Friday night and piss her off for real. So we had to find somebody to pour her a couple shots of shine before she would get in the pit to face me and kick off the official mud wrestling not covered by insurance extravaganza.

Our fight turned out a little more real than we'd planned. Jetta played a dirty trick by double-knotting her bikini top, throwing part of our mutually-agreed upon plan out of whack, and she straight stomped me. That time. It's not over.

Other, more exciting acts followed, and we are trying to edit the videos to make them Youtube friendly. Videos are never the real thing, though, and only pass the time between kick-ass moments in life. Somehow we all survived Hoefest 2015, and life is back to the normal comedies feeding the chickens, pigs, and goats when we finally roll out of bed in the mornings.