Category: Friends

Meltdown Medicine: Where the Music Meets the Mountains and Helps Heal a Community

8/13/2015

I wish to thank Coast Mountain Culture for giving me the opportunity to tell this story in their Summer 2015 issue. They only had space for a couple hundred words, but I had a great deal of material and wanted to add to the story. Thank you for reading, and I appreciate you sharing this with friends, especially those in the Meltdown Family. Photos provided by Summer Meltdown.

The highway winds through dense Cascadian forest. Nahko and Medicine for the People, the weekend's opening headliner blares on the stereo. We are cruising to the 204 Summer Meltdown Music Festival, four days of music and positivity. Just as the dramatic glaciated peak of Mt. Whitehorse comes into view, the forest terminates in a mile wide swath of destruction.

At 10:37 a.m. on March 22, 2014, a massive landslide claimed a portion of the rural community of Oso, including the lives of 43 of its residents, resulting in the deadliest single landslide incident in United States history. The Governor declared a state of emergency and President Obama surveyed the damage from a helicopter. An extensive rescue and recovery effort ensued in conjunction with a deluge of community support.

We turn the music down and slowly drive past heavy machinery sorting through wreckage. It's a sobering preamble for four days of festivities.

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Remembering My Friend Tommy Fruend

1/25/2015

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Over beers you told me about tramping through jungles in search of Mayan Ruins. I urged you to keep going, to tell me how you got there, and what you found. I ordered a round of Agavero to coax the tale forth.

You told me of swimming in cenotes and drinking cerveza with friends on the beach. You spoke proudly of your Washington roots and your children. When I hiked a portion of the PCT you took over trivia for me, charming everyone with your whit and smile.

I would run into you, swaggering around town in fringe and an inexplicable tan in November. We would embrace and continue to evolve the plan of the Central American Adventure we would go on in the hypothetical future. A trip I still intend to go on. I plan to make my trip to Mexico this year. To climb those ruins and swim in the underground rivers of the Yucutan.

It's been a year since we lost you my friend. And we still remember.

There is a place
In the grandest canyon
Where water gushes from rock
There is a mountain
Whose snows reach three oceans
There are azure rivers that flow
Through subterranean caverns
There are trees
In the jungle
Who pick up their roots
And seek out sunlight
And trees that stand a stationary vigil
For a thousand years
There are places where the entire night howls at the moon
Where the ocean glows

Birds travel far without passports
And they always speak the language
And life
In its humblest forms
Scrapes out a living in earth's least hospitable environs

There are alien worlds
With alien inhabitants
But the stories are all the same

There are webs
Connecting trees and rocks
Birds and bees
You and I

There are strangers
Making sacrifices
For one another
And a dog
Laying a comforting muzzle on his boy's knee

There is a singer singing
A band playing
And a young man
Wanting the attention of the
Young woman
Who he will one day marry
In the church on the hill under a cloudless autumn sky

Somewhere there is a father
Combing his daughter's hair
And packing her lunch
So that she can be ready for the day
So that she can lead a happy life

There are storms
To remind us

And there you are my friend

You are the eye of the storm
The spectral note of the coyote's howl
That calls all neck hair within earshot to stand at attention

You are the spirited burn of tequila

You are the rain
Seeking low spots on the plane
Sewing life where you may
On your journey to the ocean

You are the wind
And always will be

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Meltdown Medicine: Where the Music Meets the Mountains and Helps Heal a Community

Remembering My Friend Tommy Fruend

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