"Dr. Strangemud" or
"How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bog"

by Michael Guenette
Bulletin Staff Writer
The recent work weekend that I participated in afforded me a chance to compare how the Midsummerfest experience has evolved over the years. Ian and I drove up in my underpowered Mazda 323 on Saturday morning in caravan with Steve Munier and George Madrid. Steve was driving a later model of the same vehicle, but as we learned later, small changes make all the difference. I travelled the route with what has come to be easy familiarity, never needing the guidance of the original scout sitting in the passenger seat snarfing down brownies my wife Carla had made for us.
The morning had started with that long moment of chaos that I remember often characterizing Dowlish enterprises in the past. Of the four people going on the trip, one was missing. We had no phone number and no street address to use to track him down. A half hour of hopeful waiting went by. Finally, Ian was able to get George's home address by getting online and querying George's Unix account. We climbed into the two cars after quickly locating the street on a large map of Cambridge, and headed off to find him, only to discover that the map had been misread and that we couldn't locate the place. Ian set off on foot to ask around, since we knew we were in the general area, and finally managed to find the house (apparently by running in larger and larger circles from where we'd parked) at just about the time that Steve dragged out his Metro Boston street atlas and pinpointed the correct location. Ian's having roused George from a sound and, at this hour, totally appropriate slumber, we swung by to pick him and his gear up and we were on our way.
The drive itself was almost uneventful. My car was leading the way, and at one point I noticed that Steve's car was no longer following us. "He probably stopped for a coffee break" Ian suggested. We toyed with the idea of pulling over to the side of the road and waiting for them, but because of our late start decided to keep going and meet up with the others at the site. It started getting hilly (this was on Interstate 89 in New Hampshire), so I cranked up the Mazda's speed to get it to make it up the steeper inclines in something less than a week. About fifteen minutes after noticing Steve and George were gone, we were passing a car when for some reason I looked over and there they were. We stopped in West Lebanon, on the New Hampshire side of the Connecticut River, and got lunch and groceries for the weekend, then pressed on. Steve had mentioned earlier that his car's windshield wipers weren't working. As we came to within a couple of miles of the Royalton exit, the heavens opened in fine Midsummerfest style and dumped down heavy sheets of rain. Steve was forced to pull over a couple of times until the storm abated.
The first trip into the Midsummerfest site that I'd made, back in 1983, was similarly marked by map problems and heavy rain. I was riding shotgun with Alex Zubatov, a flamboyant Russian MIT student, with some other MIT Dramashop friends in the back seat. Alex was driving some kind of American big boat car, and I was trying to navigate at night in intermittent rain on bad dirt country roads using a lousy xeroxed copy of a USGS topographic map with the supposedly appropriate route traced in magic marker. None of us had been up there before. We'd gotten off the Interstate all right, but it was proving to be a real challenge to try to match the rutted country lanes we were driving down with the features on the map. Eventually we got to a point that I was pretty confident marked the end of the line traced on the topo map. Alex and I got out of the car, which by this time was completely encrusted in mud, and took a look around. "No sign of anyone." "Maybe they're all down this footpath..." We hiked down a slight path through wet grass using a flashlight while lightning flashed nearby. There wasn't a sign of anyone having set foot here all summer - no tire tracks, no footprints, not so much as a crushed blade of grass. That's when the rain started to come down in earnest. We booked it back to the car, and steamed inside it trying to figure out what the hell to do. Alex finally decided that the only option was to ask directions. Yes, it had gotten that bad - guys asking directions. And believe me, there's nothing simpler to do late at night in the middle of nowhere, where the population density is three raccoons and one person per square mile. We drove back three miles before finding a place that had lights on. The folks who came to the door were pleasant enough, spoke broken English, and had no idea of where we were asking about, but that was okay because neither did we. Out of desperation it was decided we should head back in along the road. Thankfully, Ian was out there with a hurricane lantern at a turnoff about a half mile from where we'd stopped for directions. To this day, he has never admitted that the original map was wrong...
The only other thing I can recall is the feeling of total helplessness and doom as Alex tried to drive that aircraft carrier up this pathetic, rocky, narrow, gushing, rutted streambed that Ian had pretended to us earlier would support vehicular traffic. At least we wouldn't drown, thanks to the handholds provided by the large trees hemming in the pathway from both sides. No, death by sudden impact seemed much more likely, or perhaps annihilation by fireball as the car's gas tank was imploded by the large rocks in the road. Alex didn't so much drive up it as chain stitch the car up...a quick run up, the wheels starting to slide and spin, brake, roll back a ways, try again. This was all helped by our being one of the last cars to arrive, the others thoughtfully having gouged out economy sized canyons on their way up. I'm still convinced that scores of other people who were also invited to that first Midsummerfest did make the trip (except for the final part) and are still wandering around somewhere in central Vermont to this day.
What a difference on this Work Weekend! There are now several houses along the road in to Midsummerfest, and the town of Royalton has reluctantly taken over road maintenance. The darn thing was smooth. It looked like, for lack of a better word, a road. Luckily for you nostalgia fans out there, the road is only improved as far as the last year-round house. After that, it's still a little interesting, but it doesn't require winches or tire chains like in the old days...
Lots of good stuff happened during the Work Weekend proper. We put our gear in the New Cabin, which is reminiscent of the inside of a Super-8 Motel (and I mean that as the sincerest compliment.) Steve and Ian went off to purchase lumber to repair the deck on the Upper Pond before the lumber store closed, while George and I dealt with securing a permanent privacy curtain around the latrine near the Upper Field. When our two cohorts returned, Steve and I went for a second wood run with both cars. We raced to the store (driving past it the first time thanks to rain obscuring Steve's vision) and managed to fit all of three pieces of lumber in my car. Mazda hadn't yet figured out the virtue of cutting the hatch lip down to the level of the bumper the year my car was produced. As it was, those three long pieces shifted on the return trip and came to rest on the shift lever (it's an automatic, so that's not quite so dicey as it appears...) Luckily, three pieces were all we needed to fit in the second car.
The fields had dried out some by the time Steve and I returned, so I fired up the riding mower while everyone else worked on replacing the rotten boards on the Deck. Yee Haw! This beauty has 18 horsepower, five forward speeds, and a completely dead battery. After a quick jump start from one of the cars, I tore off in fifth speed. What a blast! Maybe I'm easily amused, but I highly recommend this to anyone going on future work weekends. That thing can really crank, and you feel the g forces when you let out the clutch and when you sling into a turn. It almost doesn't seem fair to get credit for doing work using it...
Progress on the Deck went well enough that we could use the Deck for supper at the end of the day. The entrees consisted of buffalo wings and hamburgers. We sacked out in the Cabin, which is equipped with its own propane interior lighting system, stove, and heating system.
By the end of Sunday afternoon, a new latrine location was created in the woods not too far from the new cabin, the dock had been moved from the collapsing original "cabin" to the newly refurbished deck, and the Lower Field and the Dancing Meadow were mowed. We bundled into the cars and headed south. I got back in time to say good night to my young daughter Elisabeth, which seemed a perfect way to end the satisfying and productive weekend.
[Chris Dowell, Ian Dowell, Catherine Gill, George Madrid and Lynn Stromski returned to Royalton the following weekend to do more work including cleaning out the old cabin, cutting the grass again, clearing out high grass, assembling Tigger's Tramp, patching up the raft and building frames for a lower pond dock and raft. - Ed]
m