Cantiga: Michelle's Blog

Scarborough Faire Part II

We’re having beautiful weather at Scarborough Faire, and great audiences! The weekends are a blast. The concert at Tarrant County College was a huge success, and I was thrilled to play with Ade Suparman, Jamal’s friend visiting from Indonesia, a musician and composer I really admire. He joined us on stage for a tune (Cantiga 353) we had never played together, and of course, he was amazing. (You can hear it on our music/video page! )

During the weekdays, I am very busy giving violin lessons, co-organizing the First Annual Hoity Toity Renaissance Community Art Exhibition with Renae Taylor from “Studio Imaginarium”, getting up before dawn to sketch down at the waterfalls and watch the snowy herons, creating signs for booths, designing flyers and promotional materials for my bands, rehearsing with Cantiga, gigging with Istanpitta and the newly formed Musica Illuminata on medieval vielle, (with whom I just finished putting together a package & demo to submit for an Early Music competition), doing camp chores and running errands, and working on a top secret guerilla theater project…..(more on that later!) Then a couple days ago, I took a break and drove down to Houston to hear our very own cellist, Max Dyer, play a solo in "Gisele" that brought tears to my eyes. GO MAX! We're so lucky to have him.

So I’m starting to get the hang of it all, and things are much better now that I have my own room above someone’s booth space. I’m out of the noisy campground and have some measure of privacy. There is even electricity, (although it’s not very dependable), so I can have light, I can listen to CDs, work on my laptop, and plug in my cooler. There are flush toilets and showers a short bike ride away. A fountain runs in the booth downstairs, making a delightful accompaniment to the frogs and insects. A rickety set of homemade stairs leads up to my little round room up in the treetops overlooking the creek.

There is no glass or screening on the windows, so I get all sorts of tiny visitors; the other day a beautiful brown and yellow ochre butterfly flitted around while I had lunch, and a couple of wren’s woke me up the other morning, flying around looking for a spot to make a nest. While one of them went through all my stuff, the other wren perched on the windowsill right by my head where I lay, just waking up, and screamed in my ear: TWEEEEEEEEET!!!!! TWEEEEEEEEET!!!! I was amused, except that there is an old gypsy superstition that when you are visited in your home by a wild bird, someone you know is going to die. Well, I don’t buy much into superstition, but I was having a really bad week when this happened so the thought DID go through my head!

Hello from Scarborough Faire!

We just finished our second weekend at Scarborough Faire, and what a great start! Our shows have been conistently well attended by very sweet and appreciative audiences, and we are having a great time accompanying the Royal Dancers! It's so amazing to see the music come alive, and the court is very entertaining. My friend Al Cofrin from Istanpitta was just telling me how he overheard Mary Queen of Scotts ask Queen Anne how England was going. "Oh, just fine, thank you," she replied. Queen Mary mumbled, "Not for long!"

I have to camp again at this faire, but I have a spot in the shade, so it's not so bad... except when I have to wake up at 2am to use the loo, in which case all the dogs in the neighborhood start barking. Arrrrrgh. I usually wake up early in the morning, not so much because "the sun poured in like butterscotch/and stuck to all my senses", as Joni Mitchell would say, but because all the dogs start whining and barking and yelping. It gets pretty noisy, since there are 4 other tents set up within 10 feet of my tent... and the nearby creek amplifies the sounds from the rest of the crowded campground. A year later I still can't get used to that.

Luckily one of my artist friends has a booth here that is also a studio, and she lets me work with her in the little space she has. It's quite an experience, because the heavy curtains in the doorways aren't enough to keep the June bugs out, which whirl around aimlessly like broken helicopters, making a terrible racket and crashing into our faces and necks with a THUD while we try to draw. They fall to the ground on their backs, then get gobbled up by the dogs.

It's gotten really hot here in the last 2 days, so hot I'm afraid that soon it will be absolutely humanly impossible to do any work after 11am and before 8pm, when the sun goes down. Last year it didn't get that hot until May... I'm not looking forward to what May will be like in the campground, if this keeps up.

However, living out here definetely has its moments... just last week I had a very beautiful candlelit Passover Seder under the full moon and the trees with good friends and also people I had never met before. It was so lovely to have dinner and prayers under the stars. Although it's hard to be away from my family for the holidays, it's so wonderful to make new friends!

Happy Easter/Passover!

Green Grow the Lillies-O/Right Among the Gators-O

Well you won't find me canoeing in the Everglades again anytime soon. The last trip I took started out calmly, as usual... my friend Gregor Harvey from "Bedlam" and I paddled past a couple gators, as to be expected, with no problems. Less than a mile into the trip, our shoulders were already aching. "Do you remember there being so many lily pads last time?" I asked Gregor. "No, I think the water has dropped another foot or so since last week," he replied, and we continued to trudge through the thick swamp growth.

In front of us there was a gator in the water with its head poking out, and it did something unusual-- it didn't disappear as we came towards it. In fact, it turned around to face us.

We sat there in a kind of staring contest with the gator, trying to figure out what to do. Maybe it was guarding a nest? But after several minutes of waiting we realized it was not going to move, and... well it's a gator. It had nowhere to be at 5:00. So we decided to paddle past it, slowly, carefully, silently, hugging the right hand side of the narrow pass. We made it through safely... but still, the gator never moved.

We encountered three or four more gators with the same strange behaviour. I was very nervous-- why, all of a sudden, were they unafraid of us? But there was no turning back... we would just encounter the same problems on the way back and decided we might as well finish the trail.

When we got to the mid-point, there was a wooden platform we could rest on. It was at this point I wished we HAD turned back, because we found ourselves being stalked by an 8 ft gator who swam right up to the platform, put his front legs up on the grass right by Gregor and I, opened his mouth and exhaled heavily. Yikes!

Luckily I had my cell phone-- but I couldn't get through to the rangers. "Who do you call when you're being stalked by an aggressive gator?!!" I asked Gregor. He was standing a couple feet away from the gator, paddle aimed at the gators' head, ready to strike if it came to that. "CALL CHARRY!" he cried out.

We were, of course, trying to avoid a physical confrontation. But the gator kept us prisoners on the dock. We couldn't even get to our canoe. In the end, I reached both Charry and the rangers... who assured me it was simply begging for food... apparently some fisherman have been feeding this particular gator-- "Elvis"-- and teenagers have been caught tossing it marshmellows.

Eventually the gator submerged, and Gregor and I raced to get in the canoe-- but as soon as we were in, the gator appeared from under the platform and swam towards us. We jumped back onto the dock and waited for another chance to escape... eventually the gator submerged once more, and we managed to get away without any incident.

We encountered a few more gators in the middle of our path-- but this time they submerged, like they were supposed to. We noticed the water was deeper now, and easier to paddle through, and guessed that maybe the reason the gators weren't submerging earlier is because they COULDN'T submerge; the water was too shallow.

We encountered a fisherman in a kayak and I asked if he had any trouble with the gators today. He smiled, calmly wriggling his fishing line in the still murky water. "Oh yes," he replied, "the gator at the dock was following my boat, acting a little too friendly!"

I was very nervous and eager for the trip to be over.... for a while the wind was blowing against us, making the paddling even harder. Then there was no wind at all-- just the hot sun beating down on us and reflecting at us from the water below. But Gregor distracted me from the situation by engaging me in some singing rounds, and we amused ourselves by making up songs about our adventure. Later Gregor told me we had even passed by some more gators, but I hadn't noticed, and before I knew it, we had made it safely through the everglades.

When we got back to camp, we found that word of our predicament had travelled fast. Dan Looker, aka "Daniel Duke of Danger" teased-- "You are no longer simply Michelle-- you are now Michelle, Molestor of Alligators!"

Canoeing in the Everglades

I went canoeing in the Everglades yesterday, though I didn’t see as many alligators as I saw last year. Usually the gators are sun bathing on the edge of the canoe passage and lying really still, camouflaged against the periphyton algae, floating logs, mud and sawgrass. However, at one point I noticed several feet away, in the middle of our canoe path, there was an alligator poking its head and snout out of the water. I alerted my friend who was steering in the back—and the alligator quickly slipped fully into the water in front of us as the river pushed us closer, blowing a froth of bubbles to the surface. We were about to glide over exactly the place where its dangerous tail would be submerged— I didn’t even dare breath as we glided past—but lucky for us the alligator had already split.

However, nothing can beat the close encounter I had last year on the same trip-- I crashed into the grass, just a foot or two away from the second to largest alligator I had ever seen (it was as large as our canoe), and as my paddle pushed off the shore just 3 inches away from his eyeball, all I could think was “don’t scream, don’t scream, don’t scream”. The alligator didn’t even blink as I slid away.

It felt so good to be away from the traffic sounds for a few hours; despite the physical exertion of the trip, I felt invigorated, refreshed, and inspired afterwards. I had forgotten how nice it is to be totally immersed in nature, with all the fresh sweet smells and the air filled with musical calls of insects, frogs, birds and who knows what else was hiding out there…I saw orange and black spotted dragonflies darting past my face as they mated …. grass that looked like birds and birds that looked like grass… wide expanses of sawgrass with a single Great White Heron standing perfectly still against the endless green landscape...and Limpkins... it reminded me of something Charry said last year: "Psssst, hey, I know the limpkins' name... Abraham Limpkin!"

So two more weeks of Deerfield Beach… the camping is still miserable, but at least nature is only 25 minutes away! However I don’t think I’ll be inviting any alligators over for dinner at my place, even though they were so kind as to invite me…. I hope they'll understand; there just isn't enough room in my tent.

Deerfield Beach, FL

Southern Florida is a vast shopping desert! It probably wouldn't be so bad if the camping situation were not so miserable, but as it is now, it would be completely unliveable to me if not for the temporary relief of the nearby beaches and the $2.39 breakfast at Shelby's.

I don't mind living in a tent as long as I am in nature-- but since Hurricane Wilma blasted through Quiet Waters Park where the Rennies are camped, (very ironically named), the most nature I get is the scalding hot sun (most of the trees are gone) and fireants. Just trying to fall asleep at night is quite a task, because instead of frogs and nightbirds all I hear is the constant roar of the city traffic-- which I can plainly see from my tent.

On the bright side of things, a morning dove has recently been hoo-hooing by my tent, which gets my day off to a good start. And I appreciate how life on the road and camping around the country is always a challenge-- it sure keeps me on my toes! Things may be difficult at the moment, but I keep busy... preparing for fiddle lessons, practicing music, and working on artwork all take my mind off things. Besides, I always have the faire weekend to look forward to, and that makes it all worth it!

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