[Undertoad]

I only worked security two days this year, so that I could stay overnight in the camping area and get closer to the full experience. My friend explained that the peak of the entire Fest would be 3am Saturday night in the camping area. I decided I would like to witness this personally.

Unfortunately, in order to experience the holy nightmare of the Fest, you have to first experience the unholy nightmare that is parking. It's a farm, so most of the parking is on a hill; and so a great deal of it is subject to the very worst forms of mud. Working Security Friday night to midnight meant that my car wound up stuck on a hill, and so the best bet became staying over Friday instead.

This in turn meant that I was not with the dirty hippies before they had a chance to become dirty, filthy hippies. The Fest is 4 days long, in late August, and only a limited number of the 5000 campers have tickets to the elite showers.

I had two "groups" of friends at this Fest. One my business partner and long-time Fester, who is a Super Expert camper. His tent was erected under a highly engineered tarp ceiling. He pounded four steel rebars deeply into the ground, and attached a series of strategically woven ropes to them, ensuring that the tarp would stay put under any storm conditions. And it worked, because at 8pm on day one, the site was ravaged with a massive storm with 40 mph winds. He confidently stayed there, under it. And as everyone else in the area waited to rebuild, they admired his tarp -- which flapped up and down in the high winds, but never failed, as it was precisely engineered to do.

My other group of friends had a different approach. They arrived in a class-A, $80,000 recreational vehicle that sleeps seven, with indoor toilet, kitchen, air conditioning, sink and shower, running under portable generator.

I decided to go with this second group. But first I was with my elite camping buddy, because he's near the center of it all; and from 12:30am onwards was enjoying a rich diet of beer and weed while enjoying the parade of weirdness that passed by his tent.

And weird it was, because nighttime camping at the Fest is basically a strategic breakdown of the regular order.

The first thing you notice is the noise. It's drumming, strumming, horns, cheers, singing, laughter, raucous whooping, and howling at the moon together in the common square of tents.

It's deepest darkest night in the middle of nowhere, but the area is lit both electronically in the usual way, and with the hundreds of fire pits amongst the tents. Smoke is all around and there is also a light fog in the air which gives the place an incredible glow.