Octoberfest '06

Maybe it's the lack of bugs. Maybe the crispness of the weather. Maybe it's the short-term nature of the Octoberfest, dig till you drop, drink, dig, repeat, repeat, go home (insert optional frostbite). Not long enough to begin to get bored or to hit the wall and get over it -- you just realize that you'll be going home soon and there is no time to flag (although sometimes people do flag, in the early mornings, depending on the kind of late night they had. I am afraid the Quebeckers have been winning the IronDrinker competition lately). It is possible to go into the campsite and not leave it until the end of the weekend, though some people so go out for supplies. This was just pretty much the perfect weekend.

We (Dick, Mikey, George, Katelyn, Dawn, and I) met on Thursday morning and left the lab at 8:30 under threatening skies and a dubious weather forecast. As soon as we passed Franconia Notch the sky brightened. The caravan made the usual stop at the Ashland Dunkin Donuts, and then went to the Jefferson lab. Mikey was pulling a small empty trailer, perfect for carrying the pipes and tarps of the big tent, and we were parked and partly unloaded at the site by noon. Caleb and Rich and Kurt drifted in as we erected the big tent, an occasion of much ribald remark. Kurt had a wonderful thing called a tailpipe expander (the 2071 type, although from the kind of talk they provoke the "Warning: For Intended Use Only" on the models above it would seem to apply) that allowed us to unsquash the ends of the pipes where they had become oval and difficult to join or unjoin.

It seemed to take a very long time.After the big tent was up, the kitchen supplies organized, and the private tents pitched, it was getting dark (periodic incursions of threatening storm clouds didn't produce anything but added to the lowering effect. All of us in our varying degrees of age and in/firmity complained that our muscles were not used to stevedoring pipes and wrenches, instead of honest shovels. Caleb and I were almost too hungry to wait for 5 pm for supper. Dick and Deb had frozen a chunk of pulled pork and we managed to wait till it had thawed. Brian J and Matt K drifted in; we moved down into the sandpit and a wonderful campfire, with dry logs provided by our patron the landowner. I think I managed to stay awake till 8:30.

The next morning I woke up very early. It is not perfectly quiet at the site, despite the 20-minute walk in; you can hear trucks speeding on Route 2. But it is very dark there; Friday morning, the sky was full of bright stars and a half-moon that cast shadows.



Before the Quebecois arrived



After the Quebecois et al. arrived,leaving out some more tents to the left

It became discernibly colder when the sun rose and burned off the protecting wisps of cloud. Nancy and Cris arrived; they live relatively close to Randolph and we did not really blame them for preferring real beds and running water.


Opening up Charlie Block

More people arrived and we set to digging out the backfill and expanding the F block (many scrapers) and C block (biface fragments). Dawn and I sifted for C block diligently and found sod all, as Brian's people uttered birdlike cries and showed us their munsungun flakes and scraper fragments.


Matt K's fragment

We tried not to mutter. Dawn took a turn trowelling. After lunch, I took a turn trowelling, just as eight Quebecois arrived and Dick set Dawn and me with them to expand B block (many rhyolight flakes in 2004). Since 2004, the square pits, lined with plastic, had squoze and slumped, so digging them out produced unlovely results. Pierre straighted his walls (about ten cm worth) in careful 5 cm vertical slices, so his scraping-finds had a provenance. Valerie and Mathieu worked on theirs, and no one found any tools because I asked them to wait till they were back trowelling flat. Scarcely had we left C block when Rich told us they were now pulling out flakes and biface fragments, and Dawn and I tried not to mutter.

We began pulling rhyolite flakes out fairly soon; I spent the rest of the weekend sifting for Pierre C, who was in charge of the Quebecois students and very patient in working with Americans with bad French accents. Another guy joined us whom I thought, from his shyness, was from Quebec; it turned out he was from Connecticut and although he was shy he couldn't understand when I spoke to him in French at all. Every so often I wandered through all the blocks and tried to keep a record of who was working where, including outliers like the small party on the far side of the beaver pond. They were briefly joined by a fast, loud, moose crashing through the brush. Once she reached the pond she stood nicely in the water and let us take pictures.

Friday evening Jen and Pete arrived, and Sarah and Mark and Kalila and Linda and Ann and Kevin the Elder and probably some other people. (We had 35 people on Saturday morning at our most populous.) Mark and Linda had each brought good Scotch. We had not brought hot-suitable paper cups, resulting in a much greater interest among the diggers in buying SCRAP commuter mugs that I swear was unplanned. We had, however, brought cold-suitable paper cups. They were packed in the plastic bin with the unscented baby wipes (which are great when you don't have running water next to your toilets). They _were_ actually unscented wipes, only some genius in Marketing had scented te outer wrappings with Essence de Sickly Sweet to an absurd degree -- so much scent that even after I had diposed of the outer wrapping and left the bin open to air, you still had your Johnny Walker Green with a splash of ladies' room deodorant. The cups were polluted. Ewwww.

It was quite cold and the fire was very welcome. That night we had hard frost, persisting well after sunrise. I found Kevin Q in the big tent; he had walked through the forest in the dark and arrived about five am, sitting nearly frozen in his sleeping bag. It was really cold; well after sunrise, it was 22 F. My camera refused to focus, which was about how I felt; I spent Saturday night with it in my sleeping bg wiht me, when it was sullen about waking and needed to be dragged out after breakfast. Pierre, who had stayed in a motel, brought his students fresh coffee and doughnuts to make up for his sybaritic lack of character. Matt K let down the side by needing to be scraped up, patted back into shape, and stuck back in his tent until he could stop huddling sadly on the big tent floor. A hangover is a vicious thing.

My feet had became cold Friday and didn't warm up until Saturday evening, when I screwed up enough courage to take off some layers so I could add long underwear, another shirt, and boots that covered my ankles. It was cold, but sunny and if you were outside the forest like Jen and her stratigraphic section,





Fourteen thousand? year old turbulence at the melting edge of a glacier.

you could be comfortable working in a t-shirt. Inside the trees it was time for multiple layers and cups of coffee more for the heat than the caffeine.


C Block open. Note how cold people look.

It warmed up through the day and that night was much warmer. I slept through the bout of freezing rain on Saturday night. It left layers of perfectly clear ice like a sugar coating on my tent, which crackled and fell off to shatter on the ground when I unzipped the flap.

Despite this, Sunday Brian J decided to wear his kilt. It was cold enough that I considered this injudicious, but he felt this was one of the few chances he had to wear it in a friendly setting, poor lad. After bearing a lot of ribbing (because the plaid did not match his coat), he went off into a mossy and lovely stretch of woods to look at the stratigraphy there (by digging pits on a steep hill. Sooner him than me). After a while I realized it wasn't that he looked funny because he was wearing a skirt, but because he looked like a Roman soldier, completely out of context.



Brian with Eagle; Mark with surveying implement

At least until he put on the hat, when he looked like Buzz Lightyear at tea.

Rich's block C produced two fluted pieces. Brian's F Block continued to produce flakes and scrapers. We in Block B continued to dig up lots and lots of rhyolite flakes.


Dawn does not like having her picture taken. (Beta Blockers)

The landowner arrived with his tractor and cart to take luggage up the hill. Dick urged us to eat lots and make sandwiches for the trip home. None of the blocks was finished -- so after lunch we lined them with plastic. I got set to dismantling the big tent with Ann, which had a sort of mouse-nibbling-and-bringing-down-the-castle feeling when we were finally able to pull the plastic sides off. We were able to head back for Concord by five pm, and although I really enjoyed the weekend I was glad to see a warm shower.