Summer
My deepest regret this summer is that I am not able to attend Pickathon, the glorious music festival on a wooded farm in Happy Valley outside Portland, Oregon. It started with traditional and roots music but now includes punk, hip hop, electronic as well as comedy and storytelling and stages built of reclaimed wood, pipes and other oddities. And it also includes a lot of great local cider.
I had two great years of camping (usually on some blackberry bushes), randomly meeting people from home, more banjos than I would normally listen to and more than a handful of moments of pure magic. Are there really elves in those trees? Who knows.
Pickathon has a deeper commitment to sustainability than most festivals—no plastic or garbage, shuttles and bike convoys to get there and solar generated power! But this year I will not be reporting on the days baking in the sun listening to artists like the legendary minstrel Jonathon Richman, Memphis punks Ex Cult, young art rock band Sunflower Bean or the three sisters of A-WA singing Yemenite traditional music mixed with hip-hop and electronic music (they are playing soon in Vancouver!). There are always some Canadians sprinkled into the bill as well.
However, I have just returned from Portland and the Night of 1000 Tepaches, an event at Reverend Nat’s Cider. Reverend Nat (no, I do not know if he is a real Reverend) was introduced to tepache, a fermented pineapple drink served mixed with beer, while traveling in Mexico, and endeavoured to make his own version when he returned to the USA. It is a glorious drink and mixes well with almost anything including cider and champagne. Once a year he invites brewer friends to collaborate on a tepache blend such as a mix of tropical sours, IPA and grapefruit soda, or vanilla bourbon cream ale. He also concocts his own blends including with mint, with ghost chilis and mango, with mole sauce and banana juice and with Korean fermented chilli paste. I had to try all the most outrageous blends and there were all great!
A trip to the UK was not exactly a road trip but it did include a Welsh cottage, a literary mystery and lots of trips to farms where they make cider and perry (same thing but made of pears). I visited Hay on Wye, the town of many many bookshops, where I bought Wild Strawberries by Angela Thirkell, a wildly popular novelist in her heyday (the 1930s–1950s) who wrote light comedy about family life in the fictional county of Barsetshire. She excels at dialogue but is a little thin on story or character development.
The literary mystery concerns Elizabeth Fair, another mid-century novelist who is even more forgotten today. Her novels were all recently reissued by the Furrowed Middlebrow imprint of Dean Street Books. Furrowed Middlebrow is Scott Thompson, an enthusiast who is rediscovering hundreds of British women writers of the early twentieth century. Most fell out of favour, I believe, because they were more concerned with documenting what might have been considered 'women’s concerns' like family, feelings and the life of the home rather than high drama or high art. However Fair's books are of top caliber and are very funny and illuminating in terms of social commentary—I can highly recommend Elizabeth Fair’s novel The Native Heath. Stay tuned for a story about how I came to be using her furniture on my holiday.
I have long looked for non-instructional literature about cider (Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee does not count) so if you know a good book which has anything to do with fermenting apples please let me know! Also send details of your favourite festival destination this summer.