Tent Poles and French Broads

Swedish music festivals are a hidden treasure in Europe. I can’t consider myself much of a music festival goer myself but they’ve got it down pat. There was a music festival in a small rural town about 30 minutes away from where I was living, that was known for it’s free spirit.

The festival was situated along a river, and had a floating sauna on the river, a land sauna, an igloo made of IGLOO brand coolers, and the perfect setup for a hippie music festival. We managed to sneak in by sliding wrist bands on and off and going in and out, but we realized after that the gate guards couldn’t have given a fuck and one of them was friends with one of the guys in our crew.

So there are 4 of us, 2 swedes, and 2 imports, and enough molly for all of us to have a hell of a time. We had a couple of beers, then sat on this dock overlooking everything and took the pills. In about 20 minutes we were having the time of our lives telling each other how awesome this was and how cool everyone was. A perfect setting.

I get up to take a piss, and the trough is outside, with this unreal view of the river. A phrase I’d heard a lot as a child because it was embroidered and framed on the wall of my uncle’s bathroom came to mind, “If it were up to me, you’d go outside to pee”, and those words rang true then more than ever.

I fired off a shit ton of messages in those thirty minutes before the concert started to a bunch of people who probably weren’t expecting a drugged up message from me. Fortunately nothing detrimental but strange looking back on them. Eventually the main act starts and it’s this woman playing some old school funk hits mixed in with her own stuff. Clearly the ecstasy had an effect but I swear she tore it up. We were mesmerized and our brains were going a million miles an hour.

I stepped out of the chaos for a few minutes and had an adventurous 15 minutes. Once I escaped the mass of people and lights, I started my way towards the bar. As I’m walking along, a stream of 15-20 naked Swedes, full bush, pile out of the sauna sitting about 30 yards from the bank of the river directly in front of me. They jump in the river, climb back out and run straight back into the sauna. I feel like the entire process took about 20 seconds, but I’m sure if I were sober, I would have just been a part of a group staring at these hippes for 5 minutes. Can’t knock them though, they were probably less fucked up than I was and still having a better time than me.

After the spectacle had ended, I make my way up to the bar and order the most colorful can of beer I see. At this point I hadn’t really had a swedish beer that I had liked, so it was a surprise to me how good this one was. Either that or I was rolling too hard to notice. My jaw was probably permanently on the right side of my head. The beer was this Danish beer called “Hair in the Mailbox”, which was clearly a Danish phrase that was entirely lost in translation.

I get back to the stage where this woman is absolutely shredding, and reunite with my crew. The concert ends and we all stand right outside discussing how fucking awesome that looked and how much we love each other. Classic ecstasy shit.

Our next stop is the rave tent, which is packed because the DJ had started just when the other stage finished. I have an extremely vivid memory of walking into the tent with the song “Moonlight” by Disclosure playing. Fuckin banger I might add.

At this point I realize that the festival organizers have probably just dreamed up the most entertaining setting to be rolling face in, because there is a guy in a full body suit covered in mirrors and another guy in the corner shooting lasers at him. Who the fuck comes up with this kind of shit? I spent 20 minutes staring at him.

We get to the back where there are hammocks, one of our crew members saw a girl that he’d “fallen in love with” and decides he loves his Australian relationship more, so the emotions start flowing. The rest of us are trying to bring him back up to our level but he’s touch and go for a while. God knows what happens over the next 2-3 hours.

We’ll reconvene as the sun is coming up at around 2am, and our crew is sitting in the stands of the main stage, and there are these two girls, one of which who is pretty cute, the other who is a tad on the large side. The large one sits in my lap. Really don’t know how I’m gonna weasel my way out of this, but the molly is wearing off and I’ve taken to chain smoking cigarettes in order to keep the buzz runnin.

I think the fellas realize that it’s time to bounce, so we get up and start looking for the afterparty, which was supposed to be outlawed, but a crew has taken some huge speakers to the tennis court where a small dance party is forming. We walk past a “relaxation tent” and one of the girls out front asks us to come inside.

I’m still not 100% sure what was going on in there, but I believe it was a mixture of tea drinking, people coming down from bad trips, and some casual group sex every so often. I almost went in but my buddy pulled me away. Who knows what would have been going on in there.

We’re sitting out on the hill trying to recapture our high from a few hours prior, when this group of French people mozy by. A French girl who was not much of a looker but had 10/10 confidence walks right up to us and says “Which one of you wants to dance with me?”, for about 3 hours now I’ve been the only single guy in the group, and the boys look at me, so I agree to go dance with her.

Being French she immediately offers to share a cig with me, and we have a sloppy dfmo (dance floor make out) while we blow smoke in each other’s faces. I’m not often a smoker, let alone a cig sharer, so she asks me what the fuck I’m doing when I’m not really sharing it with her. Clearly the english-french communication line is fractured in a number of ways. For this she tells me “You don’t look American, but you act sooo American” and of course she refuses to explain why. This continues on for maybe 30 mins or so, we lose each other, find each other, you know how the story goes.

Now it’s getting to be crunch time. It’s about 3:30 in the morning, the sun is almost up, and the rest of the crew had laid down for their naps. She keeps saying she “wishes she could have a hotel room and a bed with me”. So I offer what little I’ve got. I should note that this is a festival where everyone camps or car camps, and we’ve borrowed a tent from a junior player who is a bit of a fuck up. When we arrived to the festival grounds, we go to set up the tent, and this fuckin kid gave us a tent with NO TENT POLES. So in our possession, we’ve got 1 tent, 1 sleeping bag, and no poles for 2 guys. This is all fucked. But we’ve gotta laugh it off. Not much we can do at this point, so I take the tent, and my buddy will sleep out in the open in the sleeping bag.

So in this situation, I offer my pole-less tent to her, and specifically say, “You’re welcome to come back to my tent, but just know up front that it has no poles, and I plan on using it like a sleeping bag”. She tells me that she’d be sleeping in a car with 5 people anyways, and she might as well. So we trudge through the woods towards the tent with no poles.

I walk past my buddy who’s got his aussie girlfriend on the phone, it’s monday morning for her and she’s about to go to work, and he’s still coming down off some molly and telling her how much he loves her and that he’ll get on a flight right away if she wants him to.

We get to the tent which is laid out on the ground with my backpack and sweatshirt as a pillow, and she immediately says “What the fuck is this? Where are the poles?”, she clearly must not have been listening earlier. We have to go through the whole song and dance again about the fact that there are no poles, and she’s mad as hell, but finally says “fine, fuck it I just want to sleep with you”. She meant this very literally, and this did not mean she wanted to have sexual relations with me, but she wanted to physically sleep alongside me. Maybe I should learn some French in order to avoid this issue in the future.

We swapped some spit for a bit, she kept saying she wanted a hotel room, I didn’t know how to answer her, then we began to fall asleep. I would have preferred to be the little spoon but I digress. Our heads were poking out of the entrance to the tent, and gently at about 5 in the morning it began to rain. We slide inside to be fully in the tent with no poles.

By 6 she sits up to look around. I briefly open my eyes, but realize she is leaving and I’d rather not continue talking to her. She stands up and wanders off into the meadow to find the carr full of 5 of her sleeping friends, never to be seen again. I still don’t have my French flag.

Get ready for the dinner party.