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by Ed Stowers June 25th 2004 we held the first ever joint Friends of John Denver campout between the Pennsylvania group and the North Carolina group at Jellystone Park in Natural Bridge, Virginia. Since I am a member of both groups and live basically in the middle of them, I had long lobbied for a joint FOJD function and we finally made it happen. Pat and Howard Liddic and I represented the PA presence in the campout, while Laura Bollinger of the NC group showed up with nine other people, some who came from as far away as Tennessee. Jellystone is a family type campground/park, which is one of several such parks scattered around the United States. It is not a remote campground at all, and while not perfect for a JD retreat (too crowded, early quiet hours, etc.) it was more than adequate for our first outing together. On a positive note, there was water and electric hookups, a swimming pool, a wading lake, a miniature golf course, a fully stocked store at the ranger station, and showers and bathroom facilities. We were hardly roughing it…technically. There were moments that it seemed we were, however, especially the first night. As Pat, Howard and myself rolled into camp during the afternoon of the 25th (Friday), it was dreary and cloudy and threatening rain. We decided to put our tents up before the rain hit and managed to do that with a lot of humorous banter about our tent-raising skills. Camping sites at Jellystone were fairly small, but we managed to pick some spots and get our tents up before the rain hit. The rain came as we were attempting to get a fire lit, and pretty much ended that activity. Then we sat around wondering where the other folks from NC were. As we were sitting under umbrellas and wondering, I was watching another group setting up camp. I think I noticed them because there was a boy in the group wearing a cowboy hat, and, being from Texas, such things naturally attract my notice. As I was watching them set up, I kept thinking that one of them sure looked like Laura Bollinger, and sure enough, it was her. They had been settingup all around us and we had never noticed them at all. So much for our powers of keen observation. It started raining fairly hard at that point and the three of us decided to go into town to get a bite to eat. It was a fair drive, and we found a nice little ma-and-pa type of café in the nearby town and got a hot meal before heading back. Fortunately for us, the North Carolina people had a huge fly tarp that they had set up. This provided us all a place to gather and chat while the rain poured down around us. It was a real deluge, too. In fact, it was raining so hard by then that no one wanted to get his or her guitars out, so we just sat and talked for most of the evening. It’s a good thing they had brought that fly. Otherwise, everyone would have been relegated to sitting in their tents for the evening in the dark, listening to the rain. The next morning dawned with the rains clearing off. People got up and began to set up for a sunny day. This brightened the mood considerably, and by about ten o’clock things were going pretty well. Pat and Howard decided to go hiking. I took up my guitar and went down to where Laura had hers out, a Big Baby Taylor, which she let me play for awhile. We sat and played a bit, mostly chatting. About that time a group of people came by in a golf cart and saw all of the guitars. They stopped and asked us if we would do a song for them. Kind of placed on the spot, I decided we could do an easy one that everyone would know, so I picked “Leaving’ On A Jet Plane.” So, we stood there in the grass beside the trees and played that song for them. I don’t understand exactly why, but these people seemed excessively thrilled at our rendition. Not that it was that good, necessarily, but merely that we actually performed for them. I believe they secretly thought we just had the guitars for show and couldn’t actually play anything. But we surprised them, and they seemed very happy. We seemed to attract the attention of a lot of other campers, as well. Nobody came by to say anything, but they kept looking over at us, and nobody complained, either, which is always a good thing. Pat and Howard had returned during our impromptu concert, so everyone who had guitars got them and we played a bit, just practicing stuff and talking. As afternoon came on, we broke up to cook lunch, and then everyone had afternoon activities. Most of the North Carolina group decided to go rafting down the James River. The boy with the cowboy hat had found a blowup orca to float on. It was memorable in that it had two “baby” orcas attached to its tail, and they had this manual pump to blow it up with that made a lot of noise. Howard decided to check out the local area for civil war sites and other personal interest things. Pat and I sat around trying our best to get a bonfire going with waterlogged wood. We finally had to cheat and borrow lighter fluid from one of the North Carolina people to get it lit. Once it was going, we sat by it, feeding it driftwood, and kept it burning while we waited for everyone else to return. I guess we were the camp guards. I chatted with one of our neighbor campers for a while, a nice couple with two little children, and invited them down to the activities that evening. By evening, people started returning. Laura, Patti, and the others who had gone “tubing,” had encountered some very mean and angry rocks, which had decided to jump up and bite them at every available opportunity. So, after hearing tales of the hard rocks, treacherous anglers along shore, and some very mean fish, everybody cooked supper and prepared for the evening’s activities. One of the baby orcas had disappeared from the blow-up killer whale and we were informed it was a casualty of the river. As darkness came in, we gathered down under the big fly for our sing-along. “Sing-along” is the proper word, too, for despite the fact that at least three other people had brought guitars, no one else brought them out, despite my prompting (begging is actually what I did) and encouragement. Alas, it seems I had to be the entire one-man band, which was a bit of a surprise, since there are always a lot of pickers at any FOJD event. So, I did all the guitar playing and everyone else sang. But I had my new Dao-wood Alvarez AF60CK 6-string, and I was excited to see how it would sound in a campfire sing setting. I’m happy to report that it sounded just fine. We had a good time, though, and we sang well into the night, long past official quiet hours. There was a little family camped right next to us. They had small children that I am sure were trying to sleep. And while we quieted it down a bit after, oh, 11 p.m., we were still going at almost midnight. Yet no one complained or even asked us to turn it down at all. We just sort of naturally got quieter in our volume out of courtesy to the other campers, and it seemed to work fine. There were no complaints, no thrown rocks, nothing. The campground seemed happy enough with what we were doing. I sure hope all those other campers liked John Denver, because they got a lot of him that evening. As midnight came on, people started drifting off in ones and twos, and at last it was just Laura and I closing the evening. I finished with “This Old Guitar,” and we sat talking a bit and trying to keep that darn fire going. The wind kept shifting and we’d have to move to find a spot to breathe. At one point, this loud whooshing noise began to come from one of the NC tents, drawing some amount of ridicule and laughter from Laura and I. It seems that someone’s air mattress had deflated and they were pumping it up, but it sounded so funny that we had quite a ball joking with them about it. It was actually starting to get cold by then—a real surprise for June—and about 1 a.m. we decided to call it a night. I went to my car and put up my guitar and then went to my tent, where I crashed pretty hard. The next morning we got up and had breakfast and then visited for a while. But the event was too short, as all good times seem to be, and gradually people began tearing down their camps to depart by the Noon. checkout time. Pat, Howard, and I said goodbye to our good friends in the North Carolina group and we checked out of the camp and went into town to have a final lunch together before each of us headed home. All in all, except for the wet and dreary evening on Friday, the first joint campout was a success. We had a good time, we sang some good music, and we got to spend a lot of time with people from our FOJD family from down in the Smokey Mountains, the North Carolina Friends of John Denver. People of like mind as far as JD goes, coming together to share space and time and music, just the way John’s friends should. And I’m sure looking forward to the next one. |
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| Camping with the NC & PA Friends of JD in Natural Bridge, VA ~ June 25-27, 2004 |
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