FIELD NOTES: Welcome to the (Tour) Crew

I’m currently sitting in the Seattle airport after spending a few weeks on the road, with the new tour crew and without. First, a few of us spent dusty days in the warehouse repacking the trailers, visited future sites we have yet to see, and hosted the first few events of the season to give the new team a chance to pack up their lives and make the appropriate arrangements to get on the road for the next seven months. There is surprisingly a lot to figure out in that time period: where will your mail go? Do you have to put things in storage? Who will hold onto your car – or maybe even your cat – while you’re gone?

Last year around this time, I remember giving away the last key on my key ring. I shedded the one to the front door of my old workplace, the apartment that had been my home for many years, the mailbox I always forgot to check and finally my car, which would take me to the airport with someone else behind the wheel. I felt immediately unmoored. I’ve had a key ring since I got my driver’s license at 16. It has held keys to friend’s houses, to storefronts, to many places that felt like home and a few that were simply a place to sleep. It’s opened doors across the country and lived in purses and jacket pockets for more of my life than not. On tour, I felt its absence every time I left a house (none of them my own anymore, always borrowed for a night or a few) reciting the routine refrain of “keys, phone, wallet” to keep track of my most practical belongings. Except now, I had to learn to keep track of all of my belongings, at all times, packing them in and out of the two bags I was allotted in order to maintain enough space in the trucks for six individual identities. 

For the rest of this year, I will be a visitor on tour. The full-time crew will be on the road together, day in and day out. It’s strange to see the dynamic from the outside; even this early in the season, you can tell this collection of individuals is braiding into a unit from which they will never untangle, regardless of where their lives take them from here. 

Meet the Crew

 While watching this year’s crew find their footing on uneven ground over these past few weeks, I was constantly reminded of my first days on the road – the bruises up and down my forearms from carrying tables, days of layered sunburns from before I learned how often to reapply in the California sun, sore muscles from lifting and a raspy voice from yelling over ocean breezes. There were plenty of moments in those first few weeks when I asked myself, “what did I sign up for?” But I also remembered, in my bone-tired haze, the late nights rubbing aloe on each other’s backs to soothe those sunburns, laughing until I couldn’t breathe at my teammates’ faux-bickering in the front seat of the truck, the wonder I felt with each new site we visited, feeling unspeakably lucky to be able to set foot in some of the country’s most beautiful places – and then trusted to share that with hundreds of others. 

This week, the team left California for the PNW. This is the first major milestone of the tour, when the trailers fly the nest, the Watsonville warehouse is no longer a drive away to pick up lost supplies and there’s no option to call in reinforcements for difficult events without some extra planning and purpose. The team is embarking on their own, producing memorable experiences for hundreds of people each week – and countless unforgettable moments for themselves. I can’t help but feel so proud of them — and a little bit envious, if I’m being honest. There’s nothing like the joy, exhaustion, abundance and never ending challenge of being on tour.

In my last note, I talked about flow — that feeling of effortless immersion in the task at hand, a separation from oneself in service of a single task. That flow state is not easy to come by. It necessitates hours of practice and countless repetitions to burn a memory into tired muscles. That kind of ease only emerges from earned expertise, from a lot of painfully obvious effort. I’m watching this wonderful new crew tackle the same difficulties and excitement and the lack of understanding that I felt last year, and even now seems only to expand as I continue to wrestle with its margins. But I guess that is what mastery is all about — learning more and more of what you don’t know as you climb on top of what you’ve learned.

If you’re attending an event anytime in the near future, I hope you take the time to say hello to these folks, many of them mainly operating behind the scenes. They work really hard, and the work is endlessly rewarding because of people like you. Your presence at the table allows them to earn that expertise, to grow into a place where the effort becomes invisible, or at least a little harder to see.

—— Ariel