Home is where you find it

After the Dancer Attack Gig, I got back to Eric's house in Oakland at one in the morning, where there was sort of a little sleep-over happening because of the morning parade the next day (since Eric's house would be the early-morning staging area for the parade). Eric was in his bedroom, I was on a sofa-bed in a guest room, there was somebody sacked out in the living room that I was pretty sure was Derek, there were drums and parade outfits all over the house, there was a carload of drummers pulling away going who knows where, and possibly there were several extra drummers stuffed into the closets. As I tiptoed past the probable-Derek, and past a table full of pandeiros and bells, and past a row of congas, and a stack of caixas, and snuck to my sofa-bed, it suddenly struck me that I felt so completely comfortable and at home.. in this house that I'd never even been to before. I'd first met these Oakland drummers in a pousada in Olinda, Brazil - I'll never forget walking into that pousada and hearing a chant of "deh, deh eh deh, deh eh deh" going on in a corner (the telltale sound of maracatu addicts rehearsing alfaia patterns) and knowing immediately that I'd found kindred spirits. We'd all bonded instantly, and had so many late-night adventures there together - chasing after Estrela Brilhante in their dark, wild, charging parade through the favelas of Recife, running around together on the Night of the Silent Drums (probably the most inaccurately named festival ever, just btw), studying alfaia in the burning afternoons under the Olinda gazebo, taking the bus back and forth to Recifie to play with Jorge Martins' group. Since then, we'd been crossing paths every August at California Brazil Camp: two weeks of living cheek-by-jowl, alternately exhausted and exhilarated in that Brazil Camp way. Puzzling through breaks together, surviving the wild Advanced Bateria classes, meeting up for impromptu parties at each other's cabins, staying up all night together, then exchanging bleary early-morning coffee hellos the next day and starting it all all over again.

There's something about going through that sort of repeated exhaustion and confusion and exhilaration together that really bonds you. I don't know why it touched me so much to be tiptoeing through this dark house full of my sleeping drummer friends, but it did. It felt like, these are my people. This is my family. This is my home.

***

Just a postscript... This was almost the first night in two months that I'd slept in a room that had walls. I woke up several times in the night with a vague puzzlement about my surroundings - where was I? was I by the Grosventre river in Grand Teton National Park? Was I rolled in a blanket under a lodgepole pine on Signal Mountain, napping while a radiotagged crossbill slept in its roost above me? or maybe I had fallen asleep on the glowing mushroom car at Burning Man, or perhaps I was on the cot outside my cabin at California Brazil Camp, or sleeping under a tarp in Modoc National Forest, or in the tepee at Mount Shasta? I looked up automatically for the Summer Triangle or the North Star or Jupiter; couldn't find any of them. I gradually realized I was surrounded by large, high walls, and reached the fuzzy conclusion that I must be in some kind of very, very large tent. Before I realized that I was in the kind of very large tent that is called a "house", I fell asleep again. Wherever I was, I knew I was comfortable and warm and I knew I had friends close by.