Salmonfest: Part 2

OK so I've got a few pictures left from Salmonfest that I figure I should publish somewhere, so why not in another post? The gist of these photos are that they were taken as I stumbled home from the concert. You see, after the concert was over, I lost Pete and missed the shuttle-bus to our campsite. At this point, I wandered up to Uncle Barry's (Where a bunch of people were staying just a little ways up the road) and crawled into Nikki's tent to figure out where everyone had gone to. I guess somehow I got mixed up and thought that she'd said that Fancy, Pete, Bert and Ania had all gone back to Redcliff campground. In hindsight, this made no sense since all except Pete were staying with Uncle Barry. In fact, I later learned that Bert and Ania were asleep in the tent right next to me.

But at the time, I'd decided that my one and only option was to get back to Redcliff. I thought it would be just a little jaunt down the road. It turned out to be longer. Keep in mind that I was utterly wrecked at this point in the night. I tried to find my way to a main road but, after passing by this big creepy church (see below), I found myself at a dead-end. I could see lights on the other side of the woods at said dead-end, so I trudged through and found myself along a wooded road in the middle of nowhere. There was a sidewalk, so I followed it for awhile before running into this couple who were stumbling in the opposite direction. I explained my situation in my native tongue of Drunkanese and miraculously, they actaully understood where I was trying to go.

**Keep in mind that all these pictures look alot brighter than they should. I just used a very slow (sometimes 15 second) shutter-speed. In combination with my drunken swaying and swaggering, that also explains the extreme blurriness of some.**


There was a little wooded park on the opposite side of the road a little ways down, and they directed me to go over there. -- Now let me just say: I keep using the adjective "wooded" to describe things, but from now on, it will just be implied. This was a pretty rural place, so just insert "wooded" before every noun I use from now on. -- From there, I was supposed to simply hop a fence on the other side of the park ("But don't let anyone see you or you'll get a fuckin' huge fine!") and travel along the abandoned railroad tracks until I got to the highway. Simple, huh?

So I get to the fence that I was supposed to just "hop" and this is what I see:


I don't know about you, but when I hear the word "hop", I clump it together with words like "skip" and "prance" -- all simple activities which little girls can perform. I was expecting a waist-high fence... not a motherfucking monstrosity of an 8-foot barricade surrounded by dense underbrush! So after pressing through a dead-end forest, this is where it started to get messy. Oh yeah, and did I mention that it had poured all night, so that both myself and my surroundings were soaked through and through. Utterly.

I decided that it was useless to try to climb over the fence in my current state, so I opted to just squeeze underneath. I pressed myself against the ground and dragged myself through a rather large puddle, almost becoming pinned between the locked gates and the dirt. I walked a little further down the overgrown path that I found myself on, only to find myself in a rocky field with a giant white pile in the middle. I figured out that it was a big heap of tires covered in some kind of massive white tarp. This was all unfamiliar since the drunks who I'd received directions from hadn't mentioned this. I ended up crossing the field and sliding down an embankment, only to find myself along the "abandonned tracks". They seemed to have been paved to make a walking path.



Above is a picture of the pathway. For reasons unknown to me now, I figured that the ultimate way to make this picture more meaningful and symbolic was to get a composite shot that combined two things: 1) the moon glowing off ashphalt on a back-woods trail... and, 2) my arm covered in fucking mud. I've good a bunch of shots of this scene or similar ones, where my arms makes appearances with varying degrees of visibility. There are a bunch where my whole arm literally bisects the shot, and another which is really blurred because I'd needed a couple-second shutter-speed to get a bright enough picture at night and I'd fallen over half-way through taking it.

So I wandered along this trail for a good 15-20 minutes, then found a little path off of it that lead to -- from what I can gather, what with the lumber lying everywhere -- a lumber-yard.


Wondering where this mystery "old highway" was, I decided to find my own way there, so I continued up a trail that ran through the woods behind tha lumber-yard. This was stupid.


It's a miracle that I was not eaten by a bear or something of that nature.

Sooooo... I come out on the other end of this trail after maybe 10-15 minutes of walking and jumped another smaller fence. It was a good thing that the trail decided to end since it had been slowly dying. It was becoming less of a trail and more of an "area of shorter trees". I came out at what looked to be an abandonned truck weighing station. I say "abandonned", but it probably wasn't really. I'm betting that they aren't the most well-kept facilities under the goverment of Newfoundland. It basically consisted of a run down trailer with a little dirt road running along-side it, with a truck-length of scaffolding running along either side (of the little strip of road). I'm guessing that they used that to inspect the trucks... So I found the front gate to that whole enclosure, and yet again crawled underneath the chain-link fence to get out. I looked back at the outside of the fence (where I now stood), and was mildly amused to see a large "No Trespassing. Violators will be prosecuted." sign on the gate. Then again, earlier on in my drunken escapade, my muddy arm had amused me to no end (as evidenced by its many cameo appearances in my photos), so that shows how easily amused I was at that point in the night.

Beside the sign was a little intercom system with a CALL button on it. Unable to resist the urge, I rang the "doorbell" and scampered down the road, giggling with glee.

So I was now walking along what I can only assume was the "old highway", marching in the general direction of all the lights and music coming from Redcliff.


Walking along this road, I eventually got to the campground, where I prompty passed out in the back seat of our car: Wet, dirty, and reeking of all things nature. All in all, the whole ordeal took up about 3 hours of my life, which surprised me since it hadn't seem that long to me...
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And just for the hell of it, here are the pics of my clothes when we got home the next evening. Three days worth of grime and deep-woods filth, for your enjoyment!


**Note: My socks are NOT supposed to be striped. You should see my shoes! Just tonight I threw them into the tub to let some of the crap soak out.