I confess this summer was a bit of a terrifying drought, event-wise. Normally, each weekend is a new adventure at a new festival in a different part of the country. We get to put Voyageur into thousands of new pairs of hands at our portrait station and we hear it come to life on stage with a new crop of musicians at each venue. It's also how we earn a living and attempt to address the debt that is the founding legacy of the Six String Nation bestowed upon us by Bev Oda right out of the starting gate.
So as distressing as it was not to have any income in what had become our bread-and-butter season, I found that even more distressing was the lack of connection with people. No matter how down I may be feeling about the state of the Nation and the prospects for its continuance, the feedback I routinely get from the people we meet in our travels acts both as a booster shot for my belief in what the whole project is about and an inoculation against depression brought about by the same struggle faced by most people working in the arts in Canada.
The passing of Jack Layton – who had certainly been a friend to the Six String Nation project – was a sad end to a sad summer. And yet the message he left us all and the outpouring that it inspired did implant a renewed vigor and sense of purpose about what it means to share this guitar, the stories it contains, the communities it reflects, the diverse citizenship and the extraordinary country it celebrates with as many people as possible.
And so, after making my own pilgrimages in Toronto and the shared experience of the state funeral last weekend, I checked in at my local Avis to pick up the car that would carry photographer Doug Nicholson and me to our only two events of the summer one day and several hundred kilometers apart in Windsor and Niagara respectively. They were each inspiring in their own way. At each, the portraits of Jack with with Voyageur drew huge cheers and each replenished my psychic reserves and put into practice Jack's final admonition to be "loving, hopeful and optimistic".
It was actually an exhausting couple of days and I am now writing this post facto with a very poor WiFi connection in a very good bookstore in New Liskeard, Ontario called Le Chat Noir – not far from Cobalt (from which a piece of famed silver adorns Voyageur's first fret) and from our family cottage at Bass Lake where I'm trying to put the summer in perspective. So I will likely come back over the next couple of days to complete the tale of Windsor and Niagara and the summer that almost wasn't.
Posted at 1:46 PM