Home > Contact > Newsletter Archive > August 2001

Fearing and Lusty in Lunenburg
Day One - Friday
Guelph-Toronto-Halifax-Lunenburg

It was a dark and stormy night. OK, it wasn't stormy, but it was dark, especially after I sabotaged the Guelph electricity grid with my cellular telephone.

At about 4:20 am I awoke to the sound of Stephen showering in the next room. I got up, started packing my things and reached for my cell phone charger. The instant that I pulled the charger from the wall, Stephen's entire neighbourhood went black. Where once we heard the roar of fans (Electric fans. Human fans are not allowed to congregate in front of Fearing's place between the hours of 2am and 10am - these hours being the normal sleep time for musicians) and air conditioners we had silence. The perfect start to what was to become a very long day.

Many months before my morning stumble Stephen Fearing was booked to play at the Lunenburg Folk Harbour Festival. As Stephen's web site guy I look at his schedule on a regular basis. It occurred to me that there must be some scuba diving in the area. After researching for a bit, we made the decision that we would attend the festival together and then go diving afterwards. As the date for the festival drew closer we decided that we might as well sign up for our advanced divers course - we'd get all of the dives that we wanted while upgrading our skills. In the past three or so years SF and I have done a fair bit of diving together - mostly in Tobermory, ON, where SF plays a yearly gig at the Crow's Nest - so the advanced course seemed like the next step to scuba stardom.

Showering by candlelight is something that I don't normally do alone but 'a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do'. Given that I'd only had about 2 hours sleep I really didn't mind being alone.

By 5 am we'd had our coffee (a gas range!), said our good-byes to Stephen's wife, Chris, and were on the road to Pearson Airport. On the way to the airport we listened to rough mixes for Stephen's new CD. It sucks and I won't buy it.

Check in at the airport went well and we boarded our plane with a few minutes to spare.

Upon arrival in Halifax it was quickly apparent that one of our five bags had not made the flight. Stephen's guitar rack and precious Manzer Cowpoke had made it, as had my bag and our scuba gear bag, but Stephen's clothes were MIA.

We headed into Halifax so that Stephen could complete an interview at the local CTV station with Todd Battis. Upon completion of the interview we killed some time at a local dive shop, checked out the neighbourhood that I used to live in, and then returned to the airport to retrieve the errant bag.

We jammed the bag into the rental and proceeded to point ourselves toward the South Shore of Nova Scotia. For some unknown reason our Ford decided that it was comfy in the parking lot and wasn't going anywhere, 'thank ewe very much'. Of course, nobody believed that a brand new Taurus wouldn't go and, since more or less middle aged guys are notoriously bad at recognising that an automobile has expired, there was a lot of tooing and froing and various attempts to get the beast to move. The young folks that ran the operation finally had to admit that we hadn't sabotaged the car during the two hours that we'd had it in our custody so, the search began for a suitable ride.

We staged a valiant effort to get upgraded to a Navigator, or at least the spiffy Mustang convertible but ended up with a Crown Victoria. Fine. Does Bob Dylan have to stand around in the broiling midday sun and argue about what comprises a suitable replacement for a dead Taurus? I was starting to think that I was in need a better class of friend.

On the road again, lookin' like a couple of Soprano rejects in our land yacht. A lot of Hunter S. Thompson references got tossed back and forth as we attempted to name our new baby but nothing stuck - it became 'the car'. Pretty, no? Such clever lads. Stephen composed a beautiful ode to the car but quickly forgot it the first time we had to fill the damn thing up with gas.

I won't tell you what fast food joint we ate at en route because even we are disgusted at our weakness.

We arrived for SF's sound check at the Main Stage about an hour late, pattin' our bellies and lickin' our fingers.

All went well at the sound check and we headed over to pick up badges, etc. Stephen hadn't played this festival for about 9 years but I was to find that his memory for the geography of the place was awesome - he knew exactly where offices, sites, and, most importantly, decent coffee, were located.

We decided that we had adequate time to get to George Rizsanyi's place for a quick cleanup before the evening performance. George is a luthier of note. George and his wife, Lisa, were putting us up for the duration of the festival. In addition, George is building a guitar for Stephen.

We proceeded west on highway 103, we had to go from Exit 11 (Lunenburg) to Exit 12 (Bridgewater). But, of course, our day wasn't over. Close to the Bridgewater exit we came across the remnants of an awful crash that appeared to involve a boat trailer and several automobiles. After some delay, we cleared the accident scene and attempted to exit at highway 10, going north. But, no. This wasn't going to be that simple…The road was closed because of a field fire. We backtracked to Bridgewater, bought a map at the local Irving station and started to navigate cross country. We turned up the Lucinda Williams CD so that we couldn't hear the banjos dueling in the background…

 

Lunenburg Day 2