2, January 2025 "Whoa! We Thought You Was ..."

    I was at an impasse to know what I was going to write for this post, until I read Woe Wednesday's post: https://wannaskanalmanac.blogspot.com/2025/01/word-wednesday-for-january-1-2025.html and his feature  

     “January 1 Historic Events, Literary or Otherwise, from On This Day”

• 1960: Johnny Cash plays the first of many free concerts behind bars at San Quentin Prison.

    Well, that caught my eye, so I googled “Johnny Cash concert San Quentin.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7e2B-thaJG0. Of course, that video lead to Johnny Cash and June Carter https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypH4xH8fjA0 and without a doubt: “Ghost Riders in The Sky”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EeD7-_E2QHw.

    I got to remembering that on New Year’s Eve 2024, I had told Catherine (Jackpine Savage) that back in 2000, I think it was, I had attended a Bluegrass Festival in Morden, Manitoba, Canada, with Chairman Joe, his lovely wife Teresa, and her niece, Abigail Mc Bride a then-budding artist: https://www.abigailmcbride.com/ in attendance. 

    I had returned previously from Slidel, Louisiana where, in addition to Mr. Solom, his son Terry, and another crew member named Stuart Somebody-or-other, I had labored upon the late Jerry Solom’s homemade steel sailboat, “Indian Summer,” www.amazon.com/Indian-Summer-Jerry-Marion-Solom/dp/150528869X in May that year (immediately prior to his maiden voyage to Norway) —where, as the story goes, I very nearly become alligator bait in the Bonfouca Marina: https://www.marinalife.com/marinas/bonfouca-marina-llchttps://, and purchased a straw hat to shield my allegedly-beautiful blue-eyes from the wicked sun down there.

L-R: Terry, WW, Stuart, Jerry in Slidel, LA, in 2000

      Despite my near-death alligator-attack experience that didn’t happen, to the surprise of the locals, at week's end I happily took a 45-hour air-conditioned Greyhound bus trip home to northwest Minnesota, managing to pack my hat, instead of wearing it, in my soft-sided canvas luggage bag, and with some luck, got it home still looking like new. I really liked that hat.

     It wasn’t but maybe a month later, that I chose to wear it to the Morden, Manitoba Bluegrass Festival, as I said earlier, perhaps: https://www.back40folkfest.com/ which was then and still is I reckon, a pretty big deal for southern Manitoba. We had arrived there early and appropriated seats close to the stage beneath wondrous leaf laden tree branches that offered cool respite from the sun, pitying those less fortunate participants filling in all the available sun-bleached yardage behind us lucky stiffs.

    Having not contemplated the distance from our obvious advantageous seating to the nearest toilet facility should I require it, my intake being what it was, I was quite surprised to realize the vastness of the festival grounds — and consequently just how far it actually was to the men’s toilet in the far north forty. ARGH!

    Being as our party had arrived there so early, and embraced our seating area with such unbridled fervor, our voyages, anywhere for anything, required passage against the grain of the row-upon-row of camp chair-seated crowd, now numbering into the hundreds. Try as I might, it seemed every avenue was chock-blocked with people sitting upon the grass on blankets or chairs with no passage breaks in-between. It was slow going.

    If I had known, I would’ve been catheterized in preparation. Each yard that I bulldozed through the multitudes was a battle. All the shrieks of recognition between old school mates; the glancing blows I suffered made by over-zealous hugs and back-slaps between long-lost relatives made me second-guess the absolute  necessity of further attempts. Getting to where I needed to go seemed as impossible as the Minnesota Vikings making it all the way to the Super Bowl in 2025.

    Ahead was a line of lawn chairs of strangely animated men all appearing too interested at my approach as one, then another, would nudge the man to his left or right and gesture toward me, then laugh. I looked behind me to see if there was something else that garnered such attention — perhaps a stirring attraction — or a large feral animal seemingly bent on issuing my demise and was soon upon my back when one of the guys stood up from his chair, looked me square in the face, smiled broadly, and then laughed,  

“We thought you was Merle Haggard!”

Upon watching this now, in 2025, I can readily see the resemblance, especially when The Hag is sitting down: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbovcK1HWfg#:~:text=Merle%20Haggard%20tells%20the%20story%20of%20how,San%20Quentin%20Prison.%20He%20describes%20his%20experience