So, two things are happening tomorrow: I am going to the Roskilde Festival and, somewhere around the time that Frisk Frugt is hitting the Gloria stage, I will be 34.
Is it crazy that I feel entirely too old for the former, and far too young for the latter? Anyway, so PJ Harvey's stopping by for my birthday. I bet you can't say that about your 34th.
This is a crazy big festival, people. It's like the mother of European music festivals. People die here. People are conceived here. Hell, I'm pretty sure that more than a few people have been born here. (Cool fact: the festival was created forty years ago by two geeky Danish high school students and, get this: since 1972, all of the profits are donated to charity. Yeah, serious.)
Now, normally, Roskilde is the sedate little sister city to Copenhagen, with about three percent of the population. And that's saying something. Dude, I’ve been there many times; it’s about as happening as Mayberry. They still have houses with thatched roofs. There's a fjord. And a Viking boat museum logically placed on the fjord. (In defense, though, their magnificent cathedral holds the bones of every Danish monarch back to Harold Bluetooth. Yeah, that’s where that comes from.)
But for one week every summer, this town gets inundated with hippies and backpackers and all sorts of unclean and possibly deranged tent-dwellers... I'm told that the Roskilde Music Festival is an absolute rite of passage for Danes. We'd put it off for a few years, but sure as hell, no one was going to let us escape the spectacle.
So, but that's just the thing. It's a motherfucking SPECTACLE, y'all. I'm talking 80,000 people and port-a-potties. I'm talking weirdos (European weirdos!) from every strange counter-culture enclave you can imagine. We'll be floating on this putrid wave of debauchery for three days in a tent you would buy at the corner drug store.
People, I'm a little bit terrified. Actually, I have a lot of anxiety about this whole business. I don't have a car. I don't have a private shower. What if I get sick? What if it's too hot? Too wet? Too crowded?
Oddly (so I've been told by the forty-somethings in my office who go every year), it's not chaos. And maybe that shouldn't surprise me. The Scandinavian ability to control oneself is not, as I first assumed, the product of inhibition. No, it's actually something much deeper than that. It's a sense of decency that comes from a society that treats people as adults and expects the same in return. Remember that one really cool teacher in high school who let you assert yourself, your identity, your manic teenaged opinions so long as you did it with respect? Do you remember how calm that class was? How supportive?
That's Denmark. That, I'm told, is the Rosklide Festival. They call this phenomenon the "orange feeling." I don't know why, but basically it has to do with not just the hippie mindset of "live and let live," but reflects something more dynamic. A personal responsibility. And a sense of trust in the system.
That's like the antithesis of counter-culture, right? But the interesting thing about Scandinavians, and Danes in particular, is that – just like the kids in that high school class – they kind of figured out how to assert themselves without fucking up everyone's good time. See, being an asshole is not hygge. And hygge is the highest Danish good. Even at a urine-soaked rock festival.
The move to Denmark has easily been the most cathartic of my life. Before I left the States, I was getting panic attacks in Home Depot. I was talking myself down in traffic jams. And it's not what you think. It's not because life is "simpler" here. It's not because I now ride my bike to work and have only three brands of toothpaste to choose from.
On a hot, crowded bus, a ten-story stairwell or a nine-hour flight, there’s nowhere to run. And in any strange country, support comes where you can find it. Sure, I'm older, I'm more centered – you might argue those things – but here's the fact of me, what I’ve learned about myself – the worrier, the superstitious fool: my comfort zone is entirely variable. It's a spoiled space of my own definition.
So bring on the Roskilde Festival. Bring on 34. Bring on the chaos and the urine dust and the hippies and all the cold showers with strangers. Bring the intensity of 80,000 bodies, all of them seeking that one righteous thing: hygge.
That’s my favorite word, by the way. A prize for someone who managed to snatch some sanity back from the face of the Chaos Monster. Dancing my ass off in the middle-of-nowhere-Denmark, up urine creek without a flushable toilet, I guess we’ll see. I guess we’ll see if joy isn’t something I can have anywhere.
