Glow Festival...

For the third year in a row, the owners of the Triangle L Ranch organize an evening art walk through the desert where all the installations glow in the dark. Meandering down garden paths lit up like runways (or rather exit corridors in airplanes), one can gaze upon .. oh, a flaming pumpkin head, a large light swirl or pinwheel, a number of video projections, a giant wind-up antique doll and so on. The event is widely advertised and, while a couple of hundred folks head up from Tucson, quite a few locals (including lots of families) also attend. While showcasing experimental work, it manages to avoid being in any way exclusive. "Glow" is also one of the only noteworthy events to occur in this small town, except perhaps the Oracle Oaks Parade.

They also countenance my husband's free jazz band, which even managed to draw a few crowds .. a thing generally unimaginable outside of urban centers that cultivate the steely nerves required of listeners. ("Free jazz" does not connote jazz that is free of charge, but rather free of strictures .. but not structures as structure is essential to creative endeavor.)

But there is of course more to the story.

My friend and I listened for a time to our husbands play and then made our way to the main ranch house where home-baked pie was to be served. We were followed in close pursuit by her 14-year-old son and his friend. Finding a table outside, we gossiped with passers by, nibbled on strawberry cream puffs, sparred with the kids and watched as another band set up on a larger stage nearby.

Suddenly people were saying the police had arrived and were asking everyone to leave. This was confirmed when an irate colonel dressed in black (as if outfitted for a swat intervention) began to shriek into the microphone that everyone present was trespassing and that anyone who remained on the premises faced imminent arrest. I looked around and took note of the kindergarten-aged children playing underfoot, someone's 85 year old mother in a wheelchair, a table full of verbose 50-year-olds, a prim couple around 20 perched awkwardly eating their pie .. and wondered whom he thought he was addressing. He spoke as a man backed into a cave corner by a troop of ravenous, teeth-gnashing, mouth-foaming bears. Or maybe he had fantasies of having to fight off phalanxes of blood-thirsty goth-outfitted drug-frenzied vampires.

My friend took the boys and headed off to their car and I headed back to the husbands to help them pack their instruments.

Later, I learned that two two deputies were overheard to remark to one another "This isn't a rave. I thought this was supposed to be a rave" (which would of course explain the presence of K9 units). One wonders, with expectations confounded, why the sherriff's deputies did not change their course. However rather than finding a solution to a minor problem (as it turns out only two cars among the hundred or so parked were hindering passage of large emergency vehicles and they of course could have been towed), the officers instead decided to create their own mini-Gotterdamerung way off in the rural remove of the Catalina Mountains' northern highlands.