This evening I’m getting ready to head off for the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival. It’s the 25th year of the festival and it’ll be my 15th year there – 12 of them sequential, and three scattered through earlier years. I plan my year around this festival; it’s the one thing that makes it onto the calendar before anything else gets planned. I can’t entirely explain what it is about this festival. It’s not the one with the best lineup – the New Bedford Folk Festival has seven stages running simultaneously and more musicians. (Falcon Ridge does have pretty great musicians, but they’re pretty similar from year to year, so I’m less likely to make new music discoveries there or see people I haven’t seen play frequently.) It’s certainly not the weather, although that’s a bonding experience; those of us who made it through the year of the tornado have tales to tell, but every year has its share of searing heat and mud-generating downpours. But there’s something about this festival. Mostly it’s the community. I’ve met a couple of my closest friends at the festival. There are people I see every year (and only there), at the morning tarp rush (those of us crazy enough to get up early to put our tarps down at the moment it’s allowed for any given day), at the campground stages, or just sitting nearby when listening to music. Most of my music friends go, either as paid musicians or as audience. And the distinction between those two is one of the great things about the festival. For some, which of those categories you’re in shifts from year to year. And there’s a whole other festival, by many of those non-paid musicians, that takes place in the campgrounds. Most of that is late night, after midnight when the music on the main stage finishes, but ever since the festival was shifted from a four-day to a three-day festival a few years ago (post-tornado), there has been professional music programming the day before the festival officially starts in the campground. I’m lucky enough to be part of that lineup this year (as well as one of the late night stages). The other important thing for me at the festival is its Dave Carter connection. Dave and Tracy made their appearances at the festival during the years I wasn’t attending. But the year that Dave died (just over a week before the festival), their scheduled time-slot turned into a main stage memorial. And although I was in Maine just beforehand (where I had tickets to see Dave and Tracy a couple days later), I drove all the way to Falcon Ridge to be there for that. I needed to be in a community of people mourning his passing and comforting each other. Falcon Ridge served that purpose. (Last year, at the 10th anniversary of his death, there was also a major celebration on the main stage, and I was honored to be asked by Tracy to join the crowd for a couple songs.) In the 10 years since then, Tracy was a part of the festival. This year she won’t be there, so it will be the first time I’ve been there without an official Dave presence at the festival. But there’s still an important presence – that year he died was the first year of the Dave Carter song circle, held in the campground, in which people came to play and hear Dave Carter songs. I’ve since inherited leadership for the song circle – the people who originally hosted it stopped attending the festival awhile back, and I couldn’t imagine the festival without this song circle, so I stepped in. So one of the things I will do this weekend is sit on a soggy hillside late at night with people who miss Dave Carter and celebrate his music together. It’s one of the highlights of my year.