Written in the airport, waiting for a plane out of Baltimore:


It is hard to emerge from Getaways. You leave a greening campus in the backwoods backwaters of the Chesapeake where seahawks wheel overhead and the pathways are people by folks who smile at you and stop to chat although you have not seen them for a year andbarely remember them. You leave a motley collection of people you might not look at twoce (with a few notable exceptions) if you were in a WalMart trying to find the antacids, with whom you have been strangely thrown by a love of old music and the singing of forgotten souls. You carry very little out of the bubble, the invisible time machine that surrounds the Getaway campus--a couple of suitcases, guitars and songsheets and old workshop notes. You carry a great deal more freight in your heart and mind from three days there tan you ever brought in by car and lugged over to your cabin.

Memories flood through the cells, exhausted by short sleep, and awake them to regenerate the sound waves. Skipper Morse, in a raspy and crusty Maine acccent, has told the salty tale of a drowned lobsterman whose wido looked down at the recovered corpse with crabs and seaweed and a couple of legal lobsters stuck to it after four days under the saltwaters off Penobscot, and told his friends to pluck him and set him again. The room laughs. His bright-eyed angelic wife stands and to the rich arpeggios of KendallÕs twelve-string, sings Gordon BokÕs song Schooners, and the picture she paints of the tides ebbing and flowing in the open holds of broken schooners leaves the room in tears.

In the middle of the night someone offers up the memory of Big Mick in gauzy feminine attire being posted as Serafina, the notorious Calao whore from Abby SaleÕs raucous bawdy ballad, and the laughter shakes the room and dries the tears from a few moments earlier when Abby told the story of his wifeÕs passing. Half an hour before, the timbers were shaking to the richest possible blend of twenty voices in five parts rendering ÒHome to MingulayÓ so deeply woven in sound and image as to make reincarnationists out of the lot of them.

A portly beatific blues singer renders the audience in the dining hall speechless with laughter singing the story of the lady who tatooed her body with little green buttons from guggle to zatch. A woman sits in front of a small gathering and mesmerizes the crowd with world-class zither playing; in another room a beauty with an open-tuned guitar recreates the wandering magic of Jeannie Redpath singing. Somewhere else someone is singing a Seeger union song from the early years of the Weavers.   The comeliest lass in all Alaska sits cross-legged in bright sulight on a rolling lawn and sings a song about Alaskan river love, and every man within 100 yards tumbles into helpless infatuation.   A wide-eyed Welshman no more than twenty joins up with Jed Marum with an outrageous series of brilliant , blazing bououki compositions and within two days they have formed a working partenership.

The kid from Colorado has turned sixty this year, and he wears glasses to read his lyrics, but when he sings in the cabin with some friends late at night the room weeps for the beauty of it. The giant from Alaska has retired to Florida now, but he comes to the front of the room with his guitar strapped across his unbelievably wide chest and sings the audience the story of his lost brother; and half the room is clutching the Kleenex before he finishes walking away from the mike.

On the lawn in the sunlight, herons are circling and seagulls are singing counterpoint to the strains of a beautiful hand-crafted harp which is accompanying small-bodied large-voiced woman with the eyes of an angel and the face of a Piney Mountain girl who sings in a penetrating, heart-thrilling shapenote voice about the love of West Virgina. A weathered Maine man with penetrating eyes wanders across the lawn and sits entranced listening to her. The wild-fingered Marum breaks into the memories of a veteran of the battle of Little Round Top and transports a room of entranced listeners through time with his sweet, tempered voice and his magic chordings.

Love and blues and the tears of human loss and frustration, hearts opening in dimensions their owners had forgotten about, the companionship of the music weaving together these hundred or two hundred lives from England, Wyoming, Israel, West Virginia, Maine and California. The bonds are invisible, like threads of invisible gold, and they carry the images at their ends, the faces and the notes, the harmonies, the forgotten phrases, the high tenors and the low basses, the tears of affection and the laughter of friendship and they--these golden, transparent threads--tie you to this strange remote campus among the trees where even the cool rains of the last afternoon cannot dampen the hearts and the affections of the wanderers.

This is the real luggage. It trails like clouds of light behond the depaerting wagons and vans and cars heading down the winding road to spread their cargos in all dorections around the world. The images flitter in the minds and hearts, clouded by sleep deprivation and reduced B-vitamins. But the freight these hearts and minds carry will not fade; over the next few weeks it will be appearing in hearts in many strange corners and at unpredicted moments while the normal pageant of living tries to march along its careful paths and when they appear, normal business is set aside without a by-your-leave while the souls of the singers stop to remember a moment from the Getaway.