Published: August 22, 2009 11:20 pm      

A distant view of Woodstock

Some of you (I hope many of you) read my article of Aug. 15 on the Times-News’ page one about Woodstock, the peace-love-dove music festival that continues to fascinate, though it took place 40 years ago.

I did the writing, but it was actually the story of a local man who had been there. His tale was riveting and, I believe, captured the essence of that place in time in the rolling hills of New York.

Anyway, middle son Seth read it and asked where I was in 1969.

Seth lives in Baltimore (ugh!) and loves it there (arghhh!). I am told that many urbanites have a phobia about heading into the mountains of Western Maryland and that the Interstate 68 cut through Sideling Hill symbolizes some sort of gateway into the unknown where violent, cross-eyed people with same-sex orientations play banjos and say things such as “This here river don’t go to Aintree.”

I have the reverse phobia, traveling through that geological slice of mountain in Washington County from west-to-east, I see the opening as the passage to the world of beltways (ugh!) and dense human populations (arghhh!). Hey, I get Channels 9 and 13 on my rural television set. I know what it is like down that way.

I like it when Seth reads my work and has something good to say about it. His creative nonfiction work is starting to get national attention and is used in some college creative writing classrooms such as Villanova University to teach technique and style. He has an amazing ability to write about everyday occurrences from his past and get readers to share the emotions and nod their heads as if to say, “Yep. Been there. Done that. It happened to me too. I feel your pain or your joy.”

But, I digress.

Married a little more than a year, the summer of 1969 found Sandy and I in Utah. I was between my junior and senior years at Utah State University where I was a fishery biology major. From June through early September, I had a seasonal job with the Utah Fish and Game Department. I worked for a good guy, a fishery biologist named Dexter Pittman, and my task was to run a creel census study of trout fishermen on Rockport Reservoir and a few of the nearby streams. It was fun and it was in a beautiful part of the world.

We rented a cottage from a farmer in Wanship. I can’t remember his name. We still had white-on-blue Maryland license plates on our 1965 Mustang and he always pronounced the state as Mary Land, making sure he said the queen’s first name very clearly.

When Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, it was a clear night at Wanship. We would look at Armstrong on the small screen on our black and white TV and then walk onto the porch and look up at the moon, trying to connect the dots through a kazillion miles of space and stars. I remember there being a substantial amount of awe involved.

Mostly that summer, I was thinking about things such as when and where I would catch a monster brown trout and if I would be able to kill my first mule deer come October.

Both things happened. The brown came from the Weber (pronounced Weeber) River and the 4 by 4 mulie buck was dropped in the Raft River Mountains, way up in Utah’s desolate northwest corner where the state comes together with Idaho and Nevada. It wouldn’t all fit in the Mustang’s trunk.

My point is this. We weren’t thinking much about Woodstock.

You have to realize that in those days we had network television, newspapers and radio. We watched KSL-TV out of Salt Lake and crazy weatherman Bob Welty. We read the Salt Lake Tribune and the Deseret News.

There were no 24/7 TV news stations, no USA Today, no Internet, no cell phones. If Sandy and I hiked into the Uinta Mountains for two or three days, we would tell somebody when we were expected out and then head for the hills where we would eat fresh trout by our lakeside tent.

She always outfished me. At a remote lake in the mountains of southwestern Wyoming she was tossing a Mepps spinner and said, “C’mere. I’m hung up.”

She was hung up for sure, with a lake trout of 5 pounds that she eventually landed and which made a superb meal that evening.

I’m sure we knew about Woodstock, but the festival didn’t seem to be of much importance in Mormonia, which is how I sometimes refer to Utah (endearingly, of course) because of its predominant religious makeup. I always admired the Mormons for allowing people to attend church on Sunday and also shoot a deer or an elk or a pheasant. Maryland could learn from that.

I wasn’t much of a fan of the Vietnam War, but then neither were a lot of people who had to go and participate in it. Even though my world at that time was physically and psychologically far removed from any counter culture effort, I was glad that it was taking place. Something was needed to shake up and redirect the country’s paths in those days. I believe that 400,000 to 500,000 wet, hungry, stoned people played a significant role.

Contact Outdoor Editor Michael A. Sawyers at msawyers@times-news.com.