July 4 Is Not a Holiday

Friendsies! It’s been a while so I guess this is going to have to be a long one. Possibly in two parts.

So – the headline news is that I went to Stonehenge! For the summer solstice, 21 June. We left on Friday on the 5:50 train out of the Waterloo station. I got to see some green rolling English countryside. There was even an Old English sheepdog on the train, how perfect is that? I traveled with two other people from the Yale-in-London program and the friend of one of them, who had come over from a study program in France for the weekend. We went well-prepared. We were a little nervous about having everything we needed. The afternoon before, for instance, I went out and bought a sweatshirt. I have a track jacket that I love passionately – my first adult relationship, seriously – but it’s worn a little thin and I worried it wouldn’t be enough to keep me warm on a night predicted to drop into the forties. (My mother says it makes me look like a homeless person, but we don’t care about that.) So, like a dork, I bought a zip-up London sweatshirt, and wore it in London. I like it, it’s cute, I’m wearing it now. I also brought a rain jacket, which I almost forgot until my mother called me and asked if I had it, and I said OF COURSE, aiya I probably shouldn’t have admitted that here but I can always deny it later.

We got onto the subject of food – what everyone had brought – as we walked to the train station that day. The friend from France was starving and so we all brought out things to supply her.

CONOR: I have a kilogram and a half of dates and six apples.

ME: I have six apples and a few bags of dried fruit and a salad! [I also had a bunch of grapes but I didn't say it here because I didn't want anyone asking for them. I share very carefully.]

SARAH: I have two bags of Ritz crackers and a box of cookie-cake.

Cookie-cake was a big part of this trip – apparently it’s cookie dough, cooked in a pan like a cake and then cut up. Its production, and subsequent consumption, was a much-publicized affair.

We got to Salisbury an hour and a half after boarding – we could have stayed there for a while and explored, but we’ll be back on our Bath trip at the end of this program, and we wanted to get to the stones as soon as possible to grab a good spot. (I saw the spire of the famous cathedral, though.) We were able to get right on the first bus out to the circle. Still felt weird to be driving on the left side of the road. The bus dropped us a distance out from Stonehenge, a distance that turned out to be two kilometers, over hill and dale and through cow field, a trek that seemed particularly odd when we noticed that the road actually went right by the destination in question. It was raining softly and my shoes were very wet by the time we were there.

But we were there! It was hard to believe it was Stonehenge, Real Actual Stonehenge. Smaller than I expected, somehow, the circle itself, though the stones are huge – Real Actual Stonehenge. It’s such an iconic image that you can’t quite convince yourself you’re actually seeing the real thing, touching the lichen-spotted stones, standing withing them. I had thought there might be a small museum nearby, at least a few explanatory plaques, but there was nothing, it’s absolutely alone in the fields, like the druids must have seen it. Ordinarily it’s fenced off and you can’t get within a hundred feet of it, but for the solstice they open it up.

It felt very rock-concert. No, I haven’t been to a rock concert, but I imagine this is how one would feel. Rock concert or music festival, somewhere in between. On the way in there were vegan concession stands. When we got to the stones, the opening ceremony had already started – lots of people in capes and tunics, lots of long dreadlocks, one particular fellow in a wizard hat. Apparently an order of druids lives on in England, led by a man who calls himself Sir Arthur Pendragon (clearly not the original one), and they started off the festivities with a chant. It was about what you would expect – deference to the gods and goddesses of the different elements, exhortations to better stewardship of the Earth. Then there was music – some of which I recognized from my recording of medieval chamber tunes that I got in France – and a procession from the inner circle out into the fields. In the fields, there were other druids celebrating – a “Stonehenge newsletter” (”Really, has this been published every year for three thousand years?” said someone) alluded obliquely to some sort of schism among the druids. A schism! I love schisms. I just love saying the word “schism”. A druidic schism!

We ended up with a very good spot on the outside of the circle, right up against one of the stones, across from the separated Hele Stone, perfectly aligned to catch the rising sun in the morning. We spread out the mats we’d borrowed from the Paul Mellon Centre and sat with our backs against the stone, we watched the people go by. We actually met up with a lot of people from the Yale British Bulldogs internship program, which was really fun – they’d heard we were going and decided to come as well. They were very friendly – one of them thought he knew me, actually: “Didn’t we go on a picnic last summer?” No, not unless you were picnicking in Beijing, but nice to meet you. Someone took out a guitar and did some strumming.

And – well, a solstice celebration is pretty static from there on out, after you’ve found a place to sit. We sat, we talked, I tried to read Nicholas NIckleby because Conor, who wants to discuss the ending in our next literature class, had threatened me about it earlier. A guy came over and asked us if we were “selling anything illegal” – I don’t know why us, maybe it was the guitar case – an inquiry we had to answer in the negative. As the sun went down – long after 9 pm – we noticed an increasing number of little lights and little clouds around us, people indulging in the ancient druidic pursuit of smoking up. Hey, they don’t call it Stonehenge for nothing.

Within the circle, there was a lot of shouting and dancing and brief nudity, the last of which was addressed fairly quickly by the police on site. Some of us had hoped for a more quiet experience, but to some degree we were able to have it outside the circle. As it got colder, we congealed into an increasingly overlapping cluster of bodies, an arrangement that kept us remarkably warm. We balanced our umbrellas to rest over our heads – it was like a very small tent. We also attracted some interest from other people.

“Are you on acid?” said a British girl who was walking by.

Yeah, said Conor, whose head was I think on my chest at this point, we’re on acid.

“Really?”

No. But she was very excited and wanted to take a picture with us. Whatever. More warmth. It was cold, it was a little uncomfortable, we were feeling a little discouraged at around midnight, when there were four and a half hours more to go till sunrise. At one point I remember groping in the bottom of Sarah’s backpack to pull out handfuls of spilled Ritz crackers. And eat them – this was not just a cleaning exercise – with great enjoyment. Here, said Conor, can I help you clean? Pass it over here. Oh, I don’t know, I said, I think I’ve picked it pretty thoroughly.

I drifted off at some point and woke up at 2:48 alone and very cold – all my littermates had wandered off somewhere and I was shivering. In wilderness first-aid they taught us that hypothermia actually happens most commonly not on exceptionally cold days but in conditions like this – people being sedentary in wet, cool weather. So I got up, shivered some more, and eventually discovered that there was a fire burning a few hundred yards away. I found my compatriots and we trudged out there. There was a tight circle of people around the screened coals, though eventually I managed to get a spot right up against it, and things were so warm. So nice. We also met some other Americans (typical, right?), college students interning in an aviation insurance firm, when I got up to give Lyssa, another YiL friend, some time next to the fire. Stay right here with us, said one of the aviation insurance guys, touching the back of my jacket, you’re really warm right now.

You know what? I’m going to go running. More later. Coming up: the Weird Sisters and their thoughts on the American presidential race. All hail Ron Paul.