Further Along the Way--a reprint
For 28 years summer meant Cornerstone Festival. Beginning in
1984, I and my family would make the familiar odyssey out to the festival
grounds. This year would have been our 32nd festival. More than half
my life was Cornerstone Festival. My engagement picture was taken at the
fairgrounds in Lake
County following
Cornerstone ’86. I was EXTREMELY pregnant while at Cornerstone ’89, aptly named
Family Reunion. https://vimeo.com/43124052
By the time my daughter was a year old we had moved the festival to Bushnell, Illinois
where we had purchased some property for the express purpose of holding the
festival there. It seemed like we might be able to stay forever.
2012 was the end of the run.
Chalk it up to a downturn in the economy, an aging Jesus
population, other concert options—but we had seen a significant decrease in
attendance after our peak years of 2000 and 2001 where the festival drew close
to 20,000. Cars lined up days in advance of opening day. There evolved a whole
pre-Cornerstone culture of kids with their generator-fueled amps playing beside
parked cars. The state police assisted us in crowd control on the one main road
back to the property. The portos were on continuous round-the-clock, 24-7
cleaning and emptying schedule. That says a lot, right there. I had a friend
whose clothes got wet the first day and put them out to dry. That night someone
pitched a tent over them and he ended up wearing the same outfit for the rest
of the festival—until the people next to him packed up to leave.
Then suddenly we didn’t need three entrance gates or an
opening-day registration crew to get the cars in off the road. We didn’t need
to schedule around the clock porto cleaners. There were still popular
concerts that were jammed packed; mostly, though, we could find a seat. People
started sitting instead of standing near the front. We were getting old, but
not tired of the festival. The spirit was willing, but the flesh was weak.
I still remember sitting on the hillside looking down at
Main Stage in that natural bowl of an amphitheater with a stream running past
the semis that worked as green rooms and were somewhat air conditioned, relief
from the heat. Just as you got to the point where you couldn’t stand it anymore,
the heat, the intense sun beating down on you from a cloudless sky, the sun
lowered, a gift. And that same sky went all orange and purple, rose-colored in
the diffused light, filtered through a stratosphere of dust worked up by feet,
golf carts, and vehicles always on the move. The heat softened, nudged down to
a clammy comfort level, and the insects came out a thousand strong to chirp and
whine in cadence with whoever was on the stage. We sat there in descending twilight, grateful, before
the sun set in a firework crescendo.
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| Cornerstone sunset. Photo by Neil E. Das |
Life was beautiful at that moment.
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