Decay and the Metabolism of Campout

“You don’t have units plus relations. You just have relations. You have worlding." - Donna Haraway

I was on the Site Maintenance team at Honcho, collecting and disposing of garbage. It was my second year in this role. It is a job that shows you the totality of stuff, only some of which will decompose in our lifetimes, discarded by me and my fellow campers over the course of the festival. This role leads me to consider the biomass of Campout as a whole, and what practices we each bring to waste, disposal, and reuse. You learn a lot from trash: what people don’t want (broken camping chairs), but also what even the most minimalist of us still needs help removing (rotting food). I feel like I know my fellow campers much better, more honestly. Campers threw away, abandoned, or misplaced wigs, entire tents, GHB vials, a huge case of spent whip-it cannisters, and many, many varieties of string lights. The basic operation of Campout also necessarily generates trash, especially from the kitchens and from the meals served.

Our pickup truck continually moved all this material over the festival’s several days. Collecting and moving trash is central to the organism of Campout: waste is not noticed, and does not become a problem, because it is removed. The removal, the movement, is essential. A rhythm. A slower frequency than on the dancefloor, more like the frequency of our own bodies’ metabolism. The trash flows, the bodies flow, the music flows.

I believe everyone comes to Campout for connection at some level. The unison of all our trash together in the giant dumpsters is one giant marker of this connection, our shared world at Four Quarters. The dumpsters are a meeting point for all our discards. The dancefloor and the dumpsters are part of the same relational network. If we keep this in mind, some waste, especially the substantial amounts of food waste from the kitchens, would serve the land better as compost. This poses a logistical challenge that I hope might be met some day. Setting up that long slow organic process in the condensed few days of Campout is not easy, but it is a goal worth our attention and our dollars.

Compost, as a sort of joyful and generative decay, also gives us a word for the deep kinship that draws us to Campout. Dancing and hugging and chatting in the woods for the four days of Honcho knits everything into a particular way of life. The leaves and the dust and bugs and the mud gradually become less background, more compatriots. We all compost together under temperate Appalachian clouds. Composting is the most fundamental communion: the living stuff of connectedness. Ecosystems within ecosystems, including me and you. The swarm is us.

Some bits of this swarm, the hot biomass of Campout, are riding in the back of the truck away from the Grove and across the stream to the giant dumpsters. My cognition and dancing legs are focused through the lens of the acid I took a couple hours ago. Standing with my crew partner in the bed of the pickup, I swing full bags of trash to the dumpsters bathed in moonlight. A night shift means we are at the bars: cans and plastic cups and empty boxed waters. This trash is a little more difficult to collect, weaving through crowds to the bar at the Grove and then back up the little bluff to the waiting truck. But the content is friendlier than dense food waste from the kitchens. Much easier to lift and swing a bag full of empty bottles and cans than a bag full of noodles or sauce.

The bass on the dancefloor passes through each of our gut microbiomes, just as through our ear canals, just as through our tender glances at one another. We are ecologically connected to each other as well: dancing habitats for microbes on and inside our bodies. Sex, too. Sex shares our fluids as one ecology touching itself through our bodies. Campout doesn’t just remind us that we are relational beings, it forces the point on us.

DJ sets, shared meals, a quick fuck in the woods, Ceyenne’s speech on Sunday night: these are relational in their essence. World-making, ecological practices. At Campout we are hot compost, a collective slime pulsing together at 120 beats per minute, always yearning for new forms of unity. Dancing and communing composts us all in joyful decay. We are metabolized, nourished, transfigured.

There is plenty of material decay at Campout of course and all the smelly organic compounds that come with that (some of which could be actually composted). Everything does break down, certainly, it is just a matter of timing. Now over at Hemlock Hole, the plastic bottles I am squeezing into my trash bag will be on this planet for around 500 years. The sugar in that almost empty soda can will be gone in a day, but the can itself will take another 250 years. Meanwhile the cells in my body expire in the thousands every second. Feet are happy-tired and shoeless now that our shift is over. Our bodies are smushed together by the hammock and we kiss and watch the light of dawn slowly overtake the trees. The acid leaving me, the ending notes of Enereph’s set, the embrace of night: these things also break down and dissipate on their own timelines.

But speaking as the kid who used to pluck discarded snacks out of the schoolyard bin, and as the grownup who loves thrifting, I know we can divert some of our poorly compostable accessories to reuse. Camping gear, outfits, hammocks, camping chairs, all have been thrown away or forgotten at Campout. Working on the trash crew showed me that our discards already connect us, same as our big sweaty hugs in the middle of the dancefloor. Our trash is relational. What we throw away still circulates among us, and we can choose to guide that circulation with more care. Some things can be passed along, others can be returned to the soil. Finding new life for our trash would be some hot compost.