Hazzard County Saloon

Helen and Steve are cool. Steve builds boats and has extraordinary parties on his boat yard. One of the bands I play in, Hazzard County, are lucky enough to be invited to perform at some of these parties when they happen and they are some of the most fun gigs I’ve ever done.

 

There is no road to the boat yard so the gear is loaded onto boats in Whitby and shipped up the Esk. Or if the tide is out its pulled on a tiny trailer by a lawnmower alongside the raliway line that passes the back of the boat yard.

 

Guests have to walk a mile or so through the fields and along the railway line and under the viaduct carrying their booze, guitars, fireworks and sleeping bags. If it’s after the pub you need a good torch.

 

The place is beautiful and secluded and made amazing by the efforts of Steve and Helen. The party last week was for Helen’s birthday, and they had built a full sized, fully functioning Wild West Saloon on an enormous jetty out on the river. It had a bar, chandeliers, swing doors, us playing, big open windows, a tree growing through the roof and room for a few hundred people. The guests were dressed in ‘Cowboys and Indians’ gear and brought tents or teepees to sleep in. The corral, the saloon, the uneven ground, the drunk cowboys, the hillbilly music, the tents, the candles and the campfires created the disturbingly real but pleasingly magical effect of being at a real western saloon, or a least, on a film set of one.

 

We were up past dawn making a right row.

 

Some of the most memorable and amazing times in my life have been the result of wonderful people putting in an immense effort to create a little bit of magic. It brings me joy to know that, although we’re so frequently surrounded by negativity, idleness, cynicism, the unimaginative, the jaded, and the stuck-in-a-routine sluggish crap big brother awfulness of so many people’s existence, that there are folks who’ll go to enormous effort to bring a sparkle to their friends eyes. To put a little bit of magic in their lives, if only for moment.

 

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if more of us were like that and put the effort in to shake people up a bit and remind them to live a bit once in a while, remind them to be a bit of a kid sometimes. Remember what it was like making dens, rolling down hills, building assault causes, racing bikes, hiding, garden hopping, playing on building sites and swinging over becks…?

 

 

Helen and Steve are cool.

 

~ by martiandog on August 12, 2008.