Trying to Find Your Friends at an Outdoor Concert is an Absolute Nightmare

And it's not getting better!

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The day of my most recent visit to an outdoor concert was the hottest of the year to that point, which is not a record that any day gets to hold for very long anymore. The weather is memorably dense and it awakened the summer smells, the sudden efflorescence of some lurid waft suggesting something fermenting distinctively somewhere out of view. So every summer, when the spirit moves us or just when we find ourselves needing an excuse to day drink, we like to see a band we like at an open-air venue. Sometimes this is easier in theory than in practice, like if one of us has to sit in line for half an hour to pay $25 for a basket of chicken tendies and fries about five minutes before the main act takes stage. This is not what I or anyone else loves about attending an outdoor concert, but the most frustrating aspect of being at these types of events is showing up 10 minutes late and trying to find your friends in the crowd.

I’ll hear them on speakerphone shouting “I’M ON THE RIGHT!” as if there is some kind of universally agreed-upon concept of right that isn’t relative to where someone is standing in the middle of tens of thousands of people. These vague directions will send me weaving like a punt returner through clots of expensively dressed young people and slow-moving bystanders with their tote bags and inconsiderate wide-brimmed hats. The nameless, amorphous faces seem to loop like the backgrounds in old cartoons, and my friends will raise their voices to let me know that they are standing and waving their hands and doing everything humanly possible to signal their precise location to me. This tactic seems to be a bit counter-intuitive considering there is a sea of an innumerable amount of loud drunk idiots on their iPhones doing the same gestures hoping to find their dumb friends.

The simple defiant vitality that breathes life into every concert is subsumed into the smell of poaching sewage, the stubborn puddles blooming with either mud or something leaking out of the cluster of portapotties. The smells all suggest, some more urgently than others, that something underneath is not working properly—or at all. I’ll breathe some slightly altered air before resigning my fate to aligning the wonders of GPS technology with a specific pin dropped into the middle of a massive field. I am not Lewis or Clarke—I am just a man trying to see Modest Mouse and the Pixies. The situation turns into a complete wash when a text pops up that says, “I’m right next to a sign that says Zone Sixteen.” I have yet to discover Zones 1 through 15. I decide to watch the show by a random tree.

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