The Quiet Moment After Arts Fest Is Bittersweet

Monday after Arts Fest concluded here in State College, I drove down College Avenue in the early morning. Outside of one small business an employee was busy hosing down the sidewalk. On Allen Street, I could see the backhoes and workers starting to dismantle the temporary landscaping and stages that had been set up for the festival. The chairs were stacked on the patio in front of Café 210 West where just the three days before, tables were full of people drinking and eating. 

The morning after a weekend like that always seems a lonely moment. The festival has come and gone. A year’s worth of work for volunteers has concluded. The excitement, anticipation and buildup have grown and ebbed. The memories of excited crowds of people have been made.

The next festival is just a year away, but tomorrow is promised to no one. And who knows what the next year will bring or who among us will be here to see it?

The breakdown starts on Sunday at 4 p.m.. As the last day of the festival ends, the artists, both local and traveling, are busy taking down their booths. Works that did not sell are carefully re-packed in cases or bubble wrap and, one by one, stowed in trucks, trailers or vans. There is a rhythm and pace to the process. They have it down to a science.

The traveling artists are off to the next show. 

But Monday morning is when it hits hardest. A new week begins and the quiet reserved summertime pace of Happy Valley returns to our community.

Outside a Starbucks, just two women are having coffee and talking. The throngs of students that would be on these streets in the autumn are not here now. The throngs of people who were here the past few days, they too are gone.

And we are left with a quiet town.

Every year as I witness that Monday morning after Arts Fest, I am reminded of the scene spelled out in Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises.” It is morning after the fiesta is done, the bullfights are over and Jake and his friend Bill are stepping through the early moments of the morning after.

“The square was empty and there were no people on the streets. A few children were picking up rocket-sticks in the square. The cafes were just opening and the waiters were carrying out the comfortable white wicker chairs and arranging them around the marble-topped tables in the shade of the arcade. They were sweeping the streets and sprinkling them with a hose.

“The white-paper announcement of the unloading of the bulls and the big schedules of special trains were still up on the pillars of the arcade. A waiter wearing a blue apron came out with a bucket of water and a cloth, and commenced to tear down the notices, pulling the paper off in strips and washing and rubbing away the paper that stuck to the stone. The fiesta was over.”

In the morning hours after another one of life’s markers in our community, we are reminded of the passage of time. Our “fiesta” has come and gone. These mornings are haunting, a reminder that another year has passed in the inevitable march towards our own mortality.

This Happy Valley quiet won’t last for long though. Arts Festival marks the turn in Happy Valley summers. There are just a few weeks before fall semester begins again. And with the fall semester comes the students, football season and a series of days and weeks filled with events, activity and a quickened pace of life.

The lifeblood of what makes Happy Valley thrive courses through our veins once again. Here in Happy Valley, we have found the legendary fountain of youth that eluded Ponce de Leon. In our college town 49,000 or so residents will always be aged 18 to 22 or 23. That never changes.

Their energy, their youth, their temporary possession of all the good and bad of youth is theirs….for a time. I, like so many of them, in college looked at four years and believed that it would always be that way. Those days seemed to stretch out in front of us forever.

They, like all of us at that age, believed what Joseph Conrad said of his own youth: “I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more – the feeling that I could last forever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men.”

On the morning after a festive weekend, we’re reminded that the festivals of life come and go. And what is college itself, if not the festive and hopeful time of life. On a quiet Monday morning, when summer’s sleepy spell was upon our town, this old guy was reminded once again of college days and the inevitable march of time that spares no one.