Prepping – Ren Faire Report, Second Weekend

I don’t have many pictures of last weekend, as I was busy as all get-out. I have a single shot of one of my pies, which I pre-made at home so I wouldn’t be so busy. The pies were great, but I was still too busy to do anything but be at the kitchen tent.

Saturday, we had a glorious day. Rumors are floating that we had over 6000 people in fair that day, which is pretty damn fine. I sold several books, which was nice. Tips were good, too. With a beautiful day, though, comes the heat. It’s vastly important to put on sunblock several times during the day, because it does wear off as you sweat and it’s vital. Even more important is drinking enough water and assorted other liquids to balance your electrolytes. Water alone won’t do it, because you’re working much harder than usual, sweating buckets (or worse, you stop sweating, which is downright dangerous), and not peeing nearly as often as you should. You can actually get water drunk (loopy from too much water) and still be dehydrated. As someone with VERY low sodium naturally, I always have Gatorade, sekanjabin (a Persian “gatorade” style drink from the middle ages), Liquid IV, and LMNT on hand. It’s necessary to stay on top of things, in order to continue to be functional.

Why is this in the “prepping” section this week? Partly because I didn’t have anywhere else to put it, but partly because there are actual survival skills that I’m talking about here. Being hydrated during heavy labor, especially a kind you’re unused to in daily life, is something  you won’t think of in an emergency situation unless you’re already in the know.

The first weekend of fair, I managed to get slightly dehydrated. I stopped sweating. I knew how hot it was, and that I should be sweating, and I dosed myself with LMNT to try and fix things. Almost immediately, I started sweating again. My body knew it was going to get what it needed, and voila. How is that done if you don’t have fancy, expensive packets of stuff to put into your water? Add vinegar, salt, ginger, and whatever flavoring makes it drinkable for you. This will quite literally save your life. Salt is necessary, and when you’re very hot and NOT sweating, it means your body can’t naturally regulate your body temperature. Salt makes the sweating happen. Vinegar helps balance your natural electrolytes. Ginger stops a cold drink from causing cramps in a very hot body. Sugar makes it palatable. Know how to make some version of it (sekanjabin, shrub, switchel, haymakers, posca, whatever).

I’m lucky in a way, wearing what I do at events. Because I’m covered from top to toe, for the most part, my clothing IS my sunscreen. I wear exclusively linen at events, because it breathes well, wicks moisture away from your skin (which also helps in cooling you), and because it’s anti-microbial (Ferguson’s Irish Linen). It stops me from stinking despite the amount of work I’m doing, and if you don’t have access to showers, rubbing yourself all over with your dirty linen underwear actually helps remove skin bacteria (which make you dirty, but also make you smell). There’s a reason that medieval people would rub themselves down with their shifts at the end of the day. Linen is light, and it blocks UV rays relatively well if it is densely woven (which is what I wear). Cotton, while it does block UV rays, is also very hot to wear. Still, it’s better than man-made fibers, especially around a fire.

That’s the other thing you have to learn, both for fair and for emergencies: fire safety. Unlike at an average camp-out, both fair and SHTF moments are frenetic and can cause you to not be thinking well. Your fire safety plans should be in place long before it’s an issue. Our campsite has a visible fire extinguisher, the one very obviously modern item in our area, because being able to put out a fire is way more important than looking historically accurate. As I often say, burning to death is entirely historically accurate but that doesn’t mean I want to reenact it. I also keep a pail of water by my fire, and routinely soak down the grass around the edge of the fire pit. This way, if a spark does happen to escape the pit itself, it doesn’t have dry tinder to catch on. At some point, I very much want to pick up one of the fire blankets to keep on hand. Patrons can be very stupid at times, and the polyester fabric in the average fair-goer’s costume will go up in smoke in seconds. Their man-made fibers won’t burn or smolder like mine. They’ll melt, and turn into gooey balls of lava that adhere to the skin. You can’t use a fire extinguisher ON a person; fire blankets let you wrap them and roll them, hopefully minimizing fire damage to their skin.

Sunday was a practice in wet weather working. We had rain come in right at gate time, so the number of attendees was much lower. I don’t get too wet, because I have a massive tent to hide under, but I still have to check my fire. And there’s another post apocalyptic skill to consider: keeping a fire going in pouring rain. Sunday’s rain wasn’t horrid for most of the day, and I knew it was coming, so I got all the cooking and fire-related things done before noon. I only had to nurse my fire through 2 hours of intermittent rain and drizzle. In previous years, when we had more steady rain, I had popped a massive beach umbrella over top of the fire (resting on the tripod above it, in fact). The rain kept it cool enough not to burn, and the fire was kept largely dry. I’m going to be talking to my blacksmith this coming weekend about getting a very large metal disc (aka saj or diskada, an old plow disk turned into a cooking surface) that can be both a cooking surface and lay over the top of the tripod to shield the fire. The commercial ones come in small and “large” (they call 22″ large), but I want a super big one, 36″ in diameter. I already have the tripod for holding it while cooking. 🙂 The other benefit to something of this size is that you can drop the entire thing over your fire, smothering it but also causing it to stay hot and low. You’ll need gloves to get it off in the morning, but you’ll still have coals and won’t need matches or lighter to get the fire going in the morning. That’s huge… because you don’t cook over flames, you cook over coals.

One thing I didn’t expect to be doing this weekend was making a safe space for Conservatives. There’s a new guy working in security, friends with the fair owner’s new husband. He is very obviously Conservative, at least to my eyes. He came to visit me on Saturday, and I offered him tastes of my food, which he enjoyed. He talked about how welcome he felt, and how he’d been a bit skeptical about folks at fairs previously. In his words, he figured most people would be fairies. I laughed, and said, “Well, you’re not wrong. A lot of them are fairies,” (politically incorrect limp hand gesture), “and the rest of them are fairies,” (fluttering wings and fairy dust hand gestures). I let him know that speaking about politics was not likely a good thing, but that he was welcome to come chat with me anytime he liked, provided patrons weren’t around. He got it, and he understood. A couple of other Conservative folk made themselves know, quietly, to me as well. When no one was about, we talked… and when people got close, we shut up about politics, mostly because people go to fair to avoid politics, not get embroiled in them. Fair enough.

Last but not least, I had an interesting conversation with an old friend, I’ll call him T. He’d left town some years ago to help out his aging parents. He’s been back in town for a year or three, but we hadn’t really caught up because I’ve avoided SCA due to the whole “lefties eating their own.” We sat and talked for a while, and he expressed how excited he was to see me at (what he assumed was) a mutual friend’s wedding in October. I said nope, not going. When he asked why, I found myself answering. I explained that I’d been uninvited, actually BANNED, because I had expressed that Elon Musk was stimming and NOT doing a Nazi salute during Trump’s inauguration. The groom and bride were so offended and hurt and terrified by my statement that they immediately unfollowed and unfriended me on Facebook, and uninvited me to their wedding (while not telling me that, I might add). I noted that SCA and other places seemed to have a bullying policy only in one direction, if the offender was Conservative and the victim was Liberal, and that I was all done with that shit.

T got pretty upset. He pointed out how I treat everyone the same, how I feed and clothe and medic people. How I do my best to use chosen names and genders and all the rest, regardless of my personal feelings on the matter. How I don’t ask people their political bent before doing ANY of that. I nodded. “I know, I just help. Because that’s what good people do. And as a good person, I don’t want to associate with the kind of people who destroy relationships over the polite posting of a personal opinion.” He offered to “have a talk” with them and I declined. I pointed out that if you are forcing someone to do something they don’t want, you’re just stupid. Attempting to force someone who’s religiously opposed to gay weddings to do a custom wedding cake is just inviting them to spit in it. Go somewhere else where they embrace the rainbow, and get your cake done there. I don’t want anyone to spit in my metaphorical cake, and I don’t have any interest in making polite noises at people who didn’t even have the grace to tell me they had surgically removed me from their lives. Their doing that even removed my ability to do the one thing in SCA that I still cared about, because they’re part of the ruling class of that one group. Whatever. So no, don’t go talk to them. They’ve made their choice, and it was rude and wrong, but it’s still their choice. I’m not the kind of person who crashes someone else’s wedding to make a point.

T is still angry over things, but is at a loss for what to do. He couldn’t understand why “those people would treat you that way.” I told him to be careful, talk like that will get his liberal card revoked and he’ll have to join me with the other new conservatives. I did point out we have good cookies, though.