The mountains don’t care about your festival.
They were there before the fairgrounds and they’ll be there long after. They just sit above Quincy, California, the way they always have — patient, enormous, indifferent — while somewhere below, a fiddle starts up and people who’ve driven three hours from the Bay Area shuffle toward the sound.
That’s how it begins.
The Plumas Homegrown Americana Festival happened the last weekend of August — three days on the Plumas-Sierra Fairgrounds, Labor Day weekend, sixty dollars for the whole run if you wanted it. You could camp. You could jam. You could square dance until your legs gave out or your partner did, whichever came first.
I’m one of the people who helped make it happen - but my role was minor.
My nickname is Barky. There’s a stage named after me. I’m not sure what to do with that information except feel quietly stunned by it every time I think about it.
Barky’s Stage was where the local acts played. The ones who maybe didn’t have a booking agent or a Spotify following or a van with the band name stenciled on the side. Just people from the region who had songs and wanted somewhere to play them. We gave them a stage.
But the thing I’m actually proudest of — the thing I’d fight hardest to bring back — is the Jam-O-Rama.
It was a series of playshops I ran out in the West Lawn, with some musician friends who came out to help lead. The idea was simple: if you play an instrument and want to jam with people, come. Seasoned or just starting out, it didn’t matter. We had handout materials, loaner instruments for whoever needed one, guest leaders who knew how to make it easy and fun. The only real requirement was a basic proficiency and a willingness to show up.
I watched people walk in nervous and leave grinning.
That grin. That’s the one.
That felt right.
The main stage had its own kind of magic. Sourdough Slim and Robert Armstrong showed up and did the thing they do — part vaudeville, part cowboy poetry, part whatever you call it when two old guys make a room full of strangers laugh until their eyes water. The Wildcat Mountain Ramblers played all weekend like they’d been born in fairground dust. Sunday morning they did a gospel set that I did not expect to move me the way it did.
It moved me.
The Newport Nightingales closed things out Sunday afternoon with 1940s swing tunes — three people, a tent that was too hot by two o’clock, nobody left.
The square dancing ran through all of it. Friday evening, all day Saturday, Sunday morning. Kids who’d never done it before. Old-timers who probably learned in a gymnasium somewhere in 1974. Everyone confused at first, then not confused, then grinning.
Sixty dollars. Forty for a tent camping spot. Free on Friday if you just showed up and listened.
I keep running the math and it doesn’t make sense how good it was for what it cost.
We don’t know if it happens again.
That’s the part I don’t know how to write cleanly. Events like this don’t fail because people stop caring. They fail because the people who care are also the people doing all the work, and the work is enormous and invisible and mostly unpaid, and at some point the math of love and stubbornness runs out.
I hope ours doesn’t.
I hope we find a way to do it again next August — to fill those fairgrounds, to run the Jam-O-Rama again for whoever walks through that gate with a guitar case and hopeful eyes, to let the mountains be indifferent while the fiddle starts up.
But I’ve been around long enough to know that good things don’t last forever.
If this was one of those things — so be it, but I’m holding out hope we’ll meet again.
At least I can say we made it happen. And I won’t forget.
