All the Way Around

The drive from Phoenix to San Diego took us through miles of desert under an unfriendly sun. With our windows closed to prevent sand from blowing into our lungs, the seven hour trip got us to San Diego feeling pretty cranky. But after relaxing a while at Dave’s cousin’s house, then heading down to the shore to dip our feet in the Pacific ocean, it was easy to forget about our scorching desert drive. It seemed that every section of the seaside cliffs was inhabited by a different animal species. Cormorants were crowded onto a shady outcropping, sea lions shared a cool rock inches above the water, and pelicans perched on a sunny ledge above a watery cave. We listened to the sea lions’ laughter-like bark and watched the pelicans dive for their dinner. Inland, the paths between beaches were home to many plants I had never seen before.

After a delicious, home cooked meal at Dave’s cousin’s, we drove to the Trinity Methodist Church where the San Diego contra dance was held. Dave and I chatted with the musicians as they were preparing for the dancers. “Are you a local band?” Dave asked the mandolin player. “Yep, there are actually four local bands and four local callers and we mix and match for each week’s dance,” he replied. The band that night was Hey Wire and they had a great sound. Their four instruments—guitar, fiddle, mandolin, and banjo—produced an old-timey sound full of twangy trills. As we talked with the band, Martha Wild, the caller for the night, finished enthusiastically teaching a beginner’s workshop. She took her place beside the band on the second step of a miniature staircase and I noticed the words on the T-shirt she wore: “She who must be obeyed.”

The first dance of the evening was proper and began with active couples going down the outside. As the actives walked down the hall alone, some inactive couples swung in the center, a move I was familiar with. But several couples began doing what looked like the hand-clapping games I played when I was young to songs like “Miss Mary Mack.” Once my partner and I got to the end of the line and became inactive, he turned to me and said, “let’s clap!” He clapped, held out his right hand, then his left, clapped both my hands at the same time, and then clapped his together. We did this a few times to the beat of the music and then stepped into a circle left. Our neighbors broke hands and twirled around before joining us in the circle right that followed. This was a signature move on the San Diego dance floor, I found.

After the next walk through, the caller turned to the band. “Give us four potatoes and away we’ll go!” This dance featured a same gender do-si-do, which the caller usually called as, “Dosey!”. Next, everyone balanced in a ring and did a “CIRcle three-quarters ’round.” This was another of Martha’s distinctive calls: she would pronounce “circle” with an accented and higher pitched first syllable. Then, either the men or the women (alternating between each progression) went down the center and back, cast off with their neighbor, passed through and swung. It was a fun dance, at its best when the dancers weren’t sure if it was the men or the women’s turn in the center. These first two dances were just the beginning of Martha’s great selections.

A lot of the dancers that night looked like I had seen them before, though I wasn’t sure why. I asked one of these familiar faces to be my partner, and we joined the only set. It was during a partner swing that I realized where I recognized him from. We had danced together somewhere in New England, most likely during the Fall Ball in Peterborough, NH. Dave and I found many folks that had once danced in the Northeast that night. One of Dave’s partners thought she recognized him from Santa Barbara, but realized after finding out he was from New England, that they had danced together in Dover, NH. We met other Fall Ball attendees, as well as someone who had danced in the Boston area. Their stories went one of two ways: either they had moved from New England and searched for contra dancing once they got to California, or were Californians that enjoyed dancing in the Northeast and traveled there for special dance events.

The last tune during my dance with the partner I recognized was Sandy Boys, one of my favorites. As the band switched I could feel the energy of the room lift and heard many of my neighbors vocalizing their excitement. After that day’s drive I had been unsure I would make it through a night of dancing, but that moment gave me all the energy I needed to dance vigorously through it’s entirety.

At the break, Dave and I shared the floor with three other couples during a polka. As was usual in this part of the country, we were the only couple doing the Norwegian Polka while others danced the Polish style. Afterwards, I was asked by one of my neighbors what dance Dave and I had just done. I told him what it was and he smiled and said that he had never seen it before. We got many comments that night on our dancing style. The San Diego dance community was a warm and welcoming one.

Spinning me around during the last waltz, Dave suddenly stopped. “Oh man!” he whispered. “What’s up?” I asked. He shook his head in disbelief, “We just danced our first dance in California, and we didn’t get to do a California twirl!”

Though Lisa and I have done some long drives since reaching the Southwest, we resolutely decided to go the extra distance between Santa Fe and Phoenix to see the Grand Canyon. As we pulled past the Grand Canyon IMax theater (a must see), snow began to fall. Looking out over the canyon’s southern rim into sporadic swirls of snowflakes, we agreed that the view was worth the trip.

A few hours south took us into the city of Phoenix. It was hot, dry, about 6000 feet lower in elevation, and had probably not seen snow all year.

Our host generously offered to drive us to the Wednesday night Phoenix dance, a lucky thing we realized when we saw what we would have had to navigate through. The main street was covered in orange cones marking off the construction area for a new light rail system to alleviate traffic. We learned that the project has been going on for years.

We arrived at the hall in the middle of a dance. I joined in with our host at the bottom of the only set.

The dance was held at the Irish Cultural Center, which contained a small space with shirts, flags, and pictures hung up around the room, all tokens of Irish culture. A big mural of an Irish castle filled the back wall. We were told that the Saturday dances are held in a much larger space, and that folks travel to it from contra dance groups all around the state. Commonly, 100 people attend. That evening’s dance was a much more local crowd. At its peak, there were about 30-40 dancers, making up two lines.

The Phoenix Friends of Old Time Music Open Band played the music. There were five of them that night, many of whom played more than one instrument. One of my favorite tunes of the night featured the keyboard player on flute and one of the fiddlers beating a drum.

Laila Lewis, the caller, came up from Tuscon. During the break, she told me that in her area, there were many callers and not enough dances to feature them all. Relatively new to calling, she and a friend generally split a night’s calling between them. In order to have a full evening for herself, she explained that she had to travel to dances in other areas.

For that first dance, as our host and I danced up and down the set, I noticed several beginners as well as experienced dancers. Almost everyone was above the age of 35, but a few kids were there, too, no older than 10.

“Go easy on the flirting,” my host told me as I looked into her eyes. “Some of the dancers here can be uncomfortable with it.” As we danced, she told me about some of the dances she had been to, and the different degrees of flirting she had experienced at each one. “It would be interesting to know which dances have the most flirting, and which the least,” she continued.

Snacks were plentiful on a table in the back. Tortilla chips, Lisa and I have discovered, are everywhere you go from Texas to the west coast, showing up at every meal as well as the times in between. The snack table at the dance was no exception. Guacamole was next to the cookies.

Toward the end of the night, I noticed two really good dancers doing some interesting twirls. I approached them when the dance was over and asked how long they had been dancing for. They told me that they had been at it for several years. “Did you dance to Nils Fredland,” I asked them.

“We trained him,” the man explained.

“But then we let him get away,” added the woman.

Nils, a nationally known caller, now lives in New Hampshire, but he got his start calling in Phoenix.

The next night, Lisa and I got together with an old flame of my dad’s who used to folk dance with him. After over 30 years, they found each other once more at a folk dance festival in Pennsylvania. She and her husband took us to an international folk session in a boat house in central Phoenix. I was excited to learn some new dances, and tried to join in wherever I could. Lisa did the same. The dancers were very inviting and did their best teaching two contra dancers their foreign steps.

I always marvel at international folk dancers. They have memorized so many dances, excitedly filling the floor with each new recorded tune. No matter what country a dance is from, most international dancers pick it up right away. One woman from Macedonia danced some circle dances with her baby slung over her shoulder. The baby gently rocked as its mother energetically stepped to the beat.

Dancing circles with Lisa in one hand and my dad’s dancing partner in the other, I felt aware of the inter-generational aspect of dancing. Dances are passed down, like all other aspects of culture, and the movements stay with us from year to year, decade to decade.

-Phoenix, AZ

Arizona, along with Indiana, has the peculiarity of keeping standard time even as all the states around it switch to daylight savings. This meant that on our way west, we attended only one dance in Mountain time: Santa Fe, NM.

Our first night in this time zone was spent in the Guadalupe Mountains National Park, home to the highest point in Texas. However, winds we estimated at 45 MPH kept it from being a peaceful stay; our tent was blown over with us inside, and we spent a nearly sleepless night in the car, wind rocking us, heat lightning flashing outside the windshield before us.

When we finally arrived in Santa Fe, we were exhausted, wearily searching for a place to eat before the dance began (though they do have great restaurants). Miraculously, we found the Odd Fellows Hall and arrived on time.

Santa Fe was a much smaller city than I was expecting. With roughly 60,000 people, it didn’t have a single sky scraper. Instead, the city’s downtown was made up of one and two-story adobe buildings surrounding a few major streets and plazas. Lisa instantly fell in love with the architecture, vowing she would move there some day. I chalked this up to the fact that we were in the state capital of “the Land of Enchantment,” New Mexico’s nickname.

Fresh bread was laid out in the dance hall’s foyer with butter on the side. As we paid to get in, I noticed a poster on the wall with a picture of Uncle Sam. It said, “I want YOU to dance today!”

The dance space was small, but the sides of the room were packed with an eclectic array of furniture. Half of the chairs were red velvet seated thrones. Not surprisingly, these were the chairs that most of the band chose to sit in. A disco ball hung from the center of the room and when the main lamps were dimmed for the waltz, it sprang to life sending small points of light all over the room.

We learned during the beginner’s session that there would be open calling that night, and Lisa insisted that I call Trip to Lambertville. I signed up with the main caller, who excitedly put me down to call after the break. He had a distinct appearance, with braids in his beard and a bandanna on his head. Lisa learned that he was a street musician, a part of the local Buskers Society, and that his group had an upcoming gig as a part of a local radio fund drive.

“We’re closely connected with the Albuquerque group,” one of my partners told me. “We’re a little wilder, though,” she added. Albuquerque and Santa Fe alternate Saturdays, with one city holding dances the 1st and 3rd, and the other taking 2nd and 4th.

The callers stood on a small stage next to the band, and each called very different dances. The main caller got things going with a circle dance; a woman called a dance with four quick pass throughs that sent each dancer hurtling up and down the hall only to return the way they came; another man taught a dance with petronella turns. At times, the calling was superb; at others, mistimed calls sent the dancers in the wrong direction. The energy always remained at a high level, and there were never complaints from the floor. The dancers took everything in stride.

When it was my turn to call, we were well into the evening. One of the callers introduced me to the dancers before I took the stage, explaining that Lisa and I were visiting from the Northeast. “So be on your best behavior!” came a shout from the crowd below.

I quickly walked the dance through and got everyone back to place, confident that they could handle Trip to Lambertville with no problem. I turned to the band and asked them for some reels. “That’s basically what we know,” was the response from the stand up bass player. I called the dance through once, then realized to my horror that I had left out a move. I quickly corrected my mistake and was amazed to find that the dancers recovered as soon as I did so, with barely a trace of confusion.

A boy of about 8 joined the dancing with his parents, adding a playful dynamic to the set he was in. It was obvious he liked to swing and alamande, jumping and smiling as he did so.

Toward the end of the night, the main caller asked if I had another dance to call, so I got up and called the Scout House Reel. The microphone inexplicably stopped working, so they set me up with a wireless headset. It was a blast watching the Santa Fe dancers do some of my favorite dances from back home. The band, known as Hey!, played great music to call to, giving me lots of energy.

Santa Fe was in a truly beautiful area, and Lisa and I took time to see some of the scenery before moving on. At Bandalier National Monument, we explored the Indian ruins in the Frijoles canyon. Lisa conquered her fear of heights to ascend over 14 stories up a ladder system into a ceremonial cave.

-Santa Fe, NM