SummerJam.

Only 359 days till next year.

One adjective to describe a wanderer’s existence: Ephemeral. Here today, gone tomorrow. Gutentag. Je suis Bayless. Nice to meet you. Adios.

Rinse, wash and repeat.

This is not a problem for those who travel solely to find themselves. It is a problem for those who want to find other people, too. For a son of The Bob like me, genetics play a role even bigger than the oak trees the old man calls calves. Like my father always says, “I just love people.”

Making friends on this trip has been like smoking crack. No matter how many hits, I can’t get enough. Just one more score, one more score, one more to get me through these next few hours. A fleeting high, because you never know where you will be the next day, your newest buddy exiting stage right forever. Some of these hit-and-run relationships last only a few hours, on a train from Bordeaux to Paris; some last a single night, chatting through language barriers over a beer in a Dutch hostel; but some last just a little longer, enough to really leave a mark.

Those are the friendships that nourish you like a well-balanced diet, rather than just giving you the quick, fleeting jolt of that rock.

(I swear, I have never done crack, but we’ve all taken D.A.R.E., so we know what it does).

I now have a slew of friends – real friends – from Cologne, with a pair of Frankfurters thrown in for some demographic balance. None of them would have made cameos in my life’s movie had it not been for a late breakfast on the Downtown Mall last April in Charlottesville.

Jamison, my old roommate, was moving slowly that day, and ventured down to Café Cubano for some early afternoon eggs and coffee – breakfast time for a long haired, guitar-playing, free spirit college kid. He made eyes with a cute waitress, used his rock star good looks to snag her digits, and called her up. Her name was Laura. Jamison and Laura began dating. Turns out she’s German, from Cologne, the hometown of Gentleman, my favorite reggae artist. Turns out she loves Gentleman, in addition to some other German reggae bands on my iPod. Turns out she has a bunch of friends going to a three-day reggae festival in her hometown in July.

It’s called SummerJam. I had been dying to go for over two years, ever since I saw a clip of the madness on a Gentleman DVD.

Turns out she was able to hook me up phat.

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If I’ve learned anything so far, it’s that national stereotypes are constantly being shattered. They may be true to an extent: Spaniards seem kind of lazy, Aussies (pronounced Aw-zeez, not Aw-ssees) are really just Americans who say “weed” instead of “weird,” Italians seem extremely vain, the French speak French, the Dutch are more like cartoon characters on acid, Germans are completely anti-war, and the Swiss are, well, neutral -- a quintessential Swiss characteristic. But here is how I now view these different tags of nationality: If every country is a Baskin Robbins, with 31 flavors of people living there, the stereotype is simply the ice cream of the month.

The most prominent flavor out of the masses, but by no means the only one. Not by a long shot.

They say that Germans are cold and unfriendly. I disagree.

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“I brought some food with me, just so I wouldn’t come empty-handed,” I said to Laeo, my right side being pulled down to earth by the weight of the bread, cheese, apples and bananas in my shopping bag. Laura, out of the country for the month, had set me up with a bunch of her old high school friends to camp out for three nights, and the last thing I wanted to do was come off as a mooch.

“Yes, but it is okay if you do come … empty … han-ded,” he said with his mouth, his eyebrows betraying the fact that he had just picked up a new English phrase via context clues. “It’s no problem.” A very popular phrase among Laeo and his friends for the duration of the festival.

The kid barely knew me, having made my acquaintance at a bar two nights earlier for a few minutes, but Laeo was already making me feel welcome. It was a sign of things to come.

This group had it all. Laeo, the quintessential nice guy. His blonde older sister Hanaa, a cop that you wouldn’t mind being cuffed by, her gun replaced by a bikini top for her 72 hours of holiday. Mascha, the cute hippie chick who shuns drugs and alcohol, but loses no cool points in the process. Patrick, the ringleader, organizer and axis of the clique. Sarah, the girl who thinks she speaks no English until she realizes that I can understand everything she says. Johannes, the country boy who exudes the vibes of someone used to a slower pace of life. René, the gentle giant who beams with astonished pride that an American finds his English presentable … and then wants to do nothing else but talk. Isi (pronounced "easy"), Laura’s best friend, completely fluent in English, who could easily ditch her medical career plans for a modeling job any day. Max, the unassuming tall guy who puts on no airs, completely content with himself and those around him. Fabian (or “Zizou”), a Zenedine Zidane clone from Frankfurt who happened to be camping next to the group of Cologners, and Nawiee (pronounced nah-vee), Zizou’s Odd Couple, Iranian-born sidekick who let me use his tent as a personal storage locker.
*Note: Some of these names are probably spelled wrong..just a word to the rest of you out there, when you write down your email address for me, please write down the correct spelling of your name. I'm in unchartered territory in this continent of many languages and many spellings.

In a sea of two and three-person tents, most separated by the width of a single human foot, these kids had corralled their wagons to form a huge living room in the middle of their temporary abodes. It may as well have been known as SummerJam Platz, because with enough room for all of us to max and relax outside, protected from the sun thanks to the two jumbo open air tents propped above, I doubt we could have scored a spot any sweeter. Even if it was still “96 degreeeeees in the shaaaaade,” as Third World sang on the last day, SummerJam Platz will probably never be topped on my list of all-time great camping spots (front country camping spots only, of course).

That’s because of the X factor that SummerJam brings to the table -- something that few, if any festivals are able to compete with. It’s located at a place called Cologne Bay – all of the music is on an island planted in the middle of this man-made body of freshwater.

That means that separating us from the island is a lake. A clean lake. A lake you can swim in.

Chill German kids making me feel at home, a shaded, outdoor living room for a camping spot and an amazingly refreshing schwimmin hole less than 15 meters away.

“It’s like this every day in Germany, right?”

“Oh, but of course,” someone from the peanut gallery responded.

Who says Europeans don’t understand American sarcasm?

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By the way, there was some pretty good music, too.

Three days: Friday through Sunday. Two stages: Red and Green. (How they decided upon those names, I have no idea, because there were no signs, no color themes, no nothing to indicate which was which). Thirty-eight shows, divided evenly between the stages. Forty-thousand people, three times the size of UVa’s student body. For 80€, I’ll take it any day.

Morgan Heritage, Damian “Jr. Gong” Marley, Luciano, Patrice, Ziggy Marley, Saian Supa Crew, Tiken Jah Fakoly, Junior Kelly, Joy Denalane, Culcha Candela, Third World, Jimmy Cliff, The Gladiators, Caramelo/Criminal, Toots & the Maytals….I could go on, but most of you have only heard of one, maybe two of those groups. Let me translate for you, then: The lineup was freaking amazing.

It was like green eggs and ham music. I watched in the middle of the crowd, I watched from the back of the crowd. From the outskirts, and from the sides. When good songs injected my weary body with sudden bursts of energy, I danced, shuffled and skanked with gusto. But when my legs could take no more, I sat down to watch, or I lied down to listen. From the pier in the middle of the lake, and from the shallow water on its banks, I bobbed to the music. From SummerJam Platz, I could hear the thud of the bass beat. And on the island, I could feel the vibrations of 80,000 dancing feet.

If only life was a video iPod, and I could just keep hitting repeat.

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So while I’ve got some juice left in my battery, and while I can still pick up this illicit free WiFi signal from a little spot in Den Haag, Holland, I’m going to post this little intro credits story, and try to tell as much as possible of the good stuff with pictures and short stories.

(By the way. Dutch people, when they speak their language, seriously sound like they are spouting out a shuffled Webster’s English Dictionary playlist from an mp3 player lodged in their esophagi – “Hour eggshells de fout ijk hammer den Jordan.” It is so weird and extremely amusing).