Last weekend, I helped out at the National Folk Festival in Salisbury, Maryland. My role was quite small – coordinating the volunteers in the Maryland Traditions Folklife area (featuring some really cool MD-based artists). But the effort was made so much more complex, and to me a bit edgier, than anticipated back in the Vaccine Optimism days of the spring and early summer.

The festival crowd was a microcosm of America’s current response to COVID’s Delta variant surge. People wearing masks diligently. People wearing masks half-heartedly (down around their chins somewhere or hanging off their ears). People not wearing masks at all – and leaning in a bit too closely for comfort. There was a well-intentioned scheme to hand out free masks to the maskless – which didn’t go over very well. There were also designations of where to stand within tents for social distancing – which no one paid the least attention to.

The Eastern Shore of Maryland is a mixed bag of humanity, and add to that the wide variety of people that free folk festivals attract. So, many people attending the event could have been vaccinated. But then again, many – for whatever their reasoning – were probably not.

I felt uneasy the whole weekend, which put a damper on what should have been a celebratory time. Back outside with hundreds of strangers, sharing folk traditions with the masses…this is my milieu after all, having worked for over 30 years on our Smithsonian Folklife Festival. I’d missed it, but still, it was not exactly a carefree return to (semi-)normality.

The potential for disaster – personally, a break-through infection for me or one of my vaccinated friends and colleagues, and worst yet turning into a super-spreader event – was ever present in our minds. A week later, and so far so good.

The whole thing reminded me of our own Festival in 2002, after 9/11, when Fourth of July on the National Mall with thousands of people seemed to many to be a big red flag. This time around, the “potential terrorists” are microscopic bugs. More subtle, and in many ways, more deadly.

Still, I feel the need to cautiously go forth into the world. Here are some pictures to remind us what we will miss if we don’t.