Woodchopper's Ball, '09

I got invited back to The Woodchopper's Ball in Kent, OH again this year. The Ball is a benefit concert for the Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless organized each year by my good friend Brian Henke. He assembles the 9 best acoustic guitarists he can get his hands on from across the country and throws them all on stage, three at a time, round-robin style. This year I was honored to share the stage with Kyle Reeder and Tim (and his son Myles) Thompson. The three of us make up the 2008 Winfield International Fingerstyle Guitar Championship winners. The show was once again a huge success.

Since I had to play in Menomonie, WI the previous night my buddy Chuck Wood flew me down there in his plane, a 1970 Piper Arrow II. With exception to a little wind that slowed us up the flight down there was great. We turned a 12+ hour drive into a 4 hour flight.

We crashed at Brian's home in Cleveland, along with Kyle and his wife Bethany, Tim and Myles, Helen Avokian, and Eric Wilson. Kyle is a monster fingerstyle chicken picker and he showed me 'everything he knows'. The weather made it too dangerous for us to fly out Sunday morning like we had planned so Kyle invited me and Brian to join him for the second half of his show at a local music store, a show he did to fill in for the absent Todd Hallawell. We had a lot of fun. Even got to jam on a Christmas tune.

Monday Morning. Time to fly home...or not. Brian took us to the airport in Kent, a good hour away from his house. We loaded our bags into the plane and Chuck went inside to do his preflight stuff. Bad news. We weren't leaving then either.

The weather had been wet and overcast for the past few days. We could have taken off and gotten above it easily enough, and the skies were clear back home, but we needed a fuel stop in between and couldn't find anywhere to get down. The ceilings were down around 200 feet. Descend through the clouds and the runway is right there. Any miscalculation and there's trouble. There was also the icing to worry about.

Brian Henke is one of the kindest people I've ever met and I'm sure he would have turned around to come and get us, but he would have wasted more in gas by the time it was all said and done than a hotel room would have cost us so we had a guy at the airport give us a ride to the hotel.

Downtown was three miles away, according to the signs, so we started walking. Found a little mexican place to get some food and continued on. We ended up in a movie theater watching The Blind Side about Ravens LT Michael Oher. I was at Lambeau Field watching him play the Packers just a week earlier but had no idea who he was so I guess I didn't pay much attention to him.

On the way home Chuck had the idea to stop into Dominoes and order a pizza to be delivered to the hotel and ride back with the delivery guy. It took some light-hearted guilt tripping but we talked him into it. Back at the hotel we watched Evan Almighty and Chuck did some more weather recon.

Tuesday morning. Rainy and fog. Chuck seems determined. We screamed down the runway nearly blind, pulled up and were totally blind. We had to climb through 6,000 feet of clouds, picking up ice along the way, unable to even see the nose of the plane before we got above it. Chuck had done this stuff before, but not me. A quarter-inch of ice is a serious problem for a little plane, and my guts were telling me that we were doing circles. The instruments weren't. I got that kind of scared that burns holes in your guts. Chuck got us above it all with no problems.

The skies up above the clouds are staggeringly beautiful. All of a sudden it's blue and sunny and the clouds go from a dirty wet grey to brilliant, flowing white. Crazy that this stuff has always been up here, but before man started flying no one ever got to see it. The top of the clouds was at 6,000 feet and we cruised at 8,000. 2,000 feet below us the cloud layer looks like it's about 30 feet down. There are hills and mountains, valleys and canyons, and a rainbow of perfect concentric circles below us, traveling with us the whole way. We talked about how all the really beautiful things in the world are the most dangerous - mountains, the ocean, women...and now clouds. The movie at the hotel last night ended with a giant rainbow, a promise from God to look after us. It felt good to have that reminder tracking with us. We were bucking 50 mph headwinds and not moving as fast as we had hoped to so we dropped to 6,000 feet to try to get under it and found the clouds, now casting shadows from the angle of the sun, even more beautiful .

When we left the clouds were still hanging thick over Lansing, IL where we had to stop for fuel and we were counting on them to clear out before we got there. We could see the edge of them on the horizon and were worried that we would have to descend before we reached it and have to deal with more ice. We started our descent 5 miles out and that's exactly where the clouds broke. We even got to play around some friendly giant cumulous clouds on the way down. Once we got on the ground Chuck said, 'ten minutes earlier and the clouds would have been right here.' Afterward I thought of the winds and the rainbow.

Clear but bumpy ride the rest of the way home. This kind of stuff makes me hope this music thing takes for me.