Flood

If you’re in the northeast US, you’ve probably encountered some instance of severe weather over the past two weeks. First, there was the earthquake. Nothing catastrophic, but an interesting twist to an otherwise typical day. Then, we had a hurricane. This was preceded in some areas by tornadoes and followed by flooding and mass-power outages. Now, most recently, we’ve got this crazy never-ending rain. It’s still calm compared to other floods that have happened across the country in the past few years, but none of these things are typical of the northeast.

Now I’m up on a hill, so flooding hasn’t affected me too much. A little water in the basement, but nothing crazy. It did, however, get me thinking about flood. Which brings me to a story; a guitar story, of course.

The setting is Summit Grove camp. It’s a good place. I’ve been going there for like 10 years. This is roughly as long as I’ve been playing guitar, so it’s pretty reasonable to say that I’ve almost always had a guitar at camp when I’ve been there. Up until recently, I’ve always taken my Jasmine (by Takamine) to camp. It made a good “camp guitar.”

So this particular year, as it often does at camp, it stormed. It was pretty nuts too; lightning, buildings struck by lightning, trees falling over, flooding, etc. It was a camp storm the way they were intended.

This particular year was also at a time before I had really “discovered” music. Ken Mueller is really who is to credit for that, but I hadn’t met him yet. So nearly all of the music I owned and listened to was contemporary Christian music. Sure, it’s got a good message when it's actually saying something, but it’s usually pretty terrible as far as music goes. It’s rather unfortunate.

So there was this storm with flash flooding and the works. At the time, I was into Jars of Clay and this one song, Flood. It seemed perfect for the situation, so a friend and I got our guitars out and played. And wailed away on those guitars. And people sang. And I may have even sung at that point. It was in the element. Perfectly. One of the most powerful jams I’ve ever had.

Weeks later, when looking back at the event, recalling how awesome it was, I picked up my guitar to notice something out of place. It was a rather extreme warp around the soundhole – the worst I’ve seen to date.

Kids, don’t play guitar in the rain.