You could see the crowd from the parking structure: forty thousand people packed into a field, all facing the same direction, all leaning toward one lit stage like plants toward a window. The bass came up through my shoes before I heard it. Everybody around me had their hands in the air, holding those little glowing phones, and from the back it looked like a field of drifting embers, a whole hillside of light that wasn't there an hour ago and won't be there tomorrow.
Here is what nobody in that crowd was thinking about. The air we were all breathing, the air carrying that sound and that heat off forty thousand bodies, is a layer thinner than the skin on an apple. From orbit you can see it as a blue line at the edge of the planet, and it's so faint you'd swear someone drew it on with a fine pen. Everything anyone has ever sung happened inside that line.
I used to think a festival was noise. A lot of people making a lot of noise on purpose. Now I stand at the back and I can't get past the arithmetic of it: that many warm, complicated, temporary people, all of them fed and hydrated and hearing, deciding on the same Saturday to gather in one spot and shout the same words at a stranger with a guitar.
There is no reason it should work. Nothing out there is arranged this well. I don't clap along much anymore. I mostly just count the lights and think about how long it took to make even one of them, and how easily the whole field could have stayed dark.