Back when Catbird was a skinny adolescent and toodled the flute, her high school band spent a week at band camp every summer, preparing for the annual Indiana State Fair Band Day Competition. In a school of fewer than 500 students, total band enrollment (including pompom girls, majorettes and flag carriers) was between 125 and 150. Additionally, this was before Title Nine, so except for the five ultra-popular cheerleaders, students of the female persuasion had few other sanctioned physical outlets. In this farming community, band wasn't just for fat kids who couldn't play basketball; it was the center of our social dynamic. Even the quarterback of the football team marched in the band. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Band was a Very Big Deal.
In 1969, Catbird's first year of high school band, Backwoods HS had a new band director with a new idea: Band Camp. Band Boosters raised some bucks, someone did some research and the kids each ponied up a little cash of our own and we were off.
Vintage postcard from the golden age of West Baden Springs
In French Lick (a town which sounds far more fun and interesting that it actually is) the derelict resort hotel of West Baden provided broad fields for marching, enough isolation from the town that our repeated riffs and drumbeats would not disturb, and a great deal on rooms long past their heyday.
From the tree-lined brick drive with ancient statuary gracing the hills, we 50s-era children of tiny box houses knew we were in the presence of something special even before we spied the enormous atrium. So what that much of the mosaic floor was gone to concrete, that the glass ceiling of the atrium was so broken that rain poured into giant pools too large and numerous to contain? Who worried that the friezes and balconies were crumbling before our eyes? That whole sections of the old hotel were barricaded against entry because they were unsafe. We were staying at "the eighth wonder of the world," at the "Carlsbad of Indiana."
She had lovely bones, the old West Baden Springs Hotel, and even in her great decline we could see it.
Indeed, testaments to her history scattered through the hallways. In the 20's trains brought folks directly from Chicago to take the waters and gamble. The circle at the top of the atrium was said to have been a platform that held an orchestra that was lowered (or raised) during special events. Presidents and royalty had enjoyed the hotel's luxury.
When economic declines began, the hotel experienced an abrupt personality change as it was sold to the Jesuits and went from decadent gambling mecca to spiritual retreat and monastery. By the time Backwoods High School summered there, West Baden hosted some kind of minor institute but was mostly just plummeting through the economic skids.
We loved it though. We were kids who had no expectation of luxury and felt lucky just to be in the presence of luxury lost.
When it rained too much to march on the grounds, we practiced our routine on the big, covered wraparound porch that circled the south half of the building. We were a large band and the porch was big enough to accommodate us, though the front row could not see the back row. It was glorious.
Nightly excursions took us to saintly statues tucked up in the hills. Imagine what went on there. The atrium, though, was our greatest joy. Strains of Iron Butterfly's In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida laced out from Nick's stereo (sure, didn't every school designate at least ONE person to bring a stereo to band camp?) across the great interior. If one was lucky enough to have an interior room, one sat in the window and scanned the vast space to the people in the windows of the opposite interior rooms. We watched all the comings and goings below. At 10 p.m. Titus stood in the center and blew taps that echoed its melancholy off the crumbling walls, through the broken windows and into the night.
Of course, we did not sleep. We were adolescents at camp. Our pheromones (which we experienced keenly even if we had no knowledge of them at that time), our restless excitement for being somewhere other than home, our nascent awareness that we outnumbered adult chaperons by a ratio of 25 to 1, and the ticklish notion becoming conviction that we could not be controlled--these things were a heady brew.
A favorite late night occupation, when the endless talking talking talking and slumber party pranks were no longer enough, was to toss pennies out into the atrium and listen to the echoing ping on the concrete. The chaperons sat at tables in the dark with a fierce spotlight they'd flame up and aim in an attempt to catch--or at least intimidate--the coin tossers. It didn't work; we just saw it as the next level in a game we were destined to win.
One night, Catbird herself collected empty soda cans and crawled stealthily on her belly to the stairway (an area openly vulnerable to the spotlight). Making trip after trip, and stacking oh-so-carefully, Catbird constructed a wall of empty soda cans that completely blocked the stairway. In the morning, when breakfast rolled around, kids coming down from above had to knock the wall down. The noise was tremendous and echoed deliciously. And that was glorious, too.
Backwoods HS and Catbird went to West Baden three years in a row; sometimes the band got better, but always the hotel got worse.
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West Baden Institute DomeCurrently Catbird is in Indiana looking after her BF (since age 12) LP as LP recovers from gall bladder surgery. For an outing as she recoups, Catbird drove LP through the familiar hills of southern Indiana. The day was stunning as only Indiana autumn can be, even though the leaves are not so brilliant this year due to the summer drought. Our outing became a pilgrimage to French Lick, to the miraculously restored West Baden Springs Hotel.
Catbird had followed the story from her sweet home in Texas as Indiana entrepreneur Bill Cook bankrolled the massive project to restore the hotel to her former glory. Catbird had heard, and had even seen pictures...but had not seen for herself.
Staff at the hotel say that everyone--EVERYONE--stops and stares when they first step into the new atrium. Catbird was no different. But for Catbird the experience was not one of architectural or aesthetic awe, but of personal emotion. The ghost of Catbird at 15 jostled with the ghosts of her lost young, beautiful friends and Catbird swears she heard echoes of In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.
What Catbird found most interesting: Despite immaculate carpets, pristine mosaics, perfectly intact statuary, friezes and murals; despite the upscale restaurants, the well-appointed plants, the sunlight warming through the clean glass ceiling, it was not so different from the way it had been 43 years ago. It looked the same to Catbird because when she was at West Baden as a kid, she didn't see the crumbling dysfunctional mess; she saw it as it could have been, as it once had been, as it is today. This ability to see beyond the immediate muck to the potential in a condemned situation--this trick of magical thinking--got Catbird through some pretty ugly adolescent situations.
And, just as Catbird had once viewed the derelict hotel through a lens of potential and beauty, this time Catbird stood in the atrium and tried to see a 5-star wonder as it had been when Catbird was young and 150 Backwoods kids burrowed in for a week. She remembered how dismal it all seemed when she climbed past the no trespassing signs two decades ago and faced the reality of one more permanent loss. Memory and imagination are like that: layer on layer on layer.
Well from the magical thinking of adolescence, to the once-burned pragmatism of middle age, Catbird has arrived at a new stage in life. Happily, happily, in Catbird's current stage we are reminded: sometimes what has to happen does happen, even if it takes a miracle.
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