American Travelling Morrice 48

A year ago my friend Ken Kearns spoke up at the 47th American Travelling Morrice (ATM) and proposed to organize the 48th one.

The ATM, modeled on the Travelling Morrice in England, is a group consisting of morris dancers from all over — mostly New England and New York, but also New Jersey, DC, California, Canada, England, Australia, and who knows where else. Most of us dance with teams in our area, but every summer we get together, in a different geographical location each year, and spend a week doing free performances — 25 or so of them. The first ATM took place in 1976 and it’s occurred annually since then, except in 2020–21.

Ken lives near Binghamton, New York; Tom Keays and I live near Syracuse. Ken asked Tom and me to help set up this year’s ATM in the Syracuse area. We got started soon after last year’s ATM. The initial task was to find a campsite. Our usual practice is to arrange with a local farmer or other land owner to let us set up camp on their property, paying a small fee to cover their costs — this lets us establish a private, temporary community of our own. You really can’t set up anything else before you know where your base is going to be, so finding the campsite is the first thing that needs to happen.

Our intention was to secure a campsite last Fall, allowing us the rest of Fall and all of Winter to start putting the tour together. It didn’t happen that way. Early on we identified three candidate sites but all three had serious drawbacks. Winter came and you really can’t scout summer camp sites during winter. Not until March did our friend Glenda Neff suggest a land owner in Marietta, New York, near Otisco Lake, whose property was near ideal for us and who was happy to have us.

And by then we were knee deep in putting together the Binghamton Morris Men’s Gilbertsville Tour, held at the end of April, so it wasn’t until May we could go full steam on setting the ATM up. We pretty much had only three months to do it. Ken lost count of the number of times he drove up to Syracuse to scout locations with Tom and me for our Monday morning practice — the one time each year the ATM practices together — and the Saturday feast, and the many venues for our dance performances. The last of these didn’t get added until three days before the event began.

On the evening of Friday, July 25, Bob Antia and Kem Stuart arrived with the ATM trailer, which we’d purchased a few years ago after years of storing our clobber in various garages and hauling it to camp in various pickups or rented box trucks. Saturday morning the other men started to arrive and we got to work, first setting up a 10’x10’ popup canopy because there was no shade in our camp area, and then erecting our 20’x40’ main canopy. That’s seen around 35 years of service and still is in decent shape, and forms the nucleus of our camp community. Under the canopy go four picnic tables, two countertops and a table for food prep, a dish washing station, and a set of shelves, all of which are designed to pack up into flat packages for storage and transport. There are two propane grills and three propane burners, and then there are numerous crates containing our pots and pans, utensils, plates, cups, silverware, and so on. Meanwhile the individuals also were putting up their camping tents and unpacking their stuff. There were about sixteen of us there by evening. Ken cooked a dinner of salad, spiedies, and salt potatoes — the latter two being upstate New York’s local cuisine. It had started to rain so we spent the evening under the canopy, conversing and drinking beer and singing songs.

For Sunday morning we’d originally planned to cook breakfast in camp, as usual, but it was still raining off and on, and on arrival we’d noticed signs advertising the monthly pancake breakfast at the Borodino Volunteer Fire Department, about a five minute drive away. So we decided to get in our morris kit and go to that. We attracted attention and questions, of course, and ended up performing three dances there to one of our best audiences of the week despite its being unplanned and unpromoted.

We’d already made arrangements with the fire department to use their shower facilities three times during the week, and on Sunday morning when we learned the building we’d planned to use for our practice was in fact not going to be usable, we were able to secure the fire house for that as well.

The first scheduled stand was at a garden store and cafe called Crazy Daisies in Onondaga. After that we headed into Syracuse for a walking tour downtown, dancing in Armory Square, at Perseverence Park, and at the Arts In the Atrium gallery, with lunch at The Hops Spot and a visit to the Limerick Pub. From there we drove to Jamesville Beach for a swim — the rain had stopped by then, and it was hot — before finishing at Heritage Hill Brewhouse in Pompey. Dinner was back in camp.

Monday mornings on the ATM always are devoted to a practice, working on problems noted during Sunday’s performances and teaching dances to bolster our common repertoire. We ate lunch in camp and then hit the road for stands at a senior home in Onondaga, the library in Baldwinsville, and Johnson Park in Liverpool where we were the warmup act for a local band’s concert. Before Johnson Park we paid a visit to the Suds Factory River Grill in Baldwinsville for some beer.

Monday morning this year was also when one of our new members, Matt Simons, arrived from England. He’d spent the previous Wednesday through Saturday with the Travelling Morrice in East Sussex before boarding a flight to New York and an overnight bus to Syracuse. Then he attended our practice and danced out all three stands. On arrival back in camp he disappeared into his tent and wasn’t seen until the next morning.

Tuesday’s tour began with another senior home, and then more of Syracuse. We went to Thornden Park in the University area to dance at the rose garden. Lunch was a picnic at the home of our friends Maria and Tom Hosmer. It worked our well because Tom is a violin dealer and repairer, and our fiddle player was struggling with a bow that was having problems. He was able to borrow a bow.

Next was a performance in Leavenworth Park, which had the distinction of having the smallest audience of the week: One woman. She was someone some of us knew, a morris dancer with Ithaca’s Hearts of Oak in the 1980s and since the 1990s with Snowbelt Morris in Rochester, and she’d driven from Rochester to Syracuse to see us. She and Tom and I swapped Five Day Wonder reminiscences after the stand at Middle Ages Brewery across the street.

The tour continued with a visit to Onondaga Lake Park, where we danced at the visitors’ center and in front of the Salt Museum. The latter was the spot where I did my first public morris dance in September 1986. (It was Bampton “Shepherd’s Hey”, I was dancing middles, and I started along with the tops at the beginning of the dance, which is wrong — an auspicious start to my morris career.) We went to The Retreat in Liverpool for dinner.

Wednesday is always our day off, after a meeting in the morning at camp. Men went their separate ways to go for a swim, visit pubs, sightsee, and so on; I went to lunch and then spent time using the WiFi at Marcellus Library. Lately Wednesday also is the day Peter Darvin arrives from Maine and cooks a fabulous dinner — this year it was multiple appetizers, watermelon gazpacho, salad, halibut and swordfish skewers with pistachio pesto, and blueberry crumb cake for dessert. Five other people also arrived Wednesday, taking the place of six people who left that day.

Early in the morning on Thursday rain moved in, and it rained hard. We hadn’t gotten all our cooking apparatus under the canopy, so rather than trying to cook breakfast we got in our cars and drove about five minutes to the Milkhouse Diner.

Thursday was mainly spent in the eastern suburbs: A senior center in Fayetteville was followed by a stand at the Chittenango Landing Canal Boat Museum where we danced for kids from the New York School for the Deaf. By that time the rain had stopped, thankfully. Lunch was at Shannon’s Place in Chittenango; then back to Fayetteville for a stand at the Farmers’ Market. From there we went to the Seneca Street Brewpub in Manlius, whose owner opened up an hour early for us. In the evening we once again opened for a local band, this time in Marcellus Park.

Then we headed to the Skan Ellus Drive In. We’d invited the local morris teams, Thornden Morris and the Bassett Street Hounds, to perform with us there, but neither could get a side up. Two dancers and a musician from Thornden did show up and did a couple of jigs. We had ice cream together, then we headed back to camp.

Friday was kind of an odd day. It started at Baltimore Woods Nature Center in Marcellus, dancing for the kids at their summer program. We had a coffee break after that to tide us over until our late lunch. Then we went to Anyela’s Vineyard in Skaneateles for a wine tasting. No dancing was planned there, but we did end up doing a few for their customers. Following that was a picnic lunch at Emerson Park in Auburn. We’d planned to swim there but after a hot start to the week the weather had turned much cooler, so we didn’t. Then a visit to Prison City North Street Farm and Brewery. That was an un-publicized pub stop, but there too we did some dances. Our second scheduled dance stand of the day wasn’t until 6:00 pm at the Equal Rights Heritage Center, after which we also danced at the State Street event plaza, both being part of Auburn’s First Friday monthly event. We’d planned to go to Shep’s Brewing afterward but there was a loud live band there, so we went instead to Prison City’s State Street brewpub to close out the day.

Saturday was the final tour day, and we drove south to Homer to dance at the farmers’ market. Next was nearby Cortland where we were a part of their Arts Off Main street festival. Back to Homer for lunch at Dasher’s, then north to Jamesville Beach again, this time to dance. And to swim, was the plan, but swimming was closed due to an algae bloom. No big deal, given the cool weather. From there back to Marietta to dance and have a beer at Lakeside Vista Tavern, then on to the Amber Inn for our final dance stand followed by our farewell feast.

Sunday we struck camp, packed up the trailer, and dispersed.

A lot of work went into making the week happen. Almost everything went as planned — just the spontaneous pancake breakfast, the practice relocation, a couple of stands moved indoors and a breakfast at a diner due to rain, and no swimming on Friday and Saturday were the exceptions. I think we did a good job, and we received kind words from our guests about the week. Now we’re pretty much done, aside from a bit of post mortem, and next year’s ATM in southern Vermont or thereabouts is in the hands of other people.