The Lost Lands Music Festival in rural Ohio east of Columbus is one of the most famous bass electronic dance music festivals in the world. Unlike a dance club that plays higher frequency EDM, Lost Lands features longer wavelength sound that can travel for miles. When such long wavelengths hit obstacles like hills, they can even bend around them. The land vibrates from the low frequency music and from thousands of people jumping up and down in unison, so actual seismic activity can be detected at concerts like these. Such vibrations bring to mind hulking, roaming dinosaurs like those depicted in the animatronics at Lost Lands.
A week ago, I didn’t know any of this. It was Friday night, and hearing the bass vibrations from 12 miles away, I assumed they were from a passing car with the windows down. When the rumbling persisted, I thought someone on my end of town was having a party and hired a bangin’ DJ. When it was almost midnight and the white noise fan and sleep music couldn’t cancel out the vibrations, I went on my town’s Facebook page to see if everyone else was awake too. That’s when I found out, duh, it’s not even in my town – it’s this huge EDM fest. The “Karens” who wanted to gather a posse to make formal noise complaints were pretty much outvoted by residents who told them in so many words not to piss on other people’s parade.
When I went to work soon after, one of my patients was wearing a boot on one foot and struggling with crutches. She had been to the Luke Bryan Farm Tour concert on the other side of Buckeye Lake from the Lost Lands Festival. Evidently, that little lake was way overbooked, with 70,000 visitors in one weekend. She thought, oh, country music event, I’ll take my teenage daughter.
Where she went wrong, she says, was when they decided to head for the mosh pit. As one does in a mosh pit, there was a lot of pushing and shoving, and she and her daughter were inadvertently elbowed in the head and ribs. The pot smoke was overwhelming. After three songs, they decided to move further back from the stage. Sadly, that was the extent of their concert experience. As she held her daughter’s hand so they wouldn’t lose each other, someone knocked her over, and she heard her ankle bones break. Her leg was useless for bearing weight after that, and the pain was so intense that the world slowly went black. As scary as this was for her daughter, the teen flagged down paramedics, and my patient woke up in the local hospital.
So, I asked her, would you ever go back to hear him again? Luke comes to the Buckeye Lake area about every other year. She surprised me. “Absolutely! We just won’t stand in the mosh pit next time.” That’s what I call a true fan.
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