Volunteers Tear Down Sweet Pea Festival

Brook Griffin, Staff Writer - Bozeman Daily Chronicle
August 7, 2005

It's known as tearing down the park.

It takes days to set up the Sweet Pea Festival and just hours to tear it all down again. The effort starts at around 3 p.m. on Sunday and rages on until after sunset.

It's a Herculean effort that volunteers pull off every year. "Tear down starts now, which is shortly after the last band starts," said Rob Pertzborn, one of the Sweet Pea board members. "It's a heroic effort."

Beneath the festival is Lindley Park, which on Monday morning must look like nothing ever happened to it. Not even the smallest reminder of the thousands of people who were there gets left behind.

"We can't even leave ice on the ground," said Rich Johnson of the Chord Rustlers Barbershop Chorus who serve up the ever-popular "tater pig".

The Chord Rustlers are the biggest food vendors in the festival, serving up more than 6,000 of the sausage-stuffed potatoes over the weekend. On Saturday there are more than 40 people pumping the Sweet Pea delicacies out. But Johnson said there won't be a thing out of place when they leave.

"When we leave here it will be spit-shined," he said.

The kids' craft area is the first place in the park to get cleaned up, arguably because it is the messiest. Tie-dye making is just the tip of the paint can, and clean up can be as messy as the event.

Sue Backtrom, an admitted tie-dye lover, dumps cans of it near one of the trees in the park. "It's perfectly safe," she said. "This really does disappear." In just about an hour that same spot is covered over with bark, leaving not a trace of the stained ground. After the last play is finished and the crowds file out, the real work gets started. Taking down stages, booths and everything else falls on the Sweet Pea, volunteers.

In years past there might have only been half a dozen people trying to clean everything up said Sweet Pea Executive Director Jo Ann Brekhus. "We've been here until 2 a.m." she said. "Tonight we're hoping to be done by sunset." Everything, save the main stage and lights, gets loaded onto one semi-truck trailer.

Clean-up crews are told not to load anything on the truck themselves because the packing job is so complicated. A Sharpie written sign on the truck's side gives clear instructions: "There is an exact (exact underlined twice) science to load the trailer."

It may be a rough job but volunteers like Pastor Brian Hopkins, who brought 20 members of Journey Church to help take down the festival, said it is worth it to help those that put the festival up. "We're the relief crew," Hopkins said. "We're coming in so they can go home and hopefully take a nap."

The grand finale of the tear down comes at the end of the night when the doors of the trailer are locked, an event that has come to mean a lot to the volunteers at the festival.

Pertzborn said trucks have to be brought down and headlights used to light the park while the last items are put away into storage until next year.

"It's a big deal to close the lock on that trailer," he said.