“Sleep that knits up the raveled sleave of care,

The death of each day’s life, sore labor’s bath,

Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,

Chief nourisher in life’s feast.”

[Macbeth, Act II, Scene III]

You know what’s good for making people sleepy? Marching around all day in the sun carrying heavy musical instruments.

You know what’s not so great at helping people knit up the ravelled sleave of care? Bus seats, that’s what. Buses, with their arctic-level air conditioning (or their tropical-jungle lack thereof), their infuriating amalgamation of hard angles and pointy edges and no good place to put your head, or your butt, or your knee, or your foot. Buses, which are bumpy, and loud, and usually smell bad, and always exactly the wrong temperature. Bus seats are the real toughest part of life on tour.

When you start out, with auditions and rehearsal camps, you think sleeping on gym floors is bad. “So hard!” you say. “I just couldn’t get comfortable. My hipbones have bruises now! I barely slept at all!” (If you are one of those soft, spoiled children who uses an air mattress, don’t talk to me. Adversity builds character. Kids these days, really.)

Then, of course, spring training starts, and that seven hours you got on your foam pad and Slumberland bag is the best rest you ever had. You just laid down and were out like a light. You don’t even think you rolled over. (You didn’t.) Boy, it feels good to stretch out and get moving this morning!

…Then tour happens. Like the showers, the gyms can be hit or miss. There’s the school that puts the corps in the wrestling room, which is nice and padded (and smells funky), but is way too small for 150 people, and is not air-conditioned. Smart people take their sleeping bags outside.

There’s the school that might be unaware it has a roach problem, until the corps arrives at 2AM straight from a show in a different state, and the custodian turns the lights on. The resident insect population does a great dramatic reenactment of “the parting of the Red Sea.”

There’s the school that puts everyone up in a nicely carpeted conference room. One with a smoke detector (hooray safety!) with a dying battery. One that beeps every forty-five seconds, all night long.

There was the school gym that was festooned with life-size portraits of its championship cheerleading squads. The school that had, inexplicably, chosen to decorate almost exclusively with creepy taxidermied animal heads. The school that didn’t have a gym, so the corps is split up, boys in the cafeteria, girls in the library (win!). Or the college that needed to use its gym, so gave us an empty dorm to sleep in, and everyone got their own room.

You know, I slept fine in all of those places.

(Except the last one. The bed was too soft, and I got lonely.)

Really, sleeping on floors is not so bad. It would be great if floors were the only place we slept on tour.

But no — a corps has to fit in its 50,000-odd miles of travel in somewhere. At night, after a show, we pack up our wagons and hit the road. Our destination isn’t usually close by; sometimes it’s hundreds of miles. And that, my tired friends, is prime sleeping time.

At least, according to drum corps staff.

There’s a math to it. 50 miles of travel = 1 hour bus time. 1 hour bus time = 1/2 hour floor time. Total sleep time = 1/2(bus time) + floor time = 8 hours.

So, a fifty mile drive meant we could expect seven and a half hours between our arrival at the housing site and wake-up call. A two hundred mile drive meant six hours on the floor. An eight hundred mile drive meant no floor time at all — we went straight to rehearsal. (In theory, at least. Often the staff, who had also spent those sixteen hours on a bus, would take some pity after really long drives. Our day in Myrtle Beach was an example of that.)

Have you ever spent sixteen hours on a bus? No? Lucky. Avoid at all cost. If you have, you might just be a drum corps vet, and you know that misery. If you can emerge from a night spent on a moving bus feeling fully rested and refreshed, you are doing it wrong and I hate you. Also I am painfully jealous and wish you to teach me your ways.

My preferred armor was a pair of pajama pants and a hoodie, a ski hat (henceforth and hereafter known as a “bus hat”), a blanket, a pillow, and a seat partner who didn’t mind if I leaned on him. It never worked all that well, but if you’re tired enough, you can sleep about anywhere.

And that’s what I learned in drum corps: how to sleep anywhere.

I’ve slept in airport lounges, hospital lobbies, public parks. I’ve slept in planes, trains, boats and automobiles. I have, more than once, slept in an ambulance running full lights and sirens on the way to a call. I keep a rolled-up blanket in my car and a bus hat in my backpack at all times. I was born ready — to take a nap.