This past weekend we sent 15-year-old photographer Dorothy Dark to cover Bonnaroo, in tandem with her dad, Pitchfork contributor David Dark. This is their report of the experience.

-=-=-=-David: "People have died there," my mother intoned over the phone. Even in the company of her safe and sensible father, the thought of her 15-year-old granddaughter Dorothy braving Bonnaroo for a Pitchfork assignment was a very hard sell. Why even entertain such a thing? What good could come of it?

My push-back: What we have here is an opportunity to seize a rare and beautiful moment. Dorothy and I could chronicle the madness together. There will be sadness and dysfunction and people possibly embarrassing themselves as far as the eye can see, but there’s also a hardcore hope afoot, a true believer around every corner, and intelligence gatherers of live performance. We’ll bond among those who believe the music and for whom laying money and personal comfort down to be in the midst of it is no sacrifice at all. What could be sweeter?

As of Day 2, I knew feelingly how a human being could meet their demise at this event. More than once, upon beholding one more horribly sunburned soul or another slumbering body in the dust, I felt something akin to the moral outrage expressed by Jeff Goldblum on the subject of extracting Dinosaur DNA from the belly of a mosquito trapped in amber to make the creatures our contemporaries. Just because you can persuade people to camp on a farm in Manchester, TN to listen to live music in the sun for four days doesn’t mean you should.

And yet, there was a tangible ethic in the air that I couldn’t deny. Because Dorothy couldn’t be made to spend every moment in my presence, I was often found wandering aimless and alone. But to the extent that I was willing to make eye contact with people, I found that most passersby were eager to connect. It was as if many of them believed they’d somehow arrived home and wanted as many people as possible to feel that way too.

"How you doing?" I was asked by a young man surely twenty years my junior.

"I believe I’m doing well," I offered with a tired smile.

"Good news. Good news," he replied. And he addressed me with the same verve and an I know you when we beheld one another again while waiting on Tears for Fears to appear on stage. I have words on TFF, but it’s time to hand Dorothy the metaphorical mic.

Dorothy: On my first day at The Farm, I promised myself I’d be present to it all and not get wrapped up in the safe confines of my iPhone. What worried me far more than the urban-myth-grade horror stories I’d heard from friends about things like getting sprayed by a stranger with a bottle of liquid LSD, was the idea of letting myself be at Bonnaroo for the sake of saying I was at Bonnaroo. It would make things less sincere, make the experience dishonest. And Bonnaroo is no place for the insincere. From the moment I set foot in the heart of the layout—Centeroo, they call it—I was overwhelmed by the mass of people. The fear of my surroundings that I had expected was nowhere to be found amidst the swarms of people I was so certain I’d feel alienated from.

In fact, there was a graciousness I found among Bonnaroovians that was unlike anywhere else. There were those I would walk by in a line and would later see under a tree in the middle of their own wedding. Then there were those who walked by me in underwear and glitter pasties, who I would initially try and avoid. But to our good fortune, there’s no way to avoid the people around you on The Farm, and those who I wanted to cower from often proved to be the most kindhearted people I encountered. The kind of people who would react to someone cutting in front of them in the Bearclaw Coffee line by merely shrugging and saying "It’s Roo."