They flow across it in shifting tableaux, with elaborate themes and spandex-clad dancers. Hell Week had come for the Marching Colonels. In the parking lot behind the band room, the asphalt was hot enough to melt chewing gum. The woodwinds were gathered there in a ragged circle, waiting for the metronome to set the tempo, while the trumpets and trombones stumbled around on the football field below. Inside the school, the leader of the drum line, a knobby fifteen-year-old named Jacob Guy, scowled at the boys slouched in front of him, thin necks bent over bulky instruments.
Count out loud! The band had been at this since eight-thirty in the morning. First half an hour of stretching and calisthenics, then marching practice, and now sectional and full-band rehearsals. All told, they would rehearse close to fifty hours that week, then two to three hours a day for the rest of the summer and fourteen hours a week in the fall.
When I asked Grayson Mack, the lead marimba player, if all that practice was hard on his body, he held up his hands. The fingers and palms were wrapped in black athletic tape to cover blisters. At one band camp, I was eating four Aleves every day. Marching band is more than a pastime in Bourbon County. They can do those shows in their sleep. There are more than twenty thousand high-school band programs in America, some with as many as four hundred members.
The top bands have dozens of staff, budgets of hundreds of thousands of dollars, and fleets of trucks for their instruments, props, costumes, and sound systems. They flow across it in shifting tableaux, with elaborate themes and spandex-clad dancers, playing full symphonic scores.
They call it the marching arts. We have duct tape on our tubas, and they have the professional model. As we talked, a succession of students wandered in. One was clutching a broken flute. Gray, we found this in the band room. He has burly shoulders and a close-shaved head, heavy-lidded eyes and a thin circle of beard, and carries himself with unhurried self-assurance. He came to Bourbon County in from a larger, wealthier school in Morton, Illinois, fleeing a divorce. His ex-wife co-directed his band in Morton, so staying there was out of the question, and Bourbon County had a last-minute opening.
