The look is key-worn blue corduroys, a black cotton Indian style shirt with ornate white piping over a black tank top, brown leather boots, long hair braided, each braid held in place with a Pocahontas-style leather lace-up tie. Sans makeup. Sans jewelry (save for beads or anything made with tiny peace signs). It’s more Michelle Phillips California Hippie than Marianne Faithfull Bohemian Hippie or Grace Slick Haight-Ashbury Hippie. (There are subtle but very important differences.) I want to blend in but I don’t want to be the first one arrested if the cops come.
There are ten thousand of us and we are in the open field, arms linked, chanting. We are swaying to the unrelenting heartbeat of a hundred bongo drums. It is distressingly hot and as people begin to strip so that they can dance naked in the circle, I find myself worrying about things like sunscreen and personal hygiene and body image. The air is thick with marijuana smoke and incense and body odor and I can’t feel my toes because about an hour ago when a bearded man in bicycle shorts offered me tea I forgot to ask ‘Is this special tea?’ and I drank a cup before I realized that it was laced. So we are chanting ‘Om,’ all ten thousand of us, in the heat, packed like blinking, bewildered cows into the central meadow, and all at once everything stops and someone points to the sky. There is a hawk circling up above, to the right of the two news helicopters. ‘A hawk!’ someone cries. ‘It’s a blessing!’ And a murmur runs through the crowd as ten thousand fingers point skyward and the hawk circles and the news helicopters close in and I realize that I can’t feel my knees. The hawk disappears over the trees and the silence is broken. The hippies leap barefoot into the air, the music begins and a stranger in a tunic hugs me for no reason. If I could feel my tongue, I think, I would say something.
I had been hearing about the Rainbow Gathering for years, so when my friend Mike asked me if I wanted to go, I didn’t hesitate. His girlfriend, Karen, had gone every year for seven years and Mike had attended the last two. I had heard stories of the Gathering: of pot smoking, tent sex, meadow romping and general vegetarian-earth-friendly-feel-good-love-one-another-over-a-plate-of-organic-casserole earnestness. It was, I had heard, one of the last bastions of sixties-style counterculture. The kid of hippies, I saw it as an opportunity to go home. Like my parents, these people had the true knowledge; unlike them, the Rainbows had never moved on. They were frozen, flashing a peace sign, in the Zeitgeist of 1968. ‘Sure,’ I told Mike. ‘Let’s go.’
There is a Rainbow Gathering Web page that tells the whole story. The first Gathering was held in 1972, when twenty thousand hippies collected in the woods of Colorado to evolve, expand, harmonize, love and embrace peace. They did drugs, slept in tepees, ate millet, played music, called each other ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ and pledged to abandon authoritarian hierarchy, bad trips, bad vibes, bad attitudes and aggressive dogs. It was such a good time that they decided the event should occur annually, on public land, and it has been held every summer since.
In 1972, I was a naked flower baby on a farm commune in Iowa. My mother spent that summer sanding sixty years of thick white paint off the kitchen window frames. Every day she sanded that paint. It came off in thin strings and fine white dust, each layer tevealing another underneath it. By fall the four frames were natural wood again and she began another project: sewing my father a green felt Robin Hood shirt (I have pictures of him smiling sheepishly in it). My parents were both on the run: my mother from society’s expectations for women at the time, my father from the draft and the war machine. My memories of this period are pure and sweet: love and music, dogs and garden vegetables, sunshine and songs. People came and went. There were ten, eight, twelve at a time. They came together from different pasts, lived together for a few years, then continued on to their own remarkable, inevitable futures.
It was all magic to me. Even today I look at my early childhood as the best part of myself. It is something you can only understand if you were there. Every once in a while I’ll meet someone named ‘Summer,’ or ‘Star,’ and I’ll say, ‘Your parents were hippies, weren’t they?’ and she’ll say, ‘Yeah,’ and I’ll say, ‘Mine too,’ and we won’t have to say anything more because we will understand some basic part of each other, some true thing. When I first heard about the Gathering, I expected it to be like that-a bigfamily reunion, a living memory-something like those half-remembered evenings listening to the Dead through kitchen speakers on that Iowa farmhouse porch.
But it wasn’t like that at all. Like so many holidays, the celebration itself has evolved into a celebration of a celebration rather than anything specific. A lot of the people I know who go were born after Vietnam, after Nixon, and they do not remember a time when their mothers did not shave their armpits. For them the Gathering is a chance to party naked in the woods. Yet there is also a core group of Rainbows who have been at the center of the Gathering from the beginning, who have never left this culture, who have raised their children in it, and these are the people who interest me.
This year’s Gathering took place in the high desert of central Oregon, where the only trees are ponderosa pines and you half expect Pa Cartwright and his boys to come galloping over the horizon looking for lost steers. All that preceding week I had been watching the local Portland news air dispatches from Prineville, a town of six thousand and the closest to the Gathering site. The good townspeople were in a twitter, awaiting the caravans of old VW buses like farmers listening for the telltale hum of approaching locusts. A stern Prineville PD representative warned that loitering was already on the rise.
Mike and Karen arrived at my Portland apartment with a car full of supplies and a Dead sticker on the back window. We decided to take separate vehicles to the site-they were being vague about when they wanted to leave, and I didn’t want to be stranded should I become hysterical and need to watch TV or something. The plan was to stay up there a week. Seven days. In the woods. With no electricity, shower, modem, telephone or permanent waterproof shelter. ‘You have camped before, right?’ asked Mike.
‘Sure,’ I said. And I had, when I was nine, with my mom, for a couple of days. Now I was committed to a whole week of living off the land in a national forest, and I didn’t even own a backpack. I borrowed one from my grandmother-a bright red nylon backpack. My aunt, apparently more worried that I might catch cold than freak out on bad acid or get dysentery, lent me a bright red…down-filled ski cap, rain pants, a rain slicker, gloves and two sets of polythermal long Johns. If I wore it all I would look like a stylish Smurf.
We drove from Portland to the Gathering in just under five hours, taking turns as the lead car so as to be antiauthoritarian and avoid any semblance of hierarchy. Just past Prineville, I followed them off the paved road at a sign with a crudely drawn heart on it that read ‘Welcome home,’ and continued down a gravel road, passing a couple of grinning drivers who flashed me peace signs.
As we approached the site entrance we were greeted by waving, leaping hippies who cried out ‘Welcome home!’ They motioned for us to stop, and a dreadlocked middle-aged woman in a short floral-print dress came bounding over to Mike’s car. I watched as she gave him a big hug and instructions and then skipped over to me.
‘Hi!’ she said. ‘Welcome home, sister! I love you!’ She reached in and gave me a tight, sweaty squeeze. ‘You’re beautiful. We’re glad you’re here. Just follow your friend to parking lot number eight.’ She waved me along and then went bounding over to the next car. I followed Mike, who was following pointing hippies, to a large meadow filled with cars. We were both directed where to park and proceeded to unload the gear and hoist it on our backs. With my heavy pack strapped with a sleeping bag, sleeping roll, water jug and two coats, it was all I could do to remain vertical. I joined Mike and Karen who were similarly encumbered, and the three of us started stumbling down the dusty dirt road with the steady march of long-haired campers. Grateful Dead music wafted through the pines, a steady ambient noise that would float disembodied through the entire site.
After a quarter-mile hike we reached the shuttle, an old VW bus that, when it wasn’t providing rides, was somebody’s home. A jagged square hole had been hand-cut in the roof so passengers could crawl up on top of the bus to a makeshift deck. Inside, the walls were littered with Dead show ticket stubs and Legalize Hemp slogans. The driver, a scruffy, leather-vested man in his forties, took our packs and stacked them on a rack outside the back of the bus. After our packs were secured, we piled in, one after another, man, woman, child, dog, until there were twenty-six of us, not counting the canines and the ten or twelve people who rode upstairs. It was hot and we were all sweating from the hike from the parking lot, but spirits were high-as was the driver.
We rattled along dirt roads for five miles, and with each turn in the road the bus seemed to lurch to one side and then rock back a second, before settling on four tires.
‘I was in a bus that rolled once,’ a woman standing next to me said to no one in particular. She was wearing a white tank top without a bra and her huge breasts swung in wide arcs with each turn of the vehicle.
Another woman called to the driver and he stopped to wait for her. She opened the side door and the bus was flooded with a brief blast of fresh air. ‘Thanks, brother,’ she said to the driver. ‘I baked a pie for Badger’s wedding and I gotta get on site.’
We passed other meadows filled with cars: Bus Village, where all the ‘live in’ vehicles park, and Bus Village II. Finally we got to Welcome Home, the entrance to Downtown, and the shuttle pulled to a stop.
‘Zuzus [treats, as in cookies or candy] and tips would be appreciated, brothers and sisters,’ the driver announced as we unloaded. ‘Especially green herb.’
Mike and Karen and I strapped on our gear again. On the way past the bus driver Karen stopped to give him two pieces of bread, and I gave him a pecan sticky bun purchased in Portland that morning. He seemed pleased, more with the bread than with the sticky bun. What takes on value at a Gathering, I will learn, is not always what is prized in Babylon.
When we arrived that afternoon, there were already twelve thousand people, with a rumored three hundred more arriving every hour. The trails were like city streets, except that all the people smile and wave at you. We walked past the welcome site and through the trading circle, past the Hare Krishna tent, the Jesus tent, the Lost and Found, the information booth, and up toward Morning Star Kitchen where we found a place to pitch our tents.
The Gatherings are remarkably well organized. Locations are thoroughly scouted and then a few hundred people come early for ‘seed week,’ when the main structures are built. Oil drums are buried in mud with fires underneath to make ovens, shitters are dug, fire pits are lined with stones and surrounded with log benches, tents are erected, stages are built, signs are posted, paths are worn, even a sweathouse is constructed. These people know what they are doing. Many have been doing it for twenty years. Karen told me that most of the old Rainbows she knows organize their whole lives around the event, living in their vans, taking odd jobs, traveling from Gathering to Gathering. Someday, a banner near our campsite read, We Will Gather 4 Ever.
After unpacking our gear, Mike and Karen and I hiked up through Tepee Village past the main meadow to a coffee circle kitchen called Lovin’ Ovens (all the kitchens had names: Morning Star, Turtle Island and so on) where some sort of celebration was going on.
Badger’s wedding! I remembered the sister with the pie on the bus. Here he was, a stocky, grinning man in his forties dressed in dirty jeans with a wide belt, wearing boots, a thick long-sleeved shirt and a wide-brimmed leather hat. His bride was in her forties, too, short, with curly black hair tied back with an ornate clip, and wearing a long colorfully embroidered Nepali dress. They embraced and the circle of people around them began to Om until the sound rose to a crescendo and broke and everyone cheered.
Guitars started up and the crowd began to dance and twirl to Dead standards. Mike and Karen disappeared to say hello to someone they knew from the previous year, so I sat back on the log where I was perched and took in the scene. Everyone was having such a good time. It was Woodstock, without the music, the rain or the war.
I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned expecting to see Mike or Karen. Instead, a young man gazed at me with glazed eyes. ‘Hey sister,’ he said. ‘I’m giving out random massages. You want one?’
‘Sure,’ I said, practicing being free-spirited and spontaneous.
‘Come lay down on my blanket,’ the young brother said, and I followed him back into the main meadow where he had laid down a blanket in the tall grass. He told me his name was Lizard.
I spread out on my belly on the blanket and Lizard unsnapped my overall straps and folded them back so my tank top was exposed. He started kneading my shoulders, then my back, arms and legs. After a while he had me flip over on my back, then he folded down my overalls, lifted up my tank top and began to massage my bare stomach.
This is so great, I thought. It is so great that two strangers of the opposite sex can have this random totally nonsexual encounter without any of society’s hang-ups or expectations.
‘Now this is the part where you have to tell me if I make you uncomfortable,’ Lizard said. He began to massage my legs, creeping slowly up my inner thighs.
Was he molesting me, or just being thorough?
‘Just tell me if I make you uncomfortable,’ he said again.
His kneading fingers crept higher and higher.
‘Urn, Lizard?’
‘Stop?’
‘Stop.’
I sat up on the blanket and thanked him for the massage but explained that it had become imperative that I find my friends immediately as they might be missing me by now.
‘Plant one here, sister,’ he said, pointing at his puckered lips.
I gave him a fleeting peck on his pucker, managing to avoid the tongue he tried to slip into my mouth.
By the time I got back to the wedding, Mike and Karen were nowhere to be found, but I could see that the minions were gathering in the main meadow for dinner circle and I figured that’s where I’d find them. I headed down the trail, passing Lizard leading another sister to his blanket boudoir.
I found Mike amid the six thousand people who had dinner that night (Karen had volunteered to hand out bread). We all listened to announcements no one could hear because ‘megaphones would be a power trip.’ Then everyone rose, joined hands and Omed for a few minutes. Finally we all formed huge concentric circles and kitchen workers came around giving each waiting bowl a healthy scoop of rice and beans served out of dirty red-and-white coolers. The mothers, children and pregnant sisters got fed first, taking a good half of the food supply, then everyone else got what was left over. Considering that your portion depended on where you happened to be sitting when the cooler ran out, people were surprisingly mellow, content to get even one helping. After dinner, the magic hat came around and we were encouraged to put a few cents in if we could spare it. The hat money goes for food and coffee, with a guarantee that not a cent will be spent on Rainbow vices such as meat, nicotine or alcohol-though it is common knowledge that the kitchen workers get free drugs, a pretty serious incentive to sign up for dish duty.
There is plenty of substance use at the Gathering. Maybe 70 percent of the adults are under the influence at any given time. People smoke joints like cigarettes (which are not nearly as tolerated) and drop LSD and take mushrooms. But it is caffeine that seems to be the drug Rainbows are most enamored with.
‘Is the coffee done yet, man?’ I had split up with Mike and Karen after dinner and found my way back to the Lovin’ Ovens fire pit. There were twenty-some hippies huddled around the fire, several clutching Starbucks travel mugs, waiting for the five-gallon coffeepot to boil. Coffee is a complicated process at the Gathering. A delicate combination of instant, freeze-dried coffee out of a can and fresh ground coffee is stirred into creek water, which is heated over an open fire for a half hour until it boils. It’s cowboy coffee, swirling with debris and chunks of unidentifiable solids. It was my first glimpse of nineties culture at the Gathering-everyone around the fire was dying for a good cappuccino.
I headed back to my tent after my cup, and got a surprisingly good night’s sleep. When I woke up, I joined Mike and Karen for fried potatoes and coffee from Morning Star, and then headed for the trading circle. It was mid-morning and already hot. Women were shedding shirts to go bare-chested, and many men wore nothing but long skirts. I walked along the main trail to the circle, where people put out blankets of wares, anything from beads to clothing to marijuana.
You can’t use cash in the trading circle. You have to barter for anything you want. I saw one kid who wanted a zipper he saw laid out on someone’s blanket. The zipper’s owner said, ‘What do you got to trade?’ The kid thought a minute and then said, ‘I’ve got this camera.’ He produced the camera, and the zipper owner immediately agreed to the barter. But the kid wasn’t a total pushover-he’d only trade the camera for two zippers. It was, the kid explained, a really nice camera.
The previous year, Karen told me, she traded a little piece of suede she got out of a free box at a garage sale for half an ounce of pot. ‘I felt sort of bad,’ she said. ‘But he really wanted it. I think he thought he got the better end of the bargain.’
The Rainbow barter economy is driven by immediate gratification. Mike met a kid who traded his graduation watch for an apple. Candy bars are worth their weight in gold. I watched a woman trade the shirt off her back for a York Peppermint Patty. Pleasure is valued over utility, indulgence over practicality.
Mike had told me to bring trade fodder, and after a brief negotiation I scored thirty sticks of pachouli incense for three snack-size Hershey’s bars. The pachouli sticks were wrapped in plastic and I found a place in the grass and unwrapped them, inhaling the sweet aroma. I lit a stick and stuck it in the dirt beside me and then, wheezing in its smoke, sat at the edge of the trading circle, watching all the activity. Men in loincloths, disheveled children, topless women in kerchiefs. A long-bearded man in his fifties strummed ‘Where have all the flowers gone?’ I watched it all with awe and trepidation. I loved the sense of community. I loved the affirmation and the music and the feeling of family. These people had, at least temporarily, created a working, cash-free Utopia. There was free child care, free food, free cigarettes, free drugs, free medical care, an authentic democratic system of political representation and a population that was happy and provided for.
Yet there was something disturbing about it all. The presumed familiarity I found comforting was also strangely invasive. What if you didn’t want to be hugged every couple of minutes? Karen told me that every year there are four or five reported rapes (a low number given the thousands in attendance, she pointed out), which usually occur because a sister feels she ‘can’t say no.’ I had kissed Lizard, hadn’t I? Indeed, the Rainbow ethos is to be open, to indulge, to be free. It’s a noble pursuit, especially in the context of today’s society, which seems to encourage repression of these same impulses. But this ‘free love as emancipation’ is the same old paradigm that my mother faced thirty years ago. In the end, sixties-style free love seemed to be more about men getting their penises tickled than achieving any kind of gender equity through rejecting sexual hang-ups and repression. The 1970s saw more than one woman look up from the bread she was baking to realize that she was, despite her progressive politics and lack of makeup, still in the fucking kitchen. Many of these women went on, like my mother, to cut their Joan Baez tresses and join the feminist movement. Three decades later, and the Gathering gender roles remain bizarrely traditional. The female Rainbow archetype is topless, in a long skirt, with a couple of toddlers trailing behind her. She is both a ‘sister’ and a ‘mother,’ who can make macrame and knows the medicinal properties of herbs. Was this sexist, or was it free? I couldn’t decide.
I wandered through the trading circle, past the blankets full of food, drugs, scarves, bongs, hemp necklaces, hats and more, down the main trail to the main meadow. The trail was full of campers filing past on their way to workshops (tai chi, yoga, meditation), the sweat lodge, the Church of Elvis. I joined a group of about seventy people that had gathered in a circle in the main meadow. They were, I learned, the Homeland Council, and they were meeting to discuss buying land and settling into a permanent Rainbow community. A feather was passed around the circle and whoever held it had the attention of the group. The keeper of the feather could speak as long as he or she wished and then the feather was passed to the next person who wanted it. It was a thoroughly democratic process and excruciatingly time consuming as person after person rambled on about the ills of established society. The idea, as I understand it, was to purchase a few acres, build on them, and then send the brothers to caravan around the country selling baked goods and baskets so the sisters could stay home with the babies. It’s not a new dream. Over the years several tribes have splintered off from the Gathering to settle full time. There is the Krishna Tribe, the Turtle Family, the (I kid you not) Naked Tribe. These people really really do not want to participate. They are desperate for an alternative to what they see as a corrupt technological society. Yet there are conflicts to be overcome, the main one being whether or not to be ‘Jones free.’ The argument against drugs is a simple one: no drugs, no cops. Allow drugs, and you ask for police attention, especially if local teens get turned on by any of the resident Rainbows. This, as you can imagine, is a big point of contention and has been a conversation stopper at the Homeland Council for the many years it has been meeting.
To their credit, the police have been remarkably tolerant of national Gathering activities. The Rainbows choose public land that is relatively out of the way, collect all the necessary permits, inform nearby towns and spend weeks after the Gathering cleaning up and planting trees. Often their presence is a boon to the local economy, as Rainbows spend thousands of dollars on supplies, from wheat flour to condoms. Yet there is a police presence. Cruisers roll through and around the camp regularly, but officers ignore most of what they see-the general rule is that if it’s inside the camp boundaries, it’s legal. Because the police are not a threat, passing police cars are often greeted with stoned smiles and peace signs and I saw more than one cop flash a peace sign back.
A pudgy member of the Naked Tribe approached and took a seat next to me in the grass. I managed to rescue my plastic-wrapped package just in time. ‘Hey, man,’ I said. ‘Watch the pachouli.’
That night, at the Fourth of July Eve celebration, everyone was decked out in his or her finest Janis Joplin attire. There were big colorful hats, flowing vintage dresses, leather pants and knee-high lace-up boots. Even rumors of food poisoning and long lines at the sister shitters did not dampen the festive spirit. Spaghetti was served to almost seven thousand people at dinner and the magic hat collected over $2,500. After dinner, bonfires were lit all over the site, so that points of light flickered everywhere in the darkness. A talent show was held at Turtle Island and the kitchens were on hand with cookies and coffee. I wore an Indian-print dress over blue corduroys, a thick wool shirt and my aunt’s red hat with earflaps. Luckily, the point was to look like a freak, or I might have stood out.
I left Mike and Karen at Turtle Island gathering wood for a fire, and tried to find my way back to the tents. The drumming circles had started and the steady beating echoed from every direction. Everyone I passed greeted me with enormous smiles and hugs. (It’s hard to pass a Rainbow without getting hugged and asked for the time; though most Rainbows do not wear watches on principle, they are always interested in what time it is.) I ended up completely turned around and found myself in a kitchen I had never been in before. Freezing cold and lost, I found a spot on a log and joined a group of Rainbows sitting around a small fire.
A long-haired sister strummed softly on her guitar and no one spoke, all eyes on the fire. Then another sister joined the circle with a guitar and she started to play and the first sister joined in with her guitar and soon we were all singing ‘Sugar Magnolia.’ I did not know I knew the words, but somehow they surfaced from my childhood and it occurred to me that I had sat around this fire before, a long time ago, singing the same song with people who looked not unlike these. I stayed at the fire circle for another hour singing old songs from the sixties with strangers, and then found my way to the tent where I fell asleep to the mindless throb of a hundred drum circles.
Now, the hawk. It is July 4, the apex of the celebration, and we are all standing, heads back, gazing up at the bright sky as the hawk banks and then disappears over the woods. Most of these people have been up all night, many on LSD, and they are a bit frayed. We have been silent since dawn, a tradition that culminates at noon with the children parading into the main meadow and a final Om breaking the silence. It is 12:15, and the children have already arrived, faces painted, wearing handmade costumes and carrying colorful banners and masks. They run free with the dogs. Karen is radiant in her suede boots and Charlie’s Angels hair. She is in her element, surrounded by her Rainbow family. Everyone is dancing and grinning and passing around huge chunks of dripping watermelon. The hawk is a good omen, a sign that the next year will be a happy one. There is some more talk about a permanent settlement, but not much is made of it. It is a pipe dream, and no one really believes it will happen. For all their anti-establishment talk, many of the Rainbows hold down jobs. The runaways will return to their parents, or back to the streets. The college students will return to study. The core Rainbows will begin to plan next year’s Gathering, of which there is already much talk, and later today I will decide to leave early and return to Portland.
I wanted to come home. But this isn’t it. My parents’ counterculture was reacting to a war and an establishment that had proven again and again that it could not be trusted. The Rainbow Gathering rejects society for the sake of it, because it always has. Am I a sellout because I don’t want to live in a bus? Because I am typing this on a computer? Because I shave my legs?
It comes down to this: During my three days here I have been called ‘sister’ and greeted by strangers as if we were raised in the same tepee. But they are not my family. I think that the people who love the Gatherings, who live for them, are people who don’t feel that sort of adoration anywhere else. The hippie daze of my memories is gone, vanished with the era and the youth of its players. It cannot be called back and, except for a minute or two of campfire singing, it cannot be re-created.
Yet there is something going on here. Something that, if unsettling, is still admirable. The Rainbows’ appeal lies in their fragile belief in the ability to create a better world. It is in their moony hopefulness, in their lack of self-consciousness, in their seeming dearth of social hang-ups. I am not a Rainbow, but it is not because I don’t want to be. There is a part of me that wants to name myself Bear, buy a pottery wheel and move to the woods. There is a part of me that wants to join the Naked Tribe and get high every day and know for certain that my government does not have my best interests at heart. I long for the simple righteousness of my childhood. But I was there. For the very best of it. And because I saw it end, I know it is over.