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,
