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
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.
Cecily Schmidt
Iowa is such subtle Beauty. I am driving east toward Cedar County, the sun glowing orange in my rearview mirror. The corn fields exude something like nobility, their crowns beginning to wither with the dignity of a very old person’s hands. November touches the countryside with the honey-coated glow that is distinctly present when the sun is low in the sky. This light gets to the core. Burrowing into crevices between soybean plants, twisting up and down rows of corn, it fills entire plains with auburn fire. It seeps up under my eyelids and finds its way to my breastbone where it lingers, humming, a moment more. Dusk brings dark purple shadows to spaces where shades of earth roll into the gentle swaying slope of the Iowa horizon. I am driving under a big midwestern sky, and once again the season is about to fall.
I know it is autumn now because yesterday I awoke early, reached for the faded blue sheet that serves as my curtain and pulled it over my head to inhale the potency of morning. Across the yard, the maple tree was stained
