The Third Rainbow Girl

by Emma Copley Eisenberg

  In a televised address the year before, President Jimmy Carter diagnoses the feeling in the air as a “crisis of confidence”: “Confidence in the future has supported everything else—public institutions and private enterprise, our own families, and the very Constitution of the United States.” He wears a blue velour suit and a diagonally striped tie. “We’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning.” More than thirty years before Donald Trump will appropriate it for his own purposes, Ronald Reagan uses the slogan “Let’s make America great again” in his bid for the Republican presidential nomination in the fall of 1980. “I need your commitment, your hope and your belief in this great nation’s ability to begin again,” he pronounces, in a dark brown suit and light brown tie. West Virginia will be one of only six states in the nation to vote to reelect Carter. When Reagan triumphs in November, everything will change.

  But not yet. In the spring and summer of 1980, there is still the possibility that the future might turn out differently, that the striped tie might yet prevail over the brown one, that a doomsday diagnosis might, in its honesty, be more uplifting than magical thinking. Many in West Virginia do not want to begin again or are not buying the kind of new beginning Reagan is selling.

  The paper of Pocahontas County is the Pocahontas Times, steered by the same family since 1892. Its main reporter and soon-to-be-editor is grandson Bill McNeel, who went away to Ohio and Oregon for school and then came back. The paper is still printed letter by letter with hand-set type and a phototypesetting machine like a journalistic x-ray. “Those days are gone!” a citizen of Pocahontas County writes in a campaign letter from this time. “Technology has brought us out of the ‘hollers’ and thrust us into the midst of a teeming, scheming, screaming society. Our people must be prepared to face the future.”

  Throughout the spring of 1980, the Survival Center at the University of Oregon in Eugene mailed thousands of flyers with gratis nonprofit postage to food co-ops and colleges and mailboxes all over America. “This is the Invitation and Information sheet to the 1980 Rainbow Family World Peace Gathering,” the flyers read. “These Gatherings are Free and Everyone Everywhere is invited to Come and Share Together. Bring your Friends and all your Relations to Gather with us in the hopes of Spreading the True Truth that Humanity is Beautiful, that We can Live and Work Together in Cooperation and Joy.” The flyer invited anyone who could get there to attend a peace festival that summer in the Monongahela National Forest in West Virginia.

  Such was the habit of the Rainbow Family, a loose organization that aimed to revive the hippie spirit of the 1960s and had been converging on a different public land for a few weeks each July since 1972. A remote location was plucked off the map, word was mailed out, and several months later, people came—sometimes as many as twenty thousand. The group usually did not bother with permits because permits required the signature of a leader and the Rainbows do not believe in leaders.

  The 1980 Gathering in West Virginia would be their first ever in the East.

  “Our Relation with the Local People is Very Important,” the flyer further advised. “Please be Perfectly Respectful of the Local People in whose area we gather. It is important that we be completely Sensitive, Clean and Polite in all our Dealings with These People. We have worked hard over the years to earn the Respect of the Forest Rangers and Local Citizens, but this is an area that can still use Improvement.”

  At other Gatherings, Rainbows turned the public bathrooms of several gas stations near their campsite into bathhouses, flooded a local diner for lunch and dinner for a week leaving only pennies for tips, and shoplifted prodigiously from the single general store. A Gathering meant thousands of people tromping, shitting, pissing, and parking their cars. Forest ranger presence had to be multiplied by five or ten, so staff had to be imported from other counties, and then everyone had to be paid overtime. Rainbow people had gotten sick, gotten hurt, inundated local hospitals. They were not malicious—some had gotten up to help waitresses at the diner serve meals, and a Rainbow leader wrote the wronged store owner a fat check as reparations—but they lived outside the rules and did what they wanted regardless of the consequences.

  Common sense and good manners would dictate a generous period of advance warning, but it was the middle of May 1980—just a month before the Gathering was scheduled to begin—before Forest Service officials in West Virginia got word that the Rainbow people were on their way. Between five and fifteen thousand people were expected, the Rainbows advised. One hundred acres of woodland were needed, plus parking.

  Fifteen thousand visitors! In 1980, all of Pocahontas totaled just below ten thousand. “It looks like we will have lots of company this summer in Pocahontas County,” wrote McNeel, breaking the news to his readers. “We urge everyone to be sure of facts before stories are repeated—they have a habit of growing.” Some were excited, eager to see with their own eyes the longhairs they had long been watching sit in and burn flags on the nightly news. But would they be naked, lurching around the woods? Would they be food stamp freeloaders?

  The Rainbows wanted a spot in the Monongahela National Forest called the Three Forks of the Williams River, which sat smack above the headwaters for nearly every major waterway in Pocahontas County. Perhaps the Rainbows might like to camp at another spot instead? No, the Rainbows said—only that spot would do.

  Movies like Easy Rider told a story that positioned “hippies” from the city and “hicks” from rural areas as irrevocably opposed to one another. Yet how much actual hostility citizens of Pocahontas County felt toward the Rainbows in the months leading up to the 1980 Gathering depends on whom you ask. Certainly different belief systems seemed to be colliding. There were incidents in nearby parts of West Virginia around that time involving locals confronting people they perceived as different, sometimes aggressively, and the more liberal newspapers in Charleston printed glowing stories celebrating Rainbow values at the expense of the more traditional local way of life.

  Pocahontas County had already been intimately exposed to outsiders for years in the form of their Back to the Lander neighbors, and though it was difficult to avoid hearing about the Rainbows’ impending arrival, there is little evidence to suggest that all or even most of the people of Pocahontas County harbored serious ill will toward the Rainbows.

  Governor John “Jay” Rockefeller, a New Yorker who had come to West Virginia as an Appalachian Youth volunteer and stayed, called the Rainbows’ impending arrival “disruptive.” Other government officials called them “leeches” and “derelict misfits.” 1980 was an election year, and in what was likely a bid for votes, Secretary of State James Manchin fanned the embers of hostility by declaring that Rainbow people were not welcome in the state because they did not practice West Virginia values. Encouraged by Manchin, several prominent Pocahontas County residents filed a request for an injunction in federal court to block the Rainbow Family from gathering in the Monongahela, but a judge threw it out. The Rainbows would come, and they would camp where they liked.

  They came by car and by VW bus. They came on bike and on foot. “By not having a camera, we missed an opportunity Monday to take a picture of a young lady walking to the Rainbow Gathering with her mule; the mule was well-loaded with gear and supplies,” wrote McNeel for the Pocahontas Times. “She walked all the way from New Jersey, and had been on her way for a month.”

  Estimates vary, but between two and six thousand people arrived in Marlinton throughout the month of June 1980 and into early July and then made their way further into the forest for the festival. Some say they stole. There were reports of Rainbows going into Foodland and using the vegetable crispers to wash their mud-caked hands. Some scandalized citizens reported that Rainbows had run naked through a car wash near Main Street. Other citizens were excited and set up lawn chairs on the bridge that spans the Greenbrier River to watch the visitors roll in. In nearby Richwood, some Rainbow People showed a slide show of past Gatherings and th
en answered questions from more than a hundred locals. “While some were a little stunned by such Rainbow exotica as a young man who introduced himself as ‘Water Singing on the Rocks,’” reported the New York Times, “the meeting ended with Rainbows and Richwood residents alike joining hands and singing the old hymn ‘Will the Circle Be Unbroken?’”

  More than five hundred local people from Marlinton and the surrounding hamlets drove the switchbacked roads into the national forest to check out the Rainbow scene, a far greater local presence than usually showed up at the Gatherings. The one-lane dirt road to the Gathering was littered with hitchhikers—some locals picked them up; some didn’t. Rainbow volunteers directed traffic, inquiring of visitors if they were just staying for the day or planning to camp overnight, and parking was suggested accordingly, with cars arranged in neat rows.

  A half mile farther down the road was a gate with a sign that said no alcohol, drugs, or weapons beyond that point. The camp was meticulously clean, as if the Gathering was instead a convention of Boy Scouts. Some visitors were greeted near the gate by a Rainbow bluegrass band, totally naked behind their strings.

  Handwritten signs on tree trunks divided the camp into sections—drug-free, clothing, clothing optional, organic foods. A Rainbow man passed out copies of the unofficial newsletter, printed with each day’s events on a press set up in the back of someone’s VW bus. Food, carried in from across the country and supplemented from the grocery in nearby Cowen, was prepared by a team of designated volunteers at five canvas-topped kitchen tents. Inside each tent, men and women stirred enormous pots—soupy mixes of brown rice, tomato paste, potatoes, and carrots—and gave it away to anyone who was hungry; all you had to do was listen to the talk and maybe peel a potato or two.

  “I was impressed by the Family members because I believe they are doing something that all of us, even conservatives like myself, have dreamed of doing sometime,” wrote Bob Scott, a visiting journalist. “Saying the heck with material things and the mortgage, and running off to live wherever the spirit and the winds and an old Volkswagen bus will take us.”

  Inorganic matter was carted off in plastic or burlap sacks to another part of the camp; early arrivals had also dug out a pit for compost and another long trench that served as an open-air outhouse. Several plastic buckets of lime were available, and people were encouraged to sprinkle a little bit on their dump, whether pre- or post-digestion.

  McNeel made the trip too, perhaps out of personal curiosity or merely professional obligation. There were workshops, he reported—Yoga, Grain and Organic Vegetable Farming, Knot Tying and Scissor and Tool Sharpening, Appalachian Folk Dancing, Poetry Reading. “This writer noted, however, that many people at the Gathering seemed not to be interested in the workshops but in visiting, talking, and being with each other.”

  On the edge of the festival grounds was a swimming hole backed by a hillside that led up to where visitors had parked. Many swam naked here, and the sight of so much flesh in such clear, clean water was special. A few local men took to standing on the far side of the hole and harassing the Rainbow women as they swam, hooting and guffawing their laughter and discomfort. Other local people dove right in. A writer for another local weekly wrote, “And what did your intrepid reporter do when faced with the spectacle of several hundred skinny-dippers? Why, the only sensible thing. I stripped down and joined them.”

  It rained every night, and every morning a fog filled the holler of the Three Forks of the Williams River that did not lift until noon. Then it lifted, and there was the sun, a sun that saturated the moss and the grass and hit the maple and oak leaves so richly they looked Technicolor. The clouds moved fast across the sky, the weather moved in fast from the west, and the Rainbow People learned, as any citizen of Pocahontas County could have testified, that here it could go from full sun to full-on pouring in ten seconds flat.

  There were those who came for a music festival, those who came to soak up the strength that comes from fellowship, and those who lacked a sense of purpose in their lives and came seeking answers or a cosmic message. Some lived the Rainbow life year-round, hitchhiking or sleeping in the back of their vehicles. When you are at a Rainbow Gathering, everyone is connected, everyone is related, you are encouraged to call everyone you meet “sister” or “brother,” and you are to hug them and welcome them “home.” Their slogan was “May You Always Be All Ways Free.” Every so often a shout of “We love you!” went up from one kitchen tent and was passed to the next, around and around, until it returned to its origin. This usually took place at dawn, as a kind of reveille, or in the evening, as a way of calling Gatherers from around the camp to converge for dinner. They held hands before eating, taking a moment of silence before the din.

  3

  BIG SKY, NO STARS, NO edge. The drama of a crossroads where two country routes meet at perfect right angles, and the quiet, a quiet that feels different than it does in the East—windblown, ringing through the telephone lines. The Dutch Country Inn, the Tequila Grill, the Hard Luck Cafe, and the Amish bakery. House, job, church, kids. Happy wife, happy life. This is Washington County, Iowa, a square thirty miles southwest of Iowa City.

  No edge here, literally—the road is flat and flows right up against the parking lot of the gravel plant without any shoulder. Few people walk from one destination to another here, except kids in the middle of empty roads, two miles from where the bus drops them off.

  Vicki Durian wanted to walk. She was born in 1953 to farmers—eighty acres of corn and beans and hogs for one hundred and twenty-five dollars a head; timber in the summer. Eight kids, Vicki the second and the oldest girl. The boys worked the fields and the hogs with dad; the girls worked the house with mom—cooking, cleaning, and doing dishes. When it was time for the boys to come in for lunch, it was Vicki who called them. “She could really whistle,” says her younger brother, John Durian.

  For a long time, Vicki was good—good girl, good citizen. Her parents were often in the Kalona News for hosting luncheons at the Catholic church, bearing palls, and chairing committees. Vicki curled her hair, kept “trim,” joined Future Homemakers of America, had many friends at school and lots of cousins who slept over in tents in the Durian backyard on the weekends. Saved the sixteen candles from the cake the girls gave her at lunch, taping them into her scrapbook.

  She had a horse for a while, had dogs and cats, loved animals. All the kids ran around the property. Camping, fishing, playing in the swimming hole behind the Durian farmhouse. “Right in the English River,” says John, “which I wouldn’t do now.”

  Vicki loved school, Mid Prairie Middle then Mid Prairie High—“Homecoming 1970, we love you hawks!” Football games, basketball games, the winter dance—“I am a Mid-Prairie Golden Hawk Booster.” Made invitations for suppers—“Bring the latest gossip!” Made clothes—“Vicki, Thanks so much for making that dress for me! I just love it and I know I’ll get a lot of good out of it!” Did she do well in school? “A lot better than you boys!” says dad Howard. Critical, it seems, but only of herself: “Not the greatest play—but I even had a part,” she wrote in her scrapbook.

  She knew how to have fun. She dressed brothers John, Mike, and Tom as little princesses and walked them around to meet the neighbors, which people still talk about. When Vicki and her cousins slept in those tents, she would sneak off on foot and walk down to the river and then cross it to the Wassonville Cemetery and the bridge, a wooded area far from the gravestones that was the party spot then and is still the party spot now. Her best guy friend was a boy from school who drove a noisy motorcycle. Howard didn’t like it when the boy parked at the farmhouse and would tell him to get lost. “I heard it all the way to his home.”

  Vicki liked the dark, was fascinated with vampires and a show called Dark Shadows. She liked television in general, images beamed in from far away. At fifteen she watched the hippies gather for Woodstock, and the picture stuck—she wanted to go, but she was too young, born too late. She bought her first album: a g
reatest-hits record by the Grass Roots. She lay on her floor and listened.

  In 1971, seventeen now, Vicki went to see the movie Love Story—catchphrase “Love means never having to say you’re sorry”—escorted by a boy named Robert and pasted the ticket stub in her scrapbook. Soon Vicki was receiving Christmas cards addressed to her and Robert. Robert came over for Christmas dinner and gave her a blouse and a pair of electric scissors.

  The world was beginning to change. The farming business was faltering. Howard took a job working the third shift at a refrigeration factory near Cedar Rapids. Vicki’s mother, Clarabelle, who had been working as a lunch lady at Mid Prairie, took a second job at the Pull’r Inn cleaning rooms. Robert saw other girls. “This is the last year I’ll have an obligation to Mid-Prairie,” Vicki wrote in her scrapbook under her senior year class schedule.

  One day her cousin DeAnn, whose family visited often from Colorado, heard the back door slam and voices—Vicki and Robert—arguing down by the river. Vicki came back in and told her parents she was pregnant. Howard and Clarabelle said, it’s your choice—go to Colorado and have the baby and come back when you’re better, or stay here and marry him. Robert and Vicki went to prom together in June 1972, he in a light blue tux, she in a yellow dress with ruffles around the throat and wrists, but there is no joy in these photos.

  Throughout the 1960s and into the early 1970s, nearly 80 percent of babies born to white women without legal spouses were relinquished for adoption. “The right thing to do to protect your parents was to get out of town, go into a home,” wrote Joni Mitchell, who gave up a child to adoption at the exact start of this boom—1965. “The homes were full.…Movies were getting sexier. It was very confusing to be a young woman then.”