At the bottom of the slope, hundreds of yards away, an outdoor stage sits among tall yellow scaffold towers. From where we stand, on a dirt road at the fringe of the crowd, the people on the stage are the size of ants. It’s before noon and the day’s lineup of acts hasn’t begun. Off to the distant right and left are fields filled with tents and microbuses, cars and psychedelically painted school buses. Leaving the BSA on the dirt road, Tinsley and I make our way through the crowd — many seated or lying on blankets or sleeping bags — trying to get closer to the stage.
In a spot where there’s hardly enough bare ground for a blanket, we spread my unzipped sleeping bag, nod hello to the folks around us, and settle down. Space is tight. Edges of sleeping bags and blankets touch, but each blanket or sleeping bag is its own island. Those on the move respect one another’s space, trying their best to walk along the edges and bits of grass between blankets. There’s an endless chant of excuse mes from the barefoot wayfarers who pass.
The rain has stopped. Before the music begins, an emcee delivers announcements through public address speakers on the scaffolding: “There are a lot of things going on with all these elements conspiring, like the sticky mud wiggling between our toes and the drippy rain rolling down our necks, but it’s all part of the high.”
And: “This is the first free city of the Aquarian age.”
And: “Richard Norris, please go to the pink-and-white medical tent immediately.”
When the emcee tells us that there are half a million people here, I can’t help thinking that, short of some miraculous coincidence, the chances of finding Barry are nil. He told me he’d be flying a kite, but even if there were a breeze, there’s no space for him to launch one. Then the emcee warns us that the brown tabs of acid circulating through the crowd are bad. Tinsley and I share another look. In our experience, public address systems have been the voice of authority used in school for morning announcements, to say the Pledge of Allegiance, or to call kids down to the office. Now the voice of authority is advising that if we are determined to try the brown acid, we should use caution and start with half a tab.
Despite the damp and muddy conditions, people are in good spirits, talking, laughing, sharing smokes. There’s a sense of camaraderie amid the awe-inspiring realization that there are so many of us. We may all be strangers, but we have much in common. Our hair, our clothes, our drugs, our music. Our general sense of alienation. Our mistrust of the government. Our opposition to the war.
Tinsley shoots pictures of the shaggy-haired guy on a blanket next to us wearing a blue-and-red-striped necktie as a headband. Many of our fathers wear similar ties, but around his head like that, it’s a symbol of rebellion and rejection of uptight middle-class existence. The guy hands us the joint he’s been smoking and says to pass it along. We grab handfuls of Cocoa Puffs from a meandering box and wash them down with water from a glass jug that soon follows. Despite the ache I feel for Robin, I know that she would never have felt comfortable here.
The grass results in the munchies. The guy with the necktie headband shares a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich with us. He’s from Ohio, got here on Tuesday, and volunteered to help build the concession booths that look like medieval tents up the hill behind us. If we need more food, that’s where we should go. He tells us that some hippies are giving away food but to be careful. Some have cooked corn they picked from a neighboring field, not realizing that it was feed meant for livestock and guaranteed to give humans a bad case of the runs.
Over the PA comes the news that a baby has been born. Not far from us, a naked woman stands up and begins shouting unintelligibly, gesturing in some strange, frantic form of cheerleading. Two other women cover her with a blanket and get her to sit down.
“Brown acid,” says the guy with the red-and-blue tie around his head.
Down on the stage, a band called Quill starts to play. We try to listen, but the band is not well known, and this far back in the crowd, many people continue to talk and mill about. The band may be difficult to hear, but there’s no shortage of entertainment. Mostly crowd watching.
Tinsley and I are engrossed in the spectacle. The masses of gaudily dressed, braless, drug-using longhairs; the music; the sensation of being in the midst of something huge and unlike anything we’ve experienced before. A tall stringy-haired vagabond wearing a colorfully knit poncho and using a tree branch as a walking stick weaves haphazardly through the crowd. His eyes fix on Tinsley and he makes a beeline for her, then leans close, his face only inches from hers. “Want to ball, baby?”
“No, thank you,” Tinsley replies.
He wanders away.
The sun comes out. Country Joe McDonald does an acoustic set, leading us in the Fish cheer: “Give me an F. Give me a U. Give me a C. Give me a K. What’s that spell?”
“FUCK!” roar half a million freaks.
“What’s that spell?”
“FUCK!”
“What’s that spell?”
“FUCK!”
He plays the “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die-Rag,” the anti – Vietnam War anthem for our generation. The largest chorus in the history of the world sings along.
Clouds drift in overhead and a light rain begins to fall. Tinsley covers her head with her damp denim jacket. We’re both hungry, so I tramp through the crowd toward the concession stands. The lines for food stretch for a hundred yards. The wait is long but not intolerable thanks to the numerous meandering joints that come my way.
By the time Lucas the Ravenous gets his hot dogs, he is both ripped and has been ripped off. They’re charging a dollar for a hot dog that would cost twenty-five cents anywhere else. Maybe Arno’s right about the fleeting nature of the hippie spirit.
When Lucas somewhat miraculously finds his way back with five precious wieners, Tinsley is on her feet and there’s a guy beside her wearing an olive-colored safari jacket. They’re facing the stage, so Lucas first sees him from behind. He’s tall, with wavy black hair that falls over his collar. Cameras with long lenses hang from straps over his shoulders.
A moment later, Tinsley introduces Lucas the Surprised (though should he really be?) to Bernard, who is handsome and faintly rugged-looking, with a prominent nose and long sideburns. Bernard offers his hand and says hello with a heavy French accent. Lucas guesses that he is in his late twenties.
“Bernard’s a photographer with Le Monde.” Tinsley’s eyes are bright with excitement as she pronounces the name of the French newspaper with an accent of her own.
“Uh, groovy,” says Lucas sans enthusiasm.
Tinsley turns to Bernard and speaks in what sounds like nearly flawless French. Le photographe replies in kind. Through the cannabis haze comes the sudden realization to Lucas the Startled that his time with Tinsley is up. She’s moving on. No need to toss the I Ching here. Bernard offers his main to Lucas and says, “A pleasure to meet you,” then heads off.
“He’s coming back later,” Tinsley announces, not looking at Lucas. “We’re going to shoot pictures together.”
They settle uncomfortably back onto the sleeping bag to consume the franks, a strained silence between them. Ever since he ceased pleasing she-for-whom-pleasure-shall-not-cease, Lucas the Vanquished has been vaguely aware that he has no claim on her. But he did expect that they’d see this adventure through together, especially now that it will be impossible to find Barry in a crowd this size (assuming he wasn’t among the hundreds of thousands the police turned away).
Quel drag.
A band called Santana puts on a rousing performance. The sun starts to poke through the clouds, and it grows hot and humid enough for a lot of guys in the crowd, and even some women, to take off their shirts. Many get to their feet and bop to the Latin-infused rock, including Tinsley and Lucas. Thanks to the awesome music and the unending parade of joints, Lucas’s hurt feelings are slowly assuaged.
No sooner does Santana’s set end than Bernard returns, and he and Tinsley go off to take pictures. Lucas remains behind list
ening to the Incredible String Band, a quirky British folk group whose music seems better suited to a coffeehouse than a huge outdoor festival. Tinsley’s left her knapsack, so maybe she’ll change her mind about Bernard like she did with Mr. Leather Vest Hairy Chest. Indeed, as dark falls, she returns alone with a paper plate of brown rice and a real treasure: a can of SpaghettiOs. Lucas pries it open with his Swiss Army knife, and they feast on cold canned pasta and rice for dinner. Not bad when you’re high and famished.
Sometime after midnight, after a soggy set by the Grateful Dead, the rain ceases and the show takes off. Creedence Clearwater, followed by Janis Joplin, followed by Sly and the Family Stone, who put on an insane performance that wakes anyone who’s sacked out and has us all on our feet, dancing and cheering.
It’s still dark when the Who launches into Tommy, but dawn is nearing. While the band explodes onstage in the dark glen at the bottom of the slope, morning light begins to illuminate the distant surrounding hills. Bare-chested Daltrey — wearing an open jacket with long wild white fringe — and Townshend in a white jumpsuit are manic rock-and-roll acrobats while Moon is his normal berserk self on the drums. How I wish Arno were here to watch his favorite band thunder into the dawn.
The Who is followed by a raucous Jefferson Airplane set. By the time Grace Slick and band finish their encore, a little after nine thirty a.m., Tinsley and I have been awake for nearly thirty hours. Using my knapsack as a pillow, I curl up on the sleeping bag, cover my face with my jacket, and fall asleep.
When I wake around lunchtime, Tinsley and her knapsack are gone.
In the drizzly distance, a bearded figure carrying a long stick propped against his shoulder is weaving around vehicles and tents in the muddy grass field behind the stage. I’ve been waiting for nearly an hour by the big pink-and-white-striped medical tent. People come, or are brought, into the tent with all sorts of injuries, but mostly cut feet. Later they leave with one foot bandaged, the other still bare.
An hour ago, I handed a note to a big guy wearing a cowboy hat at the makeshift wooden wall by the stage entrance: “Barry, meet Cousin Lucas at the medical tent. Urgent.” The guy said he’d get the note to Chip, whoever that is.
Before that I’d spent several hours huddled under a hay wagon with a bunch of others, trying to stay dry while rain and windstorms barreled through.
About twenty minutes ago, someone read my message over the PA system. I figured I’d wait an hour or two just in case Barry had made it to the festival. The bearded figure is getting closer. The stick he’s carrying juts half a dozen feet into the air. Dangling from the end is something yellow and orange.
“Get ’em off me! Get ’em off me!” A bare-chested freak wearing only cutoffs thrashes wildly as at least four guys and a girl try to maneuver him toward the medical tent. At first I think he’s yelling at the people holding him, but every time he yanks a hand free he starts to swat at his own body. “Spiders! Get ’em off me!” He thinks he’s covered with spiders.
Barry tromps up looking like a bearded overgrown Middle Earth hobbit. He’s wearing a Peruvian poncho and pink granny glasses. His wet, straggly hair hangs down to his shoulders. Having been abandoned by Tinsley, I’m extra glad to have found him, but before we greet each other, we watch a waif who can’t be more than sixteen, wearing a loose tie-dyed dress, many strands of love beads, and a fringed jacket, come out of the medical tent and stand before the flipping-out guy while the others struggle to restrain him. Now he’s screaming, “Don’t come near me! Don’t come near me!”
“What’s your name?” the girl calmly asks half a dozen times before he’s able to focus and answer: “Steve.”
“You’re going to be okay, Steve,” the girl says. “You’ve taken LSD and you’re having a bad reaction. You understand what I’m saying, Steve?”
Remarkably, Steve, who is probably close to six feet tall, stops thrashing. The hippie girl, who is as lithe as Tinsley, though a few inches taller, steps closer and gently strokes his arm. “I don’t think these people should hold you like this, Steve. Would you like them to let go?”
His eyes fixed on her, Steve nods. The others release their grip. Steve and the hippie girl sit on the muddy grass. Not only has she gotten him to simmer down, but it’s as if she’s cast a spell. “I want you to drink some tea. Okay, Steve? It will help you feel better.”
Steve accepts the tea and sips. His friends sit with him. Like a mystical healer who is finished exorcising evil spirits, the waif rises and glides back into the tent.
“Far out,” Barry says softly. We hug.
“Glad you made it, man.” I gesture at the enormous crowd. “Can you believe this?”
“Crazy, right?” Barry grins gleefully. “When’d you get here?”
“Yesterday around noon.”
“Grooving on the scene?”
“When it’s not pouring.”
“Where’re your friends?” he asks as we start away from the medical tent and through the intermittent rain. I tell him Milton and Arno couldn’t make it and that I came with Tinsley, but she met another guy and split. Barry pats me sympathetically on the shoulder. Guess we’re part of an exclusive club.
We tromp toward some woods, passing groups huddled under sheets of clear plastic, trying to stay dry. A couple of soaked, completely mud-covered girls and guys race past us, whooping and yelling. Others lie nearly hidden inside squishy-wet sleeping bags.
Among dripping trees we find Zach and his girlfriend, Eva, under a dark-green tarp strung between some branches. Barry tells me the three of them have been camping here for more than a week. Sleeping bags are rolled up. The camping stove I borrowed for Maine is set on a rock, heating a pot of tea. Boxes of brown rice, cans of beans, and bags of bread are packed into a wooden milk crate. Canteens hang from branches.
They’re camped at the edge of a clearing where four psychedelically painted school buses are parked in a circle like covered wagons. It’s a whole different scene back here. The hippies who’ve come to the festival in these buses appear to be here not as much for the music as to get together with others of their kind. When the rain lets up, some start playing guitars and recorders and thumping on congas. The air smells of body odor and wood smoke. A guy with a beard and long blond braids, wearing only a breechcloth, stirs a large metal pot over a fire with a broom handle. Everyone is barefoot and skinny, their long hair scraggly, what scant clothes they wear mud-stained and tattered.
Watching them, I feel like I’ve come upon a lost primitive tribe. Arno’s words from Nathan’s come back: All these barefoot flower people eating brown rice and alfalfa sprouts? You don’t think they’re gonna get tired of being dirty and hungry? And free love? Enjoy the crabs and clap, man. This whole back-to-the-land thing? Isn’t that why we had the industrial revolution? So we don’t all have to be farmers anymore?
He forgot the drugs. Some of the hippies are nodding off, zonked out, swaying to the music. A couple of skinny dogs sniff around. Packs of dirty, naked towheaded kids run this way and that, playing with sticks. One guy keeps trying to get them to take hits off a bong. A kid who can’t be older than nine takes a hit, exhales smoke, then runs off to rejoin his friends. Near us, a long-haired guy holds a joint to the lips of the woman sitting next to him while she breastfeeds a baby.
Turn on,
Tune in,
Drop out,
Get drafted,
Die young.
“They spread-eagled me on the ground, wrists and ankles tied to stakes. Put a nest of biting ants on my chest. Stuck slivers of bamboo under my fingernails. Fuckin’ animals, man. I’m screaming in pain and they’re laughing.”
It’s raining, and under the tarp we’re being regaled by a strange guy wearing a torn, stained green army shirt. He sits cross-legged, talks nonstop, lighting the next cigarette off the last. His name is Karl and he says he was a prisoner of war in Vietnam.
“They gave us this watery soup with pieces of shit in it. You either ate it or starved
to death. My best buddy? He got ahold of some lye and swallowed it. Can’t imagine a worse way to go, right? But he’d had it. Enough was enough. They’d hung him upside down and whipped him with bamboo sticks until he was bleeding head to toe.” Karl’s been here five minutes and hasn’t stopped talking or blinked once: speed freak.
It’s early evening. Still light out. From the distance come the sounds of drumming and a crowd chanting. Eva nudges Zach and they cut out. Karl keeps right on rapping. His cheeks are sunken, cheekbones protruding. When I look closely, I realize that his long brown hair is a wig. His bony fingers tremble each time he brings a cigarette to his lips.
Karl is appalling and fascinating, pitiful and damaged. You can’t watch and you can’t not watch. But mostly you feel like you have to listen. He and five other soldiers were captured and held in a jungle camp. The Americans attacked and the Vietcong abandoned the camp, quickly executing the prisoners before they left. Karl played dead, lying among the corpses of his fellow soldiers, covered in their blood.
No one I grew up with — and except for Chris, no one I’ve ever met — has had to face anything close to that.
“I came home and people spat on me and called me a baby killer. How’s that for thanks?”
You sense he’s told these stories a thousand times, trapped in some loop of constantly reliving the horror. A terrible sense of guilt grips me. I recall those stamp-size photographs of the 242 dead men-children in that Life magazine. Since the beginning of the war, more than thirty thousand American soldiers have died over there. And then there are the wounded. We’ve all seen the photos of GIs with one or both legs amputated at the knee. GIs with their heads bandaged, torsos wrapped in bloodied gauze, a buddy holding the plastic bag of saline solution being IVed into a forearm. But this evening I’m seeing the psychic damage . . . close up for the first time. Karl may have his limbs, but what’s left of his mind?
Chris has written about guys going crazy, guys hanging themselves. But like so many things, the atrocity of war isn’t truly real until you see it for yourself. Charles said the odds of being killed or injured were one in five, but what about the invisible wounds? How many guys come back whole yet forever broken?
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