Wild Child: Girlhoods in the Counterculture

by Chelsea Cain

Being different inside our home was easier to bear than the more public differences-no one could see my dad meditating or my mom playing the dulcimer. Food continued to be the most public declaration of my family’s strangeness. In my school they segregated the cold lunch kids from the hot lunch kids-and no, my mom did not allow me to eat any of the preservative-laden, non-organic foods full of processed meats and refined sugar served in my school cafeteria. I was, of course, a cold lunch kid. Which meant that I had to sit at a table in the lunch room that for some reason was perpendicular to all the rows of hot lunch tables. We, the few cold lunch kids, spent the whole hour providing an amusing visual distraction for the hot lunch kids. Our bagged lunches were of great interest to the hot lunchers-something to look at while they slurped down hot dogs and mac-n-cheese and chocolate cake and jello and hamburgers and chop suey. And my lunch was the most interesting of all. The kids had seen Velveeta and white bread and Cheetos and Capri Sun juice boxes before, but they hadn’t been exposed to homemade wheat bread and blue corn chips and tofu and natural licorice. And so it happened again and again-the dreaded natural food incident. The pdinting finger, the gaping mouth and the inevitable comment: ‘What is that?’ How could I explain blue corn chips to kids raised on white bread? I tried to be strong-I tried to stand up for my family’s organic choices, and I tried to tell them that the chips tasted good. But they were wasted words-because to them all that mattered was that the food looked different, which made it weird, which made me weird.

  My repeated public embarrassments due to the contents of my lunch bag bred a deep resentment inside me about my family’s food choices. I begged my dad to buy hot dogs. Secretly plotting which sugar cereals I could get my hands on and dreaming of Os-, car Meyer bologna sandwiches on white bread with that nice bright yellow mustard, I revolted. My tolerance for their food choices hit its limit with tempeh. My mom grew tempeh in their bedroom. It smelled bad and looked worse. Their bedroom floor was covered with pans of white molding cakes, which my mom would bring downstairs, slice into neat squares, fry and serve for dinner. I would not eat tempeh.

  My friends went to college and became vegetarians. I went to college and became a meat eater. After nineteen years of being force-fed tofu and beans and rice, vegetarianism did not hold an enigmatic appeal for me. Early in my freshman year a large group of my newly turned vegetarian friends discovered, to their immense joy, a restaurant that served tofu dogs. This was like the Second Coming for them. They came to my room in an excited bunch, inviting me to join them to ‘go out for tofu dogs.’ I declined. The natural foods craze held no sense of independence or contained rebellion for me. I felt more insurgent satisfaction from eating a hamburger or a slice of chocolate cake. So even now, as an adult who enjoys eating healthy foods and is surrounded by a community that sanctions rather than punishes this choice, I am still guilty of occasional secret trips to the drive-through lane of fast-food restaurants. I lust after processed sugar, red meat, full-fat dairy. It is the legacy of growing up vegetarian and sugar free, the curse of the hippie kid turned adult.

  By the time I was a teenager, I had already lived as a nonconformist and, in some ways, that left me no direction to go but toward conformity. My parents had already fought many battles for me. I was so free to become who I wanted to be that I just wanted to be like everyone else. In high school, my friends rebelled against authority by stealing their parents’ cigarettes, skipping class and getting stoned at lunch. I curled my bangs and became a cheerleader and class president. My classmates did Tarot cards and listened to Pink Floyd. I did my homework religiously and organized the school prom. Thankfully, my parents were patient enough to let this wild stage run its course, as I pranced through my teen years in disguise-my bangs curled high and immobilized with hair spray, my lips glimmering with shell-pink lipstick, my jeans rolled tight to my leg, my Keds whiter than white. They may have secretly lamented my embrace of the trappings of mainstream teenage life-but they never said a word.

  My rebellious phase is long past; normalcy is no longer an icon. I left the towering bangs by the wayside. More important, however, is that everything that once felt shameful now seems interesting; I actually enjoy the looks of incredulity from people who did not grow up as I did when I tell my childhood story. I’m no longer embarrassed to describe the setting of my birth-or to admit that my parents weren’t married until I was seven. I beg my mom to sew me clothes, having long forgotten the trauma of the pink jeans. I humbly ask her how best to cook tofu, and don’t mind that people know my dad still meditates on a nightly basis. Our family mantra, ‘You create your own reality,’ our version of the Lord’s Prayer, has found its way into my daily life. I try to balance my parents’ hippie values with my own brand of nineties realism and a healthy dose of ex-hippie-kid skepticism. I’ve stopped view-ipg the world through a lens that magnifies difference and makes it undesirable. And I’ve finally forgiven my parents for all the rusty cars and tofu sandwiches, for the homemade Care Bears and home haircuts. They knew what they were doing.

  Chelsea Cain

  Welcome Home

  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 ha
s 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.