The leader of the group spotted me across the fire and called out: “Ay, boy, what you called?”
“I am called Joshua,” I announced, trying to sound regal.
“Joe-Shwa! None other! You know what old Joe-Shwa do? Back in Zion?”
I nodded. “He brought the walls tumbling down,” I said. “I was named after him.”
“Name for him!? Joe-Shwa!” The leader turned to the man on his right: “Brother Gregory, you know what him remind I of?”
Brother Gregory took a deep drag from his water chalice and nodded absentmindedly.
“Him remind I of when we was all in Jericho, knocking down Jericho walls.”
Everyone around the fire murmured in agreement. “Joe-Shwa, you ever hear a vice speaking fah you, telling you everyting’s gwan be alright?”
I nodded.
“I and I hear it, lawd and clare,” declared the leader, and he began a chant that was immediately picked up by his tribesmen and accompanied by the low, heavy rumbling of the djembes:
I hear da vice of the I-a-mon saaay:
Babylon, you trone gawn down,
Ga-awn down,
Babylon, you trone gawn down,
Ga-awn down,
Jah come wit’ tunder and lightning and trow dem awaaay.
I soaked up the chant, intuitively understanding the cosmic dynamic wherein Babylon was the powerful evil that oppressed us downtrodden sufferers, but that we should hold our impoverished heads high, confident that Babylon’s omnipotent days were numbered.
That night I lay wrapped in my new blanket on the clammy marsh that now lined the bottom of Ranger Rick’s pup tent. The Rasta chants continued on in my head while lightning split the sky and thunder shook the ground.
Many days’ worth of meals gathered together in one place at the bottom of my belly, and I awoke in the middle of the night at the beckoning of my bowels. Ranger Rick lay snoring next to me, stinking of wine. I swept my arms around in the wet muck until I found his flashlight and stumbled down the hill to the engorged stream that marked the edge of camp. The path to the shitters led across a slimy log bridge. After I took a few tentative steps, I concluded that the log was too slippery to be safe. But then my bowels convulsed, and I figured that the risk of drowning was better than crapping my last pair of pants. I slid my feet forward like a cautious ice skater and nearly made it across to the other bank before I tripped on a branch stub and fell into the water face-first. The ice-cold stream leapt over my head, and I flailed in the water, shrieking into the night air, more from the shock of the cold than fear. The stream wasn’t deep, and the current wasn’t strong, and I was able to pull myself onto the muddy bank in a few sea lion–like lunges. I stamped around shaking the water off of me, and my body convulsed with a shiver from deep in my core. My bowels clenched within me again, and I hobbled exigently down the path toward the shitters.
The shitters were the communal restroom for the entire Festival and consisted of nothing more than slit trenches carved into the mud with a few logs thrown down to hang your butt off of. My two previous pilgrimages to the restroom had ended in self-inflicted constipation. It was hard enough setting my naked nether regions on a slimy log crawling with ants and flies over a muddy sluice flowing with excrement. But having to do this in front of two dreadlocked women crapping while they played Filipino nose flutes, or in the midst of a group of diarrheal bikers, was too great an offense to my dignity.
What sort of vile animals would condemn themselves to this? Before coming to Rainbow, I’d already concluded that Claudia and I were rare outliers, alienated from Straight Society. At Rainbow, Claudia had promised, we would meet others of our own kind. When we arrived, Claudia was confident we had. I wasn’t so sure. Straight Society clearly didn’t have a place for me, and now I was convinced that the counter-culture didn’t either. I was trapped on an island between the two worlds, able to navigate in both, but without a home in either.
In the privacy of the muddy darkness, I finally found relief and struggled to wipe myself with a pilfered Tibetan prayer flag and scraps of tapestry I had pocketed over the course of the day for just this occasion. Then the flood began. Lightning ripped open the sky and a torrent of rain plunged upon the land with a biblical fury. The slit trenches below me jumped their banks, and the ground morphed into a marshy morass of human waste that surged over my ankles. I churned my feet through the foul muck in grim resignation as I made my way back to the stream.
The stream was already swollen with rainwater, and the slimy log bridge I’d crossed over before was now mostly submerged. I stood shivering in the rain, paralyzed with indecision. “Help,” I said to no one in particular, in the off chance I wouldn’t have to be brave. When no one responded, I drew strength from the Rasta teaching about Joe-Shwa knocking down Jericho’s walls and waded into the water. Straddling the log, I shimmied myself across slowly, the numbingly cold water flowing over my lap. This kept my head above water until I got to a point where the log was too far submerged. The vigorous current pushed me off firmly but gently and sent me sputtering downstream. I clawed at the dark water in a panic and managed to keep my head up long enough to grab at a sturdy clump of weeds. The wet, stringy plants supported my weight, and I pulled myself up onto my belly, spitting out muddy water. Exhausted but safe, I rolled onto my back and let the cold rain wash the mud and filth off of me.
As I slithered back into Ranger Rick’s pup tent, I realized I’d lost his flashlight somewhere, but was too tired to care. I wrapped myself in the wet army blanket and fell into a deep sleep.
From somewhere a thousand miles away, Ranger Rick was talking to me: “Hey, buddy, we’re sliding down the mountain. Crapola, we’re really sliding.” When I came to, Ranger Rick was panting and cursing somewhere outside. The bottom of the tent was filled with muddy water. “Don’t worry, Josh, I’m tying us to a tree.”
When I finally climbed out of the partially submerged tent the next morning, I saw that the muddy hillside had been swept clear of people. In the forest on both sides of the field, hillside refugees were lashing themselves to trees and fighting one another over the scarce pockets of dry land. Ranger Rick and I spent the rest of the day wandering around like turtles with a length of salvaged brown tarp over our backs, squatting around smoky smoldering campfires, trying to ignore the rain and the dissonant non-rhythms of wet drums. We crashed that night under our tarp on the floor of Madam Frog’s tent, listening to old burnouts tell their tripped-out stories about peyote vision quests and LSD-induced hallucinations in the desert.
Sometime before dawn’s light broke over the mountain, Madam Frog’s Tea House broke over us. Perhaps the waterlogged walls of the canvas tent just couldn’t take any more weight or perhaps the spells of protection woven by Madam Frog just weren’t strong enough to hold off Mahpiyato, the Lakota sky god, any longer. Whatever the case, it took us a few minutes of crawling through mud in the darkness before we found high ground and settled ourselves back down to sleep, wrapped in our brown tarp in the lee of a big tree.
We were eventually awakened by some dedicated rainbow warrior who obviously believed it was never too early or too rainy for a drum solo.
“Maybe the sun will come out today, Josh,” volunteered Ranger Rick, whose hair, like mine, was filled with pine needles.
“It won’t,” I said.
“I know,” laughed Ranger Rick. “Boy, I really need some coffee.”
“Why?”
“Because today’s the big day, and I want to be awake for it.”
“What big day?”
“The Fourth of July.”
“What’s that?”
“You know, July Fourth, Independence Day.”
I shrugged.
“You know, the fireworks and parades and everything? The Fourth of July, it’s like America’s birthday.”
“Never heard of it.”
“Man, you really gotta get out more. Anyway, here at Rainbow it’s supposed to be like the main event, exc
ept instead of fireworks and America’s birthday, they have a big parade celebrating the whole world.”
“But it’s raining too hard.”
“Yeah,” said Ranger Rick, lying back down against the tree root that served as our pillow. “Hey, buddy, you know what else? Today’s my last day. I gotta get back for work on Tuesday.”
This was not good news. I suddenly felt alone and desperate, like I was losing a parent. “Ranger Rick,” I began.
“Yeah, buddy.”
“I’m really sorry, but I lost your flashlight in the river.”
“It’s OK, buddy. I have enough light in my life.” And he smiled like he meant it.
As we talked, we splashed through the dank forest in the direction of a growing chorus of voices and a clanging gong. The wet woods around us were soon filled with hunched human forms splashing in the same direction. We picked up speed instinctively like a herd of anxious zebras fleeing a grass fire. We emerged into a muddy clearing and joined a thousand other dirty pilgrims in a loose, chaotic circle.
No flood of biblical proportions was going to keep the rainbow warriors from celebrating the Fourth of July. I perched myself on a log at the edge of the clearing and peeked out from the protective shelter of my tarp to watch a muddy circus of unrestrained revelry unfold before me. The rain pounded down, and drum circles within drum circles pounded back. The drums were accompanied by clattering cymbals, babbling marimbas, a braying tuba, and the croaking of a thousand untrained voices. Amid the would-be musicians, a churning maelstrom of freaky dancers flung their bodies about in frenzied celebration. Topless women wearing skirts over corduroys paddled at the air like dogs in water, and shirtless bearded men shook to the music with epileptic convulsions. Pairs of jugglers slid muddy rainbow pins back and forth while a circle of men in rags kicked at a waterlogged hacky sack. A soot-faced anorexic woman massaged the air with tai chi movements. The balding man with the massive beard was wearing only a loincloth and he teetered back and forth, balancing an upright closed umbrella on his chin. Here and there a naked couple slow-danced, pawing at each other’s mud-streaked hindquarters, oblivious to the wild rumpus all around them. Occasional lone trippers weaved through the throng, their arms extended as if in flight, their minds consumed by pharmacological visions more powerful than reality.
What little ground cover there had been was quickly chewed up, and muddy water began splattering into the air with each footfall. Thousands of feet kept digging at the ground, churning the soil into a muddy soup. On all sides, dancers were soon slipping and falling onto their asses. The Earth was striking back at the rainbow warriors, bringing more and more of them down until the ratio of vertical to horizontal gyrating bodies became nearly even. This absurd development was met with euphoric howls from the downed warriors. The raw mud was a new medium for their sacred art, and the congregation converted to muddy contact improvisation, massage, wrestling, and just plain rolling around. Many now stripped off what wet clothing remained and painted themselves with mud, spinning, grunting, and howling like primordial simians rising from the muck of prehistory.
From the safety of my tarp, I was happy to enjoy the spectacle with the same detachment as an anthropologist witnessing a primitive mating ritual. But when a group of mud people took notice of me and began pulling at the tarp, beckoning me to come out and dance, I concluded it was time to move on. It wasn’t just the sheer madness of their invitation that motivated my departure, it was also the sudden realization that if all the rainbow warriors were here wallowing in the mud pit, no one was left to guard the kitchens.
I padded down the trails, pilfering dried apricots from Everybody’s Kitchen and heavily tithing the banana and carob chips at the New Dawn Tribe camp. After the initial exhilaration of stuffing my face, a deep exhaustion took hold of me. I found myself standing back in front of the great tarp-covered yurt of the Rolling Turtle Tribe. The place still reeked of hashish but was impossibly and tantalizingly cozy. In the corner of the yurt, a big round propane heater was dishing out warmth. I glided across the mud floor in an incandescent trance and curled up in the embrace of a vacant blue sleeping bag and slept.
Many hours later, I awoke to voices floating over me.
“I don’t know,” a woman was saying. “I just found him here.”
“Moonflower, we can’t keep him,” a man decided. “What would we do with a kid?”
“We’ve gotta find his parents,” said another woman.
I kept my eyes closed, trying not to freak out. Nothing was going to pull me away from this heater. Nothing. But what could I say that would make them leave me alone? I sat up to confront those who would decide my fate. Their eyes were unnaturally dilated, and their deeply tanned faces were framed with golden dreadlocks.
“My pyarents,” I began in a deep Slavic accent, “are still in Soviet Union.” I jutted my chin out, as though pondering the next words of English I would need to convey my solemn announcement. “CIA and government police, they are look for me. I must rest chere before continue on for Syan Franchesco.” The Rolling Turtles were stunned by the revelation that they had a brave little fugitive in their midst. They whispered among themselves and concluded, as I knew they would, that they couldn’t betray a little comrade to the cops. I lay back down and grinned into my sleeve. This sudden turn of events was a lot for them to handle, and they quickly medicated themselves with billowing clouds of Moroccan hash.
I stopped smiling to myself when I realized that Ranger Rick must be gone by now. We’d never had a chance to say good-bye. I consoled myself with the hope that he was in a warm, dry car out there somewhere, satisfied with his haul of photographic evidence to prove to the guys at his crummy job that he had had a great time.
Beneath me the cardboard was dry, and thick enough to soften the rigid ribs of the wooden pallet that I’d adopted as my bed. As I drifted off, floating on a sea of welling mud, I dreamt up a Russian fugitive backstory, and hummed myself to sleep with the stirring bars of “The Internationale.”
Throughout the next day a steady stream of sodden refugees cycled through the yurt to warm their hands, smoke grass, or impart nonsense packaged as wisdom. Eventually none other than my mother popped into the Rolling Turtle tent. “There you are,” she said dreamily. She came and wrapped me in a deep embrace. Her eyes looked crazy. I put a confused expression on my face, fearful that she would blow my cover. Claudia swirled her hand slowly over her head, trying to capture something in words. “Joshey, thousands of lives, life’s incantation, thousands of eyes!” She sat by me for a time, rocking back and forth, smiling. Then she stood up suddenly, and stuck her hand down the front of her muddy bellbottom pants. When she pulled it out, her hand was bloody.
“Hey, sister,” someone called out, “you cut yourself.”
“No, I’m menstruating. Does anyone have a sponge? Anyone?” She turned back to me, saying: “I’ve got to go clean the blood off my hands.”
I was afraid she’d out me as her American son. Luckily she didn’t come back. But had her visit already compromised my identity? I was worried. Luckily, the Rolling Turtles seemed to have dismissed her as just another tripper, like the rest of the visitors, living with one foot in the astral plane.
Toward evening, I was asked a few probing questions by my hosts, who seemed newly curious about me. I told them my name was Ilyich Ulyanov and gave them details of my life, inspired by what I could remember of Lenin’s early years. Then I told them that I had been sent to the United States to be raised as an American, to take over the System from the inside. They seemed duly impressed and began giving me lessons in Americanism.
“Look, Little Man, all you gotta know about America is this: Everyone’s greedy and racist and sexist, and they’ll try to pump you full of corn syrup and sugar, and the next thing you know the bank will end up owning your life.”
“Yah,” chimed in one of the women. “And money. Everyone loves money more than people.”
“Yeah,” joined in the alpha m
ale, cupping the breasts of the woman who’d been speaking and running his lower lip up her neck. “You have to remember to love people, more than money.”
I raised my reused glass bottle of rainwater into the air and saluted them: “We must to loves the peoples more than the monies!”
Everyone cheered, and the alpha male declared it time to break open the last brick of hashish. The yurt soon filled with thick, clingy smoke and the gamy smell of skunk filled my nose and burrowed into my skin, hair, and clothes.
“Little Man! Take a hit from the chillum,” ordered the shirtless alpha male, offering me a long straight pipe. No way. I’d smoked pot before, and a helpless veil of cannabine confusion was the last thing I wanted draped over my mind.
“No to thank you, tovarish,” I said, holding my hand out like a stop sign.
“Come on, Little Man!”
“He doesn’t want to,” suggested one of the two women now snaking their bodies around my would-be pot pusher.
“My friend,” I tried again, but the alpha male thrust the pipe into my face. I stared at him, summoning my toughest, most defiant man-face.
His hazy eyes sharpened, and he stared back at me, determined to crack my will. We faced off for what seemed like a minute, before he threw his head back, laughing: “Little Man won’t get high!” This was apparently quite funny. When the snorting died down, the talking stopped, and the dirty naked bodies of the Rolling Turtle Tribe began slithering toward one another in a carnal convergence.
I covered my head with a musty poncho, muffling out the noises around me, and thought of all the wonderful things money could buy: food, shelter, clothing. If only the Russians knew—I was a double agent.
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