You can’t use cash in the trading circle. You have to barter for anything you want. I saw one kid who wanted a zipper he saw laid out on someone’s blanket. The zipper’s owner said, ‘What do you got to trade?’ The kid thought a minute and then said, ‘I’ve got this camera.’ He produced the camera, and the zipper owner immediately agreed to the barter. But the kid wasn’t a total pushover-he’d only trade the camera for two zippers. It was, the kid explained, a really nice camera.
The previous year, Karen told me, she traded a little piece of suede she got out of a free box at a garage sale for half an ounce of pot. ‘I felt sort of bad,’ she said. ‘But he really wanted it. I think he thought he got the better end of the bargain.’
The Rainbow barter economy is driven by immediate gratification. Mike met a kid who traded his graduation watch for an apple. Candy bars are worth their weight in gold. I watched a woman trade the shirt off her back for a York Peppermint Patty. Pleasure is valued over utility, indulgence over practicality.
Mike had told me to bring trade fodder, and after a brief negotiation I scored thirty sticks of pachouli incense for three snack-size Hershey’s bars. The pachouli sticks were wrapped in plastic and I found a place in the grass and unwrapped them, inhaling the sweet aroma. I lit a stick and stuck it in the dirt beside me and then, wheezing in its smoke, sat at the edge of the trading circle, watching all the activity. Men in loincloths, disheveled children, topless women in kerchiefs. A long-bearded man in his fifties strummed ‘Where have all the flowers gone?’ I watched it all with awe and trepidation. I loved the sense of community. I loved the affirmation and the music and the feeling of family. These people had, at least temporarily, created a working, cash-free Utopia. There was free child care, free food, free cigarettes, free drugs, free medical care, an authentic democratic system of political representation and a population that was happy and provided for.
Yet there was something disturbing about it all. The presumed familiarity I found comforting was also strangely invasive. What if you didn’t want to be hugged every couple of minutes? Karen told me that every year there are four or five reported rapes (a low number given the thousands in attendance, she pointed out), which usually occur because a sister feels she ‘can’t say no.’ I had kissed Lizard, hadn’t I? Indeed, the Rainbow ethos is to be open, to indulge, to be free. It’s a noble pursuit, especially in the context of today’s society, which seems to encourage repression of these same impulses. But this ‘free love as emancipation’ is the same old paradigm that my mother faced thirty years ago. In the end, sixties-style free love seemed to be more about men getting their penises tickled than achieving any kind of gender equity through rejecting sexual hang-ups and repression. The 1970s saw more than one woman look up from the bread she was baking to realize that she was, despite her progressive politics and lack of makeup, still in the fucking kitchen. Many of these women went on, like my mother, 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 out of the way, collect all the necessary permits, inform nearby towns and spend weeks after the Gathering cleaning up and planting trees. Often their presence is a boon to the local economy, as Rainbows spend thousands of dollars on supplies, from wheat flour to condoms. Yet there is a police presence. Cruisers roll through and around the camp regularly, but officers ignore most of what they see-the general rule is that if it’s inside the camp boundaries, it’s legal. Because the police are not a threat, passing police cars are often greeted with stoned smiles and peace signs and I saw more than one cop flash a peace sign back.
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.