A long-haired sister strummed softly on her guitar and no one spoke, all eyes on the fire. Then another sister joined the circle with a guitar and she started to play and the first sister joined in with her guitar and soon we were all singing ‘Sugar Magnolia.’ I did not know I knew the words, but somehow they surfaced from my childhood and it occurred to me that I had sat around this fire before, a long time ago, singing the same song with people who looked not unlike these. I stayed at the fire circle for another hour singing old songs from the sixties with strangers, and then found my way to the tent where I fell asleep to the mindless throb of a hundred drum circles.
Now, the hawk. It is July 4, the apex of the celebration, and we are all standing, heads back, gazing up at the bright sky as the hawk banks and then disappears over the woods. Most of these people have been up all night, many on LSD, and they are a bit frayed. We have been silent since dawn, a tradition that culminates at noon with the children parading into the main meadow and a final Om breaking the silence. It is 12:15, and the children have already arrived, faces painted, wearing handmade costumes and carrying colorful banners and masks. They run free with the dogs. Karen is radiant in her suede boots and Charlie’s Angels hair. She is in her element, surrounded by her Rainbow family. Everyone is dancing and grinning and passing around huge chunks of dripping watermelon. The hawk is a good omen, a sign that the next year will be a happy one. There is some more talk about a permanent settlement, but not much is made of it. It is a pipe dream, and no one really believes it will happen. For all their anti-establishment talk, many of the Rainbows hold down jobs. The runaways will return to their parents, or back to the streets. The college students will return to study. The core Rainbows will begin to plan next year’s Gathering, of which there is already much talk, and later today I will decide to leave early and return to Portland.
I wanted to come home. But this isn’t it. My parents’ counterculture was reacting to a war and an establishment that had proven again and again that it could not be trusted. The Rainbow Gathering rejects society for the sake of it, because it always has. Am I a sellout because I don’t want to live in a bus? Because I am typing this on a computer? Because I shave my legs?
It comes down to this: During my three days here I have been called ‘sister’ and greeted by strangers as if we were raised in the same tepee. But they are not my family. I think that the people who love the Gatherings, who live for them, are people who don’t feel that sort of adoration anywhere else. The hippie daze of my memories is gone, vanished with the era and the youth of its players. It cannot be called back and, except for a minute or two of campfire singing, it cannot be re-created.
Yet there is something going on here. Something that, if unsettling, is still admirable. The Rainbows’ appeal lies in their fragile belief in the ability to create a better world. It is in their moony hopefulness, in their lack of self-consciousness, in their seeming dearth of social hang-ups. I am not a Rainbow, but it is not because I don’t want to be. There is a part of me that wants to name myself Bear, buy a pottery wheel and move to the woods. There is a part of me that wants to join the Naked Tribe and get high every day and know for certain that my government does not have my best interests at heart. I long for the simple righteousness of my childhood. But I was there. For the very best of it. And because I saw it end, I know it is over.
Cecily Schmidt
Iowa is such subtle Beauty. I am driving east toward Cedar County, the sun glowing orange in my rearview mirror. The corn fields exude something like nobility, their crowns beginning to wither with the dignity of a very old person’s hands. November touches the countryside with the honey-coated glow that is distinctly present when the sun is low in the sky. This light gets to the core. Burrowing into crevices between soybean plants, twisting up and down rows of corn, it fills entire plains with auburn fire. It seeps up under my eyelids and finds its way to my breastbone where it lingers, humming, a moment more. Dusk brings dark purple shadows to spaces where shades of earth roll into the gentle swaying slope of the Iowa horizon. I am driving under a big midwestern sky, and once again the season is about to fall.
I know it is autumn now because yesterday I awoke early, reached for the faded blue sheet that serves as my curtain and pulled it over my head to inhale the potency of morning. Across the yard, the maple tree was stained with sun. I couldn’t take my eyes from the orange leaves in quiet conversation with patches of newly lit sky. It seems that blue is always listening. Lying on my stomach, my chin propped on the windowsill, gaze transfixed on the fiery maple, I was reminded of hiking through a myriad of fallen leaves as a small child, holding tightly to the hand of my father, who urged me to be quiet and listen to the swishing at our feet. I wondered then, craning my neck to see into the highest trees where the most brightly colored leaves still clung to their branches, if the brightest stars are those that are about to fall. I wondered what would happen if a strong wind came and sent those leaves tumbling on air currents changing direction as fast as my small-bodied breath.
For as long as I can remember, there has been a moment when I realize the seasons have changed. Autumn is particularly poignant. In that moment, whether twenty years ago walking through whispering leaves with my father or yesterday morning awakened by the light of the maple tree, I think of myself as a leaf, falling again, sustained by the wind’s direction.
I slow down as I enter the tiny town of Springdale, scarcely more than a row of houses separated from each other by pine trees. The light has almost gone completely now, except for a random streetlight and a few early stars. I notice the first curls of smoke rising from several chimneys. I open the window and inhale the familiar smell of remembering. It is November again. I am the same age my mother was when she married my father.
In the late autumn of 1974, my parents had been married less than a year and were living in an upper flat on the east side of Milwaukee, searching for something they could call their own. My mom was finishing school, my dad working as an adolescent care worker at the County Mental Health Center, when he learned of a related facility in Plymouth, about sixty miles north of Milwaukee. It was October when they found the farmhouse-eight miles outside of Plymouth -situated majestically atop a high hill overlooking the Kettle Moraine forest, a mosaic of crimson and gold at that season. My mom remembers the sun setting as the wheels of their tiny blue Toyota sped along Wisconsin country roads toward the next stage of their life together. She recalls how the light poured from the golden underbelly of a plum-colored sky and she knew it was where she wanted to be. They lived there for the next three years, paying $140 a month for a four bedroom house surrounded by beautiful Wisconsin farmland and forest.
That big white house in Wisconsin is where I was conceived. It was heated by the same wood stove that heated the house I moved out of, eighteen years later. Shortly after I was born in January 1976, an ice storm hit our quiet country home and we were without power for three days. My mother moved my cradle next to the potbelly stove so that I could sleep under the comforting haze of its warmth. Large pots of snow were collected and set on the stove to melt so we would have water. For three days, my parents and their tiny new life huddled around slow stew and candlelight stories.