I'm no hippy. While I have played guitar on downtown street corners before, and have hung out with some of them because of this, when all was said and done I spent the night in a warm, electrically heated house, while the grizzled hippies I met were passing out in a gutter/ditch/eye-hurting-rainbow-colored-VW-microbus somewhere. I don't wear hemp jewelry or listen to Phish or go to world trade center protests.
All of that aside, I find hippies, hobos, and rouge-like drifters to be very interesting people to observe and talk to. They are always quick with a good tale, are usually very personable, and have a lot of interesting ideas about the nature of the universe. I played an open mic in Boulder once and met a guy who had been traveling around the country selling artwork and filling up notebooks with this insane gibberish about time and God and such, which he eventually shared with us on stage. He told me about the "energy" in the music he had recently purchased, and was honestly concerned that the gangsta rap album he had recently bought was filling him with the much dreaded "bad energy." Yet he had hope that he could turn the "bad energy" of the rap music into "good energy" by using it to inspire him to write poetry in his notebook (or something).
Another guy I met at a "Rainbow gathering" (more on those in a bit) a few years back had gotten sick of his life, and one day hit the road and started traveling the U.S. with little to no money. I admired his care-free attitude about life. A lot of hippies just travel around, playing music, seeing shows, spanging for change, doing drugs, and crashing on people's couches or in homeless shelters. Or living in multi-colored vehicles and moving from city to city. That's the kind of freedom you can't get on 2-weeks vacation a year, though it's got plenty of downsides to it. (Such as being arrested a lot, since most cities frown on people who sleep outside/do mass amounts of illegal narcotics.)
Anyway, my fascination with hippies and hobos led me to this year's National Rainbow Gathering, which for the first time in 14 years, was in Colorado. What is a Rainbow Gathering, you ask? Well, imagine tens of thousands of stinky, dirty, tie-die wearing hippies, train riding hobos, no-toothed vagrants, and even some street punks, camping in a large national forest area and participating in a makeshift community of "living light" for one week. No money is required, signs at the entrance read "Welcome Home," and people walking around frequently say that to you and other phrases such as "Loving you, brother!"
Food is provided via various "kitchens", all free. Each of them serving something different, and at various hours. A map of the gathering reveals the various camps of people you can put your tent by: the vegetarian camp(s), the Jesus hippies camp, the Buddhist hippies camp, the punk camps, the military camp, the Hindu camp (providing delicious Krishna Cookies, of which I partook of many!), the cigarette provider of the entire Gathering aka Nic @ Night, etc. etc. There were at least 20 camps scattered about the trails, and maybe 7 or 8 kitchens. Whenever you got hungry you just grabbed your plate and silverware and walked around until you found a kitchen serving food. Cardboard signs led you along the trail, as well as a paper map that was provided.
A sign promising the "Rainbow's Deepest Richest Cup O' Coffee" at the Deep Faith Cafe kitchen.
Fires blaze all night, with the bassy thumping sound of late night drum circles being heard until the earliest hours of the morn. Goods are exchanged, but (in theory) only through bartering via "the trading circle" area. This isn't what actually happened all the time, as one guy was telling us that he was extremely desperate for cash so he could buy gas for his truck, and would only trade his goods for cash. He was quickly reprimanded by a nearby hippie though, who said to him, "Hey man, you can't trade for money on the main trading path! Do that off the path if you have to." I traded a few things on my last day, in exchange for: a Ray Bradbury book, a book of old English poetry published in 1901, a kite for my son, and two necklaces (one for my boss as a souvenir).
One of the trader's trinkets available in the trading circle area.
The guy running that trading area poses for a picture!As you probably guessed, drug use is rampant at these things (which is one of the reasons it attracts the attention of the police and forest rangers, who were seen walking through the gathering throughout the week). Pot was so prevalent that the sight of a circle of people smoking up was commonplace. Near the end of the gathering, when supplies started running low, people would tie a string to their pipes and tie that to a stick, and then hold it like a fishing pole by the side of a trail; an attempt to illicit some passerby to smoke that group of people into a mellow haze. Another guy hung out down at one of the camps for a while one evening, and asked those of us sitting there if we had heard someone yelling "Yeah!" the night before. He then explained that that night he had been tripping, and was running from camp to camp yelling "YEAH" as loud as he could and startling people. He was very proud of his accomplishment, and I played along, saying things like "Wow, the 'Yeah Guy' has graced the presence of our camp!" as he beamed proudly.
Every evening "Main Circle" is called in an open field, signalled by the blowing of loud horns. First, everyone stands in a huge circle, holding hands and "oom"ing (for peace or something), and then, in a combined effort of many kitchens, a large feast of many different foods is rolled around the circle and served to everybody there. Granted, it all kind of tastes and looks like slop, but thankfully at this year's Gathering the "sauce guy" walked around the circle providing us with four levels of hot sauce to give the food some flavor. As bad as the Rainbow food tastes, you'll get hungry enough to chow down on whatever's served after you've been there a few days. At one point I slurped down a huge bowl of goat's milk and cinnamon that was offered to me, because I was so hungry.
One night I was wandering around from camp fire to camp fire, but kept finding them too crowded for my liking. Eventually I ended up at a camp that had some sitting space, but half of the people there were naked. I shrugged and sat down, listening to the conversation two drug addled stoners were having about "Computer Security":
Hippie 1: "There a some different types of computer security you can use nowadays."
Hippie 2: "Yeah man.. There's a new one, called.. open.. open security I think."
Hippie 1: "Ahh... yeah man, that one's really good..."
Both of them had obviously not done anything substantial on a computer in their entire life. About an hour later I started to wonder again why half of the people at the fire were naked, and when I turned my head to look for other nearby fires, I saw a cardboard sign on a tree which gave me the name of the camp I was currently at: Naked @ Night. "Ahh, I thought," getting up to leave, "that explains it."
At another camp on another night I listened to two friends discuss a Widespread Panic concert they went to where one of them was tripping so hard he locked himself in a port-a-potty, couldn't figure out how to get out, and so he just curled up and slept in it till morning.
