[lumberjim]

Enter Rainbow Family. The Rainbow Family is like a roving commune. Rainbow people go from gathering to gathering for most of the warm months of the year. A gathering is like a mass campout. There are often many smaller gatherings happening simultaneously throughout the Summer in different parts of the country, and there are “National Gatherings” which are more planned and advertised and draw as many as 10,000 people. The layout of the gathering depends largely on the location. There are typically several “Kitchens” that are maintained by volunteers throughout the gathering. They are large central campfires set up for cooking, and sitting around socializing. Some with ovens for baking, some with huge stew pots, some with a nice grill. The evening meal is eaten in a huge “circle” in the main gathering area (usually a field) and people stand up and talk to the gathering about whatever is on their mind. Oft times, there are prayers made to the earth and sun led by what we came to recognize as “Super Hippies”. These were the self appointed and very impressive people that spent the bulk of their time at the gathering organizing and leading, and being very important. They had been in Rainbow Family for a long time, some even being born into it (Rainbow Family has roots in colonial American time) . They were, in fact, very important participants at these gatherings, as hippies tend to need direction in order to accomplish things like gathering firewood, supplying the group with potable water, digging shitters, etc. There were several other types of people at these gatherings which I unconsciously categorized in my mind as one type of hippie or another. There were the Bums, who were real life bums that had caught wind of the Rainbow Family, and realized that they would be fed and usually transported if they could make friends and help out a bit with chores. “Happy” was the first of those we met. Then there were the “Wing Nuts”. They were crazy. Really. And they all seemed attracted to me for some reason. They’d be magnetized to wherever I was and invariably begin to tell me some of the most bizarre and disturbing things I had heard at that stage in my life. And there were “tweakers” that had an agenda to promote. They’d preach to you or the group you were with if you walked too close to them. There were also a lot of really, really cool people that made the gathering a life changing event. The first gathering we attended was in Shawnee Forest, in Shawnee, Illinois.