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c h aP t e r 19

I

spent that night in my tent by the ocean just inside the Oregon
border and continued north the next morning. At Florence, half-
way up Oregon, I got a ride from some students of Evergreen
State College—in Olympia, Washington—who were headed back to
school after doing a photography project/road trip over the week-
end.
Since Olympia was near Rainbow Valley and the students I was
riding with said I could sleep in the woods near campus, I rode with
them all the way to Evergreen College. Once we arrived, I followed
their directions to the nearby forest and soon found a good spot
among the trees to set up my tent. I slept there the next two nights
and spent the next day checking out the liberal campus. The morning
after that, I caught a bus west from Olympia out to Rainbow Valley.
Rainbow Valley turned out to be a fairly ramshackle arrangement,
as I had suspected. It consisted of about fifteen old school buses in
a dirt parking lot, with a large, open, green meadow down a small
hill, across from a creek. There were only a few people there, since
the festival didn’t start until the following evening. Once I found the
owner, he showed me where I could camp and then mentioned that
I could help the small crew with setting up if I wanted, in exchange
for a free ticket into the show—as I had hoped.
But rather than the mellow, conscious folks I had expected Rain-
bow Valley to attract, as both performers and audience poured in by
the thousands, the quiet, green meadow became what, sadly, felt
more like a heavy-metal parking lot party than a peaceful musical
gathering. I didn’t come across any familiar faces or old friends and
was unable to find a ride out to the Rainbow Gathering in Missouri.