There's a legend in these parts. A terrible beast lives here. Many have claimed to have seen it. Some have even met it face to face. I'm one of those people. It's something I'll never forget even if I live 1,000 years.

   I think it was during my freshman year in college. I was sitting in the breezeway of the fine arts building talking to my friend's girl, Donna. It appeared without warning from behind us. Baby blue tennis shoes allowed it to walk quietly on the concrete. From its horrible mouth that was missing one tooth came a voice that would send chills down my spine every time I heard it. "My, you two look like a couple of gargoyles sitting there." We were sitting on either side of a small stairway so it was a fair observation. I thought it would go and leave us alone after that, but that was not to be. It stayed and spoke to us for a half an hour if it was a minute. Several minutes into its prattling its true intentions were revealed. It wanted to talk to us about God. I didn't say anything because, for one, I thought she'd stop soon, and two, because my friend's girl was there, and I was sorta trying to mack on her a little and she probably wouldn't have dug me "turning on the charm" to the old crone.

   Eventually she did go away, though. That was the first time I encountered this foul beast, but it wasn't to be the last...

  Many years ago, back in the early 1990s in Ocala, Florida, I met a guy. Well, not just a guy, but The Guy. We called him The Guy because for a while, we didn't know his actual name, which was Matt, so The Guy stuck. He was what you'd call husky, large but not fat, per se. He has short hair that hung down to his eyes in the front. Nothing really remarkable abut his appearance, you'd walk right by him and hardly notice, but inside there was some weird stuff going on.

   For those of you not familiar with the city of Ocala, it' a special sort of place. It's not a big city. There is no "Ocala skyline" to speak of, really. It's a town that has sprawled over a large area. It was once home to many horse farms, but most of those have been replaced by deed restricted developments. There are many well-to-do and even wealthy families there, and that mentality seems to create feelings of privilege even among the middle class. In short, Ocala is a pretentious town.

   I went to a community college there while living in a town a bit to the south. I had nothing in common with those pretentious types so I associated mostly with the punk and metal crowd. The Guy hung out on the periphery of the metal crowd, which was mostly centered around the band Killing Addiction. I got the impression he was tolerated by those guys but not fully accepted. He listened to a lot of that type of music and so they let him hang around enough so that we were aware of his presence in those circles.

   One semester, he was in a painting class with my friend Robert. My friend John and I would often go up to the painting classroom after class let out to talk to Robert as he was packing his stuff up to leave. That's where we first started talking to The Guy...

   Welcome home!

   That was the first greeting I received as I approached the start of the trail that would lead me down to the campsite, as the shirtless Rainbow walked up to hug my friend and me. It was February 1990. I was enrolled in a community college in Ocala, Florida. On that morning, I noticed a flyer on the bulletin board in the cafeteria building. "Rainbow Family Counterculture Winter Gathering" it said, with some hand drawn peace signs and whatnot, and a map to the site in the Ocala National Forest. I took the flyer off the board, turned to my friend Robert, who was basically my main partner in crime back then, and said "Come on, we're going to join the hippies." We got in the car and headed into the forest, looking for a place called Hopkins Prairie.

   This was the first I'd heard of the Rainbow Family and I wasn't sure what to expect. We drove at least a good 30 minutes out into the forest until we spotted a tie-dyed piece of cloth hanging from a tree by one of the side roads. We turned onto the road and followed the directions on the flyer. Eventually we reached an area with a bunch of cars parked on the side of the road, and a big psychedelic painted school bus. We had arrived. As we walked to the start of the trail, we were greeted by the "welcome home" guy. He pointed us in the direction we needed to go and thus began a hike that was easily over a mile.

   This first trek down there wasn't eventful. It was early on so there weren't a lot of people yet, plus everyone was being silent until noon for world peace or something, so we headed back. I informed more of my friends at the college about this and we organized our first camping trip out to the site.

   This time it was me, another friend from college called Shannon, her friend Lara, and a couple people from the next town over who were friends of Shannon's roommate's boyfriend. It was one of those two, a guy who called himself Cynjon, who had the tent. The tent isn't important, though that's the reason we brought him along, but he figures into part of the weirdness that occurs later.

   We make our way down the trail, and this time it's a lot busier than the other morning. Lots of smiling hippies greeting us with "welcome home", one guy even sung us a song on the way there. We eventually make it to the main part of the site, there is a tall tepee and a big community fire, people singing around the fire. And so the adventure began...