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...
The first of the interesting characters we encountered was this guy who called himself Satyriasis. Apparently it means a man with an insatiable sexual appetite. Of course we could never remember his name so we often referred to him as Cirrhosis or Psoriasis when we spoke of him. He held a rather cynical view of the Rainbows, and was likely just there to meet women. He took a liking to Shannon, which was odd because these two were nothing alike.
Shannon was the kind of girl who was into college alternative music but mainly the popular stuff. She loved going to the beach, was always tan with sun lightened hair, and had the kind of body that was made for beach volleyball power moves. I'm not sure if she was into beach volleyball, but it would not surprise me to find out she was. Satyriasis was in his thirties or forties and was the kind of guy you might see sitting in front of his apartment, rolling his own cigarettes while watching people walk by because he had nothing else going on that day, or any day.
As we sat around that evening, talking to each other, Satyriasis would flirt with Shannon who either laughed it off or was just oblivious. Apparently growing tired of not getting anywhere, he eventually decides to get to the point and tells her "If you want to get into my pants it's going to take some initiative on your part." Shannon wasn't particularly fazed by that but she definitely didn't take any initiative and he eventually moved along.
An interesting epilogue to that story is some time later, Shannon and Lara saw Satyriasis in Gainesville, Florida, where he lived, and spoke to him briefly. He was going by the name Satyr now, because too many people thought Satyriasis sounded like a skin condition.
Another notable character we met out there was a guy called Lynn. We heard Lynn before we saw him. He was a mustachioed fellow, over six feet tall, had a booming voice, and wore a military field jacket. To say he stood out among the hippies would be an understatement. He was the sort of man who would, and did, pick up a young woman by grabbing her legs and hoisting her up until she was straddling his hips and had to hang on to his neck and said to her "Hey little girl. How old are you?" He didn't seem mean, it was a hippie gathering after all, but I tried to avoid him anyway.
As the first night there progressed, we noticed that the Cynjon kid had disappeared. He was a waif-like hippie goth himself so it was easy to lose track of him and we just figured he was around somewhere. It turned out that Lynn had basically kidnapped him.
Apparently Lynn was in some altered state of mind and grabbed Cynjon and pulled him into a tent where he and some other folks had gathered. Lynn was ranting about some Biblical scripture or something, and trying to play something on a guitar. Cynjon tried to get up at one point but Lynn grabbed his arm and sat him back down. He eventually escaped but every time he heard that voice the rest of the weekend you could see a look of alarm on his face.
I don't recall much of anything else remarkable happening during that gathering, but fear not, dear reader, there is much more to tell...
The Next Year
Once again I found the flyer in the college cafeteria building. A new location for this year, but in the same general area. The big difference this year was that I went with a completely different group of people. First there was John, who by that point had pretty much become my main partner in crime, figuratively and literally. Back then he was sort of like a grown up punk version of Eric Cartman from South Park, always ready to have a laugh at someone else's expense. Then there was our friend Jay, who was a VW Scirocco driving, Jam Band listening, outdoorsy kind of guy, and I believe one of Jay's friends came along too.
Our first stop on the way put was at a gas station where John filled up a soda bottle with gasoline in case we needed to start a fire. Back then 20 ounce soda bottles were glass with a screw-on cap, so you didn't have to worry about the gasoline eating through like you do with plastic bottles. He also bought some cans of this stuff called "potted meat product" in case he got hungry.
When we arrived at the trail, as expected there were quite a few people gathered there, some with small camper trailers. We stopped by one trailer and started talking to the woman inside. We talked about trading goods and John, having a deck of Golden Dawn tarot cards he liberated from a mall bookstore, showed them to the woman to see if she was interested in them. She asked "Oh, are these high?" Neither of us had any idea what she meant so John just says they're from the Golden Dawn order that Aleister Crowley once belonged to. Her face dropped and she handed them back, wanting nothing to do with anything related to Crowley. So we moved on and headed down the trail.
Once we got Jay's tent set up, we were checking out the area and found a hatchet on the ground. John picked it up and started chopping the remains of a dead tree when the head broke off of the handle. He left it embedded in the tree and tossed the handle aside. Later when we were in the tent trying to get some sleep we heard some hippies walk by and one of them noticed the hatchet in the tree. "Look, there's part of a hatchet in this tree, I wonder if it belongs to someone." One of us yelled out "You can have it." The hippie seemed grateful, mentioning that he had lost one just like it.
At some point in the evening we went over to the drum circle where they had a big fire going. The fire was getting lower and one of the hippies calls out "Hey, would some brother go get us some more wood for the fire?" John immediately announces that he'll get it. We go back to the tent and he gets the bottle of gasoline and pours it all over a big log near the tent. We carry it back over to the circle and toss it in. The flames shoot up a good eight to ten feet and we hear "Oh wow, thanks brother... that was a good log."
There were several kitchens set up throughout the site. We walked by one where a guy with a long beard and a Cossack hat was chopping up a log with an axe. John asked if he needed help and the guy thanked him and gave him the axe. John started whacking the bejesus out of the log and the Cossack guy had a panicked look on his face and reached to take back the axe saying "uhh... you better let me do that brother, that's our only axe."
So we're watching them cook at the little kitchen there and they have this grey paste they're forming into patty shapes for veggie burgers. The cook calls them "love burgers" and starts calling out "Looooove burrrrgerrrrrrrs" several times. These things start breaking apart on the grill and the cook says "Look, we have nuggets too" and laughs heartily at his own joke. We decide not to eat whatever these love burgers are and move on. John ended up eating his potted meat product and decorated a nearby tree's branches with the tins.
We also packed some Snickers bars with us, as we heard those were good for trades. At one point along one of the trails, John was eating one and this dirty looking guy comes up and asks if he can have a piece. John hands it to him thinking he'll break a piece off but instead he shoves it in his mouth and takes a huge sloppy bite. He tries to hand it back but John just looks at it and tells him to keep it. The dirty man was rather grateful.
After we settled in for the night inside the tent, we heard an older hippie guy flirting with these younger women nearby. He made some comment about how it wasn't appropriate due to their age differences, "but that's okay, I still loooove youuuu" and punctuated it with a loud fart. It's common for the Rainbow hippies to randomly yell out "I love you" and other Rainbows respond in kind. So that became our call, we would yell out "I loooove youuuu" followed by a farting noise.
The Rainbow Legacy
After a quick stop to check it out the following year and once again a few years later, I never returned to the Rainbow gathering. My last encounter with any of them was in the late 1990s when I briefly worked at a large retail store on the road that went out to the forest. A few Rainbows were hanging out by the gas station in front of the store. I spoke to them for a couple minutes and then one reached into his pocket and gave me a handful of mushrooms he had picked from the pastures nearby.
I thought about going back out there several times, but I doubt it would ever be the experience I remember from those first two years. Most of the biggest disappointments in my life come from trying to hang on to something long after I should have let it go and moved on to something new. What made those first two years such great experiences was that they just fell together naturally. I really couldn't recreate them if I tried.
A big part of the issue I would have with returning is that I'm just not a Rainbow. I get what they're trying to do, and there's something poetic about living life day to day like that, but at the same time it's barely a step up from being homeless. I've come close to having no fixed abode at certain points in my life, and it's not a lifestyle I could see myself choosing if I have nicer options. My fun with the Rainbows was being in a certain place at a certain time with certain people; having it all come together like that two years in a row is really more than I could have hoped for.