Chapter 1
The Virgin Gathering
North Carolina, 1987
The first time I heard of the Rainbow Gathering was in the summer of 1977, when I was working for the Sundance Café, a vegetarian restaurant a half a block from Central Avenue and the edge of the campus of the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.
This place called itself a "worker's collective"; it was supposedly not officially owned by any one person, but by all who worked there, and there were lots of Marxist concepts expressed in the many meetings held and the numerous "agreements" made to manage the day-to-day workings of the business. It was a magnet for people of all kinds of hippie, New Age, New Left, and other sorts of "alternative" likings.
One afternoon in June I had to run a short errand for the restaurant in my own car, and one of my co-workers brought to me two customers who were traveling thru town and had asked him about getting a ride nearer to downtown, where the bus station was. I told them to get in, and to start some in-car chat, I asked where they were going. The one who had got into the passenger seat beside me answered in a quiet soft voice, "We're going to the Rainbow Gathering."
He was dressed in tattered denim bell-bottom trousers with many patches out of mismatching cloth, a flowing peasant shirt, and beads and jewelry hanging all over him. His blond hair was shoulder length and he had a wisp of a beard, all untrimmed and uncombed – the classic flower child hippie. He talked slowly and softly, always keeping a little smile on his lips, and he seemed to be in a blissful trance.
I questioned him a little further and he told me it was a big meeting going on in southern New Mexico. He wasn't too talkative, however, so I mostly just left him alone. I looked at him a few times, and he always looked back with the same vacant euphoric expression with eyes that seemed to be looking through me and beyond.
This "gathering" was a few hundred miles away – too far for me to want to go to when I was just getting started in this new job at the restaurant and had rather little money – so I didn't take him up on his invitation to come. I also figured it must be a meeting of mostly other people like him, and he had impressed me as being rather out of touch with reality, like some of the other psychedelic space cadets that passed thru the restaurant daily.
Some of the local newspapers ran some articles about it a week later. An opening line I remember from one of the "underground newspapers" was, "Casual nudity, open sharing of marijuana, and New Age spiritual rituals were some of the outstanding features of the Rainbow Gathering held this last week in the Gila National Forest." It had a picture of some people standing in a circle with their arms around each other's shoulders and waists, and a few of them were displaying bare buttocks to the camera. In the following months I heard more people talking about it around the restaurant. It seemed like a mass hippie convention, a bunch of freaks camping out in the woods and having a big love-in. It was a pretty sizeable assembly of people, several thousand strong, and it was always held on National Forest land.
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