Take Me to Your Leader

A huge annual gathering of hippies freaks out the National Forest Service

Sam MacDonald from the February 2001 issue

(Page 3 of 5)

While Owl seemed to be the man who knew the most about sanitation, digging the slit trenches was a community responsibility. A sign at the Info Center encouraged the volunteer spirit: "Need something to do? Ask for someone with a shovel. Dig a shitter." Anyone who didn’t know how would be referred to Owl or another Rainbow who knew. Surprisingly, despite the free love and easy drugs on hand to occupy everyone’s time, volunteers surfaced to dig whenever the need arose.

According to Owl, the authorities dislike the Gathering because they can’t control the people involved or take any profits off the top. "They hate it because we are not building a stadium, like professional sports," he explained. "There is no transfer of funds. There is no way the government can tax us." There is no Rainbow Family organization, he stressed. "None of us comes here as part of the Rainbow Family. We come out as individuals. It just so happens that we have no official legal standing as an organization, and the police can’t stand that."

Owl was interrupted by a young man who stopped to ask for trash bags. He was heading out of the Gathering and planned to pick up garbage on the way. At first, Owl thought he’d have to send the kid away empty-handed, but then he looked around the lean-to and found a few bags that someone had donated to the cause.

And so it goes with Rainbow focalizers. Someone has to guide the event. In the case of sanitation, Owl is widely considered something of a shitter guru. Still, he isn’t a leader—not in the usual sense of the word. He just saw something that needed to be done, and he did it.

In this informal manner, 23,000 bellies were regularly filled, largely through neighborhood kitchens that sprang up around the site and fed the masses for free. The kitchens, often affiliated with various clans from around the country, operated almost continuously. Offerings included bread and granola baked in mud ovens constructed on site. Unlike Burning Man, where participants are expected to haul in everything they need,
or Woodstock ’99, where promoters charged drunken, dehydrated teenagers $4 or more for bottles of water, the Gathering allows people to show up with nothing but the shirts on their backs and walk away a few pounds heavier.

Merry Sunshine, operated away from the main circle of activity, was one of the few kitchens that offered meat. It also provided any and all takers with clean drinking water—a hot commodity in Montana, where cows grazing on National Forest land have had the polluting effect you’d expect. Perhaps even more popular was the kitchen’s makeshift solar shower.

NZANE, an energetic, bearded man in a wheelchair—he had lost a leg, and almost lost an arm, in a motorcycle accident—was a cook at Merry Sunshine. According to him, putting the whole operation together, counting food, equipment, and other supplies, probably cost about $15,000.

Labor, on the other hand, was free. After eating at the kitchen, my photographer went to work washing dishes. Later, he volunteered to dam a stream to make it easier to fetch shower water. A Rainbow from Amsterdam who stopped by for water ended up taking over dish duty, and an exceptionally dirty young man walking along the trail gathered firewood for the kitchen while waiting for his turn in the shower. It was impossible to tell who actually came with the kitchen and who had stopped by to help.

"There’s no organization here," admitted NZANE. "It’s just whoever picks up the ball and runs with it. Someone always seems to do it."

While Merry Sunshine did offer food free for the taking, the kitchen did not participate in the Gathering’s largest daily spectacle: dinner in the Main Circle. Every day around twilight, thousands of hungry Rainbows would gather in the meadow and arrange themselves in concentric circles. After a series of messages and some group meditation, volunteers from the various kitchens would arrive with coolers full of their finest offerings, distributing the free food to everyone sitting in the circle.

While the kitchens provided most of the food themselves, the Rainbows also organized a "magic hat" parade, a small band of still more volunteers that tramped around the circle singing the magic hat song while everyone but the Drainbows donated what they could to the cause. The money was then handled by a team of at least five respected Rainbow elders, who spent it on any needed supplies. They distributed the rest to the participating kitchens to make sure there would be food the following day.

While the Rainbows do an impressive job of guiding their anarchic community through the various hardships of living outdoors, the going isn’t always smooth.

First, the participants show a strong aversion to the use of money. On my first day at the Gathering, I made my way to the large "trading village" in the hope of scoring a trinket to impress my own hippie princess back home. The large circle included scores of Rainbows displaying everything from beads and handmade crafts to psychedelic mushrooms and rolling papers.

It soon became clear that no one was interested in my money. Trying to buy a bowl from a teenage girl, I asked what she was hoping to trade. When she told me she needed gas money to get home, I jumped at the opportunity. She sneered at my useless wad of bills. "Look man," she said, "I really try to keep money out of the trade." Instead, she was hoping to trade with people willing to siphon fuel directly out of their cars.

After several similar encounters, I realized that the closest thing to money at the Rainbow Gathering was green of another sort: marijuana. Weed was acceptable as a trade in almost any circumstance—an informal medium of exchange. Unfortunately, we didn’t have any, so we had to go to A-Camp.