Rainbow Gathering
The northern hills of the Kisatchie—looming!—lyrically, mind you, in a wild, howling, wind-whipped abandon, humping up out of the Louisiana flatlands like great sandstone whales breaching beneath an Arcadian sky! We are out on the edge, the very frayed and frazzled perimeter of the American grid, rolling up to the Backbone Trail in a two-ton metal cage of combustion and anxiety.
The car grinds to a halt. The headlights punch a yellow, vibrating hole in the utter, crushing darkness of the Kisatchie Hills Wilderness.
WHAM!
Martha kicks her door open. She leaps from the metallic womb of the Ford, straight into the pool of high-beam glare, vibrating with the residual hum of the Interstate, the caffeine, the sheer, unadulterated tension of the Straight World. And there he is. A grey-haired man, horizontal in a webbed aluminum lawn chair, totally unfazed, totally Zen, existing in the dead center of the glare like a lizard on a hot rock.
Martha lunges at him, the ultimate interrogator of the square society, her hands planted firmly on her hips.
“What in the name of God are ya’ll doing out here?!” she demands, her voice cracking the heavy, humid silence.
The man’s visage folds, collapses, reshuffles itself like a deck of Bicycle playing cards. He doesn’t blink. He simply lowers his hands, chewing with the slow, methodical rhythm of a cow on the cud.
“I’m just chilling,” he says, his voice a low-frequency hum, a tectonic rumble. “And eating a peanut butter sandwich.”
“A peanut butter sandwich?!” Martha shrieks, pointing into the absolute pitch-black void surrounding the headlights. “Out here? In the total dark? There are bears! There are panthers! There is absolutely nothing out here!”
“It’s only nowhere if you’re trying to be somewhere else, sister,” the old man says, taking another slow, deliberate bite. “Here, it is everywhere. And the peanut butter is very good. It grounds the palate. It sticks to the roof of the mouth, reminding you that you have a mouth, that you possess a physical form upon this terrestrial plane. You want half?”
“No, I do not want half!” Martha says, throwing her hands up.
I step out, feeling the heavy, wet air of the forest hit me like a damp towel. “We saw the cars,” I say, trying to bridge the gap between our high-strung reality and his lawn-chair nirvana. “Dozens of them. Parked along the fire road.”
“The great migration,” the old man nods. “Refugees from the plastic-fantastic.”
Suddenly, the shadows beyond the headlights begin to shift. The huddled masses! The hippies! The absolute, bona fide exiles from the Great Capitalist Machine, gathering in the brush! Out from the pines steps a beautiful gypsy girl, skirts swirling in the headlight beam, bangles clinking—chink-chink-chink—stopping to greet us, offering us—yes!—a repast in our lonely, rattling, exhaust-fumed trek through this thing called Life.
“You have the dust of the Great Roaring Beast upon you,” she says, her voice a flawless, silvery flute. “You look thirsty for something that didn’t come from a vending machine.”
“We drove two hundred miles,” I say, feeling the exhaustion settling into my bones. “North from the concrete.”
A guy in a Baja hoodie, his hair a tangled rat’s nest of pure freedom, steps out beside her. He looks at us with deep, dilated eyes. “Missy,” he says to the gypsy girl, speaking with the booming gravity of a medieval king, “lead them forth and thither unto our chamomile kingdom!”
“Chamomile kingdom?” Martha asks, her eyes darting around. “What is that? A cult? Are we being initiated into a cult?”
“It’s a tea house, darling,” Missy laughs, reaching out and lightly touching Martha’s rigid shoulder. “Just a tea house. Deep in the hills. Come.”
The Barefoot Beatitude
And so we go! We cut the lights. We sever the cord! Missy leads us onto the trail, across the rocky, bone-jarring ridge of the Backbone. We follow her along the ancient flow of sandstone, and she is in a state of absolute, pure, unadulterated barefoot beatitude.
Martha is slipping, sliding, her heavy hiking boots clattering—clack-clack-scrape—feeling the bite of the rocks through her heavy rubber soles. She looks at Missy’s feet padding softly over the jagged flint and ironstone, defying all laws of podiatry.
“Your feet!” Martha gasps, grabbing a pine sapling for balance. “My god, girl, they look too tender for these rocks! There’s ironstone out here! You’re going to slice your toes to ribbons!”
Missy doesn’t even break stride. She floats a look back over her shoulder, smiling a smile that could melt bank vaults. “Oh darling, I was barefoot growing up on the farm in Wisconsin! The frost! The stubble! I guess I got used to it back then. Don’t worry, my tootsies feel fine.”
“Her tootsies feel fine,” Martha mutters to me, wiping sweat from her forehead. “I’m wearing Vibram soles and my arches are screaming, and her tootsies feel fine.”
“When you wear armor,” Missy’s voice drifts back to us, light as a feather, “you expect the world to fight you. You expect the earth to yield to your boot. When you take the boot off, you have to listen to the earth. You flow with the stone. You don’t fight it.”
We, however, are fighting it. We have years on Missy. We are carrying the psychic weight of mortgages and car insurance and the ticking clock. We are getting winded.
Missy stops. She squats down in her raggedy, dirt-hemmed dress, her legs opening outward like two bent candy canes, defying gravity, defying fatigue. She smiles beatifically upon us, as perfectly quiet and rooted as the tall, rogue sunflower swaying on the ridge, gazing down upon our sweaty, puffing bourgeois forms.
“Breathe the pine,” Missy instructs, her hands resting open on her knees.
“I’m breathing, I’m breathing,” Martha pants.
But wait—what’s that in the brush?
Snap. Crunch.
“Did you hear that?” I whisper, the Paranoia instantly spiking.
“It’s just the woods,” Missy says calmly.
“No, that was a boot,” I say.
A Woods Warden! The Man! The Establishment in a pressed green uniform, creeping along the lower firebreak, spying on we merry hipsters, tracing our trails with the narrow, suspicious voyeur eyes of the State, peeking into our personal paradise! We feel the heat of the Law, the impending bust!
“It’s the ranger,” Martha hisses, freezing in place. “You’re going to be arrested for cannabis and us on suspicion because we’re with you.”
“He’s just a man in a green shirt,” Missy whispers back, her smile never wavering. “Carrying the heavy burden of rules through a forest that knows none. Send him peace.”
My wife and Missy lock eyes in the moonlight—berried-bohemian belles chiming their invisible core-sets, their sunflower smiles blossoming, petals strewn right into my very soul. They are immune to the Paranoia! The Warden pauses, flashes his heavy Maglite into the canopy—SWEEP! SWEEP!—sees nothing but shadows, and tramps away.
The Test of the Divinely Touched
We crest the hill, and there it is: The Chamomile Kingdom. A sprawling canvas tarp strung through the pines, illuminated by the orange glow of a low fire and dozens of flickering candles. The forest squatters look up from their mats, a sea of patchwork denim and unwashed hair, and the greeting washes over us in a great, harmonic wave:
“Welcome home!” “Welcome home, brother!” “Welcome to the garden!”
Missy guides us to a woven rug. She takes a steaming, soot-blackened cast-iron kettle from the fire and pours. The water arcs in a gleaming ribbon, filling our mismatched ceramic cups. We share the herbal potion, the steaming, earthy brew of roots and mint that acts as the great equalizer, the magic key that makes us no longer strangers in this deep-woods Woodstock.
“Drink the weather,” a guy with wire-rimmed glasses says, nodding at my cup. “You’re drinking the earth, man.”
“It’s very… earthy,” Martha says, sipping cautiously.
Then comes the moment. The Test. Or, in this case, the Herbal Test. A young man with a peacock feather in his hair leans across the rug. He reaches into a leather pouch and pulls out a joint the size of
a Cuban cigar. The sacrament!
“For the journey,” he says, his eyes half-closed, offering it to me.
Silence. The circle pauses. Missy watches. The guy with the wire rims watches. The fire snaps.
I look at the joint. I look at Martha. The vibrations are already peaking! The tea! The hike! The absolute unreality of it all! I smile, raising a hand, palm out, a beacon of peaceful refusal.
“Thank you, brother,” I announce to the circle, my voice ringing out with strange, unearned authority. “But Martha and I… we are divinely touched. We must abstain from mind-altering substances!”
The peacock-feather guy blinks. “Divinely touched?”
“The mirror is already wiped clean!” I declare, leaning into the skid. “The pine wind! The long drive! The fear of the Warden! We take Haldol and if we partake of Bob Marley’s herb, we might find ourselves in such a far orbit of the mind we might not find our way home! We want to see this frequency exactly as it is!”
“Oh, wow,” the guy whispers, pulling the joint back as if it were suddenly glowing radioactively. “That is… that is heavy, man.”
“Walk the clear path!” someone shouts from the darkness.
“Honor the untethered mind!”
Are we narcs? Are we squares? No! The confession acts like a psychic depth charge! It brings on a massive, spontaneous group hug! The peacock guy lunges forward and wraps his arms around me. Missy grabs Martha. We are on the bus! We link arms, swaying, rising to our feet, dancing in a massive circle under the guiding light of the eternal sunshine burning right through the midnight canopy!
The Climax: The Downpour and The Showdown
And then—KABOOM!
The sky splits wide open! A massive, biblical Louisiana downpour! The rain hits the canvas tarp like a machine gun—rat-a-tat-tat-tat! We are drenched, soaked to the absolute marrow! We walk out from under the tarp and into the post-rain cool, the temperature dropping ten degrees in ten seconds. We are experiencing the earth, the rivulets of water and thick red mud squelching between our toes.
My mind is completely at peace, afloat in a neon lake of dreams underneath the bruised and tumbling clouds.
We circle back to the roaring fire. A long-haired Jesus hippie, water dripping from his beard, looks at us with perfectly dilated, cosmic eyes. He stirs the embers with a long stick.
“Our gathering,” he intones, his voice vibrating with absolute sincerity, “is like another world. Completely unlike our workaday lives. Out there, man, time is a currency. It’s a meat grinder. You sell it until you die.”
“It’s true,” Martha says, suddenly emotional, clutching her wet clothes. “It’s all clocks and traffic and fluorescent lights. It makes it so hard to go back.”
The truth hits us like a thunderbolt! The barriers are down! We start spilling our guts, sharing our pie-in-the-sky dreams with our newfound tribe!
“We yearn to drop out!” I shout over the snapping fire. “To leave it all behind! We’re going to Oregon!”
“Oregon!” Missy gasps, her eyes shining. “The soil there is black and ancient!”
“We’ll grow rutabagas!” Martha cries out, her hair plastered to her cheeks, caught in the throes of agricultural ecstasy. “Cucumbers! Great, sprawling vines of squash!”
“We’ll live by a pond!” I yell, pacing around the fire. “Or a river! We’ll gather berries in the spring! Blackberries! Life will slow down into pure, unadulterated sanity on a breezy day with birdsong under fluttering leaves!”
“The work of living is the only holy work!” the Jesus hippie shouts, throwing a handful of sage into the fire, sending a massive plume of white smoke into the air.
But then—FLASH!
A blinding beam of halogen light cuts through the smoke! It sweeps across the rutabaga-dreamers! It hits the canvas! It hits the fire!
The Woods Warden has returned, and this time he has marched right into the center of the camp, boots squelching heavily in the mud. The brass badge gleams! The heavy flashlight sweeps over the crowd.
“Alright, that’s it! Party’s over!” the Warden barks, his hand hovering near his shoulder radio. “No permits! Illegal fire! You people are trespassing in a protected wilderness area! I need everyone to pack up their gear! Now! Let’s go! Move it!”
The tension spikes! The harsh, angular reality of the Law has pierced the Chamomile Kingdom! The dream is collapsing! The squares are taking back the grid!
“Officer,” Martha starts, stepping forward, the polite suburbanite reflex kicking in. “We were just—”
“I don’t want to hear it, ma’am,” he snaps, his jaw locked in the classic, grimace-of-the-State. “You’re all in violation of federal code. Gather your things.”
But then—from the deep shadows at the edge of the firelight—a massive, bearded Sasquatch of a man steps forward. He is huge. He is primal. And he isn’t holding a weapon. He is holding a dented, cast-iron skillet.
And from the corner of the tarp, previously drowned out by the rain, comes the unmistakable, gritty, swamp-water guitar riff of John Fogerty! A battered, silver, eight-D-cell-battery-devouring boombox is pumping out Green River! The very anthem of the Southern youth!
The Sasquatch doesn’t argue. He doesn’t cite the First Amendment. He simply lowers the skillet onto the glowing coals.
Sssssssssizzle!
The smell hits the damp, heavy air. It is the deep, peppery, vegetarian richness of red beans simmered to a velvety, slow-cooked perfection, spiked with just the right hit of cayenne and garlic, alongside a stack of thick, steaming squares of skillet cornbread—the golden, crumbly, honey-buttered kind that smells exactly, fundamentally, molecularly like the kitchen of a small, aluminum-sided house in Shreveport circa 1974.
The Warden freezes. His hand is still hovering over his Motorola radio.
Missy drifts forward, absolutely dripping wet, her eyes wide and luminous. She moves with a slow, fluid grace that makes the mud seem like a ballroom floor. She closes the distance between them, ignoring the uniform, ignoring the badge, and wraps her arms around him in a big, lingering, sensual hug. She pulls him in, tight, the scent of wildflowers and rain clinging to her, and whispers coquettishly, her breath warm against his ear:
“Make love, not war, officer…”
And then—contact!—the full, undeniable geometry of the bohemian female form! She presses the soft, rain-slicked curve of her hips and the inviting, supple swell of her breast right against the rigid, starch-pressed wall of his uniform. It is a tactile ambush! And before the State can even register the violation of its personal perimeter, she plants it—a warm, wet, absolutely devastating kiss, her luscious lips pressed perfectly, intoxicatingly against his own tight, bureaucratic mouth. The sheer, overwhelming wattage of the embrace casts an absolute, undeniable spell on him! His eyes, previously locked in the hard glare of the Law, suddenly sparkle and dance in the firelight as if she had just reached right into the cosmos and sprinkled pure, unadulterated fairy dust across his corneas!
“…stay and break bread with us.”
The Warden’s flashlight beam trembles. He is a man caught between the rigid geometry of the Law and the undeniable, gravitational pull of Mama’s red beans and a John Fogerty bassline. His jaw clenches. His eyes dart from the hippies to the steaming plate Missy is now placing on a cedar stump—red beans, rice, and that golden, familiar cornbread.
For ten agonizing seconds, the Kisatchie forest holds its breath.
Then… the olfactory triggers bypass the cerebral cortex! The smell of that cornbread hits the deepest, most primal memory-banks of his childhood! The bureaucratic circuitry in the Warden’s brain begins to melt.
His hand, ever so slowly, drops from the radio. His shoulders, previously squared in the posture of the State, slump. The heavy, blinding flashlight clicks off.
He doesn’t smile. Not yet. He doesn’t completely surrender the dignity of the badge. But he takes a slow, heavy step forward. He looks at the steaming plate, completely bewildered by his own
surrender.
“My mother…” the Warden mutters, staring at the beans and the cornbread, his voice cracking. “She never used meat. Just the beans, the rice, and the cornbread. Just like this.”
“So do we, brother,” the Sasquatch man rumbles, handing him a clean, wooden spoon. “So do we.”
The Woods Warden slowly sits down on a log. The boombox thumps its classic rock rhythm against the dripping pines. And there, deep in the heart of the great Louisiana darkness, the Law and the Bohemia break bread together, united in the warm, spicy, magnificent salvation of a home-cooked meal.
