Crafting Collectivity

American Rainbow Gatherings and Alternative Forms of Community

Chelsea Schelly

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317261957
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Every summer, thousands of people assemble to live together to celebrate the Annual Gathering of the Rainbow Family. Participants establish temporary systems of water distribution and filtration, sanitation, health care, and meals provided freely to all who gather, and they develop sharing and trading systems, recreational opportunities, and educational experiences distinct to this creative social world. The Rainbow Family has invented itself as a unique modern culture without formal organization, providing the necessities of life freely to all who attend. The Annual Gathering of the Rainbow Family has been operating for more than forty years as an experiment in liberty that demonstrates how material organization, participation, and cultural connection can reshape social relationships and transform individual lives. Grounded in sociological theory and research, the book considers what kind of culture the material systems of Babylon reinforce and how society could facilitate the kind of social world and human welfare humans desire."

CHAPTER 1

WHAT’S WITH THAT RAINBOW FEST?

Sitting at Carefree Cafe, the only twenty-four-hour coffee shop in Tulsa, Oklahoma, I stare idly at my economics homework, wishing I hadn’t already finished my sociology reading for the week. A freshman in college, I still have the teenage drive to try to look older than I am—I am chain-smoking cigarettes and don the unusual combination of a shaved head and a long polyester dress printed with large bright flowers. Neither makes me stand out in this place where everything and everyone are (or maybe are just trying to be) alternative, different, unusual, against the mainstream—everything I wanted to explore after my suburban upbringing.

It was that night, after my schoolbooks had been put away, that my world changed. That night, I met Cadence, Jack, and Sam. Cadence and Jack were just a few years older than me and went to the community college in town. Sam was older, in his mid-thirties; to me, his eyes held all the wisdom in the world.

It was late spring, already after spring break, and for a college student there’s often nothing left to talk about at that time of year except summer. So our conversation quickly turned to the season of freedom for those with a semester-based schedule, and they told me where they were headed.

“To the Rainbow Gathering,” Cadence told me.

“Rainbow what?” I asked, trying not to sound too naïve.

“A Rainbow Gathering. It’s basically where a bunch of hippies come together and hang out in the woods. Everything’s free, I mean all the food and stuff, and it’s always a good time. I mean, what’s better than free living in the woods? And the people are so cool. It’s like a big party.”

So at the end of May 2002,1 traveled to my first Rainbow Gathering with Cadence, Jack, and Sam. It was the Oklahoma regional Gathering, and we rode together in Cadence’s old Subaru with faux-wood paneling, the piles of camping gear overflowing from the station wagon’s rear storage compartment and cramping those of us seated in the back.

What Is a Rainbow Gathering?

Driving to the Oklahoma regional Gathering that summer was an eye opener: I didn’t even know that there were roads in America so worn and potholed, and certainly couldn’t comprehend that I would drive many more similar roads in the coming decade. We drove for miles down a seemingly endless dirt Forest Service road before coming to the “front gate,” where an old man with sorrowful eyes kindly gave us directions to park and walk in. We parked, collected our gear, and walked the mile or so into “Rainbow land”—the space in the National Forest where people camp, cook, and serve and eat meals in outdoor kitchens that feed all attendees for free, and make music in drum circles that sometimes go all night. Within Rainbow land, the informal rules and culture of the Rainbow Family prevail. These include looking people in the eye; saying “Welcome home” to anyone who has clearly just arrived, or to anyone at all really; cooking in outdoor kitchens, where food is made and served by an often evolving group of volunteers and where cooks announce when food is ready so that anyone hungry can come to eat; calling everyone “brother” or “sister” or “mama” or “family” and talking to anyone at any time; and making all decisions in councils through peaceful consensus. Yet at a Rainbow Gathering, no one has a definitive say on what anyone else chooses to do. It was at this small regional Gathering that I became introduced—and inspired.

Rainbow Gatherings have been happening since 1972. In 1970, a music festival event called Vortex took place in Oregon.¹ After that, some “tribes” of folks participating in the political counterculture, including peace activists and veterans returning from the Vietnam War,² got together to organize an event that they thought would be the best of all countercultural ideas they’d come to know: part rock concert (without the pricey ticket or port-a-potty lines); part motorcycle rally (without the alcohol); part New Age spiritual church where spiritualities, religions, and traditions of all kinds would be welcomed and honored (without the dogma or discipline); part life in the trenches (without the war)—a nonviolent, noncommercial Gathering, a prayer for peace where money was not a useful form of currency (except for donations to the “Magic Hat” that provide for food and supplies at the Gathering).

Thus, the first “Rainbow Gathering of the Tribes” occurred, with thousands of invitations mailed out to hippies, activists, other countercultural folk, and politicians across the country. The invitation requested that people come to attend a noncommercial, nonviolent, spiritual event where all could gather to pray for peace on a mountaintop in Colorado. In a report titled “Peace and Religious Festival Begins in Colorado,” the New York Times described the Rainbow Gathering in 1972 as “young people by the thousands” who were “quietly gathering … for what they termed ‘a religious festival.’ … They came to meditate in the forest, to chant prayers together, talk over things and play flutes and guitars and drums under the spruce and aspen trees.”³ This description is still largely fitting for Gatherings today. At a Gathering, love is the vibe and improvisational music the rhythm.

These annual events have taken place every summer thereafter, and the Rainbow Family of the Living Light celebrated their forty-first year of gathering with their National Rainbow Gathering of the Tribes in 2012. Since the very first Gathering, all the food, water, and sanitary and medical facilities have been freely provided to all attendees through the voluntary labor and participation of attendees. People from all walks of life are accepted and welcomed for a temporary repose in the woods, where kindness and consensus prevail and where people can express themselves in almost any conceivable way without formal sanction.⁴

Today, regional Rainbow Gatherings happen all over the country during the summer and throughout the year, with many different regions of the United States hosting local events. There’s even a Gathering that takes place in Florida in the winter, so that the Rainbow Family always has a place to be. Some full-time “road dogs” spend their entire year traveling from Gathering to Gathering. Others who attend Rainbow Gatherings are contemporary versions of the American hobo, full-time travelers for whom mobility itself is a virtue,⁵ who attend Gatherings in between temporary spells in various towns. Many others come from jobs, homes, and communities across the nation to attend. The National Gathering officially takes place July 1–7 every summer, although there are people gathered at the site for weeks before and after the week of the main event.

In the United States, Gatherings always take place on National Forest land, where camping is free for those willing to collect firewood, shit in the woods, and leave no trace. For the Rainbow Family, this is key: the belief that Americans have the right to use land that is public, that is legally theirs, in order to peacefully gather, providing an alternative vision to mainstream society (what they call Babylon) where conceptions and practices of private property dominate the geographical, political, and cultural landscape. At a Rainbow Gathering, in contrast to Babylon,⁶ subsistence is freely provided to all through collective work and assistance, kindness is openly shared, and no one is governed but everyone has the potential to govern themselves.

Before my first National Gathering, which took place in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in 2002, I hadn’t spent any time in a National Forest. I assume that’s true for a lot of Americans these days. Now a decade later, I’ve camped in many National Forests throughout the country and I know that there’s a lot of variation among them. But Rainbow Gatherings require that certain resources be available, and even though the National Gathering is in a different place every year, all of the sites chosen for a Gathering have to have these requisite elements.

First, there must be a place to park hundreds of cars, often a dirt Forest Service road that travels through the woods or an open meadow along such a road. Forest Service regulations require that all four tires of a vehicle must be parked off the road, so the road must have wide enough shoulders and must itself be wide enough that people can park without blocking two-way traffic.

Second, there must be enough water, often from a spring or stream, and it must be clean enough to be drinkable—even for infants, children, and pregnant women—after boiling or filtering. Finally, there must be a meadow (called “main meadow,” where “main circle” occurs) large enough to accommodate hundreds or even thousands of people. A dinner meal takes place in this main meadow every evening throughout the Gathering (for at least the week of July 1–7 and often beginning earlier, at the end of June, if kitchens are prepared to serve). The incredible celebration of July 4 that marks the climax of the Gathering also takes place in this space.

Space for parking, a source of clean water, and a large open meadow—although Rainbow Gatherings take place at different sites every year, and each site presents different resources and challenges, these three assets are essential for a Rainbow Gathering. When describing the process of selecting a site, Butterfly Bill writes, “We never expected to find all of these things just the way we wanted them, but looked for a place that satisfied a balance of all these needs.”⁷

National Forest land is used by lots of people for lots of different reasons; but if it can ever be considered wilderness,⁸ a Gathering turns it into a unique sort of metropolis. Trails become densely packed with people, thousands of feet crossing them each day. Meadows get trampled to make room for trade circles, yoga sessions, masses of tents, shared meals, and lots of smiling faces. Dozens of kitchen facilities of various shapes and styles are constructed throughout the woods, built much like I imagine the outposts of trench warfare were. Large fire pits are topped with metal grates for cooking, earthen ovens are constructed out of mud for baking, serving stations are made with tree branches lashed together and then attached to tree trunks to form make-shift countertops, and trench latrines (“shitters”) are dug nearby each kitchen (but not too near).

At the National Gathering in the thick northern woods of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, I swatted mosquitoes constantly as I wandered the trails and visited kitchens with names like “Turtle Soup” and “Lovin Ovens” and “Montana Mud.” In these kitchens, people were gathered around playing music, making food, conversing, and connecting with strangers. I also spent time at “procrastination stations” where people take a pause from walking the trail to share stories, cigarettes, or snacks. Numerous times every day, I got hugs from strangers, heard the words “loving you” accompanied by direct eye contact and a smile from people I had never met, and sometimes got asked for my pocket trash—one way to both meet a stranger and help keep the woods clean. I came to know and love this temporary world in which people live, act, and interact differently in this collective experience called a Rainbow Gathering.

Ten years later, I still have friends unfamiliar with this unique social world asking me questions like, “What’s with that Rainbow Fest?” I tell them it takes place July 1–7, with July 4 being the climax of attendance and celebration, in a different National Forest every year.⁹ It is definitively not a festival like Woodstock, Bonnaroo, or Burning Man because it is not a ticketed event. This is an important ideological distinction—it is a totally noncommercial event where anyone can come, everything is free, and nothing can be purchased with the currency of cash. At the first Rainbow Gatherings, people would highlight the special nature of these events by exclaiming, “This is not a Dead show!”¹⁰ (a reference to The Grateful Dead, a band that many of the first Rainbow Gathering attendees had likely seen perform during one of their notorious live shows while “on tour”), differentiating this noncommercial, more spiritually charged space from other countercultural happenings. At the 2012 Rainbow Gathering, I heard the phrase, “This is not Bonnaroo!” used similarly by younger folks expressing dissatisfaction with people using cell phones in Rainbow land.

It is, in many ways, still as it was originally intended—a free, open gathering of people where anyone is welcome to come and all necessary subsistence is provided freely to all through the efforts of all participants. For many (but not all, perhaps not ever and certainly not now), the Gathering is about being peaceful, acting peacefully, and praying for peace. For some, Rainbow Gatherings actively demonstrate the possibility of a nonhierarchical, freely participatory, and freely providing society where peace prevails over violence and freedom over domination or repression.

The material systems established to provide food, water, sanitation facilities, and medical care at a Gathering are based upon lessons learned by Vietnam War veterans who helped the hippies from the city construct outdoor kitchens, latrines, and systems of sanitation.¹¹ Rainbow Gatherings involve a wide array of alternative technological arrangements and forms of material organization. They take place in remote natural settings without electricity, running water, or flush toilets. Yet the basic services usually provided by the technological systems that bring these things to mainstream society—food to eat, water to drink, a place to relieve yourself, and often even a place to bathe—are provided freely to all those who attend.

To support life at a Rainbow Gathering, gatherers establish what is essentially an extremely sophisticated form of camping. Food is cooked over fires or in earthen ovens, water is collected and filtered from a natural source and transported by an elaborate system of PVC piping, constructed and dismantled by gatherers, to wherever water is needed, and bowels are relieved in deep trench latrines dug by the gatherers, often with very comfortable makeshift toilets constructed over them, which are covered when full. Volunteers stationed at the Center for Alternative Living Medicine (CALM), the Gathering’s version of MASH, provide free medical care and basic treatments for dehydration, poison ivy, minor cuts, and the like.

These systems are instituted, organized, maintained, and dismantled based on the principles of anarchistic participation and a belief in leave-no-trace environmental practices. Everyone’s basic needs (food, water, sanitation, and medical care) are provided for without commercial or monetary systems—kitchens rely on their own resources, donations (called “kick-downs” in Rainbow vocabulary), and supplies purchased with money donated to the Magic Hat, which is the only acceptable way to use currency at a Gathering. The establishment and maintenance of these temporary systems involve, indeed require, mass participation.

The cultural systems present at a Rainbow Gathering blend an eclectic mix of New Age, Native American, and Eastern spirituality, countercultural values, egalitarian organization, participatory engagement, and—perhaps above all else—freedom. The result is an annually reoccurring ritual in which many people experience collective effervescence: a heightened sense of collectivity, connectivity, and social togetherness. Some people come to pray; others come to party. The key is the freedom to come participate and experience this unique social world that exists without many of the boundaries and limitations that confine everyday life in mainstream America, including boundaries like access to sustenance and medical care as well as boundaries like social exclusion and isolation.

One of the ways that the Rainbow Family communicates is through “raps.” Although the words vary ever so slightly, you can find these raps posted or printed on pamphlets at the information booth of every Gathering (often referred to as simply “Information”) on signs and banners throughout a Gathering, on an unofficial informational Rainbow website,¹² and at other locations in cyberspace.¹³ These help to communicate the values and practices of the Rainbow Family and their rituals. Rap 107 expresses “Gathering Consciousness”:

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