Woodstock revisited 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The ride was a breeze up the New York State Thruway in my Chevy Impala Super Sport.  It wasn’t a convertible, but we had the windows down, and the August air drove through my girlfriend's black hair with ease.  Cool, we thought, going away for our first weekend together. A long weekend too, it was a Thursday.

 

We thought about a skinny-dipping side trip to low falls outside of  New Paltz, but thought we'd better get to the concert early and find a good spot to camp.  We didn’t have tickets yet.  So we drove past the Kingston exit and turned up the radio and noshed on some Wise potato chips, beef jerky, Coke, and 7up.  

 

New Rochelle Beth, as my friends called her, and I had been going out for a few months, occasionally double-dating with my Teaneck friends, but no bonding, though. She met only some of my friends, the ones who were back from College.  A few of the straight ones were going up to Woodstock; most of the others were definitely going. Since I was going with Beth, I had no plans to meet anyone, more of an “I’ll see you up” there arrangement. She was well dressed for a weekend camping trip and had a small suitcase.  I had a grocery bag and my gym bag.  

 

Woodstock was really not in Woodstock, so we took the unfamiliar exit that led to what would become known as Yasgar farm, it was “17”, near the town of Bethel.  The Music and Art festival was down a pastoral New York country road, not windy but not straight like a Mondrian painting.  The hills rolled out green as everything was back east in the height of summer of peace and love.  Little ponds and streams were spotted over the meadows dotted with cows, a small barn, and fenced-in horse pastures.

 

Beth liked music the way most of us like music; she liked to listen, but wasn’t into it. She wasn’t into much.  

 

WABC and W ??? were playing music from groups we heard would be there.  She knew who most of them were. The DJ’s were talking up the festival as a rock concert like no other.  There was no real advertising; it was different from how it was billed.  Three days of peace and love, Cool.

 

 

When we drove into the area, the place started to look like a big deal. Trucks and cars were coming in and out. It had a frantic pace.  The chain link fence was not all up, and the stage, the largest I’d ever seen, looked like an erector set or a rocket launch pad.  We had no idea where we were going and drove through, thinking Wow, this is really something.

 

We drove past the stage and up the hill. As we got further away, I wanted to get out and see the place.  I pulled over and looked down at the stage. Like ants and worker bees, bare-chested guys were climbing and hauling things up the cross metal masts as the wind blew through my strawberry blonde hair, showing no signs of thinning, at the time.  I got goosebumps when I saw how big the place was and noticed a pond on the left and behind the stage.

 

Want to go swimming I asked Beth. She looked at me unenthusiastically and said Ok.

 

I turned my yellow Super Sport around and drove down the hill. Two guys asked for a ride, and they sat on the back trunk.  I went slowly past the stage. They jumped off. To the left was a little road that led past the heliport down to the pond, but a truck with rigging blocked it, so we drove just past the stage and parked by a big 7-Up truck and got out.  Beth said let’s get tickets and I said lets swim first. So we did.  A buzz was in the air, and some of the air could give you a buzz. 

 

There were hippie-looking people all over.  The pond had a dozen or so nude half nude and fully clothed people.  

 

The pond was a typical country pond.  It was the size of a basketball court with trees leading down a small slope to the banks.  Another gentle drop off took the bottom into a cold spring-fed pool with a small stream at one end.  This pond was deep in the middle. I touched the mucky bottom, but got too much ear pressure to make it fun repeatedly. 

 

I took my clothes off. Beth stripped to her bra and panties.  They looked enough like a bikini that she felt OK.  I swam around as could be and loved it.  This was great.

 

On the shore was a guy who had pitched a tent next to his Country Squire station wagon. It was fully stocked and looked like he had pilfered his family’s fallout shelter.  There were cases of canned food. Beef stew, chicken fricassee, pork and beans. And soda chips and other junk that he bought.

 

I had some burger meat and asked if we could cook it.  Sure.  Ben said. He was totally laid back, and his girlfriend was bare-breasted and great looking.  I went to the car Beth stayed in and made friends with Ben's girlfriend. I never got her name, but we did talk plenty.

 

My car was parked in a perfect spot. Close to the stage, right on the main road, and now all the spaces on the roadside were lined with cars, VW vans, and service trucks all the way out to beyond where I could see. The place was filling with a grand, mind-opening excitement and growing by the hour.

 

It was about 4:00 pm by the time we finished eating and swimming, and we decided to take a walk. We walked up the rise to the road.  The truck was still there but nearly empty.  A Helicopter, which flew in every few hours, was landing to drop off some performer and promoter or whoever else warranted a whirlybird ride.

 

Beth thought the noise was obnoxious. I thought it was cool. We walked up the hill past the stage. It was almost done, and grips, gaffers, roadies, and stagehands crossed their paths and plugged it together, some more charged than others, some yelling for assistance, some yelling for power.  Past the stage and up the hill, the Hog farm, a community of hippies from the West coast, had put together a maze trail that meandered through the woods, which in spots was a real woods with trees thick enough you could see through them.  At intersections of birch and pines or maples and crabapple, the Hog farm had placed signposts.  I can’t remember any of the names, but I do remember smiling and laughing at the names and the whole idea that the Hog Farm colonized the forest in the name of peace and love.  Cool.

 

The word groovy, which I always felt was a West Coast word, was all over the place. I do remember that.  Mainly, because I could never say groovy and feel I wasn’t playing into some other person’s lingo and not being real. I found there were only two kinds of people who said groovy.  The ones who, to this day, still speak that way with sincerity and those who have changed how they speak several times since then.  However, at the time, it was a groovy scene without question.  I did say the word more than once over the course of the history-making weekend. We walked around talking to anyone.  No one was a stranger. Some had on wild hats and costumes.  We learned about the Hog farm.

 

Beth wanted to go back to the car and change.  I wanted to go for another swim or just watch, so we followed the groovy Hog farm signs to the stage and came out behind it.  By coincidence, across a small stream was my car.  It was about 8:00 pm, time to think about where to sleep.  We had sleeping bags, but no tent, and it was time to make our sleeping arrangement and take care of business.

 

We had used the porta-potty once and the wood twice since we had been there. At the pond, the woods were more convenient for me. Beth was OK with it, but I knew she was holding back a lot by now. A campfire had been burning all day, and more and more rocks were circling the fire pit.  Ben had a kettle that hung over it.  There were a pair of jeans and some socks drying too.

 

The socks smelled like they were burning, and Ben fished them off with his long stick with the nearly perfect three-pronged end.  He yelled, “Whose socks are these?” With only a loud voice and no accusing or ruffled emotion. 

 No one claimed them, and he placed them on one of the rocks and then fished for the pants that joined them.  

 

Can we stay here I asked Ben as if it were his place.  He was there first, and I felt he held claim to the land.  As if surprised by this landlord status, he said Yeah, of course, wherever you want.

I asked Beth if she had a preference.  She was talking with Ben’s girlfriend, who had put on a tight v- neck sweater and no bra.  I looked just enough to see how good she looked in a pink sweater, and just enough for Beth to notice I looked.  Beth had on her school jacket with New Rochelle on the back.

“I don’t care,” she said to me as I averted my eyes and smiled.  

 

I looked around and saw an unclaimed patch of flat land about thirty feet away from Ben’s station wagon and about the same distance from the pond.  “Perfect,” I thought. 

“How about here?” I called Beth as I stood in the middle of my groovy new Woodstock parcel.  “What about here?” I repeated.  “Cool,” said Beth, without looking, and went back to talking to Ben’s well-dressed girlfriend.  

“I’ll get the stuff,” I mumbled as I looked down at the pond. I could feel the summer dusk light chilling as the purplish blue hues of the sky color filled the pond.  Just then, two girls emerged from the water, one totally naked, the other topless.  They walked up the gentle grade just as the last shafts of a deep orange sun streaked over the hills and added a warm, natural glow to a very pleasing, perfectly exposed, and memorable picture. This was not a traditional Kodak moment, but it was so clear this weekend would be something for the record books, but maybe not the family album.

 

“Get both of my bags,” Beth interrupted as I blinked my eyes and went back to the thoughts of building our nest for the night.

 

The car was in the shade, and I used a flashlight to make my way over and back.  The number of people I passed in the dark seemed amazing.  This was a small town, I thought.  The road was busy enough that the cars with high beams flashing had to slow down to go past the people on both sides of the road.  There was laughing, and discussions, horn honking, some in fun, some in frustration. But everything moved along peacefully.  The air was warm-hearted and increasing thick and humid.  It kept the chill low, and not much clothing was necessary.  It was almost perfect sleeping conditions.

 

As I set up the sleeping bags, they all sat around the campfire, and some took part in what I called a recreational herb. I asked Ben if I could keep our food in his chuck wagon.  “Sure Man” was his even more casual smoke-induced reply.  I joined Ben Beth and the others around the campfire.  The rumble of concert preparation was subsiding. The Stars were brightening, and the clouds puffed past as we talked about whatever came into our heads – Man, it was a nice night.

 

Beth went to bed first, and I stayed up till my eyes said go to sleep.  I went over to my dew-covered sleeping bag.  Inside, it was comfortable and barely necessary on a warm, sultry summer night.  Beth woke, and we talked about tomorrow and meeting up with her sister in Bethel.  The sound of the summer of love was seductive, and the passion of our youthful freedom noticeable. Beth was too nervous to let our full emotions mix in public, even though we were thirty feet away and up the hill.  “No, stop it” was the last word I heard that night. I put my hands under my head, looked up at the cloud passing in the Aquarium night sky. Contemplating the Big Dipper and other remote constellations, I listened to the crickets rub their legs together, and could not help but hear the other far-out critters as they rubbed together.  This was the first night of a four-day weekend, I thought, and slept on it. 

 

The dawn of a new morning came with the smell of bacon, wet grass, and stinky weed, but the sound of the helicopter got me up.  Beth was not there.  Ben told me she went off to the port-a-potties as I got a piece of bacon and a cup of excellent coffee ladled up from a simmering pot. I went off into the woods to commune with nature.  

As my eyes dilated from the effects of the coffee, I noticed there were streams of people filling the road, thousands of them all over the hill, maybe ten thousand.

“There are people everywhere,” I said

Ben smiled and nodded. He seemed to enjoy cooking and made enough eggs, pancakes, and thick slab bacon to feed a pack of about twenty.   We had no idea the next morning Wavy Gravy would announce, “What we have in mind is breakfast in bed for four hundred thousand.”  

 

Beth came back from the Port-a-potty all pissed off.  

“I had to wait in line for ten minutes,” she complained out loud, took a sip of Ben’s coffee, made a face, then spat out some grounds. 

Some hippie guy who neither of us knew from last night said 

“Yeah, man, they said on the radio there’s like a hundred thousand people here,” He smiled a very stoned smile and sipped some coffee.

 

When Beth and I sat down on one of the rocks, she whispered to me that she dropped her lipstick and compact in the pit.  Then she moved her tongue around under her lip to get more coffee grounds out of her teeth.

“We have to meet my sister in Bethel at three,” she muttered, a demand as I watched the helicopter take off again and fly over in the direction of the stage and hover.

The summer clouds overhead were much thicker than yesterday, and it looked like rain. 

 

Anxiously, she asked, “When do you want to go? 

“We may not even get there,” I said, and told her about the radio reports. She didn’t want to believe me.  

A few dismissible sprinkles of rain hit the pot and sizzled. The clouds were puffy and fast-moving.

“But, the radio says the roads are packed,” I said with a timid, defensive tone

Ben’s girlfriend was trying to add a trusted sense of reality and told her that Governor Rockefeller might call it a disaster area.  

I don’t care, I have to meet my sister. We told out parent we’d meet.”

All right, we’ll go,” I said in a resigned boyfriend compliance.

 

The far-out hippie guy started to spout off about how the people were going to take over.  It was the age of the Yippie and the Pranksters' revolution was in the air.  I looked up again as the copter flew low over our heads. A camera was pointed out the window, and the pond had several swimmers. 

Do you want to take a swim or take a walk?

“No, I want to meet my sister,” she said and began to cry as the realization that we might be stuck hit her.

Ben's girlfriend went over to her and put her arm around her.  I threw my hands in the air and got some more coffee.

 

We debated the wisdom and option of going to Bethel.  The town was miles away from Yasgur’s farm, driving was the only realistic option.

 

 

I drove the car from my perfect spot through a no ending crowd of people my age. It was impossible not to be in awe of the hip nature of the countryside with colorful T-shirts, jeans, and faces, some smiling, some concerned.  Topless guy only outnumbered the girls a hundred to one.  But up until that summer, topless boys outnumbered girls a million to one. 

 

Beth was not embarrassed, just put off.  She was not enjoying the scene and was getting me bummed out, only more upset when she realized we would be late getting to Bethel.  About a half a mile from the stage, a state trooper was waving all cars, whether coming or going, into a giant muddy field.  Beth was fuming as we were directed to the next spot and pulled in.  My tires spun in the mud. I stopped the car and got out.  

 

We have to get to my sister, Beth insisted. 

Beth, my car is stuck in the mud in a field, and the roads are packed. What do you want me to do?  

 

We need to go to Bethel she demanded in denial.

It will take us hours, and your sister will be gone.  Why don’t we call your parents and tell them?

NO. I am going to get my sister.

Beth please 

NO.

She grabbed her small suitcase and stormed off toward the road, stumbling in the rutted mud.  

Beth, come on, leave your things here and call your parents.

No she said in a tone that made it easy for me to just shrug my shoulders and walk back to my car.

 

I looked back, and she was moving away fast. That was the last I saw of New Rochelle Beth. I don’t know when she met up with her sister.

 

I wondered if I should go with her, but I was pissed off to and it would only get worse.

Besides, this really was an amazing thing happening, and I couldn’t miss it.

 

I walked back to the pond alone, but talked all along the way to all kinds of people. The rain came down. It was the first real rain; most of it was a drizzle.  Near where my car was parked, right behind the Seven Up truck, which was now in mud too, I found a big sheet of plastic.  I pulled it over my head and walked along. It wasn’t far, and the rain let up for a minute.  Dragging my plastic sheet behind me like Linus, Charlie Browns friend, I made it back to the pond.  Ben, his girlfriend, and a few others were in his tent.  There was no room, so I sat down on a fallen branch and put the sheet over my head when the rain started up again.  The plastic rested on my head, and the whole thing fogged up.  I took the stick and jabbed it in the ground, and off and on it rained. Each time it stopped, I would    

 

walked down the muddy hill through sleeping bags and sneakers, coolers, shirts, shorts pant and paraphernalia of all kinds.  A single guitar note pierced the shell-shocked hillside. Another note, and by the third it was clear Jimi Hendrix was making those notes, and by the six stinging picked string the Star Spangled Banner was going down in the history of rock and roll. An American anthem played to a crowd of perhaps ten thousand in the rain-soaked countryside. 

I am not sure what it meant to me.  At that point, all my senses blurred, my feet swished through the place where nearly half a million people listened and watched a generation make an indelible mark and permanently change what was and what could be.

 

It was over.  I knew it was time for me to leave.

I walked directly down to the stage. Got the closest I had during the whole event and watched what seemed to be a sad Jimi Hendrix play “Are your experienced.”  

I mouthed the words “Not necessarily stone but beautiful.”  As the song ended, I went past the stage and watched another helicopter take off.  It was getting old. 

 I sat just below the helipad and looked down at my Woodstock estate.

A big carpeted tent, cans of food, a lantern, a lid of dope, and several residents who seemed to have no place to.

 

I sat there and smiled.  I lost an angry girlfriend, made love to another managed to hold it together and came out pretty well.  

Just as I wondered what to do, this guy came up tome and said hey man, you look mighty happy whats the deal.

I told him the deal and ended by saying now I’ve got to go, and don’t know what to do with all I got.  

Hey man, I am from Washington, and I’m staying here for another week.  I’ll make you a member of our commune, Cornucopia, in exchange.

 

Cool, I thought Ok

We went down to my tent complex. Everyone was around the campfire and pond. 

We had a little ceremony and did our exchange.  More later…