Hippies, Go Home

by Jennie Rose Halperin

Around the Fourth of July each year for the last fifty years, thousands of hippies (in some years as many as 20,000) have descended on a National Forest somewhere in the continental United States for an enormous campout, surprising local residents, overextending the Forest Service, and causing alarm among the postal workers, who definitely smell weed in that parcel. The campout, known as the Rainbow Gathering, is organized via word of mouth by The Rainbow Family of Living Light, a merry band of “free spirits” who style themselves the “largest non-organization of non-members in the world,” and who encourage attendees to donate money, time, and belongings to them so that they may travel the world doing good.

Overwhelming resistance from townies everywhere failed to stop the party—until now. For the first time this year, Forest Service officials issued an order requiring attendees to leave the Plumas National Forest in California, with those who refused risking fines of up to $5,000 or a six-month jail sentence.

Fern Rose, who was evicted from the gathering, told the San Francisco Chronicle, “It’s not okay to be racist. It’s not okay to hate brown, Black, and yellow people. But it’s okay to hate hippies?” (Yikes!) To answer Fern’s question, it is okay to hate the much-maligned hippies, at least a bit. I should know; I was there.

In the summer of 2010, I was 22, recently graduated from a small women’s college, and riding with a relative stranger in a black 2003 Jeep on my way to the Rainbow Gathering in the Allegheny Mountains of Pennsylvania. Unable to find a job (admittedly, not really looking), I was largely transient that summer, volunteering labor on farms and camping around the Eastern U.S. with friends. Our plan for Rainbow was to meet up with another friend who’d convinced his university to give him a research grant to conduct anthropological research consisting of getting high, meeting girls, and journaling.