Over The Rainbow

By JOHN SKOW/GRANVILLE

The big conga drums stopped rumbling at about 4:20 a.m. on July 4, with five or six hard hand cracks, then a great, cavernous quiet. A visitor, sweaty in a winter sleeping bag, half-woke in his tent, wadded what turned out to be a loaf of six-grain bread under his head as a pillow and eased back to sleep. As he did, the drums started again, more softly: chunka-chunka-CHUNKA-chunka. They stopped for good an hour later, just before full light.

Welcome home, as the quirky, wistful wanderers who call themselves the Rainbow People say to each other every few minutes for reassurance. Where's home? This time it's in the high meadows in the Green Mountain National Forest, a couple of miles westward and upward from Granville, Vt. Up, down and around for half a mile or more in all directions, there are perhaps 14,000 Rainbows. For the 20th July in a row, mostly to the displeasure of local and state authorities, the Rainbows have invited themselves to a different national forest, there peaceably to assemble. And peaceably to shake free of the plastic society, hug each other, wear feathers, wear safety pins through their eyelids (as a few metal-head teenagers do), dance all night, smoke pot (some of them), jiggle around nude (some of them), soak themselves with beer (a troublesome minority), rant or chant or quietly meditate.

Need a free meal, a joint, a spiritual jump-start? Here's the Looney Saloon, Anni's Turtle Tea Tree, the Jesus Camp, the Faerie Camp (from which, periodically, a conga line of guys in net stockings and bras erupts, followed by a very male little old lady in a granny dress, carrying a purse), the Contradiction Koffee Kitchen, the No Guns Tipi, the Positively Peaceful Anti- Natural Flatfood Forum (pancakes here), the Om Tea House and Pooh Corner (a latrine). Lovin' Ovens gives away bread, and Julie, Dianne and Danielle, from Quebec, help you choose a flower essence to improve your cellular vibrations.

The Krishna Camp feeds 3,000 people at a time from the best kitchen on the mountain. CALM, the Center for Alternative Living Medicine, soothes the wounded. Several middle-aged fellows from Massachusetts work for three days to get a rustic automatic dishwasher going: press a foot pedal, and out squirts warm water and bleach. For a tribe of peace-and-love anarchists with no structure and no leaders (their Council is anyone who shows up at the Main Circle), the Rainbows' disorganization is surprisingly effective.

Michael, from Wisconsin, who is about 40, has a subsistence job taking care of animals in a pet store. He guesses that 5% to 10% of the Rainbows are street people or rural itinerants. Some are "Dumpster divers," who scrounge for food behind restaurants and supermarkets. A larger number live middle- class lives, often with jobs in the social services. And the majority are people in their 20s who work but feel estranged from house-and-mortgage society.

Barbara, a single mother in her 30s who looks as if tiredness is a permanent condition, slogs up the four-mile trail from a roadhead at Texas Falls. She carries a big, scruffy backpack and a nursing baby. A couple of other kids skip ahead. She comes to Gatherings because "I can feel safe for a few days." Safe from what? She doesn't say, and it doesn't seem necessary to ask.

Tim, from Burlington, Vt., works with the homeless there, and some of them have come with him. "For a week or so, with the Rainbows, they can be accepted," he says. "The rest of the time they're the scum of the earth." Too gloomy? Here's a joke tollbooth. A sun god (to judge from his gold headdress) is blocking the path with a stick. Have to tell a joke, omigod, let's see: "O.K." -- phony Russian accent here -- "Under communism, man oppresses man. Under capitalism, just the other way around." Laughter. We're on our way. Here's a citizen wearing a shirt and tie but no pants. Here's blond, pretty Sittora, from Massachusetts, who gives a warm, nude hug and a suggestion: Take off your shoes and walk slower. Here's a leftover '60s flower child with a T shirt that says JUST SAY YES! And a stilt walker, and a man with a cobra.

A few miles away at the Rochester, Vt., junior high school, the massed forces of the Incident Command System eagerly await calamity. The ICS concept integrates local and state police and federal authorities to deal with disasters like the Yellowstone fires of 1988. No disaster has occurred here, but state police in great numbers, otherwise idle, are giving $50, pay-on-the- spot traffic tickets, often to enraged local residents not accustomed to seeing cops they don't know by first name. The Rainbows have kept their uproar within the family, have raided no chicken houses and have dealt themselves with one case of pilfering. In earlier years the Forest Service and state officials in North Carolina and Texas fought the Rainbows unsuccessfully in the courts. Now negotiation seems to work, and Y. Robert Iwamoto, Forest Service district ranger, says the Rainbows have lived up to their agreements, and probably can be counted on to clean up their trash and reseed trails.

Back at the Rainbow's Main Circle, below a long, lyric ridgeline between Mount Roosevelt and Mount Wilson, a 62-year-old Wampanoag spiritual leader named Medicine Story makes a visitor feel welcome. He was part of the first gathering at Granby, Colo., in 1972. "We try to live in harmony with the earth, without leaders," he says. He gestures, waving away some undeniable shabbiness in the scene, and says, "At its highest, the Rainbow vision is the highest I know on the planet."

Maybe yes, maybe no. But an unbeliever must testify that on a cloudy Fourth of July noon, when a parade of children marched to break a morning-long silent vigil at the Circle, the sun came out. And around it was a haze ring that looked a lot like a rainbow.