Woodstock West!

While sitting there, I struck up a conversation with a young couple next to our spot. Dan and Linda had been part of the overnight set-up scene but escaped the reveille beatings. They had the sense, or intuition, to move back from the stage area before the disastrous call from the stage. This meeting was another coincidence that I found amusing and fortuitous because it turned out that this couple came from my home town, Spokane Washington. Linda was petite and pretty in a gauzy, see-through, dress displaying her little apples of breasts and that dark triangle above her thighs that I found very attractive. I was disappointed to find that she and Dan were on their honeymoon. They had just gotten married a few days before at the Zen Center in San Francisco. Finding she was likely off limits, I was still willing to feign interest as she explained her Buddhist beliefs. I’d heard none of it except for the part where she explained that she had been on a bad acid trip in which she had stripped naked in front of a full length mirror, examined her body, and accepted it as beautiful.

I understood because, as the acid came on, I too loved her body and was pleasantly surprised that this talk about spirituality so far had nothing to do with the usual crap about angels and demons. There she was almost nude in her gauzy dress talking about her body and Zen Buddhism to a strange horny man right in front of her newly-wed husband who just sat there listening knowingly. I was mesmerized.

She went on, “I stood there naked and followed the contours of my flesh. I saw my body as something beautiful reaching its prime but already going towards decay and death.”

I tried to lighten it up a bit by obviously complimenting her on her form, “I don’t see any decay going on.”

She didn’t respond and continued, “I saw all that and stood there for what seemed an eternity and watched myself…, approved myself… and embraced myself.”

God, she was driving me nuts. My hormones were screaming and only abated because the crowd began pressing in. A hot air balloon hissed and drifted above, the music began and we had to stand. It was one of those elbow to elbow things… at one point the ground became muddy under my feet. I’d lost track of Randy and the sleeping bags we’d spread out.  We were down-hill from the dozen or so portapotties: that were entirely inadequate for the crowd they were to service. Perhaps there had been plans to service them but there was no way for the septic pump trucks to cut through the crowd. I looked around and saw that it was a sea of humanity completely filling that entire natural bowl with nowhere, no way, was there a route out of there to take a leak if one needed to. Besides the steady stream of urine running from each portapotty, I saw people pissing where they stood: women simply hiked up their skirts. At one point during that day, while I was still standing near Dan and Linda, a couple of school-busses were driven down into the crowd by the Hells Angels. There was nowhere, and no way, to get out of the path of the busses but that didn’t stop the buses. They simply plowed into the crowd. It was some kind of wonder that nobody was seriously injured by that Hell’s Angels display of humanity. This was only some of the stuff I witnessed and some more that I didn’t. It was said that women were being pulled out of the crowd onto the busses and raped but I hadn’t seen that happen. It was bad enough what I did see. The hot air balloon hissed and climbed and hovered over the scene …this Woodstock West crap was really getting old.

Well, everyone knows what happened on the stage with the Jefferson Airplane, Santana and so on: it is history. The evening ended after the Stones came out with Sympathy for the Devil… Mick Jagger strutted his usual stuff on the stage. “But what’s troubling you is the nature of my game… hoooh… hoo… hooo-ooh!” After the music was over the crowd started milling around in a daze. I had been tripping all day on the several hits of free acid I’d dropped by then and trying hard to understand what had happened. Camp fires here and there lit up little groups huddled around them. The medical Tripping Tent was full to capacity. I had hung out there for shelter, waiting for dawn. Some came in reporting a campfire overrun by a car driven frantically by someone paranoid; tripping, thinking the Hells Angels were after him. Three people were killed in that one. I had no idea what I was going to do next. I was in one of those here and now spaces.

Dawn finally arrived and the light of day revealed a scene after a battle. Sleeping bags abandoned scattered throughout. Baggies with sandwiches… pot… some film cans with known and unknown pills were there too. I found a bag with a fresh ham n’ cheese sandwich and ate it. I found a bag with some joints already rolled and lit one up. I saw a young looking girl in shorts with strong thighs, thick calves, wearing heavy wool socks and hiking boots doing the same… eating a sandwich. I approached her with the joint, “Have a hit.”

“I don’t smoke pot,” she answered in a non-judgmental tone that commanded respect.

“Oh, really, what is your name?” my curiosity was piqued.

“Miriam.”

She wore thick… very thick, coke-bottle eye-glasses but she reached down and picked up a joint by my feet. “You want it?”

“Sure, how did you see that?” I scratched my head. “I was looking right at it and didn’t see it.”

“You mean my eye-sight?” She adjusted her glasses on her perky little nose.

Despite her powerful legs she was a cute and pixie looking little thing, “How did you get here?” I ventured, thinking maybe she had a ride back to somewhere.

“I hitched.”

“Alone?” I probed. She picked up another joint I hadn’t seen and handed it to me.

“I was with some people from Sacramento but we went separate ways… how about you?”

“Yeah, I came in from San Francisco but my partner is nowhere… I lost contact with him by the time the music started.”

She was not only scavenging for sandwiches but she was putting trash in the cardboard barrels positioned everywhere around the area. I started doing so too. Dan and Linda doing the same further down the hill. By this time the stage and amp towers had been broken down and the portapotties taken away but the tiny airflow trailer the acts changed in was still there looking lonesome next to the race track. They waved and I followed their lead picking up trash but scavenging baggies for whatever was in them too.

News people showed up with a camera crew and interrupted us with a lot of questions. Dan and Linda refused to give their names and asked not to be filmed. Miriam and I followed suit. The woman reporter wanted to know why we didn’t want to be in the news. Were we wanted by the police or something like that? Dan responded, “Can you think of any other reason we might want anonymity?”

She looked at Miriam, “Are you a run-away?”

Miriam looked at her as though she been asked the most stupid question on earth… “Like, um, maybe we escaped from an insane asylum?”

The reporter wanted to know why we were picking up the trash. I wanted to tell her that we were scavenging sandwiches and dope but I let Dan do the talking: “Because the trash is here.”

“Were you hired and how long will it take?”

At this point the owner of the race track, Dick Carter, showed up. He fielded all the questions and told the news crew we were volunteers helping out. I never saw the evening news but I had seen enough public interest stories to know that the evening news would have a bit about how wonderful it is that the dirty hippies, who’d made this mess, were also helping to clean it up. Dick Carter talked for some time with the reporters and told them all about the damages to the fences and so on hoping that people would join these volunteers to help out. He offered us the race track tower as a place to live until the work was done after the news gang left. The Berkeley Barb reported that some such politically connected group, The Environmental Action Committee, was in charge of the volunteer action. There was no sign of them. A dozen or so like us, picking up trash and going through all the vials and baggies looking for drugs, were all that we saw. Dan and Linda moved into the abandoned trailer left and unpaid for by Sam Cutler or Bill Graham… whoever. Miriam and I moved into the pillow shack. The rest (a dozen or so in flux) stayed in the tower.

It was rumored that Bill Graham had offered a benefit concert at Fillmore West that next Saturday for the clean-up effort; inviting all of the clean-up committee free entry… oh boy. I was so sick of the whole rock-star bit by that time. I just knew it would never happen or the Environmental Action Committee would glom on it. A group of us piled in a pick-up and went all the way into the city anyway. No-one there knew anything at all about Mr. Graham’s offer. Our motley crew stood outside waiting for someone to let us in… Miriam and I hitched a ride back to the pillow shack where we made love, ate, slept, made love, and slept for about a month. I made up for all the lost time with four years of little or no poontang in the USN. Meanwhile, the hippy-press bad mouthed Dick Carter as a capitalist opportunist and everyone soon forgot about the concert and its aftermath.