Last Journey
8. Desperate Michaelangelos
Police hadnt
been much of a problem at the gathering. None of them went inside the site that I know of.
We discourage them from coming in. The very competent legal crew works things out in the
local area so they understand that we intend to police ourselves. Our Rainbow cops,
Shantisena, are capable of dealing with any problem and have proven it time and again over
the years. We have walky-talkies and full fledged doctors and medical technicians, too. We
just dont need any outsider cops walking around inside the site disturbing our
family.
On the rare occasion
when some cop or Forestry official does enter, we have them leave their guns back in their
vehicle. Were adamant about that. We dont allow any guns in the site. If the
cop were to retain his gun and any of the 20,000 people developed a bad reaction and
wrestled him for it, the gun might go off -- or it might fire if he simply slipped and
fell -- and when a gun goes off in an area crowded with men, women and children blood will
flow. So we dont allow any guns in the site. No guns, no alcohol, no vehicles.
So cops stay outside
and I think they fume a little. But they have developed other methods of dealing with us.
Mainly they try to stop vehicles that are on their way into the site, or as they leave the
gathering. They set up roadblocks with drug-sniffing dogs and wait for us. A lot of people
get busted that way.
At the 1989 National
in Nevada I was often dispatched in a small car with my video camera to video the police
harrassing Rainbows, pulling them over for no reason. My camera made them treat people
decent and frequently to leave. I volunteered my video camera in Minnesota too but it
wasnt as necessary.
As we prepared to
leave we heard that the cops had roadblocks set up and were checking every car. We held
off our departure and waited for the cops to get tired of bugging people. We didnt
want to run that gauntlet if we didnt have to, and waiting around a few days extra
at the Rainbow is no problem: there really isnt any better place to be.
Minnesota had some
problems that started early -- way back in spring with Seed Camp. Seed camp always seems
to consist of some die-hard Rainbow alcoholics whether we like it or not. 99.9% of us do
not abuse alcohol and we wish the Seed Camp drunks wouldnt give the rest of us such
a bad name, especially since the Seed Campers are the first Rainbows the local people meet
and erroneous impressions are formed.
One of the places the
Seed Campers decided they wanted to do their drinking was at the local airports bar.
When months before the gathering even began a car full of drunk Seed Campers backed into
an airplane Minnesota authorities suddenly realized that 20,000 hippies would be invading
their northern community that summer and their local cops wouldnt nearly be enough.
They set about arranging the proper reception.
Minnesota State
Troopers began arriving from every corner of the land of ten thousand lakes. Neighboring
states also loaned troopers to Minnesota. U.S. Forestry officers arrived from all over the
United States too. There was a big motel in the tiny town of Lutson. The cops booked every
single room for a solid month. Motel employees said afterwards that they never had any
trouble from any Rainbow peoplebut the motel full of cops was nothing but one
problem after another. They were a rowdy, drunken crowd of hooligans, always getting into
fights, always trying to outbrag each other -- real headaches to the staff and to many of
the normal townfolk.
I guess it really
surprised the locals. Theyd expected the 20,000 hippies to be drunk and dangerous.
When they saw most of us were sober and even spiritual they didnt mind much at all
how poor we were or that we generally functioned outside the system...
Compared to those drunken cops we were decent and it was purely obvious to farmers,
storekeepers, ministers and school children, many of whom mentioned it to us at one time
or another.
The gathering was
officially over on the seventh and the state coppers grew weary of inactivity as traffic
thinned. The remaining Rainbows still drove back and forth to town for supplies; so they
were able to give everyone the straight scoop about the status of the roadblocks. We
waited until we heard that the road was entirely clear of roadblocks before we left the
gathering.
We figured on rolling
out late in the evening and traveling by night to avoid most hassels. Many others had the
same idea. Then just as we were finally ready to leave some somber news came to us. A
couple of Rainbow brothers had left the gathering in their VW bus the previous night,
beginning their long trip home. They were tired. Rainbow Gatherings are exhausting. The
driver fell asleep at the wheel and drove head-on into a big truck. Both brothers died.
I realized it
wasnt a good idea for me to try driving that highway at night either, so we left the
following morning. Besides, we had a rim on the bus that had gotten bent so we had to stop
at the Lutsen wrecking yard and buy another one and put it on. By the time we were through
with all that we were already into the early afternoon before we got rolling south.
After only driving
sixty miles I started getting real tired and had to pull off somewhere to rest for an
hour. I spotted a roadside picnic table beside the water and pulled in. It looked so
peaceful there I gave some thought to setting up camp and taking it easy for the rest of
the day. Steps and I gathered dry wood and got a fire going to cook up some supper.
The Bike Bus attracted
the usual amount of attention; a few people came to chat with us. They were a family that
lived in a house walking distance away, a straight-looking family -- but weird.
We talked about the
gathering mostly and I dont remember how the next subject came up or what inspired
it but I remember them looking at each other and snickering and the father asking his wife
and their teenage son if they thought he should tell us about... about their special
recipes... We wondered what in the hell they were talking about. They were talking about free food;
something they thought we should be aware of.
Birds... seagulls and
crows... They ate them. Made soups out of them. I thought, they were joking. The father
got serious. He told his son to run home and fetch us a taste. We begged, him not to
bother... He told his son to go anyway. He went off running and returned ten minutes later
-- with a white plastic bag of soup -- ccrow and seagull soup, potatoes and carrots and
celery too. The father told us it was fresh. They had just thawed it out for their evening
meal and this was what was left over. They
regularly made large batches and froze meal-size portions in separate haggles.
The dad urged me to
try some. He had a spoonfull himself just to show us... His whole family was telling us
how great it was. We felt we had to be nice so we each tasted it. Blech! He said we could
have the rest of the bag. Oh, goody.
We told them we had to
make some miles and left soon after. Wed thought wed sleep in that spot for
the night but that family changed our minds. We drove a few more miles and found another
place.
In the morning we
proceeded to the town of Two Harbors, intending to go right on through but I noticed a
one-hour photo developing store and went in to have a talk with the owner. I was anxious
to develop my twenty rolls of film.
I figured rightly that
he had heard a lot about the Rainbow Gathering but of course he hadnt gone himself.
Maybe hed be curious enough about my pictures to make me a deal. My intuition was
correct. I showed him examples of my stuff beforehand to make sure he didnt freak
out about nudity. No problem.
He worked with me on
the price and I checked each batch for quality and sent the ones back that needed to be
redone and the technician redid them right away. Meanwhile we parked the Bike Bus on the
side of hwy 61 across the street from the shop. It wasnt very comfortable: We were
inside the city limits and we were a strange sight to the locals. I believe rumors about
my nude photographs began leaking out of the store and circulating around town because the
local cop got real squirrelly the next day. Im sure he suspected we were marijuana addicts
and most likely transporting drugs. He itched for a reason to search us.
The guy in the shop
had to really rush to do all my photos to perfection. I sure didnt need any washed
out images and I didnt intend paying for any. And he only had one machine and one
technician to do all my stuff in addition to the rolls of film dropped off by local
customers. The pressure began to build. The
cop told us that we frightened people. Groovy. As though they didnt frighten us too.
But you didnt see us calling the cops about them.
We were parked there
on the side of the highway for two days. It was a royal pain. Live and learn. I will sure
know better than to do something like that again in a small town in the Midwest! The vibes
got so cold and heavy! The townsfolk stared at us like we were buzzards. We tried to hurry
the developer up. He seemed to be prolonging our agony. It was taking him all day long to
do the last four rolls. It felt like a conspiracy when finally the town cop drove up and
gave us an hour to get our stuff and get out of town. He looked sleazy as shit and he had
meanness on his mind, obvious as hell. The last rolls were coming off the machine. I
waited for them in the store impatiently.
Theres nothing
illegal about nude photos. But people in little bitty backwoods towns dont always know
that. The entire population of Northern
Minnesota was nuts from the influx of all the recent wild and wooly Rainbow participants,
all of whom had passed through that town on hwy 61. And now here we were and they looked
at us through the smoked glass of their fertile imaginations and wondered about nudity and
drugs and all those bikes on that weird hippy bus...
They probably thought
it must cost a lot of money to drive such a huge rig across half the United States, not to
mention the cost of developing twenty rolls of film. The cop asked me pointedly where I
got my money. I told him I fix bikes.
And I did too. I made
fifty dollars sitting in that little town of Two Harbors -- without a business license of
course. Theres another thing the cop could get me for!
I accepted the last photos as-is and paid my bill. We flew the coop with minutes to spare, and watched the rear-view mirror as we rolled out of town, nervously dreading that the cop would appear with flashing lights and sirens.
And sure enough --
there he was behind us with his flashing lights and his siren. I pulled over and went back
to talk to him. He asked me if I was in any trouble? No. Why should I be in any trouble?
He didnt say... Then he wanted to know where we were going next. I told him we were
going to visit my relatives and friends in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area. He looked at me
real hard and finally told me to drive carefully. I climbed back into the bus and flew
down the highway. He sure had the hair standing up on the back of my neck -- and I
wondered how far away from him wed have to get before we were safe? City limits?
County line? State line?
Twenty long miles
later we were in Duluth. We didnt continue south -- we headed west on Hwy 2. I sure
wasnt going to follow the agenda Id told the cop! No way! Highway 2 was a much
less traveled road than 61. It rolled through Indian reservations -- and it was the
quickest route through Minnesota to the Dakotas. Plus the northern communities
werent as full of cops as was southern Minnesota. We had one more reason to be
nervous: Minnesota is real strident about mandatory automobile insurance and ours had
expired. I felt safe enough driving back without it, if only I could get out of Minnesota,
the only state that had ever asked me for proof of insurance.
We didnt stop;
we rolled mile after mile, plodding along. The Bike Bus is like a turtle. Its slow
but it gets there. I wanted to put as many miles as possible between us and that cop. But
driving that fifty year old tank is tiring. The shaking and rumbling turns into a
comforting pattern and I have to take a break now and then or it tends to lull me to
sleep. A hundred miles later I felt a lot safer and I thought I could go for a coffee
break. Plus I wanted to take a good look at all my new photos and begin putting the good
ones into a new album.
When we passed a truck
stop in the middle of nowhere I turned around and parked. Cafes are fun places to work on
ones art while traveling. Plus I had sort of developed a liking for working on
projects in cafes, from all the cafes where I had done it in Eugene, Oregon. Well,
actually throughout the entire Northwest United States. But it isnt the same thing
in places like Northern Minnesota, you know. Ellie stayed in the bus frying up some
chicken for our supper while Steps and I went into the cafe. I carried the album and the
new photos.
Naturally everyone in
the cafe stopped talking and gaped at us like we were from Mars. We chose the table that
offered us the most privacy and ordered coffee and french fries and dug out the first pack
of photographs. I held them carefully in such a way that the waitress couldnt see
them. I wanted to separate the good ones from the bad ones and the excellent ones from the
good ones. Steps helped. We compared them together and discussed them quietly.
Wed gone through
a couple cups of coffee each and eaten our fries and we were deeply engrossed in the
photos when we became aware of someone standing beside our table. We looked up and were
surprised to see it was a cop.
It turned out that the
waitress had managed to peek at our photos while refilling our coffee. When she saw nudity
she figured shed better call the police. Fuck a duck!
The cop asked us what
kind of photos we were looking at? I explained that we were returning home from the
Rainbow Gathering and that wed just developed our photographs and this was our first
opportunity to have a look at them. He picked up a couple at random and told us it was
Anyway, the cop
wasnt interested in anything I was saying... He was real rude. He said,
No man has
any right to see a woman in the nude except her husband...
I couldnt
believe he said that. But he was serious. He said he wasnt going to argue about it
with me either. After ten minutes of very one-sided pig-headed discussion he told us
hed give us a chance: either wed clear out of his town immediately or
hed confiscate our photographs and jail us and let us tell it to the judge.
We split fast.
For all I knew he was radioing ahead to some other cop. Or he could still change his mind and come after us and arrest us. Maybe hed do some checking and connect somehow with that cop in Two Harbors. I mean like we were breaking some pretty heavy taboos here... We were flaunting some freedoms that they didnt even want to know about.
These people probably thought degenerate hippies
Not that any of that would mean much to those Northern Minnesota cops.
Think of Egon Shiele! Put in prison because of his nude paintings. Emotionally scarred and increasingly despondent he dies a few years later -- at age 28!! Think of Francisco Goya's paintings, both entitled "Maja", considered by the Spanish Inquisition to be "obscene works"!!
How wrong is it for me to believe that an artist today in America should not have to suffer from persecution by people with attitudes that are akin to those of the Spanish Inquisition of 1813???
Id told the cop
we were taking hwy 2 straight across into North Dakota. I changed plans instantly. At the
next north/south highway we dodged south pedal to the medal. It was night now. The cover
of darkness might help us disappear. Maybe. These were dark narrow country roads with
minimal traffic...
The only problem was
in locating signs on the strange backwoods highway so we didnt get lost. Steps was
the co-pilot. He had the map on his lap and a flashlight in his hand and he tried to keep
track of our progress. We made it another sixty miles or so and camped for the night in a
small towns community park, with the snout of the bus pointed out towards the
highway for a fast departure.
The next morning,
refreshed and roadready we rolled out -- but the Bike Bus was running a little ragged. We
couldnt figure out the nature of the problem.
We stopped in the town
of Crookston to see if we could find anyone who could tell us what the problem was. And we
discovered we had a flat tire! I had to buy a new lug wrench for $35 and I put on the
spare on the side of the road in the center of town. When I finished a cop car pulled up
and ran a complete check on us. I got my scrap book out right away and showed him all our
newspaper clippings. He gradually warmed -- but, man-oh-man, those Minnesota cops were a
bunch of hardnoses. He detained us for a good hour. Shit, its lousy to be made to
feel so criminalized because of our different beliefs.
And once again we
worried hed change his mind and come after us.
We dodged west at the
first opportunity heading for North Dakota.
As we approached the
border the engine started backfiring and cutting out. We nursed it along. What in the hell
was the problem? We didnt want to stop and find out. We just wanted to get out of
Minnesota and it looked like some team of little red devils was trying like hell to get us
stuck before we could make good our escape.
We were on the edge of
our seats.
Steps
was pleading:
Come
on bus... You can do it... Just a little further... Please...
And I was doing the
same thing. Sputter, sputter, clunk, wheeze. The engine kept dying and
When the You are
leaving Minnesota sign came into view we were screaming. We were hollering and
screaming.
Come on bus.
Come on bus. Come on bus.
Chugging and
sputtering.
What a feeling of
relief when we passed that sign. Man, we hollered. Man, oh man!
But we still
didnt feel entirely safe. We managed to clank into the first little town. I think it
was Cuming or Hillsboro. We parked and I looked around for a mechanic to look at the
engine. It turned out the manifold bolts had come loose. Apparently they hadnt
tightened them enough when they put the gasket on in Lake Preston in June. I tightened all
the studs and started up the engine. Problem solved.
We got on Interstate
29 heading south. I was aiming for Lake Preston again. Id told Tom and Carol
wed stop back in on the way back.
When we came to
highway 81 we happily got off the Interstate. 81 is a laid-back country road. We rolled on
south to east/west highway 14 which passes through Lake Preston. It was great to be headed
west again.
We discovered a farm
that was full of antique cars and trucks and tractors, all rusting away out in the
weather, acres of them. I parked the bus and wandered through them with my video camera. I
knocked on the farmers door. He wasnt very sociable but he let me take the
videos. Many of those machines dated back to WWI.
Wow!
,