A young
woman sweeps her hair away from her face. This is so her friend can add silver
spirals to the paint on her forehead without making a mess. They’re spread out
on blankets, backpacks, unrolled sleeping bags. The silver woman is just one of
many painted faces. From the crowd, but I can already pick out dragons,
fairies, even an elf.
They come bedecked in saris,
swimsuits, shawls stitched all over with jingling coins. They’ve got
dreadlocks, braids and flowers in their hair. Their hands are covered in henna.
Their feet are shod with hemp sandals, Jesus style. Every man wears a beard.
They come every summer, from college, from shared apartments, from every little
brick house with a dream catcher hung in the window. It’s the groovy
pilgrimage. The glittering psychedelic romp in the woods. The hippies are on
their way to the Oregon Country Fair.
It’s difficult to explain exactly
what goes on at the Oregon Country fair. Every year in mid-July, an alternate
reality is constructed in the woods outside of Eugene, Oregon. A cynical person
would say that people come to do drugs, and they wouldn’t be entirely wrong.
The smell of weed and patchouli doesn’t wash off you for days. But the primary
attraction for me, possibly because I was there as a child, was the weird.
I step out of the crock-pot bus
into a choking cloud of dust and dazzling sunshine. I am instantly aware of the
smell of barbecue and falafel. Somebody is playing the pan flute. As the haze
settles, I see a towering shape lurch towards me. A man, standing fifteen feet
tall in stilts, dressed in a suit of tree branches and moss, strides past in an
instant and vanishes into the trees. My brother and I, six and nine
respectively, are pretty used to the antics of pacific northwestern oddballs at
this point. My family has been making this trip since before either of us can
remember. But I still feel a sense of elation every year.
It really does feel like magic,
when you’re there. It’s wicked hot, but the luscious Oregon forest covers the
winding alleyways and odd grottoes in a hazy green gloom. The Long Tom Riven is
brown and lazy in the summer, but you can find a glittering serpent rising from
the water if you look carefully. You can find a patch of grass and sleep for
hours, but why would you?
The grounds are dotted with open
air stages, built from scrap wood, driftwood, held together by spit and crazy.
You sit on the ground, or a picnic blanket, if you’re fancy, and watch people
come out and do… whatever they can come up with. Women model dresses made from
busted lifeboats and condom wrappers. A young guy sprinkles broken glass on the
stage and flops face down into the pile. (“I lost a contact!”) A shirtless,
hairy man strums a guitar and sings an ode to his own sweaty, pendulous
breasts.
Everybody seems to be celebrating
something, but it’s not clear what. Rounding a corner, it’s possible to stumble
into a full parade, marching band and all, making its way around the grounds.
Beads are given out and there is glitter in the air. A woman combs every knot
out of my awful, unruly hair and braids it into a crown. I wear fairy wings
made from wire and pantyhose. A kid here doesn’t have to pretend to be in a fantasy
kingdom, they really are. Revelers range from naked and dirty to totally
concealed within elaborate costumes. It’s a Merry Pranksters magic bus
psychedelic dream come true, where everybody ‘does their own thing’ in the very
truest sense.
This is
the place where I have what can be described as a ‘spiritual experience’ for
one of the very few times in my life. It’s all about transcendence, I suppose.
What people are celebrating is unique to themselves, like a thousand parties at
once. And in the grime and sweat of it, I felt like I really was a special
being. Like magic was real and I was at the heart of it.
By the
time my family makes it back to Eugene, it’s getting dark and we’re all beyond
exhausted. Just wash the dirt off and collapse into bed, please. In a few more
days, the people camped out in the woods will be returning to their lives,
going back to work or school or home until it’s time to make the pilgrimage
again. Then they’ll meet again in the Oregon backwoods for a celebration of the
self.
My
parents were determined to raise their children nonreligious, but they maintain
a kind of spiritual practice themselves. It’s often said that modern hippies
are overcome by nostalgia for a bygone era. While this certainly isn’t false,
this ‘past worship’ is much more than an aging generation longing for the days
of their youth. My mother lit a candle on the day of John Lennon’s death well
into my lifetime. In a way, the fond remembrance for 1960’s hippie culture had
replaced conventional religion for many adults I knew growing up.
I was
born decades too late to fully understand this system of belief, but things
like the Oregon Country Fair still hold a very dear place in my heart. To me,
the value of religion is found in the ways it brings believers together. In
this way, the Fair functioned almost as a religious event. While I will
probably always be an atheist, I feel that these group experiences are ‘good
for the soul’, in a way. It is human nature to search for the special in your
experiences, and everything I saw and felt in those woods felt deeply meaningful.
