Saturday Evening:
I could write so many, many things about the rest of the night. About how, just as I'm wiping the snot and tears away, and Zac and Stepha are preparing to head back to Sushi, he comes walking by again. With a big, trite grin on his face, bowl and spoon in hand. With herby his side-Great, so, now I look like a blubbering, insecure, unenlightened wreck; maybe that's exactly what I am. About how I have to pull him away from her to even get him to acknowledge me beyond the falsely buddy-buddy front that's being put on. About the hackles I see raised from my tribe, because they know just exactly what this is costing me. Just how little of it I'll get back.
Energy imbalance isn't something to be taken lightly by people like these, and it's the reason most of us are here: to pray for peace, to restore a flood of positive energy to the world, at least this patch of forest we're inhabiting this week. It's all over the gathering's web pages, official and not-so. Ask just about anyone who's attending, or has attended a Rainbow Gathering, and they'll tell you: it's an intentional community created with the hopes of promoting peace, but above all, of ridding oneself of anything negative, of meeting everyone you come across on ground.
But that's just it, I think, Moleskine notebook on my knee, facing the setting sun. I've never been equal here. At least, I've never felt like it. Why do I always feel so small? The ensuing conversation goes poorly. Lines drawn in the sand. I'm so tired of feeling like a little kid with a handmade paper heart. You know the type. The kind the shy, nerdy child draws for the one he loves, colored on with clumsy crayon-hands. The one he offers up with bated breath and the nervous words, "I made this for you." The one that's accepted with a genuine smile, or so he interprets it, out of admiration, out of gratitude for acceptance. Out of sheer love.
You know the one. The heart he finds in the trash the next day, half-hidden under an apple core, the daily paper's classifieds.
I could write an entire novel, and I'm not a prose writer. Suffice to say, it gets colder earlier this night. I make my slow way back to Sushi Land. Zac hands me a bowl of chicken and rice, and I eat it with tears streaming down my face. Trying to make conversation this way is like speaking a foreign language poorly in its own country. Since no one else understands the situation, there's a lot of brief staring, some "oh, poor thing" noises, and then disinterest. I mean, these people don't know me from Adam; they're probably rightfully trying to give me some space. Stepha sits by the fire with me. For an hour or more, I hunker down by the fire pit, holding someone's buff-colored pit bull puppy in my lap. The firepit circle includes Jeff and his unidentified girlfriend, a tweaked-out but kindly kid who calls himself Cloud, and a random assortment of Sushi Kids who are just trying to get warm. John comes back over. Having lost his sleeping bag and pants the night before, he's been poking around all day looking for them. I ask him if he's slept yet. He says no. He's been out here almost a week.
I wonder about what Rainbow Gatherings bring to the debate about human survivalism. It's one thing to prepare, agonize, train and then climb Mount Everest. It's another thing to go to ground, living entirely off what one scrapes from the land, like a homesteader determined to live outside civilization in the wilds of my home state, or on the prairies. Somehow pitching in the woods for a week with 20,000 other people doesn't seem particularly survivalist to me; it doesn't push the limits of what the human body and psyche are designed for. Unless you count those 20,000 people. And try to imagine inundating your brain and body with their presence and detritus. Perhaps what we're really surviving here, for this week or weekend, is each other. What we really survive is our Self.
Sassafras, the puppy, is wrapped in a black, tattered sweater. His smooth-furred head hangs over to one side. He is completely warm, safe and sacked out. I wish that were me, I think. How nice it must be to run around, helter-skelter, over and around and through all of life, all day, then collapse knowing you'll wake up refreshed, and, or I like to pretend, without any memory of the day before. I wonder if it might really be better, healthier, to just forget.
I could write more about how drained I feel. How I know somehow I've done the wrong thing by sending him away and simply saying, "I'm sorry things had to be this way." How I put my face up to his and attempted to give 'Eskimo' kisses, the way we always do. How he held perfectly still. And let me move. And let me be the one to keep on trying. There was nothing there, just as there was nothing between us when I first saw him this morning. The well-intentioned circle that surrounded me today let me purge a lot, though.
I could write volumes about how empty I feel right now.
Saturday Night, sunset:
Suffice to say that Abbey and I meander back to Rainbow Crystal Kitchen early. The fire is dying down and Sushi Tribe is splintering off in preparation for whatever everyone wants to do tonight.
Every time we walk back and forth from Rainbow Crystal to Sushi, we have to pass through Trade Circle. Trade Circle is an entity in and of itself. In it, one grasps a microcosmic sense of what the souks of Marrakesh might be like, or Middle Eastern bazaars. There are blankets and tarps spread out all over, with various crafts on them. Beads, bracelets, hemp jewelry, odd assortments of books, rocks, candy (a hot commodity in a place where marijuana is distributed as freely as food), clothes. And everyone is haggling. This for that, tit for tat, I'll trade you, I'll see you and raise you. It's insane, and the flow of foot traffic ceases in one of those Three Stooges-esque back-bouncers. You know the kind: the dude up front halts short, causing everyone behind him in rapid succession to bounce unchecked off the back of the person in front of them. And so on. Forgive me, barterers, but god, I hate walking through Trade Circle.
There's a more user-friendly, yet equally pervasive practice called Random Pocket Trade, which I actually enjoy, and engage in a couple of times on the way back to the tent. Random Pocket Trade is, my friends, exactly what it sounds like. The depth and breadth of one's pants or jacket pockets is vast and full of many mysteries. So, all over the Gathering, folks are hollering "Random Pocket Trade!" at each other. Hit someone up successfully, and you might trade a couple of quarters for a candy bar, some weed, a piece of jewelry, or essential toiletries like toothpaste or toilet paper. Then again, you might swap a pair of earrings for a used battery, half a granola bar, or arbitrary bits of other junk. I try a couple of swaps. Sure as shit, one of them is a used battery. Go figure.
As we reach camp, I can hear and smell the giant half-drum stewpot boiling. Rainbow Crystal Kitchen, like a lot of others, has rigged up an immense old 25-gallon drum as its cookstove. Wood burns underneath, and with the inside scoured out, it's a direct throwback to the 1920s railroad-trestle hobo kitchen: rusty, probably with a few holes in it, but functional. I run back to the tent and grab my backpacking mess kit just as the sister stirring the pot yells, "Come'n get yer Rainbow Crystal Stew!" When I hold out the bottom bowl of the kit to her, she ladles in 2 overflowing scoops of stew. And she ladles with a tin can lashed to a long willow branch. No shit.
You can't make this stuff up. Right next to the kitchen, some dude strikes up a riff on his old banjo. John Steinbeck would be proud.
I walk carefully over hummock-ville back to Abbey and we dig in with slightly dusty silverware scrounged from the bottom of my pack. It's delicious, whatever it is: something dark and rich with carrots, celery, and Ramen noodles drifting to the bottom. It's also spicy, lending some much-needed heat to our bellies. We sit on a red and white rug the kids camped next door gave me this morning; it's our tent's welcome mat, even though no one's really in and out but us. Puck eats some dog food and runs off to play with a rangy brindle mutt he's befriended. Abbey and I have finally, with Zac and Harrison, settled on a plan: They'll meet us at our camp in the morning, then we'll all take the shuttle down to the car to retrieve their gear. It's taken a supreme amount of effort for me to even get through the day this far, but I'm glad we finally figured out the last bit of concrete logistics before we lost each other completely in the shuffle.
I cannot tell a lie. After eating, we each take a Valium and pull on all our layers of clothing, then head into the tent to try and sleep. It's all of 8 pm. My body aches from the previous day's hike, which I've learned from passers-by is closer to 10 miles than to the 3 we were repeatedly told we had left to go. My heart aches from watching him walk away-I've done something wrong; the energy is off, and it shouldn't be, not between us, of all people. (Somewhere up ahead at some point, I heard his trademark donkey guffaw. He only does that one when something is genuinely piss-yourself funny. Oh my god. My heart.) By my goddamn brain will not shut off, and I think I sleep a whole 2 hours that night.
I'm so tired of having so many miles to go before I sleep.
The drum circle starts up again. This time I don't notice, the deep undertones of some guy's chanting echoing the lonely weariness in my heart and head.
Sing it, brother.
The night is wide, and sometimes it's hard to believe you're not the only one in it.
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