Escaping the billboards... If only for a little while...

I am Jack's raging bile duct.

I awoke this morning to shards of sunlight streaming through the broken window of the abandoned house we had been sleeping in for the past two days. This abandoned 'little house on the prairie' I like to call it. Because it looked just that... a wooden house with four rooms and broken windows everywhere. I sat up with the image of that girl's face still in my mind. The girl I hoped to see again when we finally got down to Ocala, Florida for the Rainbow Gathering. Brooke. I'd been dreaming about her again.

I stood up to watch the train rumble by no more than fifty yards away when my friend Fodi woke up. "The sun is out," I said. "Maybe we can finally get the fuck out of here." We had been trapped in this wooden shack for the past two nights by the unforgiving rain that had soaked our sleeping bags and half our gear. We packed up our stuff and went back to the highway onramp after getting some food. We spent the day desperately trying to hitch a ride, spending a few hours on the onramp, a few hours asking people for rides at the gas station, then back to the onramp...

Finally we gave up and decided to hitch the 10-15 miles back to Jacksonville and try to spange up enough money to buy greyhound tickets to Ocala. Normally I would feel a little guilty about wussing out like this, but after three days of hitching the same onramp, my faith in humanity was more than a little dented, and I didn't care about anything except getting the hell outta there. After about an hour and a half on the opposite onramp, we finally got a ride. Her name was Brianna, and she was an older woman somewhere around forty wearing the kind of pink shirt with flailing tassles that went out of style twenty years ago... and a practicing wiccan. This surprised me because not only were we in the bible belt (in which we had recieved many "jesus loves you" from passerbys), but I had never met a wiccan over the age of 18. While it wasn't a religion I took seriously (not that I take any religion seriously), I had read a few books about it over the past few years and found it an interesting subject. I continued talking to her about it as we drove to Jacksonville. On the outskirts of town she stopped at a drive thru chinese food restaurant and bought us two large boxes of food before continuing into downtown Jacksonville. Eventually we got on the subject of her daughter. "I have an eight year old daughter, and I told her she can decide on whatever religion she wants, I'm not going to push anything on her." She continued, "Everyone has to choose what's right for themselves. No one can tell you what to believe,"

I agreed. "I'll tell you though," she laughed, "this one time she went to a babtist church with her aunt and in the middle of the procession stood up on the pew and said, 'This is bullshit!' to my sister's great embarrassment of course!" I laughed with her as she said, "And my daughter is NOT one to swear, I teach her better than that! But she's refused to go to church ever since! She hates it."

We had finally reached the greyhound station by this time and she put the car into park. "Now do you kids have enough money for the bus?" she asked.

I was half hoping she wouldn't ask that question, and half hoping she would. "Um... well, not really." Pulling out her wallet, she then handed me a fifty dollar bill. I could have cried with joy.

"Oh my god. Can I give you a hug?!?!" I said excitedly.

"Sure honey,"

"Thank you so much," I said, squeezing her hard.

"Blessed be," she returned (it's a wiccan thing). Fodi gave her a hug as well while I got our packs out of the car and we both waved excitedly as she drove away. She had saved us... my faith in humanity was restored.

It was a good thing too, because if I told you trying to spange in front of a greyhound station was stupid, it would be the understatement of the century. Fodi and I had to be the happiest people on the bus, knowing that finally, after all this bullshit, we were only a few hours away from Ocala. By the time we arrived it was too late to hitch a ride to the campgrounds where everyone would be, so we snuck onto the rooftop of an Arby's to sleep. Tomorrow we would get to the campgrounds, see our friends that were waiting for us, and I hoped to see Brooke again...

The next day we climbed off the roof of the Arby's and started hitching to where the Rainbow Gathering was going on. Well, where we thought it was going on. We weren't exactly sure. It was a minor detail we had somehow overlooked. Odds were that we'd get picked up by one of the hippies that was going there anyway. After several hours, one flat tire, and a nice firefighter that just happened to be coming back from giving someone else a ride there, we finally got to the Rainbow Gathering.

Only to find out that it was basically over. Most people had packed up and left already, but there were still a few groups of people that were sticking around for another week or two to clean up everything. Fodi and I walked around looking for our friends we were supposed to meet there, meeting two punk rock girls at the former A camp, a place usually reserved for all the scumfuck punks to get drunk and fuck shit up, but the camp had been broken up by the local forest rangers when things got too rowdy. So is the reputation of A camp. Most of the punks had left after that, with the exception of the two punk girls we had met, Floozy and Emily, who were stuck there until they could spange up enough money to get their car fixed.

Floozy was my tourguide for the gathering, noting that ---in her opinion--- for our first Rainbow Gathering we had chosen the wrong one. Apparently this gathering hadn't been up to most people's standards. Floozy showed us around pointing out the various camps, schooling me on the Rainbow Gathering lingo like zuzus (candy), blissware (silverware and plate), and shawntaseena. Floozy explained shawntaseena was something only called when someone was in serious need of people to rush to their aid.

It had been a few weeks since we lost Nick and Brooke in Richmond, and when we finally found Nick at one of the camps that was cooking food for people, one look told me he had took to the culture like a sponge. Wearing no shirt and a long tie-dyed hippy dress, it appeared he had found his calling. After some excited hugs and slaps on the back, Nick made us pancakes while he explained how Dave, Brooke, and himself had walked to the train yard after loosing us and hopped a train down to Jacksonville. They hitched the rest of the way down to Ocala, and had been at the gathering for the past two weeks. Hoping she was around, I asked where Brooke was, but no such luck. Nick told me she had left the day before. So much for our reunion.

Floozy left in a drunken stupor to go harass hippies in the 'no alcohol' camps while me and Fodi hung out with Nick around the campfire discussing each other's travel plans. Nick was leaving for Gainsville that night, and Fodi made a rather rash decision to go with him. I mean, we had been here barely three hours and he was already leaving. The two of them promised to return in two or three days.

I was determined to stay at the gathering and soak in all the nature I could while there were still people here. That was half the reason I came anyway, to get away from it all and not have to look at all those fucking billboards that constantly invaded my psyche and the tidal wave of concrete covering this world. Even if it was just for a few days...

It felt great walking around the forest in my bare feet, letting go of the outside world ('Babylon' in rainbow speak) and letting my worries melt away. After Nick and Fodi left, I hung out with Floozy and Emily shwilling a bumjug of wine, rocking out to Atom and His Package, and dancing on the top of their car yelling obscenities into the wee hours of the night. They were fun girls to hang out with, and had been friends for a long time. They finally mentioned how they wish they could get married. "Well actually," I interjected, "I am a legally ordained minister..." (I really am, check out www.ulc.org) Their faces lit up as they held hands in the front of their car and I sat in the back seat and did the shortest ceremony in the history of matrimony. "Do you?" I asked, looking at Floozy.

"I do." she smiled.

"Do you?" I asked Emily.

"Of course!" she replied.

"Well then, I now pronounce you wife and wife!" The car filled with cheers. It almost brought a tear to my eye. My first marriage ceremony!

The next morning Emily slept in while Floozy and I went on our search for a breakfast beer. We walked from camp to camp, Floozy getting the occasional free beer from the older hippies, while I traded pieces of jewelry I had made for a beer here and there. Unfortunately it was only enough to wet my taste buds, and Floozy wasn't doing much better. I asked her to show me where the trading circle was. Trading at the gathering was a big thing, and I had come prepared for it. I had brought an arsenal of zuzus (candy, remember?), rolling tobacco, dumpstered go-gurts (spoonless yogurt), and the collection of jewelry I had made in Savannah. We made our way to the trading circle along one of the paths through the forest until we were interrupted by a "Hey you crazy fucker!". It was Tick!

"What's up!!!" I yelled, I had given up on finding him here. He told me about his and Tasha's trip to the gathering, how their luck getting here was almost as bad as ours. They had lucked out in the same way we had though, someone had given them greyhound tickets to get to Ocala too. We continued up the path to the trading circle, Floozy staying behind for a pitstop involving a free bong hit from a passerby. We talked about how the gathering had gone so far, suddenly running into Tasha along the way. I was really surprised because Tasha was out of her usual black pants/black shirt garb and was decked out in a very hippy skirt and brown plaid overshirt. "Looks like you're fitting in well."

"What, this?" she said, looking down at her clothes. "I got it at the trading circle for basically nothing," that was Tasha, thrifty as always. "This guy bumped into me and said 'Oh! Sorry sister bear!' and put a handful of weed in my hand. I've been trading pretty well ever since." I wasn't surprised.

The sun was setting into the trees in the distance, so we gave up on going to the trading circle, and went to get something to eat at one of the camps that was feeding the masses. Tick and Tasha eventually went back to their camp for the night, and I was walking back to mine to grab my gear and join them when the people at my neighboring camp invited me to join them. They were from D.C., and I spent several hours talking with them about the activism they were doing there, and they were fascinated with a scam zine I was thinking about doing and I eventually crashed out at their camp, too tired to make the long walk back to where Tasha and Tick were.

The next morning the D.C. kids said they were leaving to drive back home. I decided to go with them so I could get dropped off in Savannah so I could be back in time for St. Patty's day celebration. As much as I wanted to, the D.C. kids were leaving right away and I didn't have time to make the walk back to Tasha's camp so I could say good-bye. I figured there would be no hard feelings, they wouldd understand. The D.C. kids were fun to talk to and the ride went quickly. They stopped in Savannah to drop me off, and I made a mental note to visit them in D.C. sometime. Their car drove off while I made my way down the streets of Savannah in search of AJ's RV. Little did I know the trouble ahead of me, and how long I would have to spend in Savannah to be free of it...