My rebellious phase is long past; normalcy is no longer an icon. I left the towering bangs by the wayside. More important, however, is that everything that once felt shameful now seems interesting; I actually enjoy the looks of incredulity from people who did not grow up as I did when I tell my childhood story. I’m no longer embarrassed to describe the setting of my birth-or to admit that my parents weren’t married until I was seven. I beg my mom to sew me clothes, having long forgotten the trauma of the pink jeans. I humbly ask her how best to cook tofu, and don’t mind that people know my dad still meditates on a nightly basis. Our family mantra, ‘You create your own reality,’ our version of the Lord’s Prayer, has found its way into my daily life. I try to balance my parents’ hippie values with my own brand of nineties realism and a healthy dose of ex-hippie-kid skepticism. I’ve stopped view-ipg the world through a lens that magnifies difference and makes it undesirable. And I’ve finally forgiven my parents for all the rusty cars and tofu sandwiches, for the homemade Care Bears and home haircuts. They knew what they were doing.

The look is key-worn blue corduroys, a black cotton Indian style shirt with ornate white piping over a black tank top, brown leather boots, long hair braided, each braid held in place with a Pocahontas-style leather lace-up tie. Sans makeup. Sans jewelry (save for beads or anything made with tiny peace signs). It’s more Michelle Phillips California Hippie than Marianne Faithfull Bohemian Hippie or Grace Slick Haight-Ashbury Hippie. (There are subtle but very important differences.) I want to blend in but I don’t want to be the first one arrested if the cops come.

There are ten thousand of us and we are in the open field, arms linked, chanting. We are swaying to the unrelenting heartbeat of a hundred bongo drums. It is distressingly hot and as people begin to strip so that they can dance naked in the circle, I find myself worrying about things like sunscreen and personal hygiene and body image. The air is thick with marijuana smoke and incense and body odor and I can’t feel my toes because about an hour ago when a bearded man in bicycle shorts offered me tea I forgot to ask ‘Is this special tea?’ and I drank a cup before I realized that it was laced. So we are chanting ‘Om,’ all ten thousand of us, in the heat, packed like blinking, bewildered cows into the central meadow, and all at once everything stops and someone points to the sky. There is a hawk circling up above, to the right of the two news helicopters. ‘A hawk!’ someone cries. ‘It’s a blessing!’ And a murmur runs through the crowd as ten thousand fingers point skyward and the hawk circles and the news helicopters close in and I realize that I can’t feel my knees. The hawk disappears over the trees and the silence is broken. The hippies leap barefoot into the air, the music begins and a stranger in a tunic hugs me for no reason. If I could feel my tongue, I think, I would say something.

I had been hearing about the Rainbow Gathering for years, so when my friend Mike asked me if I wanted to go, I didn’t hesitate. His girlfriend, Karen, had gone every year for seven years and Mike had attended the last two. I had heard stories of the Gathering: of pot smoking, tent sex, meadow romping and general vegetarian-earth-friendly-feel-good-love-one-another-over-a-plate-of-organic-casserole earnestness. It was, I had heard, one of the last bastions of sixties-style counterculture. The kid of hippies, I saw it as an opportunity to go home. Like my parents, these people had the true knowledge; unlike them, the Rainbows had never moved on. They were frozen, flashing a peace sign, in the Zeitgeist of 1968. ‘Sure,’ I told Mike. ‘Let’s go.’

There is a Rainbow Gathering Web page that tells the whole story. The first Gathering was held in 1972, when twenty thousand hippies collected in the woods of Colorado to evolve, expand, harmonize, love and embrace peace. They did drugs, slept in tepees, ate millet, played music, called each other ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ and pledged to abandon authoritarian hierarchy, bad trips, bad vibes, bad attitudes and aggressive dogs. It was such a good time that they decided the event should occur annually, on public land, and it has been held every summer since.

In 1972, I was a naked flower baby on a farm commune in Iowa. My mother spent that summer sanding sixty years of thick white paint off the kitchen window frames. Every day she sanded that paint. It came off in thin strings and fine white dust, each layer tevealing another underneath it. By fall the four frames were natural wood again and she began another project: sewing my father a green felt Robin Hood shirt (I have pictures of him smiling sheepishly in it). My parents were both on the run: my mother from society’s expectations for women at the time, my father from the draft and the war machine. My memories of this period are pure and sweet: love and music, dogs and garden vegetables, sunshine and songs. People came and went. There were ten, eight, twelve at a time. They came together from different pasts, lived together for a few years, then continued on to their own remarkable, inevitable futures.

It was all magic to me. Even today I look at my early childhood as the best part of myself. It is something you can only understand if you were there. Every once in a while I’ll meet someone named ‘Summer,’ or ‘Star,’ and I’ll say, ‘Your parents were hippies, weren’t they?’ and she’ll say, ‘Yeah,’ and I’ll say, ‘Mine too,’ and we won’t have to say anything more because we will understand some basic part of each other, some true thing. When I first heard about the Gathering, I expected it to be like that-a bigfamily reunion, a living memory-something like those half-remembered evenings listening to the Dead through kitchen speakers on that Iowa farmhouse porch.

But it wasn’t like that at all. Like so many holidays, the celebration itself has evolved into a celebration of a celebration rather than anything specific. A lot of the people I know who go were born after Vietnam, after Nixon, and they do not remember a time when their mothers did not shave their armpits. For them the Gathering is a chance to party naked in the woods. Yet there is also a core group of Rainbows who have been at the center of the Gathering from the beginning, who have never left this culture, who have raised their children in it, and these are the people who interest me.

This year’s Gathering took place in the high desert of central Oregon, where the only trees are ponderosa pines and you half expect Pa Cartwright and his boys to come galloping over the horizon looking for lost steers. All that preceding week I had been watching the local Portland news air dispatches from Prineville, a town of six thousand and the closest to the Gathering site. The good townspeople were in a twitter, awaiting the caravans of old VW buses like farmers listening for the telltale hum of approaching locusts. A stern Prineville PD representative warned that loitering was already on the rise.

Mike and Karen arrived at my Portland apartment with a car full of supplies and a Dead sticker on the back window. We decided to take separate vehicles to the site-they were being vague about when they wanted to leave, and I didn’t want to be stranded should I become hysterical and need to watch TV or something. The plan was to stay up there a week. Seven days. In the woods. With no electricity, shower, modem, telephone or permanent waterproof shelter. ‘You have camped before, right?’ asked Mike.

‘Sure,’ I said. And I had, when I was nine, with my mom, for a couple of days. Now I was committed to a whole week of living off the land in a national forest, and I didn’t even own a backpack. I borrowed one from my grandmother-a bright red nylon backpack. My aunt, apparently more worried that I might catch cold than freak out on bad acid or get dysentery, lent me a bright red…down-filled ski cap, rain pants, a rain slicker, gloves and two sets of polythermal long Johns. If I wore it all I would look like a stylish Smurf.