Woodstock Rising. Tom Wayman
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of the Woodstock Festival and that Edward and I had been discussing it earlier.
Jay spoke in a tone of wonder. “You know Eddie could have gone. Chance of a lifetime, and he —”
“It’s the future, man,” Pump declared.
“‘Bound to be the very next phase,’ is it?” Edward mocked, quoting Donovan’s “Mellow Yellow.”
Pump was heating the blade of one of the dinner knives over the candle flame. “Woodstock happened right when we got out of the army. Jay and me talked it over. It’s a sign, man.”
“It’s a sign you and Jay have fried your brains,” Edward said.
Pump shook his head. “No, man. Woodstock’s the future.”
“Enormous rock festivals are the future?” Edward jeered. “There’s been big rock festivals ever since Monterey. Exactly how are they the future?”
Pump put the heated knife on the porch floor alongside the unheated one. He unwrapped the twist of plastic wrap, and with a penknife, carefully cut a chunk away from a lump of hash. “Who’s first?”
Jay crouched beside Pump. He lifted the smaller portion of hash onto the blade of the unheated dinner knife and stuck the other blade back into the candle flame. After a moment or two, he applied the heated blade to the top of the hash. Thick, tarry-smelling smoke instantly curled upward, which he bent to inhale. He struggled to hold the smoke in his lungs, coughed, laughed at himself, then vented smoke from his nostrils in a series of convulsive spasms. “Woooo!” he cried when the jerks finally subsided. “Eddie?” he asked, gesturing toward the candle.
Edward swung off the recliner and positioned himself by the flame.
“This stuff about demonstrations and fighting the power sounds cool,” Pump said as Edward hot-knived a share of the hash. “It’s still conflict, man. We do this, they do that in return. Like Nam — we escalate, they escalate, so we escalate more.”
“Are you suggesting we shouldn’t take any action against —” I started in.
“Woodstock was about just being,” Pump interrupted. “People were there to groove, not fight in the streets. Being together ended up being stronger than anything. Who’s going to oppose a million heads?”
“There are how many million Vietnamese?” I asked. “How many million blacks? Chicanos? The government doesn’t hesitate to —”
“I been in the army, man. You have no idea what they can unleash. Even in Nam, like our sergeant said, we’re fighting with one hand tied behind our back.”
Pump’s claim about peace and love somehow vanquishing oppression was standard hippie fare. What startled me was his linkage of this fantasy with the usual right-wing excuse for the U.S. failure to defeat the NLF: the military wasn’t allowed to operate to its full potential.
“There’s a saying,” I countered. “The power of the people is greater than the —”
“In unarmed combat they taught us to fight by using the enemy’s momentum against him. That’s the power of Woodstock — we showed once and for all we’re unstoppable, man. We did it without a confrontation trip. We simply were, all together.”
“Wayman?” Edward beckoned. As I rose and approached the knives, he reminded Pump that Woodstock was a commercial venture. “The promoters put the festival together to make money, dough, filthy lucre.” Edward lowered himself again into his deck chair. “Don told me Woodstock only became a free concert because the site wasn’t fenced properly. The event wasn’t even held at the real Woodstock. The backers —”
“The name doesn’t matter, man,” Pump said. “What’s more important is —”
“The backers got into a zoning beef with the locals,” Edward continued. “The location had to be shifted fifty miles away at the last minute. That meant the new site was never completely prepared. Hundreds of thousands more customers showed up than anticipated, and the promoters lost control. Too many gate-crashers were getting onto the site, so the organizers bowed to the inevitable and announced that Woodstock was free. Radio stations in Manhattan broadcast the news, and that convinced even more people to go. Don says the promoters lost big dollars.”
The sweetly dense smoke off the knife poured into my nostrils and from there inside my brain, coating my thoughts with pure honey. Pump was suddenly kneeling beside me, and took the tools out of my hands. I floated through air to resume my former seat. Jay had levered himself up with his arms and sat on the porch rail, his back to the night sea.
Pump was poised over the knives, still disputing with Edward. “Maybe the organizers were messing with something bigger than they understood. Maybe karma took a hand, man, and set things in motion that had to be.”
“Definitely,” Edward mocked. “Except, as Don tells it, the bigger force was a county zoning board that refused the original permit.”
Astonishingly, Edward and the other two seemed unaffected by their inhalation of the hash. Whereas my mind was drifting on an ocean of aromatic bougainvillea-like petals, pillowy with cellular gratification.
From the living room the emphatic guitar and drumbeat of Crosby, Stills and Nash’s “Long Time Gone” was displaying the self-confident assurance of tires covering ground on asphalt hour after hour. The rhythm wafted me back to my long drive, reminding me how tired I was and simultaneously infusing me with energy. The feeling echoed how when I was behind the wheel, the freeway after a time casting its spell: highway hypnosis, I called it. I hated to pull over to eat or even refuel. The road that unfurled ahead of me compelled me to follow, to see where it led next, to learn what the universe would reveal.
I glanced at my watch. Quarter to one. CS&N were insisting:
Turn, turn any corner.
Hear, you must hear what the people say.
You know there’s something that’s going on around here
That surely, surely, surely
Won’t stand the light of day.
Pump was leaning over the hash. “You and Jay are a little late with Flower Power,” Edward said. “While you were busy defending the country from enemies foreign and domestic, that crap came and went. Right, Wayman?”
I could only nod.
“When we first got here, a bunch of hippies were living in Laguna Canyon,” Edward said, as if presenting a parable. He recounted how the civic authorities didn’t like the freak colony, claiming it created a bad image for the town, had no sanitation, and the inhabitants paid no taxes on their ramshackle homes. The canyon dwellers were served with eviction papers. “At the appointed hour, not only the Laguna Beach cops but the Orange County sheriff ’s deputies arrived with lights flashing and paddy wagons to do the dirty deed,” Edward said. “A few of the more enlightened profs from UC Irvine showed up, too, to serve as witnesses, along with some students. Their hope was that the public eye would keep the Orange County sheriff ’s boys from doing what they’re famous for. Fat chance.”
Pump glanced up and started to say something, but Edward rode over him. “The Canyon freaks had decided non-violence was the route to take. They were going to preach peace to the peace officers. The hippies started chanting ‘Ommm’ as the cops approached with drawn clubs. Didn’t seem to have much effect. People got kicked, punched, clubbed, dragged off, busted. Even one of the Irvine profs, Shoemaker in philosophy, was arrested. Police brutality was the talk of the town for a week, then everybody forgot about it. There’s your power of non-confrontation.”
Jay slid onto the deck from the rail and stood. “I bet there weren’t so many freaks around in those days. That’s why the pigs could get away with it.”
Edward snorted. “That’s not the reason. Then or now, it’s —”
“More and more people have turned