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POWDER RIDGE DAY 1: part 4 THURSDAY, JULY 30 DRAFT copyright 2002-2006 Rockfest1970@msn.com It must have been 6 or 6:30. The sun had already dipped behind the mountain but it’d still be light out for a few more hours. I finally dug the tent out of my pack. Having not been used for a year it reeked even more than usual of canvas and waterproofing. I cleared the area of stones, found a rock to bang the stakes in with, and five minutes later, the tiny tent was up. At 6X4 It barely had room for two let alone gear. Hearing an amplified voice coming from the stage, Bill and I cut across the slopes until we were looking down at the main stage. Someone was announcing that the festival promoters had been arrested. A round of boos and hisses rose up from the crowd as did a few choice expletives. “Shit!” I muttered. “The pigs are afraid to take us on so they struck elsewhere.” “Don’t be so sure they’re not coming” cautioned Bill.“Not saying they’re not. Think we’ll be able to see them in time to escape?” Sometime later... perhaps around 7:30 I ventured down to the City to marvel at the activity and the influx of new people. There, I bought an underground newspaper out of New Jersey called “All You Can Eat”. (Vol 1, Number 1) for 25 cents. Adorning its cover was R. Crumb’s Mr. Natural polishing off a Dagwood sandwich that looked a lot better than the one sickly one I’d just had. Also on the front cover a photo of roasted pigs heads. I continued on, snapping a shot of the hazed-out sun setting over the mountain with Powder Puddle in the foreground. 
It was almost dusk when I headed home. Bill was still there and we each did a hit of acid. The details escape me. All acid seemed to have a name if for no other reason than marketing... Yellow Sunshine, Strawberry Fields, White Jupiter, etc.
About a half hour later it began to get weird out. I don’t remember what possessed Bill, Lee and I to hike up the main ski slope that night but I can guess. Acid was hardly a downer. Should one be so motivated, one could walk forever. OK... if it wasn’t just the acid. Maybe we wanted to check out potential escape routes on the trail that ran along the ridge. As we climbed, the crowd thinned, as did the air. Maybe it only seemed so as we left the zone of smoky campfires. The incessant drumbeat coming from the festival was also being left behind. We were now in the zone where only a few Festival hermits lived. Crickets were chirping up a storm. About 2/3 of the way to the top we met up with a young woman struggling with a sleeping bag. She was obviously stoned out of her mind... possibly on something better than what we had. “Can you roll me up in my sleeping bag?” she repeatedly asked. “Common, roll me up in my sleeping bag.” If we were not such gentlemen.... Every couple hundred feet or so we’d collapse on the grass and look back to see the hundreds perhaps a thousand points of light.... the campfires of the Powder Ridge Occupation Army. It truly was liberated territory. I was thrown back in time. “Ya think this is the way a camped army looked in the Civil War?” “Probably, but I bet they didn’t drum though the night.” Bill laughed. "Ya, it might give away their location." "Shit man, everyone knows where the fuck this army is." “Yup, there's no hiding us. Damn, I thought Gonkers was great but this fucking fantastic!” The higher we climbed the more distant lights of homes in the Big Brother World could be seen. They were the lights of people that hated us.... except of course, the guy who gave us a ride. When we finally did get to the ridge line we were greeted by cool breeze. Through the trees to the west, the lights of Meriden. We were at the upper terminal for one of the chair lifts. One chair was low enough for me to climb on. I spent the next half hour bouncing on the chair to the chants of “Monkey Man” from Bill. The chair had a natural springiness to it. After a few bounces I’d close my eyes waiting for the last bounce to decay away. It never seemed to. It might have been midnight when we got back to camp. Even if we hadn’t been tripping, the excitement alone would have been enough to keep us awake. While Bill stayed home and mingled with the neighbors I, again, ventured out eventually down to the City then followed the road back to the main gate. I sat down for a while trying to estimate the number of people pouring in. I’d heard that even at this late hour more people were coming in now than earlier in the day. My count was about 15 per minute... 800 per hour. Who knew how many people were getting in via other routes? WOW! Maybe Powder Ridge would turn into something big yet! What if the place was overrun by another Woodstock sized influx? They’d have to let the show go on, right? At a small guard house a few hundred feet from the main road there was an older, rather manic, Freak greeting everyone as they crossed into liberated territory. “Welcome folks to Powder Ridge Peoples Festival. One birth. No deaths and the most beautiful mindfuck you’ve ever been to”. As he greeted newcomers he handed each a red ticket. “By the way, you need a ticket to get in” he’d laugh. The ticket was for a concert at Madison near Cleveland Ohio and dated some weeks before. After the experiencing two canceled rockfests, I could only assume this one, too, had been crushed. I struck up a conversation with him. I don’t remember his name but I do remember that he was from California, the infamous Berkley to be exact... and, yes, I had a place to stay should I ever venture out there. Such welcoming offers were pretty standard. We all stood for the same things and could be trusted, right? He had been one of the Freaks who went around town with a pro-festival petition to overturn the injunction. He’d also been interviewed on WHCN where he pleaded the cause.So with a handful of tickets I joined him, running back and forth greeting people all the time trying to carry on a conversation. He was one of the more optimistic people there... not only still hoping that the festival was still on, but that believing some 75-100,000 people were already there. They couldn’t stop us now, could they? By 3:00 am I was burning out. I said goodbye and began the long trudge back Home. In retrospect it was only about 2/3 of a mile but sometimes such things are relative. Once home there I found Bill still awake. He was crouched by the neighbor's campfire which was so close to our tent anyway we adopted it as our own. At Powder Ridge proximity meant community if not instant brotherhood. Bill was chatting with one of the neighbors and anyone else who would stop in. One of the wanderers was a guy named Art who was originally hired as a security guard for the festival. I have no idea where he was from and even at the Fest he had no home. All he had was the shirt on his back. What was remarkable about Art was that in a sea of mellow people he still stood out as one of the mellowest people I’d ever met. So we all sat around, getting stoned and toying with the fire. I watched in fascination as glowing embers streaked up into the dark night, leaving tracers to mark their tortuous path. This was my first campfire on acid. This certainly wasn't like camping with the Boy Scouts! Who knew fire could be such a wondrous toy! Maybe fire was another life form. We babbled incessantly watching the intricate and ever mutating designs in the outlines of distant trees. In the valley below the eternal drumbeat could be heard... people banging one anything they could find: overturned garbage cans, bottles, and canteens. We dubbed them the Powder Ridge Drum Corps. At times a beat would catch like wildfire spreading upwards on a slope. As one such wave approached I closed my eyes and listened as it grew louder, hit our neighborhood, then spread ever upward to die in the thinly populated area of the upper slopes. There was even community in drumming. But it was about 4:00 am. The enthusiasm for such stuff was waning. Soon the unattended campfire began to smoke. Eyelids began to droop. Art wandered off never to be seen again. Perhaps he was one of those people that could live off the generosity of the festival itself... stumbling upon new groups of people pooling food with some to spare... maybe crashing in a tent or just on someone’s spare blanket. The weather was such as not to need shelter. Maybe Art just never slept. Who the hell know what happened. Maybe I made it to my tent.... already stuffed with two backpacks. Maybe I just crashed outside with my army blanket. Why not? The weather was fine. Summer was a friend... a joy to sleep in. One was free to sleep wherever one slumped.
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