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WATKINS GLEN 1973, part 4 Copyright 2006, Robb Strycharz JULY 29, SATURDAY continued: I must have gotten back to our camp around 4p, the time the Dead's set finished. No, no one was particularly interested in my discoveries. The mood was not good. Wally and Davy were both pretty disgusted and wanted to cut their losses and leave early before the mass exodus. I was outvoted but my wanting to stay had less to do with enjoying the music which at best softly wafted in on the wind... but because this was an historic event. But if we were to leave we had to eat. I again had something unmemorable for supper. About then the music started up again. If it was the Allman Brothers, Davy's favorite, it might have changed his mind. We walked over towards the main road to hear the group. It was The Band. Oh Well. In the meantime A small plane flew overhead and 4 parachutists emerged. They were trailing orange smoke... but something was wrong with one of them. We later learned that he died when the flares set fire to his clothing. It did nothing to improve the mood. I could not talk Wally and Davy into staying and by 6:00p we were packed up and heading out... as the storm clouds darkened. We pulled out our ponchos and plastic drop cloths just in time before the skies let loose. All I could think about was keeping my camera and my poster dry. The latter was rolled up and buried deep in my army jacket. It was a real downpour.... lightening everywhere followed by rolling claps of thunder. I shot a few pics of the refugees on the road. It might have been pouring but at least it was all downhill from here... literally. A few hours later we had little trouble finding Wally's yellow VW in the dark. Fortunately it wasn't sealed in with other cars. If it had what would we have done then? We headed south down the car littered highway. This time knowing we didn't have to take the back roads. We headed to RT-17. It was a mess with cars not just parked on the side of the highway but abandoned in the median strip. Somewhere we saw a landmark we recognized... Uncle Gumby's. We'd connected with the route we came in on. I don't know how it happened but at some point we missed RT-7 back to Albany. We took RT-23 east. All this time the storm followed us... or more precisely we just managed the same speed at the weather front and always managed to stay beneath the storm. We were traveling through cow country with it's massive barns and silos... often suddenly lit up besides us by a violent bolt of lightening. All I remember about the trip being wet and since the car had not heat, I was cold. Sometimes the rain was so heavy that Wally could not see out the windshield and we seemed we were out of control. This was no time to doze so I chomped down some No-Doz. We pulled into Great Barrington about 3:30a. The Bug was on empty... and at 3am all the stores and gas stations were closed. Someone remembered from Abbie Hoffman's Steal This Book that often gas hoses still had some gas in them. So we stopped at a gas station. Wally was about to try draining a gas hose when a cop car stopped. He suggested we move on and buy gas in Lee. Ya right. We were running on fumes. Luckily we soon saw a tow truck and persuaded the driver to sell some gas. A $1 a gallon is a bargain these days but back in the pre-Oil Embargo summer of '73, gas was going for about 30 cents a gallon. We dragged our asses home about 5a. Still buzzed on No-Doz more than acid I scribbled down 4 pages of crude notes. Then it was Happy Darkness. EPILOG Back in 1971 I wrote up my trips to the Mountaindale and Powder Ridge rock fests . It was easy since I had contemporary journal notes and the events were still fresh in my mind. Upon that foundation I hopefully was able to reconstruct the experience of being at those events. I never was so motivated to write up Watkins Glen. While it was a historic event to the outside world, it really was not a trip I had really fond memories of. Unlike Powder Ridge, my time at Watkins Glen were clearly not the best days of my life. I never bothered to get any of the Summer Jam concert albums that were eventually released. While not writing up the story remained a sore spot, decades soon passed. I began to think it was much too late to even think of reconstructing the story... so I never did. Yet here is was now some 33 years later. If not now... when I was working on my website, when? Could I do it? Sadly I could not find much about Watkins Glen out there on the web... at least not personal stories. But I'd saved lots of news articles and I had a book on the rockfest era. I also had my 3-D photos... even if they were not numbered in sequence. At some point in the distant past I made a crude map of the festival site and tried to note where each pic was taken. Along with some aerial photos of the site shot before the festival and with the crowd in place I was able to retrace my steps. Once everything was integrated, the chronology all made sense. But in the end I could never have recreated the trip if I hadn't written down those 4 pages of crude notes on now yellowing paper upon returning. That and thankfully I'm a pack rat who never throws stuff out. Hope you enjoyed the story!
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