Wild Child: Girlhoods in the Counterculture by Chelsea Cain

spray, my lips glimmering with shell-pink lipstick, my jeans rolled tight to my leg, my Keds whiter than white. They may have secretly lamented my embrace of the trappings of mainstream teenage life—but they never said a word.
    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.

Chelsea Cain
    Welcome Home

    T he 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