Travel

The Rainbow Gathering

I'm finally back from my 1.5 weeks of vacation. I'm clean, slept, healthy, 5 pounds lighther and vastly more optimistic about the world. I really needed to step away from the computer and interact with more human beings.

The first leg of my vacation took me to the Rainbow Gathering near Likely, CA. If you're not familiar with the Rainbow Gathering, think about 20,000 hippies camping together in a pristine forest.

If hippies panhandling near the side of the road, or the stank' of hippies bugging you for smokes drives you batty, then the Rainbow Gathering is not your place. Even at the gathering there are people who are constantly begging for smokes, doses (read: LSD or mushrooms), or weed. However, if you can convince your brain to pencil out those drainbows and focus on people who earn their keep by contributing in one of numerous ways, then you may really enjoy the gathering.

For me, the highlight of each day is dinner time, when a large number of the hippies gather on the main meadow to come together to listen to the daily announcements and to have dinner. But, before I talk about dinner, I need to talk about how the rainbow kitchens work:

Each year a few dozen kitchens set up shop in the middle of the forest. Lovin' Ovens, Brew-ha-ha, Montana, Simply Wonderful, and many other clans of hippies erect kitchens from random felled trees and rocks. These kitchens are supplied with bulk food from the Rainbow supply lines which are kept alive from money donations from the magic hat that is passed at each dinner. Throughout the day these kitchens cook up food, bake bread, make pizzas and all sorts of nummy vegetarian snacks. Rainbows know to keep a spoon and a dish with them at all times, because you never know when a kitchen will be serving and going home to get your dish is not an option -- all the food will be gone by the time your get your dish. You need to strike while the food is hot.

The kitchens cook food and serve it throughout the day, but many kitchens make large stews, rices or soups for dinner and bring them down to the main meadow in large 5-10 gallon buckets. Just before dinner, the rainbows in the meadow organize themselves into concentric circles (a challenging task, trust me) and volunteer servers go through the circles to scoop food into the dishes held out by hungry rainbows. You never know what you're going to get -- sometimes its bland rice. Sometimes its a tasty curry dish. One meal I had a bell pepper/onion/misc veggie stew that could've been served in a fancy vegetarian restaurant in Berekeley or LA.

The Rainbow Gathering is amazing in many ways, but this year I was most amazed at rainbow communication. In general Rainbows tend to be very low tech -- there simply isn't much technology. Flashlights, portable CD players, some glow sticks and blinky lights and that is it -- there are NO generators providing power. All cooking is done over a wood fire. Consequently there are few forms of electronic communication going on -- some of the larger kitchens have walkie-talkies to coordinate supply runs, but that is it.

The dinner circles serve as the formal communication medium for the gathering -- the announcements before the dinner serve to get the word out about important events. However, one person speaking to 10,000+ people without a megaphone is not going to reach everyone. Typically one speaker will make an annoucement, and as speakers go, they turn to attempt to address the entire audience that is gathered in circle about them. But as the speaker turns to address the others, the message is not repeated and certain groups of people get certain chunks of the message. Very few people get the whole message, leaving me to wonder how effective these announcements are in the first place.

It turns out that they are quite effective in the end. The people close to the center of the circle get the whole message and these people also seem to be the people who care the most -- they show up earlier than other people. Thus it is these people who carry the message to the rest of rainbow. I think of it as one gigantic telephone game, with one major difference: the important messages make it out correctly.

At first, the system works in a top-down fashion -- the central organizers have a message to pass to the community. They pass the message on to as many people as they can reach, which is only a tiny fraction of the whole crowd. Then others in the crowd will take the message that is dearest to them and spread it out to others -- which is a bottom up function. So in the end, the Rainbow communication is both top-down and buttom-up, which is fascinating to me.

There are many more facets to Rainbow than kitchens, meadows and communication -- mostly its about the cool people that come to the gathering. There are so many people you don't know, many people you do know and a few that you know, but didn't know they were Rainbows. My fondest moment of the gathering was when Brian and Shoshanna Zisk showed up with their kid at the dinner circle and said hi to me. Having last seen Brian and Shoshanna at the Future of Music Summit, I really wasn't expecting to see them at the Rainbow gathering. But I am so glad I did -- I love reminders that the world we live in is a small and beautiful place.

Posted by Mayhem at July 13, 2004 02:38 PM