Last Journey

8. Desperate Michaelangelos

       Police hadn’t been much of a problem at the gathering. None of them went inside the site that I know of. We discourage them from coming in. The very competent legal crew works things out in the local area so they understand that we intend to police ourselves. Our Rainbow cops, Shantisena, are capable of dealing with any problem and have proven it time and again over the years. We have walky-talkies and full fledged doctors and medical technicians, too. We just don’t need any outsider cops walking around inside the site disturbing our family.

       On the rare occasion when some cop or Forestry official does enter, we have them leave their guns back in their vehicle. We’re adamant about that. We don’t allow any guns in the site. If the cop were to retain his gun and any of the 20,000 people developed a bad reaction and wrestled him for it, the gun might go off -- or it might fire if he simply slipped and fell -- and when a gun goes off in an area crowded with men, women and children blood will flow. So we don’t allow any guns in the site. No guns, no alcohol, no vehicles.

       So cops stay outside and I think they fume a little. But they have developed other methods of dealing with us. Mainly they try to stop vehicles that are on their way into the site, or as they leave the gathering. They set up roadblocks with drug-sniffing dogs and wait for us. A lot of people get busted that way. Ellie and I have no worries inasmuch as we don't allow any pot or drugs of any kind in our Bicycle Bus ever. But we don't like to see our brothers and sisters harmed.

       At the 1989 National in Nevada I was often dispatched in a small car with my video camera to video the police harrassing Rainbows, pulling them over for no reason. My camera made them treat people decent and frequently to leave. I volunteered my video camera in Minnesota too but it wasn’t as necessary.

       As we prepared to leave we heard that the cops had roadblocks set up and were checking every car. We held off our departure and waited for the cops to get tired of bugging people. We didn’t want to run that gauntlet if we didn’t have to, and waiting around a few days extra at the Rainbow is no problem: there really isn’t any better place to be.

       Minnesota had some problems that started early -- way back in spring with Seed Camp. Seed camp always seems to consist of some die-hard Rainbow alcoholics whether we like it or not. 99.9% of us do not abuse alcohol and we wish the Seed Camp drunks wouldn’t give the rest of us such a bad name, especially since the Seed Campers are the first Rainbows the local people meet and erroneous impressions are formed.

       One of the places the Seed Campers decided they wanted to do their drinking was at the local airport’s bar. When months before the gathering even began a car full of drunk Seed Campers backed into an airplane Minnesota authorities suddenly realized that 20,000 hippies would be invading their northern community that summer and their local cops wouldn’t nearly be enough. They set about arranging the proper reception.

       Minnesota State Troopers began arriving from every corner of the land of ten thousand lakes. Neighboring states also loaned troopers to Minnesota. U.S. Forestry officers arrived from all over the United States too. There was a big motel in the tiny town of Lutson. The cops booked every single room for a solid month. Motel employees said afterwards that they never had any trouble from any Rainbow people—but the motel full of cops was nothing but one problem after another. They were a rowdy, drunken crowd of hooligans, always getting into fights, always trying to outbrag each other -- real headaches to the staff and to many of the normal townfolk.

       I guess it really surprised the locals. They’d expected the 20,000 hippies to be drunk and dangerous. When they saw most of us were sober and even spiritual they didn’t mind much at all how poor we were or that we generally functioned outside “the system”... Compared to those drunken cops we were decent and it was purely obvious to farmers, storekeepers, ministers and school children, many of whom mentioned it to us at one time or another.

       The gathering was officially over on the seventh and the state coppers grew weary of inactivity as traffic thinned. The remaining Rainbows still drove back and forth to town for supplies; so they were able to give everyone the straight scoop about the status of the roadblocks. We waited until we heard that the road was entirely clear of roadblocks before we left the gathering.

       We figured on rolling out late in the evening and traveling by night to avoid most hassels. Many others had the same idea. Then just as we were finally ready to leave some somber news came to us. A couple of Rainbow brothers had left the gathering in their VW bus the previous night, beginning their long trip home. They were tired. Rainbow Gatherings are exhausting. The driver fell asleep at the wheel and drove head-on into a big truck. Both brothers died.

       I realized it wasn’t a good idea for me to try driving that highway at night either, so we left the following morning. Besides, we had a rim on the bus that had gotten bent so we had to stop at the Lutsen wrecking yard and buy another one and put it on. By the time we were through with all that we were already into the early afternoon before we got rolling south.

       After only driving sixty miles I started getting real tired and had to pull off somewhere to rest for an hour. I spotted a roadside picnic table beside the water and pulled in. It looked so peaceful there I gave some thought to setting up camp and taking it easy for the rest of the day. Steps and I gathered dry wood and got a fire going to cook up some supper.

       The Bike Bus attracted the usual amount of attention; a few people came to chat with us. They were a family that lived in a house walking distance away, a straight-looking family -- but weird.

       We talked about the gathering mostly and I don’t remember how the next subject came up or what inspired it but I remember them looking at each other and snickering and the father asking his wife and their teenage son if they thought he should tell us about... about their special recipes... We wondered what in the hell they were talking about.  They were talking about “free food”; something they thought we should be aware of.

       Birds... seagulls and crows... They ate them. Made soups out of them. I thought, they were joking. The father got serious. He told his son to run home and fetch us a taste. We begged, him not to bother... He told his son to go anyway. He went off running and returned ten minutes later -- with a white plastic bag of soup -- ccrow and seagull soup, potatoes and carrots and celery too. The father told us it was fresh. They had just thawed it out for their evening meal and this was what was left over. They regularly made large batches and froze meal-size portions in separate haggles.

       The dad urged me to try some. He had a spoonfull himself just to show us... His whole family was telling us how great it was. We felt we had to be nice so we each tasted it. Blech! He said we could have the rest of the bag. Oh, goody.

       We told them we had to make some miles and left soon after. We’d thought we’d sleep in that spot for the night but that family changed our minds. We drove a few more miles and found another place.

       In the morning we proceeded to the town of Two Harbors, intending to go right on through but I noticed a one-hour photo developing store and went in to have a talk with the owner. I was anxious to develop my twenty rolls of film.

       I figured rightly that he had heard a lot about the Rainbow Gathering but of course he hadn’t gone himself. Maybe he’d be curious enough about my pictures to make me a deal. My intuition was correct. I showed him examples of my stuff beforehand to make sure he didn’t freak out about nudity. No problem.

       He worked with me on the price and I checked each batch for quality and sent the ones back that needed to be redone and the technician redid them right away. Meanwhile we parked the Bike Bus on the side of hwy 61 across the street from the shop. It wasn’t very comfortable: We were inside the city limits and we were a strange sight to the locals. I believe rumors about my nude photographs began leaking out of the store and circulating around town because the local cop got real squirrelly the next day. I’m sure he suspected we were marijuana addicts and most likely transporting drugs. He itched for a reason to search us.

       The guy in the shop had to really rush to do all my photos to perfection. I sure didn’t need any washed out images and I didn’t intend paying for any. And he only had one machine and one technician to do all my stuff in addition to the rolls of film dropped off by local customers. The pressure began to build. The cop told us that we frightened people. Groovy. As though they didn’t frighten us too. But you didn’t see us calling the cops about them.

       We were parked there on the side of the highway for two days. It was a royal pain. Live and learn. I will sure know better than to do something like that again in a small town in the Midwest! The vibes got so cold and heavy! The townsfolk stared at us like we were buzzards. We tried to hurry the developer up. He seemed to be prolonging our agony. It was taking him all day long to do the last four rolls. It felt like a conspiracy when finally the town cop drove up and gave us an hour to get our stuff and get out of town. He looked sleazy as shit and he had meanness on his mind, obvious as hell. The last rolls were coming off the machine. I waited for them in the store impatiently.

       There’s nothing illegal about nude photos. But people in little bitty backwoods towns don’t always know that.  The entire population of Northern Minnesota was nuts from the influx of all the recent wild and wooly Rainbow participants, all of whom had passed through that town on hwy 61. And now here we were and they looked at us through the smoked glass of their fertile imaginations and wondered about nudity and drugs and all those bikes on that weird hippy bus...

       They probably thought it must cost a lot of money to drive such a huge rig across half the United States, not to mention the cost of developing twenty rolls of film. The cop asked me pointedly where I got my money. I told him I fix bikes.

       And I did too. I made fifty dollars sitting in that little town of Two Harbors -- without a business license of course. There’s another thing the cop could get me for!

       I accepted the last photos as-is and paid my bill. We flew the coop with minutes to spare, and watched the rear-view mirror as we rolled out of town, nervously dreading that the cop would appear with flashing lights and sirens.

       And sure enough -- there he was behind us with his flashing lights and his siren. I pulled over and went back to talk to him. He asked me if I was in any trouble? No. Why should I be in any trouble? He didn’t say... Then he wanted to know where we were going next. I told him we were going to visit my relatives and friends in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area. He looked at me real hard and finally told me to drive carefully. I climbed back into the bus and flew down the highway. He sure had the hair standing up on the back of my neck -- and I wondered how far away from him we’d have to get before we were safe? City limits? County line? State line?

       Twenty long miles later we were in Duluth. We didn’t continue south -- we headed west on Hwy 2. I sure wasn’t going to follow the agenda I’d told the cop! No way! Highway 2 was a much less traveled road than 61. It rolled through Indian reservations -- and it was the quickest route through Minnesota to the Dakotas. Plus the northern communities weren’t as full of cops as was southern Minnesota. We had one more reason to be nervous: Minnesota is real strident about mandatory automobile insurance and ours had expired. I felt safe enough driving back without it, if only I could get out of Minnesota, the only state that had ever asked me for proof of insurance.

       We didn’t stop; we rolled mile after mile, plodding along. The Bike Bus is like a turtle. It’s slow but it gets there. I wanted to put as many miles as possible between us and that cop. But driving that fifty year old tank is tiring. The shaking and rumbling turns into a comforting pattern and I have to take a break now and then or it tends to lull me to sleep. A hundred miles later I felt a lot safer and I thought I could go for a coffee break. Plus I wanted to take a good look at all my new photos and begin putting the good ones into a new album.

       When we passed a truck stop in the middle of nowhere I turned around and parked. Cafes are fun places to work on one’s art while traveling. Plus I had sort of developed a liking for working on projects in cafes, from all the cafes where I had done it in Eugene, Oregon. Well, actually throughout the entire Northwest United States. But it isn’t the same thing in places like Northern Minnesota, you know. Ellie stayed in the bus frying up some chicken for our supper while Steps and I went into the cafe. I carried the album and the new photos.

       Naturally everyone in the cafe stopped talking and gaped at us like we were from Mars. We chose the table that offered us the most privacy and ordered coffee and french fries and dug out the first pack of photographs. I held them carefully in such a way that the waitress couldn’t see them. I wanted to separate the good ones from the bad ones and the excellent ones from the good ones. Steps helped. We compared them together and discussed them quietly.

       We’d gone through a couple cups of coffee each and eaten our fries and we were deeply engrossed in the photos when we became aware of someone standing beside our table. We looked up and were surprised to see it was a cop.

       It turned out that the waitress had managed to peek at our photos while refilling our coffee. When she saw nudity she figured she’d better call the police. Fuck a duck!

       The cop asked us what kind of photos we were looking at? I explained that we were returning home from the Rainbow Gathering and that we’d just developed our photographs and this was our first opportunity to have a look at them. He picked up a couple at random and told us it was illegal for us to have pornography in that public place. I tried to explain the difference between photographs of people involved in a nudist culture and “pornography” and I told him that I was a professional photographer which is only true in a very broad sense; however I knew I would soon be doing gallery shows and... So what if I allowed myself a little latitude in attempting to vindicate my art?

       Anyway, the cop wasn’t interested in anything I was saying... He was real rude. He said,

       “No man has any right to see a woman in the nude except her husband...”

       I couldn’t believe he said that. But he was serious. He said he wasn’t going to argue about it with me either. After ten minutes of very one-sided pig-headed discussion he told us he’d give us a chance: either we’d clear out of his town immediately or he’d confiscate our photographs and jail us and let us tell it to the judge.

       We split fast.

       For all I knew he was radioing ahead to some other cop. Or he could still change his mind and come after us and arrest us. Maybe he’d do some checking and connect somehow with that cop in Two Harbors. I mean like we were breaking some pretty heavy taboos here... We were flaunting some freedoms that they didn’t even want to know about.

        These people probably thought degenerate hippies were responsible for all the nude art in the world and it was up to them to stamp it out quick. Times like this I think of Michaelangelo painting his nudes on the vast ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Michaelangelo hadn't wanted to leave his sculpture to paint the Sistine ceiling but the pope insisted. So Michaelangelo made a bargain with the pope. He would paint the ceiling on the condition that he had two years to do it, with no one looking over his shoulder. No one was allowed to see his paintings until he was finished. Not even the pope. And what he chose to paint was up to him. The pope agreed. Two years later on the day of the unveiling the pope and the cardinals were very surprised to discover that Michaelangelo had painted the entire ceiling of the most expensive church on Earth -- with nudes. Some cardinals were very angry. They wanted Michaelangelo burned at the stake and his masterpiece paintings destroyed. A heated debate raged on. Finally it came to a vote. Michaelangelo's life and his precious art were spared -- by one single solitary vote! One!

        Not that any of that would mean much to those Northern Minnesota cops.

        Think of Egon Shiele! Put in prison because of his nude paintings. Emotionally scarred and increasingly despondent he dies a few years later -- at age 28!! Think of Francisco Goya's paintings, both entitled "Maja", considered by the Spanish Inquisition to be "obscene works"!!

        How wrong is it for me to believe that an artist today in America should not have to suffer from persecution by people with attitudes that are akin to those of the Spanish Inquisition of 1813???

       I’d told the cop we were taking hwy 2 straight across into North Dakota. I changed plans instantly. At the next north/south highway we dodged south pedal to the medal. It was night now. The cover of darkness might help us disappear. Maybe. These were dark narrow country roads with minimal traffic...

       The only problem was in locating signs on the strange backwoods highway so we didn’t get lost. Steps was the co-pilot. He had the map on his lap and a flashlight in his hand and he tried to keep track of our progress. We made it another sixty miles or so and camped for the night in a small town’s community park, with the snout of the bus pointed out towards the highway for a fast departure.

       The next morning, refreshed and roadready we rolled out -- but the Bike Bus was running a little ragged. We couldn’t figure out the nature of the problem.

       We stopped in the town of Crookston to see if we could find anyone who could tell us what the problem was. And we discovered we had a flat tire! I had to buy a new lug wrench for $35 and I put on the spare on the side of the road in the center of town. When I finished a cop car pulled up and ran a complete check on us. I got my scrap book out right away and showed him all our newspaper clippings. He gradually warmed -- but, man-oh-man, those Minnesota cops were a bunch of hardnoses. He detained us for a good hour. Shit, it’s lousy to be made to feel so criminalized because of our different beliefs.

       And once again we worried he’d change his mind and come after us.

       We dodged west at the first opportunity heading for North Dakota.

       As we approached the border the engine started backfiring and cutting out. We nursed it along. What in the hell was the problem? We didn’t want to stop and find out. We just wanted to get out of Minnesota and it looked like some team of little red devils was trying like hell to get us stuck before we could make good our escape.

       We were on the edge of our seats.

Steps was pleading:

“Come on bus... You can do it... Just a little further... Please...”

       And I was doing the same thing. Sputter, sputter, clunk, wheeze. The engine kept dying and restarting, dying and restarting. The asphalt road turned to gravel. We were far off the beaten track. We asked a farmer directions and he told us it was five more miles to North Dakota. We chugged and sputtered along.

       When the “You are leaving Minnesota” sign came into view we were screaming. We were hollering and screaming.

       “Come on bus. Come on bus. Come on bus.”

       Chugging and sputtering.

       What a feeling of relief when we passed that sign. Man, we hollered. Man, oh man!

       But we still didn’t feel entirely safe. We managed to clank into the first little town. I think it was Cuming or Hillsboro. We parked and I looked around for a mechanic to look at the engine. It turned out the manifold bolts had come loose. Apparently they hadn’t tightened them enough when they put the gasket on in Lake Preston in June. I tightened all the studs and started up the engine. Problem solved.

       We got on Interstate 29 heading south. I was aiming for Lake Preston again. I’d told Tom and Carol we’d stop back in on the way back.

       When we came to highway 81 we happily got off the Interstate. 81 is a laid-back country road. We rolled on south to east/west highway 14 which passes through Lake Preston. It was great to be headed west again.

       We discovered a farm that was full of antique cars and trucks and tractors, all rusting away out in the weather, acres of them. I parked the bus and wandered through them with my video camera. I knocked on the farmer’s door. He wasn’t very sociable but he let me take the videos. Many of those machines dated back to WWI.

Wow!                ,