A bit more about _Wild_

[walkitout]

Book group is on Monday, so I really should finish this. It's a weird book, hard to put down when I'm reading it, but when I do put it down it is almost impossible to pick back up. I'd rather do nearly anything rather than pick it back up.

In any event, I'm past the bit at Toad Lake where they were hoping to run into Rainbow Gathering (the internet says that year the Rainbow Gathering was in New Mexico). As I read her description of how there was all this free food at a Rainbow Gathering (and remember, I don't at this point know anything about this group/these events), I'm weighing in my head, okay, more of the food obsession and then on the other hand, wait, I'm pretty sure it's not really _free_. If this is really a bunch of hippies, then you eat the free food, you're gonna have to do something in exchange.

Then I learned that a person who eats and hangs out and drinks and smokes and does drugs and generally consumes without contributing at such a gathering is known as a Drainbow. But I didn't get that from _Wild_.

Comments

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

I get the impression that there are also smaller regional gatherings, not just the major annual one.

other 1995 gatherings

[walkitout]

Czech Republic, Israel and Colorado.

http://www.welcomehome.org/rainbow/graphics/graphics.html

Contemporary coverage of the New Mexico 1995 gathering at NYT

http://www.nytimes.com/1995/07/02/us/in-northern-new-mexico-some-seek-the-end-of-the-rainbow-gathering.html

Re: other 1995 gatherings

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

That's just the ones people have submitted pictures for. There could still have been a smaller one where Strayed was. Or she could have made it up, or spliced it in from some other experience, or whatever.

Re: other 1995 gatherings

[walkitout]

I believe I have identified the misunderstanding! Strayed went to a Rainbow Gathering some year _before_ her time on and around the PCT. While on the PCT, she heard rumors that it would be at Toad Lake. The people who relayed the rumors to her did not know what a Rainbow Gathering was. She describes the Rainbow Gathering, partly in terms of food (free, good and lots of it). The Rainbow Gathering was not at Toad Lake. They encountered people on a road which intersected the PCT who were also looking for the Rainbow Gathering, who were similarly looking for food and who were similarly down when they discovered it was not there. (All of that is in the book. All of that is how she presents things.) Strayed and the internet are fully in agreement on the NON presence of the Rainbow Gathering at Toad Lake in 1995. Did Not Happen.

My complaint in this case is that Strayed misrepresents how hippie gatherings/the Rainbow Gathering work in general, in that she says the food is free. It isn't, and the internet is _also_ in agreement with me on that topic, and provided me with the term Drainbow for moochers who show up at Rainbow Gathering hoping for free food, etc., and not being willing to dig shitters and similar by way of contribution to the cause.