Over the Rainbow

Hippies think they invented free love, but they were, at best, revivalists. Anthropologists have established that sexual monogamy developed about the time property ownership did, when it started to matter whose son that was because it determined who would inherit the farm. Cave men had no use for monogamy.


And so, at a Rainbow Gathering, an international conglomerate of free-loving, nature-hugging, communally eating neo-Hippies that cropped up last month on the banks of the Ganga, what I see are not so much pilgrims on a path to a new world. They’re more… historical revisionists, regressing to the way we lived 10,000 years ago and adding a strong dose of “speaking with intention.” It’s like a visit to the BC world, complete with a tribal chief, tribe mothers, hunters, warriors, and gatherers.

Sasha and I packed a few things and walked out of town like gypsies one afternoon, catching a ride in a half-full jeep just as far as the second waterfall (what a destination to give your driver). Then we walked down a road, down a streambed, and along a path beside the river until we came out at a beach spotted with tents, lean-tos, and bedrolls. It was late afternoon, and people were sprawled out in small groups around the beaches and on the boulders that form half the beach to the Ganga.

We changed, and took a dip in the river, washing off all those sins and guaranteeing centuries of human lifetimes in which to walk the slow road toward enlightenment. The dip, however, was a quick one; the waters are frigid.

As the sun went down, a huddle of women made salad in a vast tin bowl, tearing the leaves with their hands. Vegetables were chopped on a tin plate. Pasta boiled and salted, chickpeas cooked. They called “food circle” and people came in from the hillsides—men collecting firewood with only sarongs wrapped around their hips, or meditating on far boulders, or swimming in the shallow pool by the camp, and women from their other corners, their quiet conversations and clusters of guitar-jamming sessions. Everyone joined hands and sang—about family and unity, about being happy, about rising up, then “Thank you for the food. It’s healing, it’s healing, it’s healing me.”

Food was brought around and dished out to each outstretched tin bowl or cup, everyone’s fingers and utensils getting into everything. (I’d just been reading a book on infectious diseases—guess what was on my mind.) We ate, sitting in the sand, broke to wash dishes in the Ganga, then reassembled in small circles to play games, play guitars, play real-world conversations.

The guitars gave way and conversation silenced when a man brought out a didgeridoo and started to play it the way I imagine that instrument was meant to be played. It was the second didgeridoo of the night, and the first instrument at all to not get talked over or sung around. The circle formed to a full circle again, instead of a chain of small rings, and his audience sat spellbound as he pulsed out a sound like the heartbeat of humanity, raw and primeval, broken by percussive flair.

Sasha and I crept to our alcove while he was still playing, wrapped in our blankets and laid down under the stars and the scant branches of a bush, and fell asleep listening to that pulse.