About twenty minutes ago, someone read my message over the PA system. I figured I’d wait an hour or two just in case Barry had made it to the festival. The bearded figure is getting closer. The stick he’s carrying juts half a dozen feet into the air. Dangling from the end is something yellow and orange.

“Get ’em off me! Get ’em off me!” A bare-chested freak wearing only cutoffs thrashes wildly as at least four guys and a girl try to maneuver him toward the medical tent. At first I think he’s yelling at the people holding him, but every time he yanks a hand free he starts to swat at his own body. “Spiders! Get ’em off me!” He thinks he’s covered with spiders.

Barry tromps up looking like a bearded overgrown Middle Earth hobbit. He’s wearing a Peruvian poncho and pink granny glasses. His wet, straggly hair hangs down to his shoulders. Having been abandoned by Tinsley, I’m extra glad to have found him, but before we greet each other, we watch a waif who can’t be more than sixteen, wearing a loose tie-dyed dress, many strands of love beads, and a fringed jacket, come out of the medical tent and stand before the flipping-out guy while the others struggle to restrain him. Now he’s screaming, “Don’t come near me! Don’t come near me!”

“What’s your name?” the girl calmly asks half a dozen times before he’s able to focus and answer: “Steve.”

“You’re going to be okay, Steve,” the girl says. “You’ve taken LSD and you’re having a bad reaction. You understand what I’m saying, Steve?”

Remarkably, Steve, who is probably close to six feet tall, stops thrashing. The hippie girl, who is as lithe as Tinsley, though a few inches taller, steps closer and gently strokes his arm. “I don’t think these people should hold you like this, Steve. Would you like them to let go?”

His eyes fixed on her, Steve nods. The others release their grip. Steve and the hippie girl sit on the muddy grass. Not only has she gotten him to simmer down, but it’s as if she’s cast a spell. “I want you to drink some tea. Okay, Steve? It will help you feel better.”

Steve accepts the tea and sips. His friends sit with him. Like a mystical healer who is finished exorcising evil spirits, the waif rises and glides back into the tent.

“Far out,” Barry says softly. We hug.

“Glad you made it, man.” I gesture at the enormous crowd. “Can you believe this?”

“Crazy, right?” Barry grins gleefully. “When’d you get here?”

“Yesterday around noon.”

“Grooving on the scene?”

“When it’s not pouring.”