“Where’re your friends?” he asks as we start away from the medical tent and through the intermittent rain. I tell him Milton and Arno couldn’t make it and that I came with Tinsley, but she met another guy and split. Barry pats me sympathetically on the shoulder. Guess we’re part of an exclusive club.

We tromp toward some woods, passing groups huddled under sheets of clear plastic, trying to stay dry. A couple of soaked, completely mud-covered girls and guys race past us, whooping and yelling. Others lie nearly hidden inside squishy-wet sleeping bags.

Among dripping trees we find Zach and his girlfriend, Eva, under a dark-green tarp strung between some branches. Barry tells me the three of them have been camping here for more than a week. Sleeping bags are rolled up. The camping stove I borrowed for Maine is set on a rock, heating a pot of tea. Boxes of brown rice, cans of beans, and bags of bread are packed into a wooden milk crate. Canteens hang from branches.

They’re camped at the edge of a clearing where four psychedelically painted school buses are parked in a circle like covered wagons. It’s a whole different scene back here. The hippies who’ve come to the festival in these buses appear to be here not as much for the music as to get together with others of their kind. When the rain lets up, some start playing guitars and recorders and thumping on congas. The air smells of body odor and wood smoke. A guy with a beard and long blond braids, wearing only a breechcloth, stirs a large metal pot over a fire with a broom handle. Everyone is barefoot and skinny, their long hair scraggly, what scant clothes they wear mud-stained and tattered.

Watching them, I feel like I’ve come upon a lost primitive tribe. Arno’s words from Nathan’s come back: All these barefoot flower people eating brown rice and alfalfa sprouts? You don’t think they’re gonna get tired of being dirty and hungry? And free love? Enjoy the crabs and clap, man. This whole back-to-the-land thing? Isn’t that why we had the industrial revolution? So we don’t all have to be farmers anymore?

He forgot the drugs. Some of the hippies are nodding off, zonked out, swaying to the music. A couple of skinny dogs sniff around. Packs of dirty, naked towheaded kids run this way and that, playing with sticks. One guy keeps trying to get them to take hits off a bong. A kid who can’t be older than nine takes a hit, exhales smoke, then runs off to rejoin his friends. Near us, a long-haired guy holds a joint to the lips of the woman sitting next to him while she breastfeeds a baby.

Turn on,

Tune in,

Drop out,

Get drafted,

Die young.