The hippies had it right all along

It’s brutally hot in southern Arizona these days. We are waiting for the monsoon that have held off well past the average start date of July 4. I hope everyone has had a chance to visit the mountains, dip in a pool or at least stay out of the sun with some A/C.

My solution has been to get out of Dodge when possible. In late June, I was in the Seattle area at a friend’s wedding. I visited family on the Pacific Sound and took a day trip to Vashon Island.

More recently, I spent a week in Oregon with my girlfriend and our younger kids, a couple of our parental figures came along making the trip a multigenerational excursion. Our destination was the Oregon Country Fair, held every year since the early 1970s outside of Eugene.

The fair is a music festival with a distinctly hippie flavor: eight stages and hundreds of food and craft vendors. This year more than 10,000 staff camped out on the property for five days and welcomed 15,000 patrons daily who came to shop for crafts, eat and dance to the music and share in the experience.

My bride-to-be and her mother have been to the event many times over the years and knew what to expect. This year’s event was bigger and better than ever. As a first timer, it was a pleasant surprise to experience the planning, civility, talent and artistry. It’s something that one must experience to fully appreciate.

I have long considered myself a true green-bleeding hippie, but I’m starting to wonder if I am hippie enough. I have often spoke of how these hippie ideals cultivated in the 1960s were the truth and what is good for our planet and our fellows.

Taking care of the environment, being judicious in our use of finite natural resources, clean green energy, appreciation for things made by hand, cooperation to create a more sustainable self-sufficient existence is what they idealize. If I was going to break it down into a single word that word would be “love.”

Similar to other trade shows, the space was divided among different vendors sharing the venue. What was different was the lack of a regimented military-style division of the space into 10 by 10 squares. The property had mostly temporary wooden structures handcrafted from lumber milled onsite, each one took on the shape of the trees and the meandering path that connected one area to another.

There were stages and concert venues, some big and some small, all made in the same sustainable craftsman style. There was the most beautiful handcrafted wooden bathhouse you could imagine in hippie paradise with sauna and showers. It was fueled by a wood-burning boiler and a closed-loop system that heats the cold water into hot and loops it back around again.

All parts of the fair were a feast for the senses, bands playing, creative art and unique costume; we call it hippie bling, the feel in your hand of handmade items that are beautiful and functional, the smells of food, incense, ash and walnut.

The artisans’ crafts were made from a broad spectrum of materials. Their traditions states that a significant majority of what the vendor sells must be made with their own hands, on site during the event. Also made on site and no-less artisanal were the food offerings, which include every cuisine you could find in a major metropolitan city.

Meals, coffee and other beverages, baked goods and flavors of every ethnicity are on hand, made from scratch and served with real silverware. The utensils were taken to central collection spots and washed for later use, rather than filling the landfill with single-use plastic cutlery. The efforts to leave no trace on the property did not end there. The waste was collected at central sites in the festival venue and in all of the surrounding campgrounds with a cluster of 55-gallon drums. They were filled and emptied daily of plastic, metal and compost, including all the paper, and the small amount that was truly waste and destined for the landfill.

There were banks of “Honey Buckets,” or porta-potties. About 15,000 people camping 24/7 for five days plus 10,000 visitors on the fair’s three days creates a lot of human waste.

I am usually a pee-in-the-woods kind of guy but with the close proximity of one tent to the next on all sides, it was not the peace and love kind of thing to do.

The fair is held as a drug- and alcohol-free event and I didn’t see anyone drinking. However, there were people discreetly using cannabis in their campsite and at night. Many hippie vendors were taking a mental health break and expanding their minds with various hallucinogens.

This sort of intoxication can cause a person to put quite the hurting on a “Honey Bucket,” but they were pumped out daily and there were no reports of illness from the human waste or food products.

I found a few things quite remarkable about this experience. There were no serious altercations and that says a great deal about the sense of peace and community.

Compliments about crafts, people’s creative costumes, clever jokes and songs flew freely.

The talent, creativity and care put into the event are feats of commitment and organization. I have never seen anything else like it.

When we were on the last leg home, a car ride from Phoenix, I asked my youngest daughter if she had enjoyed the festival. She has been to Tucson’s Gem and Jam, many headline shows, and smaller festivals with their 10 by 10 squares, like our Pride Festival or Tucson Meet Yourself. She is also an aspiring yogi and has a deep spirituality for a young adult headed to LA for her freshman year in college next month.

She said she had a great time, she commented on the creative talent on display, the civility, acceptance and sense of community and hard work that made it all happen.

Then she asked a simple question, one that made me think carefully of my answer.

She asked, “Why are so many from the hippie culture full of talents and ideas and values that work? How do they achieve the successes they achieve?” And, in the end, the answer is love. The hippie ideals are all about peace, acceptance of those different, admiration for others’ talents and uniqueness. By celebrating someone else’s weirdness and accepting all comers it gives each individual freedom to be themselves. Free thought and expression are the norm, and it allows humans to flourish and enjoy physical health and spiritual well-being. One love.

This article appears in Jul 20-26, 2023.