Transcript for the Piece Audio version of Festival Express

FESTIVALS OF LIGHTS

We're off to Canada. It's the summer of 1970 and I'm traveling out west with four guys in search of rugged nature and rock and roll. We're following the Festival Express, a train filled with rock performers heading west across Canada, stopping to play at rock festivals along the way. Every band we wanted to see that summer is on the train: Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead, Delaney and Bonnie, Ian and Sylvia and the Great Speckled Bird, the Band, and Sha Na Na, who are friends of ours from Columbia University, where we all go to school. Sha Na Na gave us VIP passes, so not only will we get into the festivals for free, we'll be able to sit with the performers!

On the way to Toronto, first stop on the Festival Express, we spend the night in Montreal where we meet a dope dealer at a Procol Harum concert at the Expo Center. We crash at his house that night and the next day he decides to come along with us. After all, we've got the VIP passes.

That night we camp on the shores of Lake Ontario, in this beautiful park, that's almost in downtown Toronto. The flickering lights of hundreds of little campfires are sprinkled across the darkness, lighting up a new world of hippie villages we are creating on the edges of rock festivals.

The next day we go to the festival. Here in this football stadium are 30,000 people we don't know, but we are all fast becoming friends for life with these people we will never see again. We trip out on rock and roll and psychedelic drugs and we share everything: food, water, dope, love - and all this incredible music that plays on and on into the evening.

As the sun is setting, we start to come down, so the dope dealer and I do a second hit of mescaline. While The Band plays the last set for the evening, I begin to rise above the stadium. I'm looking down at all these tripping hippies and I see my body lying on the ground. The music is distorted and full of static, like a scratched record playing on a bad stereo. I float above the stadium trying to find a place in my head where I can hear the music better. Then I'm back in my body again, and when I can lift my head high enough to see the stage, The Band is melting over their instruments.

The festival is over. We join a long procession back to the campground. My head is a helium balloon bouncing high in the sky, above the clouds, bouncing against the moon. I'm looking down at all these freaks. . .and my feet that are somehow still on the ground.

Back at our campsite beside Lake Ontario, everyone has gone to sleep except the dope dealer and me. The two of us sit around the last campfire of the evening and all the energy in me starts to implode. I'm inside Van Gogh's Starry Night, and when I look across the fire at the dope dealer, he turns into Lucifer.

We head across northern Ontario and follow the arc of the Great Lakes heading toward Thunder Bay. As we drive along the endless thread of highway with Lake Superior on our left stretching far beyond the horizon, we take turns shouting at the top of our lungs: THUNDER BAY! I have never been so far from civilization. I have never seen such gigantic mosquitoes. And then we hit the prairie. There is nothing as flat as Saskatchewan. We're trying to go with the flow but then the flow stops. Beside a wheat field in the middle of all the flatness of Saskatchewan, our 1960 Econoline Van breaks down.

But even out here in the middle of nowhere we are not really alone. We've become part of a caravan of recycled vehicles: psychedelic school busses, old VW vans, and mail trucks, milk trucks, bread trucks, cookie trucks all retrofitted for hippie living. We keep running into each other at gas stations and restaurants along the Trans Canadian Highway. We have become an extended traveling family, and sure enough, one of our newfound kinfolk finds us stranded on the side of the road. He knows enough about auto mechanics to fix our problem and get us back on the road to Calgary: last stop on the Festival Express.

Calgary is a cowboy town and when we get there it is crawling with thousands of hippies and thousands of cowboys. It's really tense. So we go and buy authentic cowboy hats. Then we head to the festival.

Inside the festival I do some more mescaline, and this trip starts out where the last trip left off.

I am so high that all I know is my first name and the first names of the guys that I'm traveling with (Josh. . .Norm. . .Stu. . .Bert). I know I'm in Calgary. . .Alberta and that it?s the fourth of July.

I leave all my stuff in a pile on my sleeping bag near the stage - my glasses, my shoes, my ID, all my money - and I turn to these people that I've never met before and ask them to watch my stuff, and they say, sure.

Like a super ball, I bounce from one point to another. First I'm up by the stage and then I'm in the back of the stadium where the psychedelic school busses are parked, and I keep going up to people and asking: "Who's playing?"

And they say, "Sha Na Na."

Then I'm back on the blanket, where all my stuff is still there, and I ask the people on the next blanket to watch my stuff again and they say: "Of course."

My brain is turning into a fried egg. I need to get out of the sun. I'm standing beside a psychedelic school bus, painted with large melting multi-colored letters that proclaim: "The question is not why, but why not!" This guy is sitting behind the steering wheel. He has a long red beard and looks like Mr. Natural. I recognize that he's the guy who fixed our van in Saskatchewan. I go up to him and ask him if he's tripping. He says: "I don't trip anymore, but I know all about it," and he invites me on board the bus. Mr. Natural becomes the driver for my trip.

I'm sitting behind Mr. Natural at the front of the bus. At the back of the bus are members of my family.

There's my father: "Barbara, you ruined your life. If you hadn't seen West Side Story, you'd be a nuclear physicist now."

And my mother: "Barbara, why do you take all these drugs people give you? You don't know where they've been."

My brother, the lawyer: "Barbara, don't you think you've done enough with radical politics? Why don't you do something constructive? Why don't you join the Democratic Party?"

And my hippie artist aunt, who smokes pot with me and meets me at anti-war demonstrations: "Barbara, I think it's fine to smoke pot, but I'm afraid that LSD is just too dangerous."

I leave my family in the back of the bus arguing with each other about what I should do with the rest of my life, and am about to go up to the bus driver and ask him who's playing, when I realize it's the Grateful Dead!

I grab the bus driver's hand and we dance off the bus and we grab the hands of everybody standing around us, as I lead a snake dance through the entire festival, while the Grateful Dead plays "Turn on your Love Light."

[Janis Joplin] "I want to know why half the world's crying while the other half is still crying. If you have a cat for one night, man, that's all you need. You gotta call that love. You don't need him for the other 364 days, because, as a matter of fact what we learned on the train, tomorrow never comes, it's the same fucking day, man."

The next day, I meet Danny Shapiro, an economics graduate student who looks like a Jewish Jerry Garcia. He's traveling east, I'm traveling west, he's peaking on acid, I'm still high from the day before, and we fall in love beside the stage at the Festival Express.

It's the end of the evening and The Band is playing "I Shall Be Released." Danny and I and 30,000 others are standing with our arms around each other, swaying to the music, singing along at the top of our lungs. We are all in love.

After the festival Danny takes me to the campground where his friends are staying. We cross a bridge over the Bow River that runs right through Calgary and step onto Princess Island. Hundreds of little campfires sputter and flare in the darkness. We find a campfire where no one else is sitting. It's just one gigantic log somehow burning all by itself. And as we sit there, really getting into each other, people start coming up to us and ask us if they can join us, and we say, "Of course." And we realize that our spirits and the spirit of the fire have become one.

This guy walks up and he's grinning and singing, and he says: "I just married a couple at that campfire over there."

Danny asks him, "Are you a Universal Life Minister?"

And the guy says, "No, I'm just happy. Would you like me to marry you?"

Danny says, "No, we already got married a couple hours ago."

Another guy comes up and he asks if he can put wood on the fire, and we say, "Of course."

"You see," he explains, "I built this fire and I don't want it to go out."

The horizon shimmers with a coral glow and occasional bolts of distant lightning. The sun never quite sets before it is morning. Danny and I exchange addresses and the four guys and I head off into the Rockies and reach the Great Divide, this place in North America where the watersheds on one side of the divide flow toward the Atlantic Ocean and on the other side they flow toward the Pacific. We stand with our legs straddling this tiny stream, that is actually a tributary to the headwaters of the Columbia River, with our right foot on the East Coast and our left foot on the West Coast. Then further up into the mountains of eastern British Columbia to Glacier National Park, where we camp at 10,000 feet. I have never been so high up. We wake in the morning surrounded by snow-capped mountain peaks. Still lying in our sleeping bags, we keep turning our heads in every direction. These mountains can't be real. I'm used to waking up in a narrow dark New York apartment. All I see outside my bedroom window are the fire-escaped facades of six story brick tenement buildings that mirror the building I'm living in. If you walk a quarter mile from my apartment you get a glimpse of New Jersey. I keep blinking at these snow-capped peaks trying to pull my mind into the same place my body has landed.

We're about to hike up into those mountains, when I start to feel sick. Instead of going hiking I go in search of the outhouse, a few minutes walk from our campsite. Suddenly right in front of me is a family of black bears. The mother bear looks at me, then at her cubs. I look at them and then at the outhouse, just a few yards down the trail beyond the bears. I wish I were feeling better so I could enjoy my first encounter with a bear family. I want to tell the mother bear, look, I'm from New York, I'm really very harmless. The bears and I head off in separate directions. New York City seems very far away now.

It's late January, six months later. I am with these friends on a rocky beach called Halibut Pt. just outside Rockport, Massachusetts. It is overcast and cold, the beach is deserted and the ocean is wild. It reminds me of the Pacific coastline. This is the most beautiful place I have been since I returned to the east coast. For four years I have not known that I could live anywhere but surrounded by the pain and ugliness of New York City. Now I am filled with a need for lasting beauty and a connection with nature. I can feel the earth spinning slowly on its axis and suddenly I know I have all the time in the world to allow this beauty to seep into my pores and permeate my being. I spit out the dirt and squalor of New York and embrace the sky.

"This place is so beautiful. It's made me just realize that god exists."

"I know what you mean," says J.P., who's standing beside me, "but don't call it god. Call it dialectical materialism, or anything, but don't call it god."

I laugh into his eyes.

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