War and Watermelon

She gives Ryan a look that says she knows better. “You’ll thank me later. It isn’t heavy—two gallons. Brody can carry it.”

By the time we pick up Jenny and Skippy it’s nearly two o’clock. The thing is, we have to drop off an apple pie at Aunt Lizzie’s house in Port Jervis, New York, which is out of the way but in the general direction of the concert. So we’ll be going on back roads instead of taking Route 17 and the New York Thruway. I think the only reason we’re dropping off the pie is so Aunt Lizzie can give us directions and report back to Mom that we’re halfway to our destination.

Lizzie is my grandmother’s sister. “She knows every road in that area,” Mom says. “She’ll send you to White Lake the safest way, and she’ll also know where you can stop to go to the bathroom.”

Skippy smokes eight cigarettes before we even get to Port Jervis. I’m in the backseat with him, in my family’s red Plymouth station wagon. No air conditioner and a radio that gets only AM.

Jenny spends most of the time turned toward us, talking about how exciting this trip is and how her all-time favorite, Joan Baez, is supposed to be performing tonight. Jenny’s wearing a silver chain with a small peace sign hanging from it, and she wove some tiny reddish flowers into her hair. “This is wild,” she says. “We probably won’t get home until one o’clock in the morning!”

“I heard there’s gonna be sixty thousand people at this thing,” Ryan says, drumming his fingers on the dashboard. “Sly and the Family Stone tonight!”

I’ve only vaguely heard of these performers, but I’m excited. We catch bits and pieces of news on the radio, but the reception is terrible. Lots of concert-related traffic up ahead, they’re saying, but so far we haven’t hit any.

That’s another thing about Ryan and Jenny: They laugh when I try to be funny. Tony’s the only other person who ever laughs at my jokes, especially if they’re about snot or farting.

“It’s not just the music,” Ryan says. “The way they’ve been talking about this on the radio stations, you just know it’s going to change the way things are in this country. You get sixty thousand people protesting about Vietnam—and doing it with peace and brotherhood—then those idiots in Washington will know they’d better start listening to our generation. That’s what this is all about: bringing down the establishment.”

That’s not what Dad said. He told me to stick within an arm’s length of Ryan every second and expect to see a crowd “full of damn fools getting stoned.”

Aunt Lizzie has made a huge pot roast. She lives alone and we see her only once or twice a year. No way she could finish all that meat herself, so we sit at her dining room table for an hour and a half, eating beef and potatoes and most of the pie that my mother sent.

“You’ll turn onto Route 55 in a few miles, and that’ll take you all the way to White Lake,” she says for the tenth time as we’re leaving. “You can’t miss it.”

We pass lots of cows and barns and pine trees. Traffic starts to build. After an hour Ryan picks up four hitchhikers—two guys and two girls around his age with backpacks. One of the guys has a guitar. They’ve got a handmade sign that says WOODSTOCK in big red letters.

The two guys get in the third seat by the watermelon—the seat that faces backward—and the girls squeeze between me and Skippy.

The one next to me says her name is Annie. She’s skinny and smells strongly of armpit. She has long, straight brown hair and keeps giggling. The other girl is even skinnier and has a woven headband with a hand-rolled cigarette stuck in it over her ear.

They say they started out on Tuesday from Grand Rapids, Michigan. “Haven’t brushed our teeth since then,” says one of the guys with a laugh.

The cigarette she lights is obviously not tobacco. I’ve never smelled it before, but I’m not stupid. It’s pot. Skippy and Jenny take drags on it, but Ryan says not while he’s driving.

Skippy reaches across the girls and tries to hand it to me, but I shake my head. I catch Ryan’s eyes in the rearview mirror. “No way,” he says to Skippy. “Keep that thing away from him.”

I realize right away that we don’t have any cups. So I hold the cooler up, stick my mouth under the nozzle, and push the button to get a direct squirt. It’s basically orange-colored sugar water—fortified with Vitamin C! We pass the dispenser around the car, and everybody takes hits from it.

Traffic continues to build, and the reports on the radio say that the concert crowd is already way bigger than anyone expected. We figured we’d get tickets at the gate, but I’m starting to wonder if we’ll get in at all. The people running the show actually issued a radio alert telling anybody still on the road to turn back, but no way we’re stopping. I mean, these hitchhikers have been on the road for three days to get to this thing. The van ahead of us is from Maryland, and the car behind us has Ohio plates and is packed to the gills with hippies. Everybody’s moving in one direction, but very slowly now.

I feel a surge of nervous energy thinking about it. Hippies and dancing and rock music and me! Biggest event of my life, for sure. Let’s get there!

After another hour the car is moving only about twenty feet a minute because of the traffic. As we come to the top of a hill we can see an endless stream of vehicles ahead of us. Most of the cars are parked along the shoulders, and there are people walking on both sides of the road.

We inch forward for another few minutes, and then we’re at a standstill. Ryan keeps the car running, but we all get out. The male hitchhikers step into the woods to take a leak. Jenny and the two girls stand near the back of the car and start laughing at them, because they’re barely off the road. I follow Ryan as he walks toward a group standing by another car.

We walk back to the car and Ryan pulls it off the road, lining it up behind a brown van with Pennsylvania plates and a STOP THIS IMMORAL WAR bumper sticker. “Good a place as any,” he says.

I glance at Ryan’s watch. It’s five minutes to eight. We’re a long way from Bergen County, New Jersey, that’s for sure.

Soon the four of us are a hundred yards ahead of the hitchhikers. Skippy keeps looking back. “Neither one of them was wearing a bra,” he says.

“They’re totally stoned,” Ryan says. He glances at Jenny and smiles. “Don’t get any ideas about taking yours off,” he says. “I don’t want nobody looking at you but me.”

There are lots of people to look at. I haven’t seen anybody near my age; most of them are older than Ryan. There’s gotta be five hundred people within sight, all walking in the same direction. The sun isn’t down yet, but it’s definitely getting darker. The woods on both sides of the road are full of tall, thick evergreens. We walk between the stopped cars right down the middle of the road, which is a two-laner. I feel important just being here; this event will be huge.

We take a break around nine fifteen, leaning against a red Mustang from Ontario and eating oranges from the bag. We’ve walked way more than the two miles that fat guy said it’d be. I’m already thinking about how late we’re going to get home tonight.

Skippy says his feet are sore. “Any of you know how much farther?” he calls to a group of three guys walking with cans of Schaefer beer.

One guy in a leather cowboy hat puts his hand to his ear and says, “I think I hear Jimi wailing.” Then he laughs. He points forward with his beer can. “Right around the bend, I believe.”

It’s dark now, so we walk closer together and shine the flashlights at the road. The guy was almost right—we reach 17B in about thirty more minutes.

Cars are everywhere; not just in the road and on the shoulders, but up in cornfields and down in ditches. “How many people are going to this thing?” Ryan asks, shaking his head.

“We ain’t there yet,” says a woman walking behind us. She’s wearing a peace-sign necklace and a long skirt. She waves up the road. “It’s another couple of miles.”

We walk along the edge of 17B. At least it’s mostly flat here. After ten more minutes I say to hold up. That Tang’s made its way through me. I take a flashlight from Jenny and duck into a gate, where a sign says EVERGREEN CEMETERY.

I decide I’ve carried the cooler long enough and I’ll just pick it up on the way back. So I ditch it behind the gravestone of Johnny Townsend. It says he died on May 26, 1889. I like that name—Town’s End. I feel like I’ve walked through the world’s longest town.

We pass a white wooden church packed with people. Light is shining from the stained-glass windows. There’s a bonfire in the dirt parking lot, and some hippies are dancing around it.

In about twenty minutes we start to hear music way in the distance and we feel a few drops of rain. We turn onto a dirt road and start moving faster.

Never heard of him, but I get a chill anyway. Must be significant if Ryan thinks so. The music sounds tinny and weird to me, but we’re still a good distance away.

The rain becomes steady, then turns into a downpour. But the air is warm and we’re overheated from walking so far, so it feels good. I can smell wood smoke and swamp.

We reach the top of a hill and there’s this huge valley below us, and it’s absolutely filled with people. Unbelievable. There’s a stage way down at the far end throwing light onto the hill. People are sliding down the muddy slope on their butts. Everybody is dancing and spinning and yelling.

We just stand there with our mouths hanging open, staring at the throng of people packed shoulder to shoulder on every inch of the hill. Even in the partial darkness, I can tell that there has to be way more than sixty thousand here. That’s about how many you’d get at a Mets game, and this crowd looks like it would fill Shea Stadium more than twice over. Everybody seems to have long hair and bare feet and scruffy dungarees and peace signs and headbands and tie-dye shirts. That is, if they’re wearing shirts at all. A lot of people aren’t.

The crowd is waving their arms and chanting, “No rain! No rain!” between songs, but it’s coming down in buckets. It’s dripping down my face, and my sneakers are full of mud. I join in—“No rain!”—but who cares? Let it come down. I start laughing for no reason. Just happy.

We make our way down the hill; there’s no sign of a ticket booth. It hasn’t been raining long, but the grass is already slick. It smells like cow manure.

The closer we get to the stage, the denser the crowd, but there are flashes of lightning, so some people head for cover. We get to within twenty yards of the stage. There are people sitting in the mud with pretty much all of their clothes off, smoking marijuana and laughing. You hear lots of shouting about the war between songs. About ending it.

“We’ll be dead meat in the morning,” I say, but I don’t care. Ryan is part of this thing, part of the reason for it, part of this throng that doesn’t want to kill or be killed for that immoral war. I’m not even sure what immoral means, but it isn’t good.

Ryan laughs. “Dad’s gonna kill us. But what can you do?” He starts clapping his hands really hard. “Enjoy it, Brody! That’s Arlo Guthrie a piss length away from us, singing a Bob Dylan song! Can you stand it?”

I look up at the massive crowd and wonder how I’ll ever find my way back to Ryan in the darkness. But there are small campfires on the hill, and the strobes from the stage are bright. I glance around for some landmarks—a guy in a sleeveless leather vest, a woman in a yellow sun hat—then trudge up the hill.

It takes several minutes to get clear of the crowd, and I just duck behind an overflowing trash barrel and piss. As I’m walking back I hear a familiar voice. “It’s that kid,” she says.

It’s the two girls we picked up hitchhiking. I don’t see the guys, but then again, I don’t look around much. Not only aren’t they wearing bras; they aren’t wearing anything up top. First time I’ve seen the real thing in person. “Brady!” Annie says. She’s wet with rain and spattered with mud.

“Isn’t this outasight?” She puts her hand on my shoulder, as if she’s about to hug me. I think I’d pass out if she did.

The other one is hurrying across the hill and Annie yells, “Wait up,” and follows, not even looking back at me or saying good-bye.

It takes a few minutes to find Ryan and Jenny and Skippy, but I feel pretty safe among all these peaceniks. When I reach them, they’re sitting in a circle with a white guy with a big Afro and sunglasses and a huge woman with a red bandanna, and they’re passing around a joint and a bottle of wine. Arlo Guthrie is singing “Amazing Grace,” and there’s a flash of lightning way in the distance. The rain is still steady.