Hahn’s Peak Village – Aaron Griffin was 3 months old when his parents brought him to his first Rainbow Gathering, and his buddy Jeshuel Hubbard hadn’t even been born.
Today, the 19-year-olds mark the new generation of the Rainbow Family of Living Light, a disorganized collection of counterculture connoisseurs that has been congregating in the woods for 35 years.
“I just got my first real job, paying taxes, $15 an hour. It has its place,” said Griffin, sporting several days of scruff on his cheeks beneath his Boston Red Sox cap. “But we come here to listen to what people have to say. It’s like a tribal reawakening.”
Scattered over nearly 4 square miles of the Routt National Forest some 35 miles north of Steamboat Springs, this year’s gathering reflects the young and the old: Neo-hippies and drifters, Deadheads and Earth Mothers make up a group in which everyone is accepted but in which a generation gap is developing.
A new guard of hard-edged teens, many of them urban runaways wearing grime-laden clothing, tribal tattoos and feral looks, gradually are becoming more dominant as the older hippies, with their long, frizzy beards and gray ponytails, are fading from view.
“A lot of the older Rainbows don’t come anymore because of the younger people,” said a 54-year-old veteran of the gatherings known as Little Bear.
The elder statesmen will tell you that the Rainbow Family represents a philosophy as well as a lifestyle, emphasizing human bonding, compassion and communal living.
Many of the younger crowd, meanwhile, see the gathering as a spot to score some drugs, enjoy free meals and avoid the hassles of real life.
“It’s nothin’ but a … party, dude,” said one 20-year-old who asked not to be identified as he was shaking down itinerants for “dose.”
“They just come here like it’s another homeless camp,” said Hubbard, a college student aspiring to become an organic farmer.
A 58-year-old participant known as Graywolf disputed that. “There’s less drugs here, less alcohol, less cussing and less bad behavior than anywhere in America,” he said.
Perhaps that is so, but there are few other places where such vices are so openly advertised.
“I’ve got a hole in my pot, and I need something to fill it,” said one participant, a scraggy young man with a bolt through his nose and a steel stud piercing his lower lip. Nearby, another lost soul sat in the dirt staring straight ahead, seemingly catatonic, while friends nearby cursed him and periodically asked: “Are you OK?”
About 9,000 Rainbows have congregated in Big Red Park, with more expected for the culmination of the gathering today, but the number almost assuredly will be down from predictions of as many as 20,000.
Rainbow veteran Richard Reames suggests that the gatherings can be positive experiences even for the hard cases, introducing them to a community of people who care about them and will take them in.
“Folks see these street kids in the city and tell them about Rainbow as an option,” he said. “What do these kids do afterwards? Maybe they go back to their old lives. Maybe not. It depends on how it affects them in the heart.”
Staff writer Steve Lipsher can be reached at 970-513-9495 or slipsher@denverpost.com.
