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alt.gathering.rainbow |
On the next day, the 25th, I heard on the radio that the LEOs had
decreed that all cars parked on the north side of Forest Road 520 had
to be moved within 24 hours. That included my van. I got someone else
to take the radio, and asked Marken if there was any place I could
stash the Guides in case I had to park way the hell back in the outer
Bus Village. He gave me the combination for the lock on the Northwest
Tribes trailer, which was in the Handi-Camp.
I high-tailed back out to the trailhead, got up on the road, and found
that every vehicle on the north side had some kind of paper under a
wiper on the windshield. Those who really were parked improperly got
parking tickets. My own van had received a red tag saying:
"ABANDONED VEHICLE TAG
The Routt County Sheriff has stopped and made a courtesy check to see
if you needed assistance.
We urge Removal of this vehicle as soon as assistance
Should this vehicle remain abandoned at this location 24 hours or more,
the vehicle will be removed and stored at your expense, as per the
Colorado Model Traffic Code XXII, Section 22-20, as adopted by Routt
County Ordinance Number 80-1"
I moved all the boxes from the front seats back to the bed, and looked
for a place to park on the south side. The south side was the side that
had a steep dropoff to the valley 3 or 4 feet from the edge of the
pavement, while the north side faced up the hill, so if I were to pick
one side, it wouldn't have been that one. I drove up and then back, but
at this late date the road was packed and there was no way I was going
to park anything larger than a Mini-Cooper.
So I decided to stop in the loading lot and dolly the boxes up to the
Northwest Tribes trailer. (Info had one that I had wheeled all the way
back down.) I loaded up two boxes on it, than asked two people for help
getting it thru a ditch in front the Handi-Camp lot. One of them asked
what they were, and I said "Rainbow Guides." After saying that several
people appeared from all around and started asking if they could have
some, and I satisfied them.
I then asked if I could bring my van in to make the unloading easier,
and more than one person said yes. So I removed the rope with the pink
origami birds and pulled my van in. I found a place just big enough for
my van, parked it, and put the Guides in the trailer. I left the van
there after I had finished the unloading, and nobody tried to kick me
back out. Grandpa Woodstock was walking around acting sort of like the
ogre for the place, and he acted friendly toward me when he saw me. The
lot turned out to be occupied by mostly "elder" or "high holy" types,
including Plunker and Marken, and contrary to all my first prejudices
it was a quiet mellow place at night, very conducive to sleeping, with
only conversational noise coming from the Welcome Home fire.
The north side remained free of parked cars for about two days, then it
filled up again by the first of July and this time the LEOs mostly gave
up and let them stay there. There were places that were genuinely
congested, where two cars couldn't pass and school busses had to have
someone outside watching as they tried to get thru.
On the 26th, as noontime was passing into early afternoon, I started
hearing on the radio, "15 LEOs coming up the trail." They were going
around looking for certain individuals that they had pictures of.
Interpretations were going around that they were looking for
ringleaders in the big blockade confrontation. I heard position reports
as they stopped at Shut Up and Eat It and Magic Bowl. Then they got to
Trading Circle, and I was hearing acoustic voices yelling "Six Up". I
heard reports on the radio that people were sitting on the ground with
their arms cuffed behind their backs.
Then I heard shouts of "shanti sena" from down in Main Meadow, and saw
a small group of people down there with others walking in from all
around. I started down to see what was going on. When I was about
halfway down, a young sister started calling over to me, "What are you
guys with the radios doing by calling this stupid? Do you want to help
the family or don't you? Why don't you high holies let the people do
what they want?"
I didn't know what she was talking about, I had not said "stupid" on
the radio, but her vibes felt freaky. I got further down, and a bunch
of people were trying to get a mob together to go and confront the
LEOs. And there were others trying to hold the growing vigilante vibe
down. A shouting argument arose between those advocating action and
those advocating restraint. And I finally heard on the radio a
reference to the "stupid council."
I went back up to Info and heard more reports of more tension in Trade
Circle on the radio. Amid the chatter, there was a brother down at the
front gate who kept interrupting everybody and yelling "Back off,
Ba-a-ack off, DO NOT APPROACH WITHIN @) FEET OF THEM..." over and over
onto the airwaves, sometimes interfering with the conversations of
those at the scene of the action. Other people were also yelling
warnings into the radio that nobody except someone with an earpiece
would have heard. And in the middle of all this there were parts of
conversation between two kitchen people about onions.
Finally I saw lots of people all running downhill into the woods away
from Info, and I wanted to go and witness what was going on myself. I
ran thru the trees for a few hundred feet, then I came upon a circle of
maybe a hundred people holding hands and saying OM, and inside this
ring was a another circle of a dozen people surrounding a pile of
people lying face down on top of each other. There were FS uniforms
walking around both inside and outside this inner circle.
One by one the people unpiled, then I saw a Rainbow brother carried by
his shoulders outside both of the circles and laid on the ground. A
sister climbed on top of him a started hugging him. After this,
attention shifted to another pileup of people in a different place in
the larger circle, where I couldn't see as well. I heard chants of "let
him go, let him go..." Meanwhile there were cops pointing cameras all
around. The OM ceased for a while and some people starting chanting "we
love you, we love you..." rhythmically over and over again. The chatter
on the radio had deteriorated to unintelligible chaos, and I finally
turned it off.
I heard voices on the other end of the large circle yelling, "leave
them an opening", and eventually the cops retreated thru it as they had
done in the earlier battle out on the road. I went to the top of the
hill by Shut Up and Eat It and looked out at the trail going down to
the parking. There was a group of uniforms followed by a couple of
hundred people walking down to the trailhead. I heard there were some
shouting and scuffles in spite of shanti sena efforts, and one man went
after one of the cops with a rock and landed a blow. He was arrested
and restrained, and the gatherers let the cops succeed in getting him
out of the gathering. I went back to Info and apologized for being a
lousy Info radio monitor during the fray, but I had been totally swept
up in this wave.
The 27th was a calm day relative to the rest. Only the giddyups were to
be seen, and they were letting people pet their horses. The foot
soldiers were back again on the 28th, but there were no more major
confrontations between the gatherers and the LEOs. From this day on the
cops entered main trail on foot only in groups of less than half a
dozen, and when they did they had a definite quarry in mind. They
usually looked for people with outstanding arrest warrants. Both the
gatherers and the cops showed no more desire for combat, and the people
who were arrested mostly submitted peacefully. The word which I heard
again and again on the radio was "chill". A group of five or six six-up
giddyups patrolled the site constantly between about nine in the
morning until five or six in the evening.
But they struck at small groups of people camping on the outskirts of
the gathering. I came across two sisters by Magic Bowl, washing their
eyes out with water with very pained looks on their faces. I asked them
if anything was wrong, and they told me this story, which I told them
to tell again to Info. Their story was like a lot of others that I
heard coming thru Info:
The two sisters, another brother, and a dog were sitting in front of
their camp, a small tipi near the edge of a meadow. They heard calls of
"six-up" in the distance, then a man's voice from the other side of the
tipi saying, "is there anybody in this camp?" They didn't answer, but
tried to sneak off into a nearby part of the meadow where there were
more people they could get lost in. The leashed dog cooperated and
didn't bark.
But they didn't get too far before they heard, "You three, STOP!"
There were two male FS LEOs and one female. Before they had too much
time to react, one of the men ran up to the brother from behind,
grabbed his arm, and pulled him back so that his rump landed on the
ground. "Sit down", he said while he was doing this. The female cop
came up behind one of the sisters and put one of her arms across the
sister's neck almost in a choke hold and likewise dragged her backward
into a sitting position. The dog didn't growl at first, but then
started barking and acting like a dog does when its mistress is
threatened. The other man threatened, "I'm gonna spray your dog", and
then actually did. He had a can of pepper spray, and he directed it
right into the dog's eyes.
All three Rainbows were ordered at first to stay sitting, then they
were told to get up and go back uphill to their camp, while the LEOs
followed them. When they got back, the men chewed them out over the
condition of their firepit. "This is the worst fire I've ever seen."
The sisters said that it was a proper pit with rocks around it and
there were three gallon jugs of water and a shovel nearby. There were
some embers that were still smoking.
One of the sisters was ordered to bury the fire with the shovel. The
brother was told to sit on the ground again. The sister was protesting
while she dug, ""I can't believe you just maced my dog.!" More LEOs
appeared on the scene, eventually totaling 10, and they all joined in
ridiculing and scolding. "No water, no people around." "Worst firepit
I've ever seen."
The sister was then asked to put the shovel down and show an ID, which,
like a lot of gatherers who don't want to take something into the woods
to be lost, she was unable to do. She continued digging and ignored the
cops. She was ordered again to put down the shovel, and in an angry
gesture she threw the shovel on the ground, causing it to ricochet on a
rock and bounce onto a log.
Then the female cop who had tackled her before did it again, this time
getting her prone on the ground, and the cop sprayed mace in her eyes.
The other sister, who had been sitting on the other side of the pit
just watching, was also pounced upon and sprayed.
The LEOs turned them loose, and the crowd of gatherers who had come to
see the commotion finished burying the pit as the cops left, and the
two sisters stumbled thru the fields trying to find CALM. I came across
them at the first water they found to wash out their eyes in, at Magic
Bowl.
And it started to look like the LEOs were targeting people they thought
were key individuals in the infrastructure of the gathering. They
ticketed Felipe at Kid Village, Calif at the front gate parking, and
gave three separate tickets to Badjer. They did a raid on CALM where
they ticketed Stone, the doctor, and went into Jayne Lightwaryr's tent
and cited her for possessing prescription drugs she couldn't prove that
she was authorized to have. Hawker told Info a story about how he went
up to his parked van with all the radio equipment inside, and found
three cops had surrounded it and were staking out for his return. (He
saw then in time and didn't get caught by them that time. They finally
did catch up to him later. )
Plunker was going around to the kitchens with a rap about how the
police were trying to bring the gathering to a halt by requiring all of
our key workers to be in court on the 30th. On the morning of that day,
there were masses of people at the welcome home camp waiting for
Rainbow vehicles that had volunteered to shuttle them in.
But it was only a little after one in the afternoon that some of these
"Rainbow Leaders", who were mostly in a group that was scheduled for
the first session in the morning, were back from the court. Karen Zirk
had been exuberant in joyous enthusiasm. ("I get to go to court, I get
to go to court!..."). She had a speech all rehearsed to give to the
judge, and she said that she had been successful in delivering it. Most
of the ticketees had been offered collateral forfeiture and had taken
it. The room used for the proceedings was big enough for some observers
to sit, and they were not told to leave -- in contrast to the closed
off corner last year at the Cranberry Nature Center.
She also said to us that she "had a nice chat with Tim Lynn", the
Incident Commander, and had made arrangements to escort him and his
entourage of LEOs thru the gathering while she was naked. The next day
I was walking on the trail up to Kid Village and did indeed see her
coming the other way behind some uniformed men, wearing a pair of
hiking boots and socks, a green backpack, a wide brimmed straw hat, and
nothing else but a big grin. Tim Lynn I didn't recognize the first
time, he had on some very dark sunglasses under his black baseball cap.
Back on the 27th I saw for the first time resource rangers with no LEOs
with them, two young women in gunless green uniforms. They said they
were going around to look at kitchens. The next morning there was a
meeting at about 11 in the Cooperations meadow next to Info, that was
attended by more seven-ups. I wasn't there, but a few hours later I was
given some xeroxed pages stapled together, with the title: Rainbow
Gathering 2006 Operating Plan - 6/28/2006. (The full text of this I am
putting into a separate post.)
That evening at Dinner Circle, Plunker asked to address the circle, and
everybody blobbed together in the middle to hear him. He read the
operating plan, and asked for a consensus by silence. There was only
one person who asked for clarification of some words, then he asked
again and got the silence he had wanted.
An agreement was reached to ban all personal fires, and only allow the
ones in kitchens and the larger bliss pits (which were referred to as
"warming fires"). Some rangers toured the site and started issuing
permits for the individual fires, No gatherer signed anything; it was
for the fire and not any persons. No fee was asked for either. Their
selection of which fires to allow to stay made sense to most gatherers,
and I didn't hear too much bitching.
And the Family fire watchers turned quite ogrely in spots. I heard one
person complaining about not having his white ashes in the morning for
the shitter because someone had doused it with water in the middle of
the night. Enforcement was strict, at least in the easily accessible
regions.
On July 1st, the revival of the Family Council on the land that Plunker
had asked for in several e-mails before the gathering actually took
place. About 70 people were there when we Omed and he started the
discussion out, and the number doubled after an hour or so. There were
four Forest Service resource people present.
He went into a long historical narrative starting with the days of the
Vortex festival where the idea for the gathering was born, then thru
all the troubles that the Family has had with the FS in the past. The
main point that his talk finally led to was that, since the
constitutional challenges based on freedom of assembly had now lost in
court, a new direction to the Family's challenge must now be taken. He
cited a recent (2006) Supreme Court decision that the government must
"have a compelling reason" before it can interfere with a "spiritual
assembly". The Family could make a new case based on religious freedom.
And he said that a "good constitutional lawyer" should be hired, one
with experience who might even cost some money.
He then passed the feather asking for comments, and it started to go
around, with wandering from the subject by some of the feather holders.
I stayed for about two hours, but the circle lasted until Dinner
Circle. There were a few people down there next noon, and there was
some activity for the next few days. No stated formal consensus ever
reached Info.
(to be continued)