It took me one 5-mile walk in 20-degree weather in the pitch black through the Ocala National Forest for me to kill my idols, or for them to nearly kill me.
My newspaper adviser in high school would often regale me with stories of transcendentalists and "The Rainbow People," as they're called, who would retreat into national parks for national and regional gatherings for periods of peace, reflection and an escape from consumerism and corporatism. When I heard they were doing a long stint only an hour or so away, I decided, after much deliberation, to experience it first hand.
With thoughts of "On the Road" in mind, I expected to see people truly living outside of the status quo. Intellectuals who thought the "real world" was not for them and made a conscious effort to live outside or above it.
What I found was both disillusioning and frightening.
Hippies do not exist anymore. In their stead, I found an array of felons in hiding, psychologically disturbed youth, feral children and homeless teenagers with nowhere else to be but in the forest.
I had experiences with some of them previously. I had met a band of train hoppers about a month before who had told me more about Rainbow gatherings. When I met them, I was filled with the romantic notion of responsibility-free traveling. I thought that I was talking to people like Kerouac, who had the gumption to set foot across the country and discover the spoils of America for themselves.
As that night progressed, my illusions about who I was talking to disappeared. I was not talking to a bunch of kids from square-shaped states who decided that suburban life was fraught with disappointment. I was talking to misfits who, even if they tried their very best to stick out a normal life, would never meet the cut. They were compulsive liars, thieves, vagabonds and winos.
Wasn't the point of hippies supposed to be of merit? Weren't they striving for something, whether it be the end to Vietnam, a revolt against the confinement of the 1950s or god, anything else?
There were some upsides of the excursion (I was able to trade "shiny rocks" for drugs, there were free pancakes and I got some exercise) but there were mostly downsides (I got called a yuppie upward of 20 times for "having parents," I almost got hypothermia and heat stroke in the same 12-hour span, and I was almost raped and dismembered by a boy who insisted that I go out to his "ninja camp" with him deep into the prairie). But the biggest downside of all was that I realized that hippies, or beats, or whatever, no longer exist.
No one once tried to talk to me about world issues. No one considered what they were doing revolutionary. No one wrote or made art (I did not meet a single person who had heard of "journalism."). They were there out of necessity. I could leave at any time, and I did the next afternoon.
Maybe I am a yuppie (as soon as I came home I took a long shower, took an extreme amount of Flintstones vitamins, and gorged myself on sushi), but at least I have a sense of who I am and where I belong. That one night destroyed my qualms with living inside of a system. What is the alternative? In today's world there is none. The best we can do is to try to change the system from inside. There is no hope in overturning anything if we just ignore it by living deep inside the woods.
I will always wonder what became of the train-hopper kids I spent a long night with and about the kids I met at the Rainbow gathering. I hope they get out of that system because it is far worse than the one of which I am a part. But I know they won't. Living in that system is a drain. Once you're in it for more than a month, you can never assimilate yourself in what is called "the real world." Once you have nothing but shiny rocks and nothing more than an elementary school education, you're pretty much fucked.
But then again, what do they know of the world they abandoned? The world that they perceived as unbendingly cruel? Nothing. And for the most part, I wish to know nothing more of the world they call their own. And that's where I'll leave it, until I meet another group of kids who can temporarily make me abandon my own set of values and make me question my own self worth.
Because really, what else is there?
Allie Conti is an English and journalism sophomore. Her column appears weekly.
