Stories from the Road Ed. 2

By Boomer Sunshine

I'm on my way back home from Mexico, still grooving off the experience. Cheap pot, beautiful women, good coke, and all the tequila I could drink. Man, what a dream! I hitch west on the I-10, catch a ride from a trucker, gets me a free shower at a truck stop, and I'm heading north on the I-25 junction. A woman and her kids take me to Albuquerque, New Mexico. Ten minutes of walking and another car stops. I'm pleasantly surprised. Rides are really lining up. This must be my lucky day.

The woman who stops is in her mid 40's, and I can tell right away she's a hippie mama. There's a dude in the back, and sitting next to him is a beautiful hippie goddess. Her name is Spring, and she's from Santa Fe. She and the dude were on a boom vacation and her van broke down, so her mom had to come pick them up The mom's totally cool with it, been there, done that. So we get to talking about mushrooms, real interesting conversation with people who can dig the experience.

Spring is truly a goddess, and we connect on many levels. We're swapping tripping stories, talking about our beliefs and our spirits and all kinds of crazy stuff. It is amazing the kind of people you can meet on the road. They are brief connections, but the more traveling you do, the smaller the world gets. Sometimes you get a sense of déjà vu.

Spring is going back to her house in Santa Fe. We get into town and she runs into her house and comes back out.

I have some things to do, I'm gonna meet up with some friends. You're more than welcome to come along. That sounds just fine to me, and I end up cruising to this place called The Plaza, a park in the middle of town, with Spring and the dude.

The Plaza is the local hangout for the degenerates and hippies, the druggies and dropouts, all the interesting people. We meet up with her friends and they're all as cool as Spring. So we hang out in the park for a while, pass a few j's, and I find a place to crash for the night. It's a good night, and I don't get much sleep. In the course of the night, Spring tells me about a happening called The Rainbow Gathering. It's in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, right next store, so to speak. She says she's gonna try and get out there, and from how she describes it, it's gonna be fun to say the least. Its funny how if you just go with the funniest thing at the time, it gets better and better.

I wake up in the morning, say my goodbyes, yadda yadda ya, and I'm on the road. I get to Woodland Park two days later.

I stick around town for about a week, dropping in on some old friends and getting chewed out by the folks whenever I see them. It's nice being back home; I never thought Id miss it. I stick around long enough to recuperate from my travels, chill out a while, and then I head north. Next stop, Steamboat Springs.

Getting there is a nightmare from the beginning. Oddly enough, my buddy Jeff takes me twenty miles north of Colorado Springs, and from there I walk about ten miles until I get picked up again; an Asian guy takes me about thirty miles north. A few more intermittent rides and I'm in Denver.

Its hell in Denver; I get dropped off in the middle of the city and have to walk to 85 west, a six-mile hike. I get a few rides west, and end up sleeping in a train station, or rather not sleeping. It's not exactly a busy train station; no trains stop there and I'm the only one there the whole night, but every time I start to drift off, a train blows through and shakes the whole building. It's not heated either, but there's a wall with pamphlets and stuff, and a metal stand-alone ashtray. I burn up about half the pamphlets trying to keep warm. I leave at six the next morning, spend my last five bucks on some French toast in town, and hit the road again.

Rides line up for me fast and quick. Three rides take me about fifty miles outside of Steamboat. The last rides a really crazy lady, all kinds of cool. She tells me my aura is purple, and that I'm an indigo child. It sounds friendly enough; I take it as a compliment.

So I'm hitching up the final stretch of my destination and I see a VW van cruising my way. Hell yeah, I think. Guaranteed ride, probably straight to Steamboat. The van pulls up, the door opens, and the driver is none other than the goddess Spring of Santa Fe. We smile, recognize each other instantly, and are quite taken aback at the strange coincidence. I thought I'd never see her again, and she felt the same. So I hop in and get reacquainted.

In the car is Tim, a really cool guy dressed in army pants with no shirt on, his girlfriend Amy, a beautiful woman wearing a silky dress and nothing else, not even shoes, and this young grizzly bear named Squatter Dave.

We immediately exchange stories, and a joint is lit. We pass it around, getting more comfortable, and a while later, a pipe goes around. By now, we're about ten minutes out of town, and we start getting excited. It's the first Gathering for everybody but Squatter Dave, and all our expectations are running as wild as our imaginations. How many people are going to be there? What kind of drugs? Any music? Any trouble with LEOs? All this runs through my mind as I enter an unknown land with a few new friends and, surprisingly enough, a girl I met in Santa Fe. What followed proved to be immensely more than I expected- a journey into the depths of myself, a face-to-face encounter with the American dream, and a lesson in the essence of human nature.