Rainbow Family is an option
</element><element id="paragraph-1" type="body"><![CDATA[It's finally jacket weather. Autumn announced its arrival with a violent lightning strike to Jerry Pry's house on Mable Street and the days of warm sunny evenings in the back yard are about gone.
Now leaves are crumpled on the backyard table.
I'm staying mostly in town now. If there is one neat thing about living in town over living in the country it must be the skitter of leaves as they blow down the sidewalk.
In town a person doesn't take on that me-versus-the-universe sensibility that creeps in after spending enough time solitary surrounded by howling coyotes and hollering barred owls.
In town there are neighbors to stare at, conversations to listen in on and emergency sirens to ponder at all hours of the day. These scenes and the streetlights distract a person from pondering the stars and moon and realizing only concepts of physics too complex to understand are keeping us from floating up and away into the vacuum of oblivion.
As to whether town or country is better for a person, that's a toss up. But the house has a furnace, hot water, a shower and toilet so this winter should be more comfortable than last.
This is the time of year for unpredictability.
Who would have guessed that about the time I decided to act responsibly and finally sign up for the company's 401K plan that the stock market would nosedive. A bunch of greedheads approved a bunch of bad loans for people who couldn't afford their payments. Now everything is in chaos and I'm supposed to agree that my money is needed to save the country from another depression. And if I don't agree, maybe I'll change my mind if they stop calling it a "financial bailout" and instead call it a "financial rescue."
Citizens are willing to step up to the plate and help when retirement plans, savings accounts and ability to get a home or car loan is in jeopardy. We don't want to worry that those in power are crying wolf again while they hold out their hands, when there are no heads rolling, only multi-million dollar severance packages rolling into the bank accounts of the disgraced-but-incredibly-wealthy CEOs.
Its easy for anybody to complain about this embarrassing issue, especially when most of us around here had nothing to do with the problem and can take no action about it. We can only hang our heads in shame or shake our fists. And if our savings and retirement go down the toilet, there is always the Rainbow Family circuit to fall back on.
The Rainbows are back in town for their Shawnee Gathering, camped out in far southern Saline County near Palestine Church, and will be for a couple of weeks.
That wouldn't be so bad, hanging out in the woods, mass bathing, living off organic spaghetti and herbal tea and whatever else gets passed to us.
The Rainbow Family is an entertaining and unpredictable band. For people who like the woods, hugging other people and giving away all their cigarettes it could be a good life. But, for all the group's love and harmony idealism, my experience has led me to regard them as a peace-hating group that has helped to make my life less lovely and more disharmonious than what it was before.
The first Shawnee Gathering I went to, I was an unwitting accomplice in a child abduction operation that led to police roadblocks, the arrest of friends and loss of my reputation. How was I supposed to know the girls had lied to their parents about where they were going?
Then the guy in the Tea Time Camp went berserk because everybody had already given away their cigarettes and had none to give him. In an instant his personality transformed from peaceful mixer of tea to enraged gorilla, throwing camping gear, uprooting trees, smashing boulders and shrieking obscenities. It was a shocking performance that caused me briefly to ponder the laws of gravity suspending themselves in his spot just long enough to send his ranting self floating up and away into the vastness beyond.
A few years ago, I went down to the gathering at One Horse Gap to benignly interview some of the folks in "A Camp." They are unofficially considered the greeters and the alcoholics of the gathering. Whether accurate or not, Rainbow folk have fascinating personal biographies between the peace and love rhetoric.
All went well until the next day when the Forest Service and Pope County Sheriff's Deputies descended on the camp, made numerous drug arrests and took a child away for a Department of Child and Family Services investigation.
The parents of that child burst into the office calling for my head, convinced my newspaper story that mentioned children running around prompted the raid. Luckily for me I was gone off on an interview, but I understand the agitated, no doubt gorilla-like performance left quite an impression on the office staff.
As fortune would have it, the Rainbow parents moved into a rent house on Dayton Avenue in Harrisburg - two houses away from my own rent house. The good news is with permanent housing, they regained custody of their child. The bad news is I had to duck every time I drove home while they pushed their child in a stroller down the street.
I never had a conversation with the couple, but often spoke to another neighbor who checked on them. The man beat up the woman and she had to go to the emergency room, he fled up north and then died of a drug overdose.
I decided my dealings with the Rainbow Family were over. I approached the Rainbow world with an open mind and with the best intentions and always wound up leaving them breathing a sigh of relief and with a sour taste in my mouth.
But then Brandon Simmons and I were backpacking the River to River Trail last October and as we approached Cedar Lake noted some extravagant campsites in the woods. There were multicolored handkerchiefs and flags hanging above the tents. There was black, plastic PVC piping erected in the trees as an apparent makeshift aqueduct.
We agreed these were the footprints of the Rainbow Family of Living Light. I was, once again, in their midst. Then a bunch of kids came up to us asking us where they were supposed to go for the gathering.
Sure enough, around the next corner was Cedar Lake, and a line of naked dreadlocked men were washing their rear ends.
A young man with fiery red hair was racing along the bank waving a club and screaming obscenities at a black lab that ran with a handkerchief in its mouth. I assumed the handkerchief contained his last cigarette.
Other Rainbows harassed a father and two kids holding fishing poles and who appeared uncomfortable. The Rainbows explained to their uninterested, but patient, audience the Rainbow ethos for at least 30 minutes and invited them to a potluck dinner they were holding eight months away. Brandon and I debated staying out one more night to hang out with the Rainbows and see what happened. We decided against it. The opportunity for trouble was too great.
The Rainbows Family would be an option for some of us if we lose our safety nets, but I think I'd prefer my tax money go toward bailing out the Wall Street scum.
-- DeNeal is a staff writer for The Daily Register in Harrisburg, Ill., and The Daily Journal in Eldorado, Ill. He may be contacted at 253-7146 ext. 230 or by e-mail at bdeneal@yourclearwave.com.