Sunday, June 27, 1999
By Don Hopey, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
"Welcome home."
That's the standard Rainbow greeting. It's more appropriate than usual this year as the nomadic, communal, philosophically nebulous but ecologically aware Rainbows return to the Allegheny National Forest.
The group first gathered in 1986 on the western side of the forest, near Endeavor in Forest County. Regional Rainbow gatherings occurred on that same site, just north of the forest crossroads of Yellow Hammer, in 1988 and 1996.
This year they are on the southeastern edge of the forest, near Ridgway, Elk County, but given local concern about the gathering's impact on the forest and the group's embrace of a peculiar flavor of spiritually based, Mother Earth- friendly environmentalism, a visit to see how the old campsite is doing seemed in order.
The trouble was finding it -- off the beaten path, off anything but an unmarked route through the woods. North up Route 62, through Tionesta to East Hickory, then right onto Route 666 - - locally "Triple Sixes" -- through Endeavor. A left onto a chipped and oiled road brought me to Yellow Hammer, a handful of houses, summer cabins and a stable where the 1999 Allegheny Mountain Championship Rodeo will be held next month.
At a crossroads, I was stopped and was debating among myselves about which way to turn when a gray-bearded man in a yellow rain slicker came over a distant rise on the dirt road.
I rolled down the window and said "hello" to Home Free.
An original Rainbow "graybeard," he was part of the first gathering in 1972 near Granby, Colo., and the 1986 gathering in the Allegheny. He'd been camping alone in the woods since late last fall.
He was walking what turned out to be more than five miles to purchase eggs from a local chicken farmer, but knew the old Rainbow campsite and would be happy to take me there.
Chance meeting. Dumb luck.
We stopped for the eggs, then drove out an old logging road for a ride that could be a Jeep commercial. At the end of the road, I pulled over and we set out through a deep green forest on an overgrown deer path. During a hike of about a mile, Home Free talked about peace, spiritualism, the Rainbows and the Second Coming -- the last, occasionally in the first person.
"Spiritually, they don't have their hearts together yet," Home Free said of the Rainbow family, which was beginning to coalesce on the eastern end of the Allegheny National Forest. "They're all in a hurry to get 'home' but it's not there. They're doped up or on alcohol or caught up in cliches."
Home Free led us off the path and we bushwacked down a steep hillside through wet, waist-high ferns. At the bottom of the hill, after stepping into boot- sucking mud along a small run, he said, "This isn't it."
Back up the hill to the path, we walked another half mile before veering down the hill again, this time on a trail through a grove of hemlock and white pine. When the trees ended, we were in a wide meadow, full of thistle, tall grass and wild flowers. A hawk spooked from the pines made two lazy circles against a sky that had stopped spitting and gone blue.
We could have been the first two people to enter the meadow.
After pointing out the locations of the various Rainbow "kitchens," camps and Main Meadow circles, Home Free raised his arms. "Welcome home."
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