By Kurtis Alexander,Reporter July 12, 2024 (SFChronicle.com)
A sign welcomes people to the gathering of the Rainbow Family in Vermont in 2016. A Rainbow Family gathering in Plumas County is just finishing up — marred, participants said, by a heavy law enforcement presence and local opposition.Wilson Ring/Associated Press 2016
It’s not easy being a hippie in California these days.
Slipping into the woods to spend time with nature and friends, maybe beat a drum, pray for peace, or smoke a little something, can come with all sorts of obstacles: environmental restrictions, rural residents wary of outsiders, high fire danger, tribes protective of sacred land, misinformed critics on Facebook.
These are a few of the issues encountered by the Rainbow Family when it tried to hold its national counterculture gathering this month in Northern California’s Plumas National Forest. Of course, inviting thousands of people to a weeklong camping event on public lands, and not getting a permit, complicates matters.
The Rainbows, a loosely affiliated group of drifters, dreamers and pacifists that meets up somewhere each Fourth of July, were ousted from their gathering site this year by federal authorities just as it was getting started, amid numerous concerns about their presence. Many regrouped about an hour and a half away, but the ensuing event was smaller than expected and heavy on law enforcement. There were five arrests and 115 citations, authorities said.
While several of the nearly 1,800 attendees praised the experience as “epic” and “healing,” others said the scrutiny cast a shadow over the gathering. Some felt misunderstood, unable to share their message of peace and love, and ultimately victimized by a world that may have passed them by.
“We represent something that doesn’t align with most people,” said Fern Rose, who attended the gathering with her husband and kids from Cave Junction, Ore. “It’s not OK to be racist. It’s not OK to hate brown, Black and yellow people. But it’s OK to hate hippies?”
Rose said she enjoyed her time at the event, spending most of it walking, cooking and attending children’s programs. She, like others, despises stereotypes of the Rainbows as doped-up hooligans and said they’re a judgment-free community offering hope and happiness. Still, she said her family felt the heavy hand of law enforcement at this year’s gathering, specifically with threats to tow their truck, which she attributes to pressure from a broader community that just doesn’t grasp the Rainbow Family.
“There was no goodwill,” she said. “No one wanted to work with us. They just wanted to call us drug addicts and get us out of the woods.”
The irony wasn’t lost that California is proudly viewed by many as the birthplace of the counterculture movement.
The crackdown on the gathering began on June 26, when National Forest Service officials issued a closure order for part of the Plumas National Forest near the Lassen County community of Janesville, about five hours from San Francisco, where the Rainbow event was initially planned. The agency deemed the assembly “unauthorized.”
But things were getting weird long before this.
In the weeks leading up to the gathering, reports of early attendees running pipelines to carry water from creeks to campers — a potential violation of state and federal laws — prompted a few local residents to take matters into their own hands and remove the makeshift infrastructure. Tensions began to build.
Soon after, a local group went to the area with the intention of blocking cars headed to the gathering site. Ultimately, it stood down but not without crystallizing the opposition.
“We’re going to have to clean up this mess,” Aaron Albaugh, chair of the Lassen County Board of Supervisors, told the Chronicle at the time. “It’s going to come out of our county coffers. It’s terrible that rural counties are getting (burdened) and the federal government doesn’t do anything.”
Meanwhile, news of the event was fanning already sky-high fears about wildfires in Northern California. Memories of the devastating Dixie, Camp and North Complex fires are fresh, and the prospect of more people meant more chance of another catastrophic spark.
There were also the tribes. Representatives of the Maidu, Paiute, Pit River and Washoe asked the Rainbow Family, earlier in June, to stay out of the area, worried about disruption to ancestral sites.
To top things off, social media was stirring things up. Steady streams of posts chronicled what the gatherers were doing and, from the posters’ perspectives, why they needed to be stopped.
By the end of June, when larger crowds began pouring in to the event ahead of the Fourth of July, public sentiment about the Rainbow Family was firmly against them. The forest service’s eventual decision to push out the congregants was widely supported, and some who planned to attend just stayed home.
“People were just out there acting stupid. There were threats of violence from the locals. That’s not what we represent,” said David Smith of Burney (Shasta County), who has been attending Rainbow gatherings since 1997 for the sense of belonging he found after growing up in group homes and completing his military service. However, this year, Smith made the last-minute decision to sit out. “I didn’t want the harassment.”
Lafayette resident Chris Bair wasn’t deterred. He drove from the Bay Area to the second gathering site, which was near the community of Beckwourth (Plumas County) in Plumas National Forest. He immediately had second thoughts, however.
“Honestly, I’ve never seen so many law enforcement officers in a single location in my entire life,” Bair said.
Bair was pulled over, he said, for going 21 mph in a 15 mph zone, then he had his car searched. The self-described “boring dad from the suburbs” who went to gatherings as a younger man and hadn’t been to one since 2007, called the reaction to the assembly “absolutely egregious and uncalled for.”
“When I left, I was the most paranoid I’ve ever been, and I’ve got nothing to be paranoid about,” he said.
Bair and others acknowledge that the Rainbow Family might have made some missteps in planning this year’s gathering, such as underestimating the region’s fire risk. Still, they say the response was overblown. In the end, the site they convened at was an area that had recently burned, which likely presented less fire danger.
Forest service officials said the group simply posed too many potential problems for the agency to ignore. They cited the need to maintain public health and safety as well as ensure adequate stewardship of public lands and natural resources.
In advance of the event, the agency assigned a 65-person “national incident management team,” consisting of 36 federal law enforcement officers from outside the area, to help manage the situation. The team is regularly activated for the national Rainbow gathering, which has been held on forest service lands since 1972 and can draw upward of 10,000 people. Local police and sheriff’s deputies also assisted.
Hilary Markin, spokesperson for the forest service, said concerns about the event could have been sorted out in advance if the Rainbow Family had gone through proper channels and obtained a group permit. A permit is required for events with 75 or more people and allows for conditions to be imposed to limit impacts, such as requiring portable toilets.
The gatherers, though, have long asserted that they have no leadership and no one who represents them, meaning they’re not a group. (Those who spoke to the Chronicle for this story made clear they’re not speaking for everyone, and the Chronicle couldn’t find anyone to speak for the Rainbows.)
“Even though we declared it an unauthorized gathering, they claim to be individuals camping in the woods,” Markin said.
The forest service reported 384 law enforcement contacts over the course of the event, which was still going on at the start of this week, with a few hundred attendees at the site. The arrests and citations were for several alleged wrongdoings, including damage to natural resources, violations of fire restrictions, traffic infractions and narcotics possession.
Many of the gatherers were adamant that, while they felt bullied, they wouldn’t be intimidated.
“We’re moving on now,” said Rose, from Oregon. “But I will show up to every single gathering for the rest of my life until the day I die. We need to keep up our numbers.”
Bair, from Lafayette, said, “We really are all in this together. With all that’s going on in the world, if you break down the divisions and pray for peace, you’re certainly not going to make things worse, and hopefully we can make a meaningful difference for the better.”
Reach Kurtis Alexander: kalexander@sfchronicle.com; Twitter: @kurtisalexander
July 12, 2024
REPORTER
Kurtis Alexander is an enterprise reporter for The San Francisco Chronicle, with a focus on natural resources and the environment. He frequently writes about water, wildfire, climate and the American West. His recent work has examined the impacts of drought, threats to public lands and wildlife, and the nation’s widening rural-urban divide.Before joining the Chronicle, Alexander worked as a freelance writer and as a staff reporter for several media organizations, including The Fresno Bee and Bay Area News Group, writing about government, politics and the environment.
