Joyous Lake 1975

The Aquarian Exposition: 3 Days of Peace & Music on Max Yasgur's 600-acre dairy farm near the hamlet of White Lake in the town of Bethel, New York has impacted American music culture for over forty years. Richie Havens opened the festival and Jimi Hendrix closed the concert with a fiery set of psychedelic finesse. A half million freaks, heads, and hippies attended the outdoor show. Millions more have said that they were in spirit. I was one of them, for that August weekend I was stuck washing dishes and walloping pots in the kitchen of the Tara Hotel in Braintree, Mass. 17 years old and trapped in a meaningless job listening to the newscast over a radio. I thought that I must have done something horribly bad in a previous lifetime to have been punished so severely in the present.

Few of us knew that the summer of love was history. Teens grew their hair longer. We smoked more pot. I dropped LSD. The anti-war movement expanded into the middle-class. Woodstock was our two-syllable nirvana. Everyone wanted a piece.

In the Spring of 1975 AK was studying keyboards at Berkeley School of Music and I was teaching school at South Boston. He received a phone call from Rockford. We had met the previous summer north of San Diego. The three of us had shared an acid trip on Moonlight Beach. The Pacific roared with motorcycle waves and a seal had spoken to us in a trance. There was a girl with blonde hair. She had big breasts. It was a nude beach. None of us wore a thing. After we came down Alan announced that he was heading north to San Francisco. I would have joined him, if AK hadn't talked me into returning to Boston.

"We have no money."

Rockford had hit the road with $10, the blonde, and a guitar.

He stayed a year.

During the phone conversation Rockford explained that the Haight was overrun by junkies, speed freaks, and scammers.

"A very uncool place, but Nona said that Woodstock was cool."

He invited us for a visit.

The next weekend AK and I drove west from Boston in his Firebird. 4 hours to Woodstock. Rockford's house was a renovated chicken coop by Tannery Brook. Nona was exotic with long black hair and a Balinese legong dancer's body. She spoke with a New Jersey accent. A nasal grate forgiven by her beauty. We smoked hash and then walked down the wooded side street to the Joyous Lake. Joe Cocker was playing at the small bar crowded with hippie die-hards and free spirited women.

Cocker had just emerged from a de-tox clinic. His friends refused him the right to drink, while guzzling beer. The Sheffield singer's voice retained its gritty tone and the audience hit the dance floor. I met a full-breasted brunette from the town. Her dress revealed her tits down the the nipples.

"You want to come to my place?" She ground hips against my cock.

"Love to." Hippie girl, pot, sex. It might be six years after Woodstock, but this was my Aquarius moment. The Summer of Love might be over, but the Season of Lust was in full swing winter, spring, summer, and fall.

I had sex with Dora three times that night.

"You gotta go." She shook me awake.

Her body was a little bigger than I remembered. And she was a little older. I didn't care. I wanted more.

"Why?" I was ready to move into her small apartment overlooking Main Street.

"Because my old man is coming back tonight." She threw my jeans and tee-shirt on the bed. "He's a biker."

"I'm going." Bikers were trouble and angry bikers even more trouble. I dressed like as fast as Clark Kent turning into Superman. Ten minutes later I was back at Rockford's place. AK and he were playing African thumb piano. Nona was swaying to the rhythmic plinking. They laughed at my story. I didn't think that it was that funny and later I saw Dora on the back of a Harley.

Her old man was a tattooed bear.

I visited Woodstock a couple more times over that summer.

AK and I dropped acid in July. We rocked out in the chicken shack. I played kazoo, Rockford strummed his guitar, and AK plunked out notes on his kalimba. Nona our muse was the dancing tambourine girl.

We wanted her, as did every man in Woodstock. Nona was Rockford's for the moment. AK and I hated him for that possession. Neither of us were proud of that envy.

That autumn Rockford and Nona moved back to the coast. Neither AK nor I returned to Woodstock in the following years. I ran into Nona in Bali in 1993. Rockford lives in Iowa. I saw him in 2009. . AK teaches school in Jupiter Beach, Fla. We see each other at least once a year.

This past Labor Weekend I passed through Woodstock on the way to the deep Catskills. The Joyous Lake was now the Not Fade Away. The hippies were in their 60s. I walked over to Dora's old apartment and knocked on the door. No one answered and I went downstairs to the Garden Cafe.

"Does a Dora live upstairs."

"No." The long-hair teenager answered while smearing butter on a bagel. It was morning. "But a lot of guys ask the same question. She must have been something."

"She was."

And so were the rest of us from that Woodstock generation, for the Age of Aquarius keeps on shining with the Earth pointing at that constellation for the next 2000 years.

Rock on, Dora.

The name means golden and my memory of that night glows like treasure.