My wife and I spent this past weekend at the Starbelly Jam music festival in Crawford Bay, B.C. Crawford Bay is across Kootenay Lake from where we live. You catch the ferry, the big Osprey 2000 or the much smaller Balfour, at Balfour (two miles from our house), and cross the lake to Kootenay Bay. It's a pleasant little voyage of some three miles ("The longest free ferry ride in the world!") and takes about forty minutes. This time of year the line of vehicles at both ferry landings is long, and you often endure a two-ferry wait. When there's something like the Starbelly Jam going on, it can be a three-ferry wait, as long as the usual wait down on the coast to cross from Vancouver to Vancouver Island. What helps is that, with only the Osprey running at night and big lines of waiting cars on both shores, the captain sometimes opens the boat's throttle, cutting the crossing time in half, to twenty minutes or less.
This is the season for festivals -- mostly music festivals -- throughout North America, if not in Europe and the Northern Hemisphere generally. They seem to have started (I don't think they existed when I was a youth in the 1950s) in the 1960s with the Monterey Pop festival in 1967, which was also the year of the Summer of Love in San Francisco (and the summer of the race riot in Detroit, during which I was a mail carrier in the inner city) and reached their zenith with Woodstock in 1969. In between those two events, and for a while afterwards there were many lesser events called Love-Ins or Be-Ins, here and there, where hippies, semi-hippies, bikers, college students -- Sixties youth, in short, disaffected and otherwise, being young together -- gathered to smoke dope, make out, and listen to the funky good music of the era.
Here in the Kootenays of British Columbia, as elsewhere, I'm sure, such festivals remain alive and well, drawing old and new hippies, ex-hippies (like ourselves, I suppose), and just folks, though I must say they've become rather less wild, more controlled, than they used to be. At Starbelly this weekend I saw a beautiful young woman nurse her baby, then unabashedly leave her shirt off while her male partner gave her a haircut. Nobody seemed to notice; or rather, people noticed, as I did, and accepted (and perhaps secretly applauded) it as part of the scene. It harked back to the Flower Power 1960s, but had this been sometime between 1967 and 1971 or so, there would have been more than one topless young woman in the crowd, many of them lined up and swaying in front of the bandstand. The Sixties, one remembers, weren't only political; they were sexy.
It occurs to me now that the Sixties never died, and in fact are enjoying a revival as Iraq becomes every bit as messy and controversial as Vietnam was and we face the undeniable evidence (though deniable still to world leaders and the profit-mad corporations they serve) of Global Warming.
More than ever, it seems to me, Dickens's opening sentence in A Tale of Two Cities applies: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . ."
This is the season for festivals -- mostly music festivals -- throughout North America, if not in Europe and the Northern Hemisphere generally. They seem to have started (I don't think they existed when I was a youth in the 1950s) in the 1960s with the Monterey Pop festival in 1967, which was also the year of the Summer of Love in San Francisco (and the summer of the race riot in Detroit, during which I was a mail carrier in the inner city) and reached their zenith with Woodstock in 1969. In between those two events, and for a while afterwards there were many lesser events called Love-Ins or Be-Ins, here and there, where hippies, semi-hippies, bikers, college students -- Sixties youth, in short, disaffected and otherwise, being young together -- gathered to smoke dope, make out, and listen to the funky good music of the era.
Here in the Kootenays of British Columbia, as elsewhere, I'm sure, such festivals remain alive and well, drawing old and new hippies, ex-hippies (like ourselves, I suppose), and just folks, though I must say they've become rather less wild, more controlled, than they used to be. At Starbelly this weekend I saw a beautiful young woman nurse her baby, then unabashedly leave her shirt off while her male partner gave her a haircut. Nobody seemed to notice; or rather, people noticed, as I did, and accepted (and perhaps secretly applauded) it as part of the scene. It harked back to the Flower Power 1960s, but had this been sometime between 1967 and 1971 or so, there would have been more than one topless young woman in the crowd, many of them lined up and swaying in front of the bandstand. The Sixties, one remembers, weren't only political; they were sexy.
It occurs to me now that the Sixties never died, and in fact are enjoying a revival as Iraq becomes every bit as messy and controversial as Vietnam was and we face the undeniable evidence (though deniable still to world leaders and the profit-mad corporations they serve) of Global Warming.
More than ever, it seems to me, Dickens's opening sentence in A Tale of Two Cities applies: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . ."
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