woodstock, 40 years later

I couldn’t find my boyfriend.
Bill said to meet at the first tree to the left of the stage.
As far as I could figure out, the first tree to the left of the stage was right by the freak-out tent. I mean, the medical tent, where everyone who didn’t have their meds—or had taken some they shouldn’t have, like, specifically, the brown acid—or who had gashed themselves or broken something or were going into labor were screaming.
This may have colored my experience.
But apparently, I was parking at the wrong tree. We never did meet. Bill later said that there were so many girls there who looked just like me with long blond hair and wire-rimmed glasses and work shirts or black T-shirts and jeans that he started seizing their wrists to see if they had a mole on their forearms.
When I was going through the LIFE photographs of Woodstock to do a where-are-they-now issue for the 20th anniversary issue, for the life of me I couldn’t tell myself whether I was the girl in some of the pictures or not. I was 18 and going into my sophomore year at Vassar. (I can’t say I’ve changed my look much since. Other than what 60 pounds and 40 years will do to you.)
Does anyone remember how paranoid we were then? Leading up to the date there was a whole school of thought that held that the Woodstock festival was a government conspiracy to corral all the freaks in the area and let them drug themselves to death behind barbed wire. This may partly account for the trampling of the fences and the reaction to the helicopters that were airlifting in the talent. Hey, Bob Dylan who lived right nearby didn’t go, man. He might’ve known something.
Or maybe he just didn’t like crowds. I sure didn’t. Before it rained, people were lighting little bonfires in the field all over the place. I could just picture them escaping—I mean, people were so stoned—and the crowd stampeding. I couldn’t hear the music worth a damn (see the column by Gail Collins), and my back hurt. It looked like rain.
Freaked out by the freakout tent and my failure to meet Bill, I convinced my high school friends, sisters, to depart. They’re probably still mad about it—I’ll have to ask them—cause they were having a petty good time. I was the bummer.
The Corvair convertible was parked in the middle of the highway what seemed like miles away along with all the other cars that got stuck. We wiggled out onto the verge and into a dirt road. There we drove around until we could get back on the highway and to our safe and privileged homes in Westchester. I went back for the sleeping bag I had stashed behind a bush a week later. Yes it was still there. The whole place was trashed. Another boyfriend who was hired for cleanup detail told me he scored a lot of drugs and money. I have heard he later went completely crazy and died.
Most of the folks at Woodstock seemed like kids who scored some dope and knotted ties around their heads and took a weekend off from their suburban homes and exclusive colleges. Only, like, the older hippies like Wavy Gravy and the Hog Farm seemed like they really had their trip together. I mean, they were far out, right?
My boyfriend Bill became a salmon fisherman and then a lawyer and married my best friend from college. He’s a judge, and she’s a museum docent now. Sometimes I see them.
I would keep trying to be a real hippy. I got pretty close in Hawaii in 1973 (snapshot with another boyfriend). Maybe I’m still trying. What is a real hippy anyway?