Acid Crawlback Fest: Armageddon Postponed
Granby, Colo. – You could read about it in the Denver Post or see it on the Six O’clock News. By the middle of May, all 800 or so people in Granby expected to be overrun – by an estimated one million fanatic Christ and dope addicts coming to a blasphemous festival at Table Mountain, right smack in the middle of their park.
It was going to last three whole days and climax on the Fourth of July – sacrilege for sure – a bunch of peace-crazies trampling over the mountains on Independence Day. A million of them! Granby was gearing up for the greatest natural disaster since the locusts ate Utah.
A million is what they said, or sometimes 144,000 – which still came to about 180 strangers per each local resident. Whoever had organized the event, the Rainbow Tribe or some such lunatic group, had been working at it three years. They had invited every Congressman, Senator, and World Leader; but of course no one expected Nixon and Mao to show. No, more likely the motorcycle gangs that had been invited would make it. Hells Angels, Straight Satans, rapists on wheels, roaring through Granby trailing a white cloud of cocaine and heroin. They would run the deer and the antelope clear to Estes Park. Shit in the streams. The trout would float belly-up all the way from Table Mountain to Granby.
Worse, the one big tourist weekend of the summer would be a bust. Hippies (the fact is well-known) don’t sleep in motels or buy guns and fishing equipment. By the looks of it, some of them didn’t even eat. But the people who did, the regulars, the smalltown summer tourists, they would avoid Granby by the thousands of dollars.
Consider: Granby has about 110 summer days to get it through the fall and winter. And the Fourth is a big, critical holiday. Stopping this festival would be a matter of survival for most of Granby. A controversial letter signed by a local businessman, Darvin G. Eherman, in Sky-Hi News, a Grand County weekly: “Yellow journalism and the agitation of TV is causing the county to become an armed camp. You can’t even buy a box of .22 shells anywhere. We even have ‘locals’ spoiling for a fight just to kill or harm someone just for the hell of it. I even get the feeling many of these locals are glad the ‘strawberry folk’ are here so the vigilantes can roust them out and burn them up just like a Gene Autry movie . . .”
A court order was issued against the gathering at Table Mountain, but a local developer, Paul Geisendorfer, 46, offered a 320-acre site at Strawberry Lake, nine miles from the mountain. The Denver Post ran an article mentioning the donor’s recent divorce and bankruptcy and speculated on the effect 20 months in a Korean POW camp might have had on his mind. Never well liked in Granby – he was an outspoken peacemonger – Geisendorfer suddenly found all his credit gone. On several occasions he was even asked to leave Granby business establishments. At last report he was still doing his grocery shopping 30 miles away in Kremmling. There were two phone threats against his life.
On June 24th, a team of county officials rode horseback up the steep trail to Strawberry Lake where 2,000 of the advance guard were already camped. A meeting of Grand County commissioners was held and the camp was declared a public nuisance. Property owners and adjacent National Park officials were given 48 hours to abate the nuisance. Special deputies and state patrolmen set up road-blocks on the two roads leading to the site. Sheriff’s deputies with shotguns monitored overland trails. At least 50 people were in jail for hitchhiking, walking on the wrong side of the road, or driving with faulty tail lights.
A highly-placed state official is reported to have said: “There’s more of the sons of bitches on the road every day, but we’ve got the state locked up tighter than a drum.”
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There are those who will tell you Barry E. Adams is a spiritual hustler, the Elmer Gantry of hip. Others know him as Barry Plunker, or just Plunker, and consider him a prophet. He is a slight man in his late 20’s who wears a wispy beard and wire-rimmed glasses.
A little over three years ago, Plunker, a man with a mysterious past, had a prophetic vision: A great gathering of tribes, the 144,000 of God’s elect mentioned in the Book of Revelations. The elect would all meet on Independence Day at the Center of the Universe – a spot which Arapaho legends conveniently fix at Table Mountain. The more Plunker talked about it to his tribe, The Rainbow Family of Living Light, the more real, the more inevitable the vision became.
Equipped with a list of 1000 or so communes in America, the Prophet Plunker set forth with his brother Rainbow tribesman, Garrick, (looking even more prophetic than Plunker: flowing black hair and dark sunken eyes) to testify personally to the Will of God. The two prophets visited the communes, then the film and food coops, picking up hitchhikers along the way, giving them Table Mountain leaflets to peddle. Periodic newsletters were sent out to remind the elect of the event. Ten thousand posters were printed and distributed.
Now Plunker is sometimes difficult to talk to. If you ask him where he lives, he’ll say “Earth.” If you ask him about the structure of the tribe, he’ll mention Tao and liken the way of living light to the highway. And, as befits a prophet, Plunker extemporizes in parables.
A little research shows that the Rainbow Tribe of Living Light is a legal corporation situated just outside Eugene, Oregon. There are some 40 tribesmen and women living on the land at present. In 1966, Plunker lived in a commune on Haight Street in San Francisco, and later the tribe migrated to a farm in Marblemount, Washington.
Part of Plunker’s charisma is a mean ability to couple scripture and legend. Witness this: In the Book of Revelations it is written, “And I will give power unto my two witnesses, and they shall prophesy a thousand two hundred and three-score days, clothed in sackcloth.” Forget the sackcloth, it isn’t necessary, but the 1260 days, why that comes to . . . three-and-a-half years . . . the realization of the prophet Plunker’s vision. Hallelujah, brothers and sisters!
Then there are the Indian legends claiming the spirit of slain warriors will return to reclaim the earth. If you think about it hard enough and smoke and talk with the Indians, it becomes clear that today’s long-haired young people . . . are the reincarnation of the dead warriors. The Gathering of the Tribe could be the Peace Dance the Hopis elders always talked about; it could also be the Great Ghost Dance the plains and mountain tribes started talking about in the late 1890s.
The more Prophet Plunker saw how scripture and legend grooved (why shouldn’t they, if both come from God?) the more enthusiastic he became. And Plunker’s energy, along with Garrick’s energy, generated a universal wave of spiritual excitement. A great pyramid would be built on Table Mountain. Plunker carried a rock to form its base for three years. And at high noon on Independence Day (another legend), the elect would join hands and O-m-m-m-m. With that much spiritual energy vibrating 9000 feet above sea level, who could tell what would happen? Apocalypse? Armageddon? The end of the world? The genesis of the universe?
For it is written of the prophets, “When they have finished their testimony, the beast that ascendeth out of the bottomless pit shall make was against them, and shall overcome them and kill them.”
The Table Mountain vision: On the 12th hour of the sacred day, a mighty O-m-m-m shakes the earth. Then, splitting the ensuing silence, a mighty bellow shatters the eardrums of the assembled tribes. Below, the great beast Moloch rises huge and terrible out of Lake Granby and the waters roll away from its scales – and the lake, which was as a blue eye in the face of the earth, is but a muddy and hollow socket. Still the beast rises toward Table Mountain in steps hundreds of cubits long and the Children are sore afraid and tremble before it, for Moloch is a beast mightier than the earth has seen. More terrible than Kong who strode the land or Rodan which slew from the air. More powerful yet than the fabled Godzilla who pillaged the ancient land of Japan. But, lo, the prophets Plunker and Garrick stand naked and unafraid before the beast. Silent, they suffer their limbs to be torn from their bodies and their flesh to be mauled and shredded by Moloch.
The same chapter of Revelations reveals that the bodies of the prophets shall not be buried and those who hated them in life shall make merry and exchange gifts. After three and a half days, the prophets rise to heaven, and another beast shall rise from the earth and slay Moloch and the enemies of the prophets, leaving only the elect of God to inherit the earth. “I don’t think all that’s going to happen.” Denny Eichhorn told me, “but I like thinking about it. It gives you goose-pimples up your back and along your arms.” Eichhorn helped Plunker organize Vortex 1, the rock festival alternative to busting up the Portland, Oregon American Legion Convention a few years ago. He had promoted the first Universal Life Church Picnic at Farragut State Park in Washington – a three-day affair that drew 80,000 people. Now he was doing a little freelance promoting on behalf of the Rainbow Tribe.
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