My brother Chris had a knack for being a part of major events. He was drafted by the organizers of the 1969 Woodstock Festival of Music and Art, later known simply as Woodstock, to be a member of backstage security. I planned to go to the festival too, as an attendee. We agreed to meet up there. 

The magnitude of the event was unexpected by everyone. “Meeting up” with just anyone was out of the question, except by happenstance. But because Chris was working, he was easy to find once I got to the grounds. Getting there was not easy. 

I left my job as a payroll clerk at the nursing home on East 79th St. by 11 a.m. on Friday after working the night shift. I had a ticket for all three days of the festival and hoped to get there before dark. I stashed my work clothes in a locker at Port Authority, changed into my Landlubbers and buffalo-hide sandals, bought a pint container of tapioca pudding from Horn & Hardart, and boarded the bus for Monticello, NY. 

When the bus reached Route 17 in New York, it slowed to a crawl. The highway was packed with traffic, all going to the same place. By the time we arrived in White Lake on Route 17B, it was dark and pouring rain. I sat down on my green rain poncho on the side of the road and dug the pint of tapioca out of my backpack. I was starving by this time and there was no bus station or restaurant nearby. I took several bites of pudding before I realized it was spoiled and vomited it out. That taste would follow me to the festival site until my next meal on Saturday afternoon.

But now, I had no idea how I would find my brother or the festival or my next meal. I looked around me, my eyes bleary from lack of sleep, and saw a familiar sign across the road: The White Lake Motel. My mother knew the owner, Elliot Tiber, through her friend Peter Healy, and we had visited Elliot there once the previous summer. A motel! Just what I needed, I thought. 

By the time I arrived at the office door I was tired, hungry and wet, a condition that would plague me all weekend. But now, I was hopeful. Answering my insistent knocking, Elliot opened the office door. “Cassie! Oh, my! Look at you!” he said. I moved forward into the little office to get out of the rain and he just stood there, staring at me. 

“I wish I could offer you a place to stay but we’re all booked up,” he said finally. I ogled the couch. It was not going to happen. The bastard turned me out into the dark of night in the rain. His friend’s daughter. My mother would never forgive him. His excuse, once confronted, would be that I was drug-addled. It was my red eyes, he said. Even more reason to take me in! But Elliot was more concerned with his celebrity clients and his own comfort. I understand. The history of Woodstock treats Elliot nicely. He managed to create a story around his involvement that neglects to mention the arrival of his friend’s daughter or her quick exit.

Out on the road, I befriended a young woman who was also traveling alone. There were throngs of young people on the road, leaving only one lane of traffic to crawl along 17B toward the site. Pretty close to where we started, a pickup truck with a cab stopped near us, and the driver offered us a ride. We got in the back seat and the driver made a turn away from the traffic onto a side road. We looked at each other and decided wordlessly to get out at the next opportunity. 

The guys were either drunk or high, and one reached back to touch my leg. “Where you girls from?” he said, a cigarette dangling from his mouth. His fingernails were black with dirt or motor oil or both. There were empty bottles of Yuengling beer on the floor of the truck. “Oh, shit, I left my purse at my uncle’s motel!” I lied. At the next stop sign, the driver made a U-turn and took us back to Elliot’s. We both got out and ran into the gas station across the road until they left. 

The rest of the night, we followed the miles-long tribe of teenagers, walking all the way to Hurd Road, where the tribe made a right turn. The rain kept coming, soaking me through my poncho even. The night air was cold and I shivered almost constantly. I looked down at my feet slurping through mud in my brown sandals and promised myself I would never romanticize this journey. I was plain miserable. 

After what seemed like hours but was probably only one or two, the road ended as dawn broke over a hillside onto a field of wet, hungry people like us. I said goodbye to my road-mate somewhere along the line and found my way to the stage area through the tangle of people huddled on the field like refugees. The smell of marijuana filled the air. The “wake and bakes” were just rising. Roadies were setting up for the morning act. I got up close enough to the stage to ask one of them if they could help me find my brother. 

“His name is Chris. He’s working security,” I said.

The next thing I knew there he was, looking like a giant on that stage with a bright orange Woodstock Security T-shirt on, his dark hair down to his broad shoulders. He motioned for me to come backstage and gave me one of his bear hugs. 

“Sis, is this crazy or what?!” he said. He showed me where I could stash my backpack in a trailer, and managed to get me a dry Security T-shirt. He signed me on to monitor the mud hill that people were using to break their arms and legs by flinging themselves into the mud naked. My job was to make them stop. I wasn’t very successful. 

After that, I was put on the road detail to make people get out of the way of ambulances trying to get the injured and strung out to the helipad.

Even as a 17-year-old with a Festival Security T-shirt, I was seen as a “pig” and my pleas to move out of the road went largely unheeded by the stoned and oblivious crowd of fellow teenagers. Still, I took my assignment seriously and as a result got more and more frustrated by the insensitivity around me. 

Before long a farm wagon approached the intersection of West Road and Happy Avenue, where I was stationed, near the helipad and medical tent. A man was laid out on the wagon with other men around him as the truck tried to make it through the crowd. I could see that his body was purple. The helicopter could not stay for long on the soaked ground, and by the time they made it to the helipad with him, the copter had taken off. The next time the farm wagon passed the intersection, going in the opposite direction, the man’s body was gray. He had been run over by a tractor while sleeping in a field on the farm. I felt that if he had made it to the medical tent in time, he would have lived. I’ll never know the truth, but disillusionment with my generation, espousing peace and love, began there on that day. I saw that we were just as selfish as any group of humans before us.

That afternoon, food appeared in the form of a Dixie cup of beef stew for each staff member. It was the most delicious thing I ever tasted and there wasn’t enough of it to sate my hunger. But it was something. I hadn’t slept since Thursday night except for a snooze on the bus on Friday. I had been working all day and needed a break when I ran into my friend Chris L. from our theatre group in the Village. He was there without his girlfriend and we decided to go for a swim in the nearby pond. The sun had come out and we were now baking in the August heat. At the pond beach, others had the same idea and it was clothing optional. We stripped down and as I was hanging my clothes on a branch to keep them out of the mud, Chris ran ahead of me, full sprint into the water. Then, the most horrible sound, inhuman, animal, and he was down. The crowd surrounded him and picked him up. He was bleeding profusely and crying in pain. His foot had landed on a broken Coke bottle and severed a tendon. I grabbed our clothes and a couple of young men carried Chris on their shoulders, all of us butt naked, to the medical tent. As the chopper lifted off into the evening, Canned Heat was playing “Goin’ Up the Country.” 

I found my brother back at the stage area. I was dead tired and feeling quite alone in that big crowd. Chris said he had a place for me to lay my head for a few hours. He led me to a trailer and unlocked the door. “Go back there,” he motioned, “nobody will bother you if you keep your head down.” I did as he said. I could hear the bands playing as I fell asleep on a pad on the floor. The trailer had sunk into the mud unevenly, so my head was below my body, but no matter. I was out of the elements and dry. 

I woke up hours later to the sound of a helicopter landing and soon there was a commotion at the trailer door. The door opened and I did as Chris told me and kept my head down. People were talking and laughing. Someone lit a joint. A woman cackled a husky laugh and stepped over me as she went to the toilet. Then they were gone. A few minutes later, Janis Joplin was on stage singing in her inimitable style. That’s the laugh I recognized. Still too tired to move, I listened to her from the little window of the trailer.