I was a city girl when I attended the California Rainbow Gathering on the Modoc National Forest. I flew out West to San Francisco and hitchhiked north on Interstate 5 up the Central Valley and then east into the mountains. I was a confused college dropout fleeing New York City. I’d heard about the gathering from some guy I’d met in a sporting goods store in Manhattan earlier that spring. It sounded like a cool thing to check out.

With a backpack full of gorp and dried salami, I made it to Likely, California, a tiny mountain town coping with the arrival of 20,000 vagabonds and hippies who provided locals with an entertaining diversion and a boost in tourist spending. From that last outpost of the civilized world, it was about twenty miles up a winding gravel road to an impromptu parking lot below a series of High Sierra meadows. A woman who looked like Janis Joplin directed traffic and hailed newcomers with the greeting “Welcome home!” I’d never seen so many long-haired, dreadlocked, sandal-wearing, pack-toting freaks. It was 1984, and I had thought I’d missed the sixties. Janis warned us of undercover CIA, FBI, DEA and U.S. Forest Service agents who had infiltrated the gathering. Then she stared right at me and said, “You look scared.” She was right.

I’d packed in enough food for myself for a week, but it turned out I didn’t need it. The gathering’s network of kitchens fed thousands three meals a day, usually rice and beans or some sort of mush served from a fifty-five-gallon oil drum. I didn’t need my tent, either; there were plenty of places to sleep (particularly if you were a young, single female). People called each other “sister” and “brother.” Strangers hugged each other. Some folks spent half the day shouting “I love you!” to no one in particular and everyone in general. Many walked around naked, or wore nothing but a loincloth. Bongo drums and guitar music echoed long into the night. On the Fourth of July, thousands stood in an Om circle, held hands and prayed for world peace.

The gathering offered free food, free childcare, free first aid, free shoes and blankets, well-dug latrines, a water system, an internal peacekeeping network. All the work was done by volunteers and funded through noncompulsory donations to the “magic hat.” You could get massaged, channeled, healed with crystals, rolfed, rebirthed or baptized. Out of the wilderness, an instant community had sprung up, where everyone was taken care of and everyone belonged. But there were no rules. Everything just seemed to happen in a Rainbow way.

Brian Michaels has attended about twenty of the last twenty-eight national Rainbow Gatherings held annually on public lands across the United States. A civil rights attorney, he has also argued the Rainbow Family’s case in court. Since 1996, Rainbows have been fighting the government over the right to gather freely on national forests as a collection of individuals sharing a common vision rather than as an organized group.

“We don’t do it,” he says of the Rainbow phenomenon. “It does itself.” He’s polishing off another martini at an upscale bar in Eugene, Oregon, where he’s come to talk to me about the Rainbow Family’s legal problems. But after about three or four drinks, the topic shifts to Rainbow magic. “There’s a magnitude to it that is undefinable,” he says. “It draws things to itself. It’s alive. It’s a living organism.”

The Rainbow Family of Living Light is an ever expanding and shifting collection of people who periodically gather to further the cause of world peace through prayer and to create a free, nonhierarchical society that can serve as a model for reforming Babylon, i.e., the industrialized world. Gatherings have taken place annually on national forests over Fourth of July weekends since 1972, when the first one occurred in Colorado. And the Rainbow idea has spread across the globe, giving birth to many smaller regional and broader international gatherings, including one held in a different European country every year.

The Rainbows’ only formal decision-making body is a council that meets every July 7 to choose the state that will host the following year’s event. Anyone can join the council. Early in the spring, Rainbow scouts select a national forest site and work with Forest Service personnel and local officials to prepare for the multitudes who always come. “Ignore all rumors of cancellation” is an oft-repeated Rainbow motto.

Gatherings take place under the assumption that the Constitution allows Americans the right to peaceably assemble. And Michaels points out, “On public lands, that right is amplified because the state has a higher burden to allow people to gather on their own land.” But Forest Service rules require groups of seventy-five or more to obtain a special-use permit and to designate a representative to sign it. Those who don’t are subject to a fine of up to $5,000 and can face up to six months in prison. Though Rainbows generally adhere to Forest Service guidelines for noncommercial group use, they steadfastly have refused to sign a permit. They say the unstructured nature of gatherings makes it impossible to choose a leader, or even a group representative.

The Forest Service has enforced the permit requirement only since 1996, when the most recent regulations governing special uses of national forests were issued. At last summer’s gathering in Pennsylvania’s Allegheny National Forest, three Rainbows received citations for participating in “unauthorized noncommercial group use.” Garrick Beck, a gemstone dealer who has attended twenty-six national gatherings, was one of those cited. He says that law enforcement officers wanted to make examples of some of the principal Rainbows, though they had a tough time identifying any leaders. “We are all individuals,” he says. “We have no formal association, no structure in our group, no bosses.”

That assertion frustrates many agency administrators, especially members of the law enforcement branch, whose presence at Rainbow Gatherings has increased significantly since the 1970s and early 1980s. Rex Woodson, a special agent based in Hot Springs, Arkansas, worked the North Carolina and Texas gatherings, in 1987 and 1988, and he’s still ticked off. “You’re dealing with people who don’t want to be structured, who don’t want responsibility and really don’t have respect for authority,” he says. “It’s hard to deal with them in a twelve-hour shift.”

Woodson accuses the Rainbows of causing traffic, health and safety problems, conflicts with the locals, environmental degradation and of flaunting drug and alcohol use. And he considers their claimed lack of leadership to be a calculated legal strategy. “You think you find the leader,” he says, “and all of a sudden there is no leader.”

The leadership issue is one that Rainbows have raised repeatedly in federal court, debating the Constitution’s free assembly clause and the legality of the Forest Service permit requirement. A motion for acquittal, filed last winter on behalf of Beck and other defendants in Erie, Pennsylvania, argues that the government cannot legally charge individuals for committing a group offense. “What did these individuals do to break a federal law?” their lawyers ask. “They, like 20,000 others, did not sign for a permit. However, they, like the others, could not sign for the permit, as they were not designated to do so by the group.”

Rainbows also argue that the regulations are overbroad and that they give the Forest Service too much discretion and allow officials to discriminate against certain types of groups, such as those that have no formal hierarchical structure or those that engage in unpopular types of speech. So far, two district court judges have agreed, ruling that portions of the group-use regulations are unconstitutional. But these verdicts apply only to a few specific citations, issued at the 1998 Rainbow Gathering in Arizona and an Earth First! Rendezvous. Courts in other locales have upheld the rules.

Responding to a lawsuit brought by Rainbows in Oregon—where several individuals received tickets at the 1997 gathering (charges that later were dismissed)—attorneys for the Forest Service explained that the signature requirement is meant to give permits legal effect and to deter false statements. The government also challenged the assertion that the Rainbow Family lacks organization. “Simply put, 20,000 persons do not accidentally and unexpectedly happen to find themselves in the same remote area of the forest at the same time doing similar things and sharing similar goals and ideals without some form of internal structure,” states the government brief.

Indeed, gatherings appear to be organized affairs. The Rainbows have an excellent track record for cleaning up sites and working with resource professionals to address environmental, public health and safety concerns. After the Oregon gathering, two specialists with the state Health Division reported, “We found that the Family has developed good internal procedures for protecting public health and the environment based on many years of experience.”

Forest Service employees also have found Rainbows to be receptive to resource concerns. Susan Skalski, district ranger on the Ochoco National Forest, the site of the Oregon gathering, told a reporter with the Portland Oregonian that she was impressed by the hundreds of Rainbow Family members who lingered long after the event to decommission trails, repair fences, remove ovens and fire rings and pick up truckloads of trash.

But Michaels points out that just because thousands of people attend gatherings and behave in a way that promotes peace, love, and harmony with nature doesn’t mean a single body is responsible. “You can point to those who seem to be in charge,” he says, “and if you took all those people out, it would still happen.” Rainbow Gatherings are meant to be participatory workshops in community-building. Michaels says the process is organic and elusive and has a life of its own. “This is not something that is a product of our form,” he says. “We are mere conduits.”

John Buffalo ran away from home when he was fifteen and became a “rowdy rebel.” In the early 1970s, he recalls, “I used to hitchhike up and down the Oregon coast, looking for a redneck ass to kick.” He eventually found a home in Rainbow Gatherings. Today, he’s a highly sought-after “alternative security professional” who often serves in the Rainbows’ internal peacekeeping network, known as Shanti Sena, from a Sanskrit word meaning “peace army.”

Buffalo takes credit for helping capture the kidnapper of the world’s first milk-carton child at a gathering during the 1980s. He says he’s disarmed ax-wielding psychos, handled people freaked-out on drugs and defused potentially violent confrontations. “Every time I deal with these nuts, I’m scared they’re going to kill me dead,” he admits. But he says he tries to transcend his fear for the good of the community.

Rainbows prefer to rely on the Shanti Sena to handle any security problems that arise, rather than on an outside police force. At the Arizona gathering, the unarmed Shanti Sena apprehended a man wanted for a brutal rape and murder in Key West, Florida, and turned him over to police. A local deputy in Apache County told the Arizona Republic, “In my long law-enforcement career, this is something I have never seen happen – With 25,000-plus people, and being so unstructured, [the suspect] must have figured it was a good place to hide out. He was wrong.”

With such a good track record for catching criminals, keeping the peace and cleaning up after themselves, many Rainbows wonder why the Forest Service is making such a fuss about a signed permit. “All that the permit requires us to do, we already do,” says Michaels. He feels that by focusing on the permit issue—which has rendered all Rainbow Gatherings since 1996 illegal—the Forest Service is able to justify having “a larger than necessary law enforcement presence.” Some officers, he says, are using the regulations as an excuse to harass members of the counterculture whose lifestyle they don’t agree with and whose actions they can’t restrain. “They can’t control us,” Michaels says, “therefore they want to.”

Other Rainbows go even further. Beck claims the real agenda of the Forest Service law enforcement branch is to outlaw Rainbow Gatherings altogether. He says, “It’s the same thing as saying, ‘Why couldn’t one of the Jews eat pork?’ The Forest Service wrote this clever little regulation because they know that we, as a group, would balk at playing ball with it.”

Previous versions of the Forest Service’s group-use regulations—which were ruled unconstitutional before they could be implemented—clearly were designed to stop Rainbow Gatherings. In 1987, the government tried to get a judge to enjoin the national gathering in North Carolina but was outmaneuvered in court by Michaels and other Rainbow lawyers. Frustrated by their inability to get an injunction, Forest Service law enforcement officers (commonly known as LEOs) went after individual attendees with a vengeance and arrested the cleanup crew. It was one of the few times a Rainbow Gathering site was not properly rehabilitated (an example the Forest Service frequently cites in court).

The next year, when LEOs tried to shut down the Texas gathering, a federal court found “that the health and other problems seen [the previous year] were exceptional and traceable—at least in part—to a hostile and adversarial relationship between the government and the Rainbow Family.” The judge also noted, “There is substantial support for the defendants’ argument that the government has acted with hostility to the Rainbow Family, in seeking to enforce the special-use permit regulations.”

In the early 1990s, the Forest Service law enforcement branch became independent from oversight by regional managers. LEOs now answer directly to the chief of the Forest Service in Washington, D.C. (a change instigated so special agents would not have to investigate their bosses in timber theft probes). During the Missouri gathering in 1996, when the Forest Service began enforcing its most recent noncommercial-group-use regulations, LEOs established a checkpoint on a Forest Service road. They detained Rainbows heading into the site, searched cars for alcohol, drugs and other contraband and ran background checks on individuals. When local Forest Service employees, including the district ranger, complained that these checkpoints were excessive, their concerns were overruled by the newly unfettered law enforcement branch.

Last July, a federal judge ruled that the roadblock was unconstitutional. “Basically subjecting Rainbow Family members to a ‘shakedown’ to achieve – ignominious results should strike fear into any citizen who values their personal liberty,” wrote Judge Russell G. Clark.

On an individual basis, many Forest Service workers—even LEOs—have enjoyed a positive working relationship with the Rainbow Family. The permit dilemma, however, has turned what was once a large, recreational event into an expensive law enforcement nightmare. On-the-ground forest workers tend to get caught in the crossfire. Mike Lohrey, a regional water resources manager who served as incident commander of the Oregon gathering, feels the Forest Service should recognize that assemblages of large groups are a legitimate use of national forests, whether or not a permit is signed. In a memo to the agency’s Washington, D.C., office, Lohrey noted, “Our requirement for a signed Special Use Permit creates an air of confrontation and anxiety [and] has little to do with the success, or lack thereof, of gathering management.”

Last summer in Pennsylvania, though only three people received citations for “unauthorized non-commercial group use,” federal and state law enforcement officers hassled thousands of others on the road to the gathering site, according to Rainbows. Beck claims that LEOs stopped vehicles for minor infractions, such as feathers on the dashboard (obscuring views), people riding in the back of pickup trucks (illegal for minors), or cracked taillights.

A media liaison for the Forest Service Law Enforcement and Investigations branch indicated that officers merely enforced all applicable federal and state laws and regulations. Because the terrain at the Allegheny National Forest site was extremely rugged and inaccessible, law enforcement efforts were concentrated on the road into the gathering rather than at the gathering itself.

Beck claims the main transgression was “DWR” (driving while Rainbow). Even locals felt the law enforcement crackdown. Frank Aiello, owner of a cafe in Ridgeway, Pennsylvania, was handcuffed and detained on his way to the gathering, where he hoped to sell sandwiches for one dollar apiece. Aiello says a Forest Service LEO searched his vehicle, found his cooler and made him take Polaroids of the contents for evidence. When Aiello asked, “Are you detaining me for intent to distribute bologna sandwiches?” he says the officer told him that if he continued to “get smart” with him he’d confiscate his vehicle. In the end, Aiello received a $100 ticket for selling food without a permit.

If trends continue, this year’s national gathering—slated to occur somewhere in the northern Rockies—will be managed by a law-enforcement-focused national incident command team, leaving local resource workers mostly out of the loop. Neither the Rainbow Family nor the Forest Service has put forth an agreeable, consistent alternative to the signed-permit regulation, and animosities keep growing. The government probably will continue to enforce the regulations unless a federal court throws them out.

Lohrey recommended in his report that the Forest Service develop a waiver for large groups “that have demonstrated the ability to meet objectives outlined in the operating plan and restoration plan for a five-year period,” a standard the Rainbow Family would meet.

Beck suggests that the government require a permit but not a signature.

Michaels doesn’t believe there should be a permit requirement and plans to keep fighting the “annoying little tickets” issued by LEOs.

Buffalo admits, “Sometimes I think it would probably be easier to just go ahead and sign the sumbitch – but if I tell what I know to be a falsehood, then I’m breaking the law.” It’s a fine line, but it’s one Rainbows won’t cross.