The weekend car trip from Jersey City to upstate New York had been uneventful. Leaving the Thruway, I turned onto Route 28, a two-lane country road, which eventually connects to Route 20, which takes me directly to my mom’s house. Route 28 makes its winding way several miles up a long hill, past farms and fields, and it’s rare to see more than a few other cars while driving it.
So I was surprised when I had to stop for a long line of traffic ahead of me.
“There must be an accident,” I thought, “a bad one if there are this many cars stopped dead on old Route 28.”
I thought maybe a truck had lost its brakes while coming down the hill and struck a car. Maybe the state police had stopped traffic while the wreckage was being removed. Maybe they’d start directing traffic around it in a minute or two.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
I began to notice something peculiar about the other drivers. Some were getting out of their cars and talking to each other as if they were friends. And most of them didn’t look like rural upstaters but instead like hippies – long-haired, tie-dyed, multi-generational hippies – a class of people I thought had pretty much vanished decades ago. This was beginning to feel like a bizarre dream.
“What the hell is going on,” I thought. I rolled down the window, intending to ask one of the passing “freaks”, a guy in sandals wearing a yellow T-shirt that said “Play Dead,” if he knew what the holdup was. Before I could say anything, he flashed a grin and asked, “You going to the Dead concert?”
“Uhh, no…” I said, feeling confused. The Dead? The Grateful Dead? Aren’t they…dead?
Or at least, their leader, Jerry Garcia, is gone. This was starting to make sense, though. There was no accident. This was a traffic jam – a hippie traffic jam of people trying to get to a rock concert. Woodstock Nation, or the 21st-century equivalent, was keeping me from my mommy. “How much further is it to the concert?” I asked. “Five miles!” the guy said, still smiling. “You might want to get off on one of the side roads.”
There was indeed a side-road turn-off just a few feet ahead. I had no idea where it might lead, but I decided I might as well try it. It felt good to be moving again, but after a few twists and turns, the road brought me right back into the line of cars on Route 28 again.
Back to the Dead
I decided to be stoical and just observe the slow-moving caravan. Some people had abandoned their cars and were apparently walking to the concert, which I guessed must be in some farmer’s field. I noticed that some of the local residents along Route 28 had signs in their driveways offering 10-dollar parking. So they knew about this huge upstate concert – why was it news to me?
Gazing at the car ahead, I could see that it was full of partiers, including a girl with blonde dreadlocks who had her bare feet sticking out of the window. She was laughing about something. After a while, she got out of the car and strolled into some tall reeds by the roadside. The people in her car were shouting something at her. She turned and gave them “the finger.” Then she squatted down into the reeds. “When you’ve got to go, you’ve got to go,” I thought.
Eventually the line of cars ahead of me began to go, too – inching at first, but then at about 10 miles per hour. We came to another side-road turn-off that must have led directly to the concert site. There were two state troopers directing the cars to turn there. They seemed amused when I indicated that I wanted to go straight, but they motioned me forward.
Suddenly, I was on the open road again, cruising along at 60 mph with Route 28 all to myself. Truckin’….
I later found out that the concert was by former members of the Grateful Dead (former Dead members?), and that it was held on the grounds of a dead millionaire’s country estate, which had been turned into a concert venue. Apparently, the concert hadn’t been publicized much, if at all. I guess the Deadhead cult network doesn’t need mainstream media to announce its plans.
Moral of the story: as Stephen King once said, “When you turn off the main road, you have to be prepared to see some funny houses.” – Michael Gates
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