By the Time We Got to Woodstock

I was nine that summer and unaware of the events unfolding on a farm in Bethel, New York, a couple of counties away from my home in Carmel. Naturally over the years I have seen the pictures and heard the music of Woodstock and like most of my contemporaries have wondered what it would have been like had I been a decade older, old enough to have made the trek in a beat up Volkswagen to join the 400,000 who have come to symbolize the counterculture generation and unwittingly becoming part of history.

My August 15-17, 1969, weekend was likely filled watching Friday night sitcoms on ABC, a movie at the Brewster Cameo theater or at the Mahopac Drive-In, and an endless rotation of top 40 hits with Dan Ingram, Ron Lundy, and Cousin Brucie on the radio. For the teenagers, who seemed eons older, that weekend meant being sprawled out in the rain and the mud amid the unwashed bodies in the unsanitary surroundings that doubtless they did not notice or chose to ignore at the time. They listened to Richie Havens perform “Freedom” as I would forty years later at Pete Seeger’s 90th birthday concert at Madison Square Garden. They tried in vain to stay dry and futilely to inch closer to the distant stage.

In the photos we see now in commemorative books and illustrating newspaper and magazine tributes most faces blend together and bodies hide the ground. Some look like they have not slept in days, naturally or with some aid. In one photo, the couple huddles together in a blanket. It is as iconic a time capsule as few others have achieved: the flag being planted at Iwo Jima or Marilyn Monroe’s dress blown upward on the subway grating. Were I older in 1969 with whom would I have shared a soggy blanket and the last drops of clear water from a battered canteen?

Nobody there knew what was happening at the time. You cannot plan history, cannot predict a generation defining event. Yet for almost half a million, they can look at the pictures and know they are in there somewhere. They can listen to the music and know their voices are among the cheers. For the rest of us, 40 years later, we look back with envy, but the pictures and the music are but shadows. They lack the feel of dirty water weighing down clothing and of mud caked between toes. They lack the touch of another body becoming one with your own and of that union becoming part of one much larger. Too young for Woodstock. Too young as well to be sent to Vietnam. Everything has its pluses and minuses. In 2019 when The Woodstock Music and Art Festival is 50 and I am almost 60, the same sense of envy will still remain. For those who were there, however, the images will still be real.

Lou Orfanella is the author of twelve books, most recently Shoot the Unicorn: Reading, Writing, and Understanding Poetry; Objects in Mirror are Closer than they Appear; and In a Flash: Twenty-One Short Short Stories. He lives in Lake Carmel.