The Monarch Review sent our Tonasket Correspondents to the Third Annual Conscious Culture Festival. This is what they found:

I became aware of the Conscious Culture Festival a few years ago at the local Tonasket, Washington, Qwiki-Mart. I’m buying a newspaper. A young black guy with dreds and a scruffy beard leans against the building. He has on a Bob Marley tee-shirt and one of those gigantic knit hats done up in the colors of the Jamaican flag. Nearby a knot of adorable white girls in bright sarongs giggles. “I’ll be damned,” I say to myself; “the next-wave invasion’s begun.”

“What’s up?” I ask the cashier, nodding toward the newcomers.

“Oh, it’s that festival thing,” she says, and tells me a bit about it.

This year, I went.

Things began badly. Driving up Highway 20, I zip past the turn onto Cayuse Mountain Road. Coming back carefully, I spot the festival sign against a bush, facing inward. At the gate, four guys work admissions; three young and shirtless, another neither. “Will-call tickets?” I ask. “Sure,” somebody says—but my name’s not on any list, nor is that of the editor that got the tickets or the magazine in which this piece appears. I look at my cell, contemplate whom to call. I’ve got zero bars, the screen says “Emergency Only.”

A young woman wanders in and asks what’s up. I explain, mention the editor’s name. “Oh, yeah,” she says. “I just saw him the other day. Everything’s cool.”

But it’s not: my truck won’t start, won’t even chatter at me. I stare under the hood at battery terminals coated in fuzzy green goo. The old guy says, “You’ve got to piss on it.”

I look at him. “You’ve got to stand up there on the fender and piss on the battery to clean it up.”

I almost smile.

“You need a new starter,” one of the kids says.

“Solenoid,” says another. “Not a starter, a solenoid.”

I try to scrape off goo with a tire iron. “I don’t have any tools with me,” I say.

The shirtless guys crowd around. “I had a tool box in my jeep,” one of them says slowly. “I took it out.” He stares into space. “I don’t know why.” We all nod.

I think of Hunter and Dr. Gonzo at the desk of the Mint Hotel—but that’s wrong; it’s the wrong way round and way cuddlier here. I’m clear-headed as Mozart can make me, and these guys are just visiting Forgetville; no blood-spattered dinosaurs in sight.

We decide to push-start my truck. It works like a charm and I drive home and come again in my wife’s car.

There’s a sloppy, irregular circle of campers and a tighter circle of food carts, awning-covered sale booths anchored by a shell-shaped center stage. Two other stages—one a large dome, the other a simple rectangle—are on the periphery.

I walk around:

Tents and trailers and camper shells and more tents. Sillouettes and rumpled heads squinting out at me. Boom boxes everywhere, a cacaphony of rhythms, the bass beats blend to a single heart-throb.

Shaven heads, dreds, long auburn locks and grey ponytails; sunburns aborning—soft white stomachs already-red arms. Tats everywhere, numberless as dusty toenails, dark lines smudged and shapeless.

Generator hum, dynamo hum

straw hats and top hats and pirate hats, green cannibis logos on dirty baseball caps

white skinny legs and wraps round girls’ bodies, frilly short skirts and floppy halter tops; guys in leathers and gym shorts and bare-chest vests, a shirtless fat man in a kilt

“Peace Love Respect” sign before a kids’ area: swings, slide, playhouse, “No Hitting” “No War Toys.” No kids save two who run to me selling “cedar bundles”—a tight-wrapped branch—for two bucks each. Stick your head in the cut-out hole; underneath it says “It’s All God.”

a million billion cars and trucks, RVs the size of Greyhound buses, a U-Haul trailer with a “for sale” sign on it

At the “First Aid Tent” I ask about business. Three young guys sit smoking cigarettes. “Sure, we got em comin in,” one says. “Sunburns, blisters, sunburns, y’know.”

“No flaming dragons?”

“Not yet.”

A “Yoga Area” hosts young women trying to hula hoop. They’re not very good at it.

The “Prayer Circle” looks great: a hundred tall poles, pointy white flags fly from each. Three kids throwing a frisbee are the only devotees.

First in the commerce circle is a booth for “Sick Donkey Records.” They’ve got lots of tee-shirts, horrible art as if Robert Motherwell had lost his talent on a bad acid trip and charcoal-stroked endless angry faces, spattered red splotches over everything

Pop’s Pickled Garlic

pot parephenalia earrings quilted purses “Jah Love Blessed Juice Bar”

A weedy beer-garden’s hot day business. They won’t let me in less I give up my bottle of water “More Precious Than Gold.”

A young woman lies on a table in the garden, two people massage her with magic rocks.

A booth nearby sells them—”Rocks that Heal” “Earth Conscious Vibrations”

Kitchy lego-faces feather earrings  glass works all pot pipes and hash-oil vapor tubes  “Freegan Awesome Hummus” tie-died everything “raw organic chocolate” “Help decalcify your pineal gland with a yogurt bar” awful “psychedelic” print everything  hand-squeezed organic lemonade vegan smoothies  gmo-free gluten-free free your willie and the chicagoseven

a shirtless guy sits on an exercise bike hooked up to a blender, smokes a cigarette

a girl with beautiful bare butt-cheeks sports a bushy faux-fox tail; the same outfit on another strides by on stilts

“Hey, yo, check it out, check it out,” a guy hollers as I walk past his booth, “Some really cool stuff there.” I look at tables of tee-shirts and pot-themed whatever and shellacked stones and glass-bead necklaces and slip quietly away.

“Dr. Gait’s RX 4 a Good Life,” a sign says. “Peace Love Compost Caring.”

I run into a friend. “Lotta young people,” he says.

I nod. “It’s the comin thing.”

“I guess,” he says. “I still can’t get used to it.”

The band on the center stage is really good, a bluegrass group.

The Dome Stage is a different trip: three guys in baseball caps and recorded music—huge amps and a sound-board with which they distort what’s playing; one has a mike, he free-form raps over the mix. Decibles flirt with pain. Two dozen kids bend and sway 60 years from blue-smoke air of beatnik sugar-shacks, pills, pot out back, bongos, bad poetry with a beat. Angry young men with their manic hair and mournful art and goddamned cigarettes, wonderful young women in black tights that put up with them.

T’he third stage is for folkies: a guy with a guitar aims for the notes of “Me and Bobbie Magee” and misses often. He tells a long story about Grandmother Duck. I wander away, come back to a light soprano singing “Okanogan Highland Blues.” A second song imagines the Earth in space, a pretty pearl of a planet. “She was just singin a song about the universe and everything in it, you know?” a girl nearby says to a newcomer. “And it was fuckin awesome.”

Back at Center Stage, a woman with a mike asks “How many of you brought your kids here?” A couple hands go up. “That’s so fly,” she says. “Cause they the ones gonna keep it goin.”

A new band does bar-blues stuff, Johnny Winter lite. “Hand Jive” morphs into “Hand Job” and it’s time to head out.

I pass another glass-pipe place. “Piece of Mind” the sign says. A huge canvas dominates the booth—a logo of a human skull, superior aspect, the centers of the parietal and frontal lobes opened to form a peace-sign, the spaces a bubbling, smoking waterscape: your brain as a bong.

“Everything I do, I do it wrong,” the blues guy sings.

A girl beside me says to someone else, “Look! A rainbow cloud in the sky!” She points.

It’s hot and clear, but I look up anyway. And damned if it’s not the truth; a band of cirrus cloud shines like an irridescent rainbow.

I take off my sunglasses and it’s still there, the colors even brighter.

I step over a PBR can balanced on a clump of dusty cheatgrass and open my car door and drive down the hill to home.