Those making the trip to Mecca or Jerusalem know pretty much what they’re going to find when they arrive. But there are many kinds of pilgrimage, many silly-seeming little dream journeys we’d all like to fulfill. I’ve made a few in my time — to the pacing grounds of Galileo and the tight-hearted brick houses of a youthful D. H. Lawrence — and none of them turn out like I expected. My father’s dream, to seek out an icon of the 60s , didn’t either.
On a drizzly, cold Saturday in March a few years ago, my father, my husband and I were driving in circles, trying to find Woodstock . The roads curved through dripping trees covered in rich green moss. We didn’t quite know what we were looking for—a field? a farming community? a touristic town full of shops selling T-shirts with the slogan “I was in Woodstock in ’69—I just don’t remember it”? The place was a blank, known to us only by a legend and a standard green exit sign on the New York State Thruway.
We followed the signs for Woodstock, but almost passed its main thoroughfare, Tinker Street. “This is beautiful,” I said, a little ashamed at my surprise. I blanked the half-formed picture in my mind: an assortment of bedraggled shacks housing pot-smokers continually reliving the sixties. Instead, 19th-century clapboard houses, now converted to prosperous shops and cafes, rubbed their mustard, raspberry, and pewter shoulders together.
“Nothing like what I expected. I thought it would be more like a farm town,” said my father. His voice sounded stuffed-up, the effect of a long-ago nose break that never healed. He and Ian shrugged on their raincoats. My father looked short, his nearly-bald head hovering four inches below my six-foot-tall husband. He smiled at me. “Let’s find me a mug.” It was a family joke that he hated clutter, but collected souvenir mugs.
“Let’s find a latte,” said Ian, yawning. The three of us strolled past a colorful display of fabrics in a quilting shop to see what else this cultural icon could surprise us with.
My father was in New York City for a short business trip, and had come to visit my husband Ian and me at the house we had just bought in upstate New York, 50 miles north of the city. While trying to find our farming village on a map of the state, my father had found that Woodstock was less than an hour’s drive north. “Let’s go,” he said. “Let’s make a pilgrimage.”
Ian looked puzzled. My husband is English, raised on a diet of Dvôrak and Tchaikovsky. His education in pop music extended as far as Abba, but hadn’t included Bob Dylan. He winces when I slide Janis Joplin into the car’s CD player. When my father and I started talking about the Woodstock concert, we had to explain to Ian what it was—the festival that had attracted 500,000 people and still beguiled the national consciousness.
My father had grown up in the Soviet Union, but by the time he was a teenager was an avid follower of the defiant music of America’s 1960s. In Leningrad he had kept a precious collection of Beatles records safe in a cupboard in the living/dining/bedroom he shared with his brother, sister, and parents. In the Soviet Union, rock music was considered a capitalist plot, so it was illegal to buy or sell records, but, strangely enough, not illegal to own them. When my American mother started bringing records from the US over to him, he became the only person in Leningrad to own ‘Electric Ladyland.’
The only music we heard when we started walking down Tinker Street was the Bob Marley spilling out of one turquoise-colored store. The entrance reeked of patchouli oil, and we went in to see if we could find my father a mug. The place was typical of hippie stores country-wide: tie-dyed flags of Che Guevara’s face, blown-glass hash pipes, incense, and medallions with Native American spiritual symbols etched on them (made in China). No mugs.
We went out to explore the rest of Tinker Street. My surprise at its obvious prosperity and artsy feel increased. Several expensive galleries sold glass blown into wavy shapes, paintings by local artists, and decorative pottery. The street also had an abundance of cheap Buddha statues, but few places sold anything that made reference to the famous festival. The shops were, for the most part, not as they seemed, and each required investigation. One store’s window displayed only fairy figurines and incense. Inside, it housed homemade potpourri, spiritual guidance stones (pink for ‘romance,’ blue for ‘courage’), cards, and an extensive selection of fine bone English tea sets. Ian lifted a dainty pansy-patterned cup with gold trim on its handle. He turned it over. Royal Dalton, one of England’s most prestigious china makes. He set it down carefully and turned to inspect the wall of imported Fortnum & Mason teas.
Across the street from that shop squatted an unadorned white building—the Woodstock Guild. I picked up a free brochure from the plastic box outside its door. The day before, I would have expected that the artists’ Guild was formed in 1970 or a little later. Instead, I read that it had been in the area since 1939, and seventy percent of its funds come from the sale of its members’ artistic productions.
The Guild also owns the Byrdcliffe Arts Colony , which since 1902 has been hosting painters, furniture craftsmen, writers, potters, and musicians every summer in a rustic country atmosphere a mile from Woodstock proper. The Woodstock area is populated by people who are serious about their art. My pre-formed ideas about America’s peace and love icon were revolving rapidly.
For such a famous location, Woodstock was a strangely tiny town—population only 6241, as I found online later that night. It took us ten meandering minutes to get from the municipal parking lot to the square at the center of town. The square was actually a triangle of grass, trees, and a park bench sitting alongside the sidewalk. A traditional New England white church flanked one side of it—Dutch Reformed, 1799, it said in bold black letters, although it had the red door that usually signaled Episcopalian. Young and old people in tie-dyes and expensive fleeces, long ponytails and trim cuts, sat on the bench watching traffic.
“Let’s go see if we can find the concert site,” said my father after a lunch of vegetarian wonton soup and organic coffee. We had no idea where we were going. Too shy to tell people in town that we were looking for the Woodstock concert site, we just drove around the area looking for signs to it.
“Look, look,” I told Ian. He slowed down to stop by an historical plaque advertising Maverick Concert Field .
“Is that it?” he asked. We read the plaque. The sign told us that the field, and the hall built on it, had been home to concerts, festivals, theater productions, and myriad artistic events since 1906.
“1906?” I said. The idea finally came home to me that Woodstock had a tradition of artistic and liberal expression older than Woodstock. Those of us who came from other parts of the country expecting shrines to the Grateful Dead had no idea what the place was about.
“Doesn’t sound like the place,” said my father. We drove down Maverick Road to look in any case. Our car twisted along the quiet, wooded street to find houses marked only by hand-painted number signs and wooden mailboxes staked at the ends of hard dirt driveways. The houses sat behind a thick screen of tall trees that were bare now, but would be waving with leaves in a couple of months. The houses’ roofs and outer walls had turned woodsy greys, browns, and greens; they looked as if they had grown there instead of being built. Deep green lichen blanketed the tree trunks, indicative of a wet climate. The tall, old trees swayed in the mild wind that shook the rain off of them. I had never expected Woodstock to look anything like this.
We stopped at a small carved sign pointing the way to Maverick Field. Through the trees we could see a large wooden building on perhaps two acres. “That’s not it,” said my father and I at the same time. It looked idyllic, but just from looking at pictures we could see that this field had never been a dairy farm and couldn’t possibly have held 500,000 people. My father sighed. “Let’s go home,” he said. “It would have been nice to see it, but maybe another time.”
That night we found an article online that gave a detailed description of the Woodstock concert and the events leading up to it. We also found its location. “Bethel. Where’s that?” Bethel was where they finally found the dairy farmer willing to rent them 600 acres of field.
I brought out a state map. “Sixty miles. Woodstock was held 60 miles from Woodstock.” We looked at each other, ashamed of our ignorance.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I should have found out where it really was before we went out. And we didn’t even find you a mug” My father shook his head.
“Look, this is just some field with a little plaque. It’s just a site. You remember that the guy in the hardware store told us lots of the performers came and hung out in the town afterward? And look,” he referred again to the article, “Bob Dylan, The Band, Van Morrison—they already lived in Woodstock.”
“And?” I said. “It’s still not where the concert was.”
“But it doesn’t matter.” And he was right. Although the concert was held elsewhere, even 35 years later we could feel the spirit and vibe that had attracted musicians and artists to Woodstock in the first place. “Now I feel like I’ve been there,” said my father. “A little late, but I’ve been to Woodstock.”
