Woodstock on the Beach
by Nowick Gray
Fifty years ago, the summer of 1969, I got a job after freshman year in college, selling encyclopedias door to door. Supervisor Troy Trent, with his blond waxed handlebar mustache and smooth talk, helped me close a sale my first night out. The victims asked of my aspirations for law and affirmed that I “sure could talk good.”
I thought I would get rich quick, but it proved beginner’s luck. I settled for an average of a sale a week, a passable wage of ninety dollars. With Troy’s crew of four I enjoyed crabcakes and iced coffee in the sultry summer afternoons, before canvassing the evening’s “territory.” At the end of July, we took a weekend off in North Carolina, where we drank Lowenbrau, played pinochle in our rented cabin, and tried surfing.
Unsteady on the board, even in the tame curls of that shore, I tumbled into the waves, over and over. At night, bruised and frustrated not to realize my instant Beach Boy transformation, I reflected on my ambiguous lot in life — blessed with certain gifts and potentials, but cursed with ambitions beyond my capacity to achieve. My surfing debut simply matched the results of my other recent efforts. I counted off on fingers: debate, skiing, guitar, lacrosse, sales… oh yeah, I guess sex, too. A wave of humility washed over me, soothing shame and envy in a whale’s exhale.
Drifting along shoals of sleep in my beery limbo, I wondered if trying to make it with all these pursuits in conventional society was the problem. The rising tide of hippiedom promised a better way. To ditch all that mindless struggle at false occupations and diversions, the hamster-wheel chase after money, even the worry about parental expectations and career choices. Out there in the wider world, especially among so many awakening voices of my generation, there was a new anthem to sing: Live for today.
In August I talked Troy into a few days off so I could go with my parents and younger sister on our traditional summer migration to Cape May, New Jersey. Dot lived three hours away up the Garden State Parkway, so I invited her to join us.
She wore a pale pink and white checked, two-piece bathing suit to the beach. Upon seeing her wide thighs and bulging midsection thus exposed, I felt a pang of disappointment but held my tongue. Then in a private moment I took the opportunity to remark that she’d filled out a little.
She squinted and offered a defensive, puffy smile. So she had. What of it?
Okay, I was chastised for my callous objectification of the female body. What did I expect? A plastic, anorexic Barbie doll?
Properly silenced, a grumpy irritation still rankled. She’d implied her weight gain was none of my business. But hey, argued the future sophomore of Sigma Nu, physical attraction was part of the deal, in having a girlfriend. Sure, she had a right to look any way she wanted; but I didn’t have to like it. What could I say?
I awkwardly rearranged my own stick limbs on the lounge chair, self-conscious and unsure if she found my own bony body to her taste, or not. And then I wondered if this new distance between us had also to do with her friends in Saddle River.
“So,” I inquired, “what have you been up to this summer?”
Translated, this meant, “Have you been seeing your old boyfriend Lanny again? And if so, what happened between you?”
A part of me — an alternative future self? a suitor with second thoughts? — wanted her to say she’d fallen in love with Lanny again, that it was all over now with me, and she’d just come to hang out with me on the beach for a few days for old times’ sake, to say goodbye.
“Oh,” she replied, rubbing her toes around in the sand, “going to lots of parties. Seeing my old friends.” The toes kept working.
“And… how did it go?”
“Go? It was fine. Fun. You mean Lanny? No problem, silly. He’s engaged to a girl from Sarah Lawrence now. We had a good time.”
My mother said she liked Dot’s natural manner, her good looks, her father’s position selling bonds on Wall Street. Instead of taking pride in my catch, I found myself oddly disenchanted; staring at the ceiling at night while Dot occupied her own bedroom in the rented bungalow. I sensed my father’s smirk, with his built-in male bias, assuming she was just sleeping material. This was the golden girl Billy was so in love with? Their shy boy, with his gangly limbs, his sunken chest. What was she giving him? It was so obvious.
The front section of the Sunday New York Times sat beside us, as my mother had discarded it to work on the crossword puzzle. The feature photo framed a sea of faces and muddy bodies, taken at a farm near Woodstock, New York the day before: nearly half a million young people like Dot and me, grooving on drugs, rock ’n roll, and, according to the news report, plenty of “free love.” I gazed out wistfully at the waves.
“A bunch of my friends were going up there,” Dot said. “Party of the year. They almost talked me into going, except I’d already made plans to come here to see you.”
I felt an ache inside. I also had wondered about going. But my parents already had made the plans, and were anxious to meet Dot, a possible future bride. As for going off to some hippie love festival, that would not sit well with parental sponsorship of the would-be lawyer’s education. Besides, it was a long way and probably expensive, just for some music; and the weatherman had predicted rain; and it was probably sold out anyway; and Dot was pretty straight so she probably wouldn’t really enjoy it… I put it out of my mind and resigned myself to a last tribute to the summers of my childhood.
Dot, perhaps impatient with my reflective silence, got up and shuffled toward the surf. She turned and smiled with that disarming “natural” expression of hers that had so impressed my mother, beckoning for me to come join her. I returned her smile but shook my head, and went back to reading the article in the Times, while Dot gave herself to the waves, swimming alone.
Up to four hundred thousand, the news reports said, and every top musical act was there. Nude bathing, gate-crashing, communal living, open drug use… anything and everything was possible. It appeared the Age of Aquarius, celebrated on Broadway the year before in the musical Hair, was indeed dawning. I wondered if Dot and I were being left behind, sunbathing with the middle-class masses while the flower children flourished and frolicked in the mud and rain at Yasgur’s farm.
Only a couple of weeks before, a man had walked on the moon. The ultimate techno-trip had been accomplished, with all due media hype. Somehow, I was not moved. It was just another adjunct to The Johnny Carson Show, a new cartoon, a mirage on the magic screen in front of your face. It was not actually happening out there in the world that mattered, this world.
But Woodstock, that was a different story. My generation, by the hundreds of thousands and more, was walking on the real Earth. Barefoot, faces to the sky, twirling in the dance of naked bodies, digging live heart-and-soul music. Planting the flag of love and freedom, a new way of life.
Party of the year, fuck, party of the century.
I fished out my watch from the beach bag and thought even at that late hour, eleven-thirty Sunday morning, we might still take destiny in our hands and make a run for upstate New York…
Dot emerged from the surf and stood dripping before me in the hot sun: a Botticelli Venus ampler than life, trying to smile. I saw that moment as a crossroads in my life. Either hoe this row of my parents — come to the Jersey shore every summer and rent the little bungalow and go out for sticky buns and cantaloupes for breakfast and read the New York Times with sand all over it — or throw convention, fear, and security to the wind. Take to the open road, go up there and see for myself where my generation was headed.
I sat there squinting at Dot, in the glaring sun, wishing I was different and could make the decisive choice, the break from familial inertia. Maybe it was hype. We’d piss off our parents and end up camping in the squalid dregs of the festival, lost among zoned-out zombies and frazzled freaks…
The moment passed. The sun beat down, relentless on the hot sand. I could hear Hendrix in my head taunting from his watchtower, The hour’s getting late. Dot reached for a towel and sat on the beach chair next to me, reaching for the magazine section of the paper. That week’s edition featured on the cover a field hockey coed, an article on the current boom in women’s sports. Pink and white, I thought, would not look good in mud.
My parents arrived with white boxes of takeout for lunch. I forced a smile and stood up. The beach stretched in both directions with vacationers like us, broiling as we pored over newspapers, pulp fiction. Waves unwrapped themselves on shore, teasing children nearby shoveling, building castles of sand.
Sticky buns were passed around. I resented my father with his brown broad shoulders, my mother with her carping chatter, Dot licking her fingers already. So where did that leave me, at nineteen, Nowhere Man?
Woodstock, like the burning monks of Vietnam, or the Who’s emblematic hit single of 1965, like JFK or the man on the moon, was already history.
Cape May wasn’t history. It was just… the way things were.
I folded up the rest of the Times while Hendrix’s needle, soul to soul, dug deeper: You and I, we’ve been through that / And this is not our fate.
— —
Nowick Gray writes from Salt Spring Island, BC. After graduating from Dartmouth College in 1972, he pursued adventures in California, the Quebec Arctic, the interior rainforest of British Columbia, and various tropical beaches. “Woodstock on the Beach” is an excerpt from a forthcoming memoir, My Generation. Sign up for the Wild Writings newsletter to receive updates on this and other new releases. Connect on Facebook , Medium, and Twitter.
