Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, August 16, 1994 TAG: 9408160113
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By TERENCE SAMUEL and MARK DAVIS KNIGHT-RIDDER/TRIBUNE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
SAUGERTIES, N.Y. - As the Woodstock Nation collapsed and dispersed after three days of peace and music, there was talk that the 840-acre farm on which it had gathered had been rendered hallowed ground. But the most visible monument to that consecration was a rolling sea of garbage that spoke volumes about the Woodstock pilgrims.
How the world will remember what happened here - if it chooses to remember at all - may be a question for the historians, but this place may finally be remembered as the place where shoes and underwear went to die.
Generation X knows footwear.
They left behind flip-flops, penny loafers, tennis shoes, sandals. They even left Birkenstocks. They left them in pairs and in piles, in bags, in tents, in ditches, in the woods and on the hillsides.
All over the concert site Monday shoes appeared as humble offerings to the Mud Gods.
There was the $100 pair of size-10 Spalding XPs laid gently beside a pile of rubble. Nice stuff - if you don't mind a thorough caking of mud. The weekend weather gave Woodstock II a feel of authenticity by providing conditions similar to the original 1969 version. But this time the mud took a different set of prisoners.
More tents were left behind this time than there were all together at the original Woodstock.
``All these abandoned tents are sacrifices to the Woodstock gods,'' one man, relaxing in a lawn chair, told The Associated Press. He would not give his name.
``They should send all this stuff to the bums in Philadelphia and Chicago, the people who have nothing,'' said Patricia Gronvold of Philadelphia, one of the thousands of stragglers who turned toward home Monday.
Plastic liter bottles of Pepsi and Mountain Dew littered the fields. There were the bottles of sunblock, SPF-15; Velcro sandals; fanny packs from The Gap.
There were abandoned neoprene plastic coolers, inflatable mattresses, sleeping bags (in sufficient numbers to bed a Super Bowl crowd), beach chairs, Jamesway shopping carts, a black baseball bat, Almay cosmetics spilling from a Sasson purse, a light blue plastic bedpan. Empty.
Heidi Wenger was leaving her packets of cocoa mix, because she never found any hot water with which to mix them. As she and her friends packed up to head back to Lancaster, Pa., they paused to consider what their part of the garbage legacy would be.
``I'm leaving all my clothes from being a mud person,'' said Stephanie Paul, 22, Wenger's roommate.
That included a pair of shorts, a tank top, five pairs of socks and, of course, shoes.
``I'm leaving my Keds,'' she said, pointing to a clump of mud that looked like a small, dead animal. ``And when I get to the bus, I'm leaving my boots.''
Wenger, 30, looked around at the mess and admitted that it might bring harsh judgement.
``People might say that Generation X are a bunch of pigs,'' she said. ``We are, but we can't help it.''
She challenged announcer Wavy Gravy, who kept after the crowd during the concert to pick up the garbage around them even though all the trash cans were overflowing.
``He kept saying, `Pick up the trash.' What were we supposed to do?'' she said. ``Mosh with our arms full of garbage?''
Around the water fountains there were piles of shampoo bottles, soap wrappers, conditioning containers. One completely full tube of AquaFresh toothpaste stood gleaming in the sun that winked from behind the clouds.
``Generation X has all the toiletries,'' declared one woman, who was closer to the earlier Woodstock Generation in age.
One spot in front of the South Stage attracted a lot of attention. A pile of single pills in tiny Ziploc bags was strewn across a patch of grass.
People stopped. Picked up a bag, held it up to the sun and wondered.
Said one young man about the pill: ``Three-twenty-five written on one side, and an `N' on the other; must be some kind of drug.''
It was. Nuprin. But before the crowds thinned, one entrepreneurial spirit was selling the pills for $5 each.
And there were hints that at least some of the people here were interested in more than just peace and love. A perfectly unsoiled edition of Friday's Wall Street Journal sat beside a discarded tent on the side of a hill.
At the top of a hill above, an American flag at full staff on a tree branch belly-danced in the wind. From the overview of the hilltop, the concert site resembled a hurricane disaster area.
Up close, however, each bit of debris became distinct; and if trash could talk, this collection seemed to promise a thousand stories.
There was the white lace bra sitting on top of a pile of butter cookies, next to an unscarred lime and a pack of Red Man Chewing Tobacco. Right next to that were a pair of socks and a packet of 21 Shop Rite Babywipes. The neat pile looked like an offering at the foot of a gravestone.
All the debris represented fine pickings to a bearded man in a faded tie-dyed T-shirt. He called himself Free Blunt, 31, of Eugene, Ore.
``Got a nice tent here, man,'' he said to no one in particular. Free Blunt lit a Lark cigarette, puffed hard, and held one person's trash - his treasure - to the light. Wind ruffled the tent's edges.
``I see this as the biggest ground score I've ever seen in my life,'' he said. Blunt gestured across the site.
``Far out,'' he said. ``Peace, freedom, music and mud.''
by CNB