From Scranton, we drive northeast until the highway morphs into a country road that curls around mountains, woods and rivers. Bash, being a teen, spends a lot of time on his phone, but that eventually bores him, too, so that he reverts to messing with Jade in the back or laughing and shaking his head at our great escape yesterday in Scranton.
Like the roads, the towns eventually grow smaller. Most of them have a gas station, a family restaurant, the mom-and-pop to go with it, and little else. Like in the South, there are buildings just crumbling apart, the result of businesses going belly up, or small towners breaking the chains of tradition and leaving for the bigger cities. The roads continue to curve and wind through the woods until we reach the famed Highway 17B, the rain still accompanying us.
Like all X-ers, I suppose I was a little in awe of the Woodstock generation. The Summer of Love, Beatlemania, the moon landing...all of this coupled with music that was as fresh as a hippie's daisy. Woodstock itself would set the tone for all music festivals going forward. And to think this could be accomplished on a dairy farm nobody had ever heard of. The 17B itself was packed during those fateful August days in 1969. When half a million people descend on a dairy farm in the middle of the sticks, you just know the infrastructure wasn't built for it. It got so bad that the concert organizers had to fly the musicians in by helicopter.
We get off the 17B and park. The dog can't accompany us into the museum, although I let her walk and sniff around the concert grounds later. Even without the museum and the new amphitheater they built there, the festival grounds have that magic you look for in certain places, like a certain baseball diamond in an Iowa cornfield. Bash and I stop where the stage was and look up the hill. Half a million people...it's as true as it was mind-blowing. For one day, this was the second biggest city in the State of New York.
The museum, although abundant with tasteful exhibits, doesn't really tell me anything new. This is a place for nostalgia, of which I don't feel any...not for my generation, and certainly not for the Woodstock generation. As a 20 year old, I would have been dumbstruck by the museum. As a grown man with family, I have to admit I am less enthusiastic. How could one generation create something so marvelous, but get everything so wrong? In the end, I feel the Woodstock generation, although it certainly had its merits, was like the crowd at Woodstock. Party, peace, love, and music...only to leave the cleanup to others. In many ways, the country is still reeling from the decisions they made in the years to come.
In the end, it was still a wonderful place where history was made...a beautiful assembly of people who truly believed they could change the world, and actually did, for three days. The music, to me, was secondary and often not that good, quality wise. The fans were the star here, and rightfully so. Even Bash visibly appreciates it.
Definitely worth a visit. My advice is to listen really close on that meadow, and you might just hear that roar of the crowd again. Maybe you can hear Richie Havens madly strumming his guitar as if his life depended on it. You can hear Sly Stone rousing the concertgoers out of their sleep at three in the morning. Or Jimi Hendrix's crushing rendition of The Star Spangled Banner. It is still very tangible in the air...not unlike another place we would be visiting shortly, albeit for opposite reasons.
