On the road to Woodstock
A family pilgrimage to the site of the famous Woodstock Festival during pumpkin season ends with a rather awkward discovery...
An urban myth of my youth was that only 7 per cent of Americans had a passport – evidence that citizens of the USA aren’t interested in travel. It turns out 36 per cent have a passport, and the reason it’s not more isn’t because they don’t like to travel – it’s because they’ve got it all here. Within the 50 states they have polar, Mediterranean, alpine, subtropical, desert, jungle – and Hawaii. They do travel – it’s just they can reach everything they want without crossing a border.
So we’ve started exploring – and last weekend involved a pilgrimage to Woodstock. According to our map it’s in Vermont, only 260 miles north of Manhattan, but the countryside is forests, lakes, farms, sheep, clapperboard houses, rocking chairs on porches, red barns, maple trees, covered bridges and the most beautiful autumn trees in the world.
The main lure was for our sons to understand the epic nature of the 1969 Woodstock Festival. How, over three days of music and free love, 32 acts played outdoors before an audience of nearly half a million. It was the definitive expression of the counterculture generation, and a vision of how the world might be after the Vietnam war (I looked it up on Wiki before we left to appear intelligent to my children).
We LOL’d at Woodstock facts like Jimi Hendrix being paid $30,000 to take part, but Santana only getting $750, and were shocked that Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and Led Zeppelin had all turned down the offer to perform, missing out on a moment that changed the history of rock and roll.
In the car, we played the concert soundtrack and whooped when we passed the nearby town of Bethel (where, according to our rather confusing guide, the concert actually took place). We felt like rock pilgrims, and the sort of parents who encourage their children to watch educational programmes instead of
The X Factor (we don’t; our children have studied every season of The X Factor but zero episodes of
The World At War).
Woodstock was exquisite; nothing there about the famous festival now – it was 46 years ago and is clearly forgotten – but we found the sort of houses you’d recognise from old movies, those amazing red/orange/gold/ burgundy trees and, as it’s October, everywhere pumpkins.
In our area of London, roughly one house in three will pop an apologetic pumpkin on the doorstep on Hallowe’en afternoon. In Woodstock, every house has multiple pumpkins on display two weeks before. They sit on window ledges and porches, they line the paths from picket fence to front door, they get piled up like totem poles on doorsteps and adorned with scarves and hats to make pumpkin-men.
This is tricky for me as I find it hard to see a pumpkin without wincing… the first time my father met Richard’s mother, she cooked him a meal at her flat. He used to be a professional chef, she was nervous, and put her heart and soul into this significant dinner, serving up Pork with Crackling and Roasted Pumpkin. My dad took his first bite, there was a silence, and then he declared: “I always forget how genuinely revolting pumpkin is.” She said later that was the moment she knew they would be friends, but I still feel the shame.
The folk in Woodstock would not agree with my father – come October, they put pumpkin into everything. We saw pumpkin breakfast cereal, pumpkin cappuccino and pumpkin crisps. Also pumpkin ice cream, beer, waffles, popcorn, yoghurt, granola, porridge, cheesecake, butter, doughnuts, chocolate, bread, macaroons, caramels, bagels, almonds and, my favourite, actual pumpkin vodka.
We had two days of pumpkin-flavoured food, the magnificent autumn, and a wonderful on-site canter through the freedom movement of the Sixties. It was only when we arrived home and went online to check out what had happened to the Festival site itself that I discovered the Woodstock Festival of 1969 had taken place in Bethel, just outside Woodstock, New York State, not Bethel just outside Woodstock, Vermont.
I haven’t told the children.