On the Road to Woodstock -part eight

I woke Sunday morning to a beautiful day compared to the shivering cold of Saturday's morn. I looked at my watch, and it was early, a little after seven, and there was still a chill in the air. I stood and wrapped my blanket around my shoulders, and saw that John was still asleep.

For the hour, there seemed to be quite a bit of foot traffic on the road, and I moved closer to watch the people. The rising sun silhouetted their figures, and long shadows moved across the dew-covered grass where I stood. My boots were slightly wet from the dew, and the air was slightly acrid with the smell of rotting food.

I was startled by a figure moving up beside me, and then I saw it was Sherry. We exchanged glances, and she gave me the shyest of smiles. I tried to return it, but my mouth muscles wouldn't work.

I looked down at my boots and cast furtive looks at Sherry. She wore blue sneakers that were darkened where the dew had wet them and a pair of light gray slacks with dark gray pinstripes that were worn through and wet at the knees. She had on a brown sweater that came down to where her hips began to swell outwards, and she played nervously with her hands. I chanced a glance at her face, and she was looking down a little with a melancholy look and where the morning sun hit her hair, it turned it all golden and angel-like. She was very pretty.

Sherry and I stood there in silence, and all the while I was thinking she was waiting for me to say something, but nothing would come. I was much too shy. She was older than me, probably 17 or 18, which put me more at a loss, but she could have been an eight-year-old girl, and I still would have clammed up. I was that shy.

After a couple of minutes, she turned back towards the tent, and I felt like I had failed her. After a moment, I heard John's voice. "Hi," he said. I turned, and saw that he was greeting Sherry. I felt I was a failure when it came to girls. I was okay once the initial moves were made --I could kiss for hours--but I was hopeless when it came to making the first move.

"Hi," she replied to John. She didn't sound exactly chipper, but there was a little bit of a smile in her voice. He was still lying on the ground with his blanket wrapped around him, and he was rubbing his eyes. Just then, Linda crawled out of the tent. I saw she and Sherry exchange looks, and some sort of communication took place between the two of them, and I imagined it had something to do with me for Linda gave me a quick look that I could not place.

John and Linda said something to each other, and then Linda waved for me to join them. I kind of sauntered back not being in any particular hurry to be amongst the girls, but I ended up there in spite of myself.

"Hi, Johnny Lee," Linda said, and she sounded chipper. I was embarrassed of the name Johnny Lee, but I guess I was in the same predicament that I was in with my family, there being two Johns and all.

Linda had a bright smile on her face, and though she was a bit heavy, she was cute and had big boobs that bounced when she moved, and it was not an unpleasant site. Sherry, on the other hand, was slim by comparison and not big in the boobs department, but she looked quite alright to me. I just wished that I could get up the nerve to talk to her. She seemed friendly enough, but I could tell that she was shy and waiting for me to make a gesture that I liked her: a hello, a smile, anything. But, much as I wanted to, I was not forthcoming.

"Hi," I replied back to Linda. Her smile made me smile, which made me feel both good and bad, and I looked down not sure what to think. It felt good to smile at Linda. Hell, it felt good to smile, period. It was only the second time I'd smiled since John and I had gotten here, but I felt guilty at not being able to smile at Sherry.

I looked up at Sherry, and she looked over at me, as if she felt my glance. My first instinct was to look away, but our eyes locked together, and in that brief moment before I broke it off she seemed that she was lonely and wanted companionship, and I would have loved to have given it to her.

Besides having Sherry on my mind, I was beginning to worry about how John and I were going to get back home. Were the busses going to come back for us? Were we going to be on our own to get back home? I thought of calling the bus company in DC that had brought us up. It was my uncle's company, and I was sure that they would accept a collect call, but there were long lines at the phone booths, and there was still another day and night left of the concert, so I tried to push those worries away for the moment.

I began thinking of Sherry again and our age difference, and that put me in mind of one of Chris's friends, Nancy, that I had had a brief thing with during the beginning of the summer. She had just broken up with her boyfriend and just wanted a warm body to cuddle with and kiss, but I didn't mind. I was still feeling pretty bad about being dumped myself. Besides, she didn't seem to mind making the first move into the kissing stage, which worked out well for me.

Both she and Chris were the same age, 17, so it wasn't like I hadn't been with an older girl before, and Sherry even looked a bit like Nancy. They both had blond hair and big noses, though Nancy's nose was bigger by far. Sherry's nose was just on the large size, but Nancy's nose bordered on being a beak. I had a thing for big noses, though. I had a crush on Barbra Streisand, and she really did it for me, big nose and all.

I noticed that everyone seemed to be busy, so I slipped away to be by myself for a while. I went up to the road where everyone was walking, and fell in along with the people going down away from where John and I had first come in from the main road. It was an interesting mixture of people I passed coming the other way. It was mostly a younger crowd in varying stages of hippie dress, as with those I had seen the day before when I had walked among the tents. I saw girl wearing nothing but bib overalls, which showed a lot but not everything. Her breasts were covered, but when I shot her a quick look at her sideways as she passed me, I could see the edge of her boob through the edge of her overalls, and I could feel myself getting aroused. It was the most I had ever seen of a real naked breast.

After my head stopped spinning, I noticed a guy with longish hair with an army jacket on who had a peace sign painted on his forehead. And then there was a girl with a flower painted on each cheek in Day-Glo colors, and her long jet-black hair framed her face making the colors of the flowers seem all the more vibrant. Several girls had flowers in their hair, and more girls had long hair than short, and by short I mean shoulder-length short, not some Twiggy shit.

I kept pace with a couple that was walking in front of me. The guy had a backpack on that looked army surplus. It was stuffed pretty full, and he was bent over forward to counterbalance the weight. The girl was carrying a sleeping bag under her arm, and I wondered what their story was. Were they just getting here, or had they pulled up stakes and either leaving or looking for another place to camp?

Along the way, I passed a path that I recognized from when John and I had used it the day before to get from the stage to the trailer that I had thought was the first aid center. That was right when Santana had started playing.

I looked at my watch, and was surprised to see that it was after eight o'clock already. The sun had risen higher in the sky, and the shadows had shortened accordingly, and I figured it was time to get back. I made a U-turn into the path people walking the other way and began my trek back to the tent.

It was warming up a bit, and I felt as if I could do without the blanket around my shoulders, so I took it off and carried it on my side. I was overwhelmed by the amount of people that were here. Most of the people on the hill stayed on the hill, and this was a huge hill--I mean crater huge --and it was seemingly solid with people. This was not counting the people who did not stay on the hill overnight, people who had camped out, and that was a hell of a lot of people just by themselves.

A half-million in all was the latest count, and nothing like this had ever happened before. On Saturday, the stage announcer updated us from time to time by on various subjects and we soon learned that Woodstock was making national news. We were the third largest city by population in New York, we were told. We were making history, they said, but I was just surviving.