Robert August

At some time, very late at night, somebody plays an old tape of Jim Morrison and the Doors. They turn it up so loud that it drowns everything else out.

Easter at the Colorado River is like a holy pilgrimage for those who believe. They pour out of the hot cities of Southern California in endless caravans, crossing the mountains and deserts, enduring the merciless heat, suffering robbery at the hands of the Bedouin gas merchants, forging onward through the savage regions of Brawley, Indio, and Blythe. They come in hordes, following an internal clockwork which tells them that the sun has returned another year, the first moon of spring is waxing full, and it‘s time to gather on the cool banks of the sacred Colorado, bearing magic fetishes of painted eggs and chocolate rabbits, to celebrate the rebirth of the earth.

Nobody dares to venture more than a few feet without a cold beer.

Robert August

From Parker Dam ten or fifteen miles south to Earp, as far as the eye can see in either direction, they’re camped in the yellow dust of the river. They’re living in tents, boats, pick-up trucks, trailers, inner tubes, the back seats of Volkswagens, under palo verde trees, or just curling up in the dirt at night with a raggedy blanket and a warm bottle of beer. Day and night the campgrounds that dot the riverbank are a throbbing bazaar of dusty cars, lawn chairs, picnic tables, boat trailers, ice chests, wet dogs, and unconscious bodies. Rock and roll blares out from every direction in a howling symphony of confusion. The roar of motorboats and jet skis romping up and down the river adds to the bedlam. Everybody screams to be heard.

It’s so hot that when people stand up they rock back on their heels for a moment until their heads clear, and nobody dares to venture more than a few feet without a cold beer. The smell of marijuana wafts through the crowd like incense in a church, and mingles with the odors of suntan oil, burning rubber, adolescent perfume, motorboat oil, dog piles, and sweat. Everywhere there’s flesh, flesh, flesh — young and firm, old and flabby, freckled, fried, hairy, dimpled, flat, sagging, peeling, cracked. It’s mostly a young crowd, though, because only the young are wild enough to see this celebration clear through. It demands at least a three-day vigil from Good Friday to Easter Sunday, and many have been here for a week. By Saturday they’re loud, restless, and obscene as they stagger up and down the banks of the river, mingling, roaming, reveling in the drunken chaos of it all. It's a feast of flesh, an orgiastic, gluttonous circus of drunken debauchery and lust. It is a pagan rite of spring.

Easter is a Christian word. It seems strange, and to some no doubt sad, that a Christian celebration has degenerated into a pagan festival. On the other hand, you have to remember that it was a pagan festival long before the resurrection of Christ. The celebration of the spring equinox is as old as man, and even older than that if you consider that ground hogs, migrating birds, all hibernating reptiles and mammals, annual flowers and trees, and just about every other living thing north of the Tropic of Cancer celebrates the event in one way or another. Pagans seem to have taken some bad press in the last few thousand years. The very word pagan has come to be a kind of religious slur. But our ancestors were pagans, and you might say we have it in our blood. We have our fertility rituals, too.

The young virgins who have blossomed just in time for spring are eager to test their new appeal. It’s easy to sec from their faces that their new status and power is baffling, but they're compelled by instinct to exercise it and chart its boundaries. Out on the river they wear intricately strapped bikinis that leave tan lines criss-crossing their backs and bellies like spider webs. They sport exotic-looking one-piece marvels with ruffled stitchery designed to accentuate every curve and cleavage. They strut around in these things like little starlets, peeking back over their shoulders now and then to see what sort of devastation they leave in their wake. The bored expressions on their deadpan faces are stolen from magazine models, but their darting eyes give their uncertainty away. They seem to understand that this celebration is as much for them as it is for Easter; they can feel the power being placed at their feet and they accept it like natural-born queens, but how to go about using it, they haven't a clue.

The young men with long, narrow waists like wasps cruise through the campgrounds in black low-riders, yapping and bellowing like packs of dogs. They hang their tattoos out the windows so everyone can see they ain’t kids. They pile out of the cars and prance around barefoot, waving bottles of beer and hustling every girl that passes by. They don't care about cool, slick come-ons; this is Holy Week and those rules don’t count. Ain’t no such thing as underage, and ain’t nobody old enough to tell them what to do. They know what they want — there it goes right there — and they came here to get it. You just gotta reach out and grab it before it gets away.

The older girls have more moxy than their younger sisters, and they don’t waste their charms. They realize that it’s a woman’s privilege to pick and choose from the herd of drooling beasts, so they grease up their bodies and lie back in their lawn chairs, waiting for the action to come to them. They want things on their own terms. If they're unimpressed with what they see, they slip their little black blindfolds over their eyes, turn their wrists up to the sun, and play like nobody’s home. These girls move in coveys like quail. They came to the river in carloads, eager for the freedom of the crowd. They'll never see these guys again, and the only ones who could ever tell are their girlfriends. For that reason they try to make sure they’re all equally guilty when they go home. They stick together and fight the hordes back-to-back, but they surrender one by one. It’s what they had in mind all along.

Customized vans are popular with this crowd. Most of them aren't set up as campers, though. The idea seems to be more along the line of a portable orgy room. The interiors are luxurious, with floor-to-ceiling padding, tinted windows, full-length mirrors, and quadraphonic sound. The boats out on the river, however, seem to be the pinnacle of Colorado River culture. The jet boats that cost up to $ 15,000 are painted metal-flake colors that glisten in the sun and glow in the moon. They flaunt plush tuck-and-roll and long chromed headers that stick out the back like folded wings. The boats are waxed and polished and fussed over like jealous gods. They’re towed to the river on gleaming pedestals, and covered at night with black vinyl or scarlet velour. They ’re given fierce and virile names like the Screamin’ Semen — an orange and red vision of lust; or the Cyclops — an omnipotent, multicolored demon. Their owners sit at the controls like high priests at the altar, guiding the awesome power of these monsters with profane incantations as they leap over the surface of the water in long slapping strides, spewing in their wake a misty veil.

Spread out along the river south of Parker Dam are several marinas where the boats dock to fill up on gas, and where the crowds gather to buy beer and ogle each other. Girls in disco shoes and bikinis wobble down the fingers of the docks, and boat owners offer them rides. These marinas are the kind of places that pay for themselves in a few good weekends a year, but are barely open the rest of the time. ‘ That’s why there’s no gas shortage on the Arizona side,” the bartender at the Roadrunner bar laughs. “We gotta have the tourist business to survive; we can’t afford to close on Easter.” And it seems to be true, because on the weekend of one of the worst gas shortages ever, there’s no problem getting gas at the river. Even the high-grade fuel the motorboats suck up, like beer through a straw, is plentiful.

By Saturday afternoon just about everyone is in a drunken frenzy. The wind starts to blow like a bad omen, and the sky turns to an orange haze from all the dust in the air. Here and there, from Buckskin campground near the dam to Ah Villa campground several miles south, people are passing out. They curl up around garbage cans, collapse in inner tubes, or fall asleep in the shade outside restrooms. A few unlucky souls fall asleep face-up in the sun, and their skin shrivels and peels until someone drags them under a picnic table or the tailgate of a truck. The river has become a blaring freeway of machines, and the drivers seem to be taking chances they wouldn't take in a sober state of mind. They swing close to the shore and spray water up on the crowd, and the crowd curses and shrieks after them. Everybody seems to be on the edge of rioting, as if the whole scene could suddenly explode into violence. Territories are being harshly defended, and you can see the hackles go up over little things like someone sitting in the wrong chair, or even looking at the wrong woman. Everyone's instincts are raw, and instincts are all that’s left when other mental functions shut down.

In the late afternoon a houseboat cruises up the river with a loudspeaker shouting into the crowds. “Come to the Sundance tonight. Big Easter Party. No cover. Rock and roll. Come to the Sundance tonight.” On the stem of the boat there’s a blond girl in a bikini, posing stiffly and smiling as if the vulgarities being hurled at her from the shore were wonderful promises. It’s pretty crude advertising, but the crowd gets the point. They begin thinking about Saturday night. It’s time to get out of the sun anyway, so a lot of them start looking around for a place to take a nap.

If you leave the river, cross the highway, and walk into the hills, you’ll find that the desert around Parker Dam is almost biblical in its mystery and splendor. Not far away, over in Page, Arizona, film companies can often be seen making those TV Bible films because the area looks so much like the Sinai Desert. It’s right on the boundary between the flatland desert and the redrock country that covers so much of the Southwest. The washes are full of palo verde trees and graceful pink tamarisks. The barrel cacti are in bloom at Easter, and the bright blossoms seem too delicate for the ninety-five-degree heat, but there they are. A few big saguaro cacti rise up out of the hillsides like monuments, and the scattered chollas look as if they’re radiating a light of their own in the afternoon sun. Lizards scurry around everywhere, and there are other little animals moving in the comer of your vision, but when you turn to look, they’re gone. John the Baptist would have felt right at home here, eating locusts and honey, but the only voice crying in the wilderness is the whine of boats on the river below.

From up above, the river looks brown and muddy, although every thing it touches turns green. That much green seems out of place in this desert, just as the river would seem out of place if it weren’t so old. This is the river that made the Grand Canyon. The people down below are waterskiing in mud that comes from Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and Utah.

It's the biggest river for a thousand miles in any direction. It's so grand that it makes everything around it, particularly the celebration below, seem childish and trivial. It seems to tolerate the mobile homes, liquor stores, garages, marinas, and bars that line its banks with a kind of patient indifference. With one good shrug it could send it all crashing off toward the sea.

The Sundance is the night spot at the river. It's so popular that it takes the Arizona Highway Patrol with road flares to handle the parking on Saturday night. The establishment knows this crowd has plenty of money to spend, but that they could also destroy this place faster than a curse of God (Arizona drinking age is eighteen). So they’ve hired several bouncers in red T-shirts to welcome the guests. “You can’t park in the road ... I don’t know where you can park, but you can’t park there.” “No alcohol taken inside. ’’ “Sorry, fella, everybody pays.’’ It’s a big place, built on three levels, with a dance floor and two bars. There’s only one restroom, though, upstairs, and they say that last year it was so overused, with the beer drinking and all, that it was leaking onto the dance floor below.

The crowd inside, despite a refreshing siesta, still looks pretty crazy, but they’ve cleaned up some and put on fresh clothes. The girls are all in white to show off their new tans. The guys, as soon as they walk through the door, start pacing about like animals in cages waiting to be fed. Before long a group of bikers arrives, and even in the dark they look gnarled and scarred. One fellow in a leather vest wears a pair of wrist gauntlets that climb up to his elbows, resplendent with steel spikes that shine in the disco lights. The bikers add an element of danger to the scene and bring out something wild in the crowd.

The band this festive Saturday night is a slick group in black slacks and silk shirts open to the waist. They sing the standard, tired, rock and roll, but it’s noisy enough to dance to, and plenty of people are out doing that. In between songs, the couples grope in the dark like kids on an Easter egg hunt. There’s a loose-looking gentleman out on the floor dancing with himself. He’s got a military haircut and big blank Xs in his eyes. He looks as if he just got off a plane from never-never land. Pretty soon some people start talking about him.

“Hey, that guy’s really stoned.”

“Yeah, I wonder what he’s on.”

“Acid, probably.”

“Wonder if he’s got any more.”

“Go ask him. ”

“Yeah, see if he's got any Quaaludes, too.”

And they go off to see if they can approach him but before they can get close, the big henchmen in red T-shirts have hold of him by all four limbs and are galloping him toward the nearest exit.

Before long the whole place is packed with people until it’s as hot and humid as a greenhouse. There’s at least three times as many men as women, and the only females left unattached look like street fighters with losing records. The bikers snatch them up in a hurry.

But back at the campgrounds things are picking up again. In fact, the celebration is reaching a kind of tribal climax. The mood is one of total abandonment. People shriek and wail in a kind of blissful agony as they huddle around the campfires. The moon is overhead now, the first full moon of spring, golden and pure, and totally bewitching. It’s the kind of moon our grandparents said would give us lunacy if we exposed ourselves to its rays. Perhaps they were right — everyone here is a little bit loony. It’s impossible not to yield to the attraction of that moon. It draws something dissolute and primeval out of this crowd as surely as it draws the tide.

People have queued up outside the campground restrooms as if everyone has decided to empty their bellies, bowels, and bladder all at once. It’s as if they want to get rid of it all — purge their bodies in one devastating groan and start over. The lines wind out the door and into the moonlight. The people waiting are dancing and singing, waving bottles and hugging each other with all the joy of born-again Christians.

Inside one of the restrooms there’s a kid kneeling at the toilet bowl as if it were an altar. He’s practically embracing it. He's retching his soul out, and most of it isn’t reaching the bowl but dribbling down his neck and chest and onto his bare feet. Somebody flushes the toilet next to him and it overflows, swamping the floor and soaking the poor kid to his knees. The people behind him are watching all this, and they moan in sympathy. But when he stands up, the look in his eyes isn’t disgust at all, rather it’s a kind of odd humility, as if he'd seen something in that toilet bowl he could never tell. There’s a purity in his eyes that suggests by this pathetic ritual he’d been somehow cleansed. He turns and walks out into the moonlight while the people watch him weave unsteadily.

“What time is it?” somebody shrieks.

“Two o’clock!”

“Oh. ... I thought it was late.”

It’s that time of night when everyone talks and nobody listens. Everywhere there’s senseless, ceaseless babbling, as if everything that has gone unsaid must be said right now. In the shadows couples are making love. It’s urgent; it can't wait; it has to be done tonight when all the burdens that usually go with love are forgotten. That has been the promise all day, and for the lucky ones it's now being fulfilled.

This is the hour of the ancient celebration. This is the meaning of rebirth. In Babylon the dead were resurrected on this night. For the Hebrews it meant the Angel of Death passed over their door. For the Christians it meant that Christ rolled away the stone and we could all be reborn. The Karok Indians of the Northwest called it “the world making.” and celebrated it with a feast of salmon. In the Ukraine, in Java, and in Central America, the peasants planted seeds for the new crop, then made love in the furrows to ensure their fertility. Everywhere in the world it's always been the same. Nobody thinks about this tonight, of course, and nobody cares. It doesn’t matter, because in this sacred hour when the moon is full and the sun is in the plane of the earth’s equator, all that matters is the drunken, orgiastic celebration of rebirth.

At some time, very late at night, somebody plays an old tape of Jim Morrison and the Doors. They turn it up so loud that it drowns everything else out, and those few people who are still awake are forced to yield to the eerie sound of a dead man singing about a moonlight ride. That song could be played a thousand times and it would never have the meaning it has tonight. It’s the very voice of death having its say in this celebration of life.

At dawn on Easter morning the river is quiet. It’s strange to lie awake at that hour and marvel at how quiet it really is. If there were one soul who had a scream left in him, one last demon to be purged, he probably wouldn't keep quiet out of respect for the sleeping crowd; he’d have somebody’s tape player cranked up full blast and he’d be screaming his fool head off. But there isn’t even one, not in the whole crowd. The silence comes from a unanimous communal exhaustion. It’s true peace. Everyone here has said goodbye to winter and hello to spring. We’ve made our peace with death and been resurrected. We've survived one more winter and have now celebrated our survival. Hallelujah.