Excerpt from The Third Rainbow Girl by Emma Copley Eisenberg, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"I was impressed by the Family members because I believe they are doing something that all of us, even conservatives like myself, have dreamed of doing sometime," wrote Bob Scott, a visiting journalist. "Saying the heck with material things and the mortgage, and running off to live wherever the spirit and the winds and an old Volkswagen bus will take us."

Inorganic matter was carted off in plastic or burlap sacks to another part of the camp; early arrivals had also dug out a pit for compost and another long trench that served as an open-air outhouse. Several plastic buckets of lime were available, and people were encouraged to sprinkle a little bit on their dump, whether pre- or post-digestion.

McNeel made the trip too, perhaps out of personal curiosity or merely professional obligation. There were workshops, he reported—Yoga, Grain and Organic Vegetable Farming, Knot Tying and Scissor and Tool Sharpening, Appalachian Folk Dancing, Poetry Reading. "This writer noted, however, that many people at the Gathering seemed not to be interested in the workshops but in visiting, talking, and being with each other."

On the edge of the festival grounds was a swimming hole backed by a hillside that led up to where visitors had parked. Many swam naked here, and the sight of so much flesh in such clear, clean water was special. A few local men took to standing on the far side of the hole and harassing the Rainbow women as they swam, hooting and guffawing their laughter and discomfort. Other local people dove right in. A writer for another local weekly wrote, "And what did your intrepid reporter do when faced with the spectacle of several hundred skinny-dippers? Why, the only sensible thing. I stripped down and joined them."

It rained every night, and every morning a fog filled the holler of the Three Forks of the Williams River that did not lift until noon. Then it lifted, and there was the sun, a sun that saturated the moss and the grass and hit the maple and oak leaves so richly they looked Technicolor. The clouds moved fast across the sky, the weather moved in fast from the west, and the Rainbow People learned, as any citizen of Pocahontas County could have testified, that here it could go from full sun to full-on pouring in ten seconds flat

Excerpted from The Third Rainbow Girl by Emma Copley Eisenberg. Copyright © 2020 by Emma Copley Eisenberg. Excerpted by permission of Hachette Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.