Up at Betty's Meadow

There is nothing dull about the good people of Sultan, Wash, (pop.: 960). They like a county fair as much as any body else, and they'll whoop and holler with the best of them. But what happened last week was the wildest thing in Sultan's history since the 1884 visit of the Black Diamond Minstrel Company. By the thousands, strangers streamed into the tiny hamlet hard by the Skykomish (Big Sky) River, 48 miles northeast of Seattle. As the incredulous Sultanites watched, onward trooped hundreds of hippies, pseudo hippies, camp followers, hangers-on, even some ordinary-looking folks. Then came the musicians with the weird-sounding names and getups -- Country Joe and the Fish, the Cleanliness and Godliness Skiffle Band, Frumious Bandersnatch, Mother Tucker's Yellow Duck, Dr. Humbead's New Tranquility String Band. They all headed for the farm owned by Divorcee Betty Nelson, a late-blooming flower child of 39 and, starting right then and there, Sultan's first rock impresario.

For three days and three nights, through intermittent downpours, the musicians held the first Sky River Rock Festival and Lighter than Air Fair. The music was incessant, loud, wild and swinging--folk rock, just plain folk, acid rock, cool jazz, blues, country and Western. There were tents pitched in Betty's muddy meadow, but nobody did much sleeping. The first night, everybody stayed up listening to the music until 2:30 a.m., then watched a psychedelic light show and underground movies. The next night, they never went to bed at all. With the morning came a "Sun Dance." The musicians played drums, chimes, tom-toms, anything at all, while the audience hopped around in the mire chanting, "Sun! Sun! Sun! Sun!" When the sun obliged, a balloonist named Mark Semich took off in a huge red, white and blue hot-air balloon and rode the wind over the hills. That was supposed to be the lighter-than-air part of the festival, but Semich need not have gone to the trouble: many of the youngsters were already lighter than air on pot.

To the surprise of the more skeptical Sultanites, the festival did not turn Sky River into a shambles at all. True, some locals did notice that a few kids seemed to take pleasure in making love in the rain-soaked woods, but this was rather tolerantly interpreted as a harmless aberration of the hippie culture. At any rate, the music was not so terrible and, besides, the hippies were rather charming. It tickled the townsfolk to hear the kids say that the Sun Dance had been the festival's moment of truth, that without it the proceedings would have been a failure.

In the aftermath of the festival, Betty Nelson even became a heroine of sorts in Sultan. The hippies dubbed her Universal Mother, or U.M. for short, and the townspeople seemed ready to accept that title. As for the Universal Mother herself, she returned cheerfully to her wild raspberries, five children, two horses, two pigs, 75 chickens and an assortment of cats and dogs.

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