“How many roads must a many walk down, before you call him a man?
“Yes, ‘n’ how many seas must a white dove sail before she sleeps in the sand?
“Yes, ‘n’ how many times must the cannon balls fly before they’re forever banned?
“The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind,
“The answer is blowin’ in the wind.”
– Bob Dylan
Lest counterculture folks think I have no soul, I have reprinted the first verse and chorus from old mumble-lips (one of the most famous and lasting icons of the peace-love-and-rock-and-roll generation; after all, many of them are dead).
That noted, we come to this week’s reader concern (with apologies to Dylan’s “Lay Lady Lay”):
“Say, lady, say
“How long will this topic last?
“Say, lady, say
“We tired of hippies — darn fast.
“Those many Rainbows you describe each day,
“We’re sick of them, so stop the coverage today.”
The Rainbow people that readers — 65 of them this week alone — are talking about are the itinerant folks who travel around the country apparently looking for the footloose lifestyle they crave.
Once a year they have a big gathering on federal lands where they are joined by myriad professionals such as lawyers, doctors and librarians who drop out for several weeks of group turning off and tuning in. This year Utah apparently lost the toss, because the Rainbow people have gathered in the Uintas and journalists have been unable to resist the lure.
Instead of covering them when they came to the forest and then again when they went, reporters from The Salt Lake Tribune seem to have dogged the Rainbows’ every step, fashioning a group of stories that basically read alike. With the exception of today’s story in Body and Soul by Linda Fantin, which details the folks who minister to young people, many runaways, most of the stories have a “gee whiz I saw a hippie” quality.
The Salt Lake Tribune had a story on June 25, saying that weather in the mountains made for muddy and cold camping for those first few Rainbows; a story on June 27, saying tensions between Rainbow people and U.S. Forest Service personnel erupted into a melee that caused several minor injuries; a story on June 28 that talked about various interactions between Rainbow people and Forest Service law enforcement; a story on June 29 that asked readers to think of the gathering as “Woodstock without the music.”
That last story described medical, food and sanitary conditions. And, it quoted some residents of the camp on peace, love and dog poop.
On Tuesday, a spread in Salt Substitute repeated much of the earlier information disguised as a guide for people who wanted to trek to the woods. Another story on Thursday described parts of the counterculture event, many of which were in earlier stories. On Friday, the paper ran a 15-inch advance story on today’s “Ohm” circle, the traditional close for the happening.
But, all those stories were long on atmosphere and short on what effect this gathering is having on small towns like Kamas and Evanston, Wyo.
Enough, say some readers.
I say reporters need to look for the real stories going on up there. Why not try following some Forest Service folks around to see how tough their days are? Why not find out how smaller merchants in Kamas and Evanston are coping
with this? Why not check with highway patrols in contiguous states — and Utah — to find out if some of these travelers got stuck along the road? Why not find some Utah folks — bastions of success and dedication — who have trooped up to the mountains to commune with veterans of the road?
Summer — when schools are out, politics are operating in the slow lane and the process of covering a beat moves at a speed resembling molasses running out of a jar — is the time to get aggressive about enterprise reporting and computer-assisted reporting, endeavors that eat up time.
But some reporters seem to be mired in the muck. Has it come down to this: If a hippie relieves himself in the woods and there is no reporter or photographer to document it, did the hippie fail to get relief?
Most readers of The Tribune have enough imagination to know what people smell like if they have not had baths or what campsites smell like if people pee against trees. Even TV crews found an interesting story this week about how the feds moved the portable courtroom they prepared for the Olympics up near the encampment to provide instant justice for lawbreakers.
Tribune writers should stop describing the counterculture scene and start talking about the impact and the politics of this gathering.
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The Reader Advocate’s phone number is 801-257-8782. Write to the Reader Advocate, The Salt Lake Tribune, P.O.
Box 867, Salt Lake City, Utah 84110. reader.advocate@sltrib.com
This week’s scoreboard:
Number of readers who called about the size of type in stories 13
Number of readers who claim The Tribune is owned by the Deseret Morning News 38
Number of readers who , after the Reader Advocate answers the phone, think she is a he 10
Number of readers who believe The Tribune editorial pages have taken a sharp turn to the right 12
