War and Watermelon Read Online Free PDF

we have to drop off an apple pie at Aunt Lizzie’s house in Port Jervis, New York, which is out of the way but in the general direction of the concert. So we’ll be going on back roads instead of taking Route 17 and the New York Thruway. I think the only reason we’re dropping off the pie is so Aunt Lizzie can give us directions and report back to Mom that we’re halfway to our destination.
    Lizzie is my grandmother’s sister. “She knows every road in that area,” Mom says. “She’ll send you to White Lake the safest way, and she’ll also know where you can stop to go to the bathroom.”
    Skippy smokes eight cigarettes before we even get to Port Jervis. I’m in the backseat with him, in my family’s red Plymouth station wagon. No air conditioner and a radio that gets only AM.
    Jenny spends most of the time turned toward us, talking about how exciting this trip is and how her all-time favorite, Joan Baez, is supposed to be performing tonight. Jenny’s wearing a silver chain with a small peace sign hanging from it, and she wove some tiny reddish flowers into her hair. “This is wild,” she says. “We probably won’t get home until one o’clock in the morning!”
    â€œI heard there’s gonna be sixty thousand people at this thing,” Ryan says, drumming his fingers on the dashboard. “Sly and the Family Stone tonight!”
    I’ve only vaguely heard of these performers, but I’m excited. We catch bits and pieces of news on the radio, but the reception is terrible. Lots of concert-related traffic up ahead, they’re saying, but so far we haven’t hit any.
    â€œRolling Stones gonna be at this thing?” I ask when “Honky Tonk Women” comes on the radio.
    â€œDoubt it,” Ryan says.
    â€œHow ’bout the Archies?”
    Everybody laughs at that one.
    That’s another thing about Ryan and Jenny: They laugh when I try to be funny. Tony’s the only other person who ever laughs at my jokes, especially if they’re about snot or farting.
    â€œIt’s not just the music,” Ryan says. “The way they’ve been talking about this on the radio stations, you just know it’s going to change the way things are in this country. You get sixty thousand people protesting about Vietnam—and doing it with peace and brotherhood—then those idiots in Washington will know they’d better start listening to our generation. That’s what this is all about: bringing down the establishment.”
    That’s not what Dad said. He told me to stick within an arm’s length of Ryan every second and expect to see a crowd “full of damn fools getting stoned.”
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    Aunt Lizzie has made a huge pot roast. She lives alone and we see her only once or twice a year. No way she could finish all that meat herself, so we sit at her dining room table for an hour and a half, eating beef and potatoes and most of the pie that my mother sent.
    â€œYou’ll turn onto Route 55 in a few miles, and that’ll take you all the way to White Lake,” she says for the tenth time as we’re leaving. “You can’t miss it.”
    It’s 5:07 when we get under way again, but Aunt Lizzie assures us we’ll be there in less than an hour.
    We pass lots of cows and barns and pine trees. Traffic starts to build. After an hour Ryan picks up four hitchhikers—two guys and two girls around his age with backpacks. One of the guys has a guitar. They’ve got a handmade sign that says WOODSTOCK in big red letters.
    The two guys get in the third seat by the watermelon—the seat that faces backward—and the girls squeeze between me and Skippy.
    The one next to me says her name is Annie. She’s skinny and smells strongly of armpit. She has long, straight brown hair and keeps giggling. The other girl is even skinnier and has a woven headband with a hand-rolled cigarette stuck