61. August 15, 1969 Bethel, New York
Beatrix weaves through the crowd, clutching her picnic blanket to her chest. Woodstock is larger than she ever thought possible, an endless ocean of people stretching in every direction. Oliver would have told her exactly how many people if he was here.
He is here. She just hasn’t found him yet.
She has no idea where to start looking.
She searches the faces of the people she passes, asks them all if they have seen anyone matching Oliver’s description. They laugh and look at her like she’s mad. Maybe she is. She only has an hour, maybe two, before the festival starts. And when the sun goes down, it will be impossible to find him.
Nearly.
Beatrix keeps looking, keeps asking, keeps shouting his name as she makes her way down the muddy hill toward the stage, sure Oliver will try to get the best view of history he can. When she scans the faces of the people gathered in the front row, she doesn’t find him there, either.
Maybe he is with the musicians or with the people organizing the festival. She keeps an eye out for anyone who looks official, but it is organized chaos, and mostly chaos at that.
And then she sees him, out of the corner of her eye.
Tall, with dark hair and those thick-framed glasses, chatting with a man near the speaker towers.
She races toward him, pushing through the people in her path.
She’s about to call his name when he turns toward her, and her heart falls. Crashes. It’s not him.
It’s hopeless. There are hundreds of thousands of people. Even if he has come, how is she supposed to find him?
Maybe he will find her. She trudges up the hill and claims a spot with her blanket, half hoping Oliver will appear out of thin air to sit next to her. Woodstock’s first act takes the stage and her heart sinks. He wouldn’t miss this.
Her hope dwindles as the evening stretches on. The sun sets and darkness settles over the crowd. There could be fifty of them or a million, the people swallowed up by the black night.
A young man with a cloud of curly brown hair and an acoustic guitar sings a folk rendition of Simon & Garfunkel’s “America” in the glare of a single spotlight.
The crowd rises to give him a standing ovation, and Beatrix wonders if he feels—if any of the people cheering on their feet now have ever felt—that empty, aching loneliness he sang about.
The rain starts soon after, cool and unrelenting. Beatrix wraps her blanket around her shoulders, but it’s not long before she’s soaked through to her clothes, to her skin. It’s nearly one in the morning when Joan Baez takes the stage. The night’s final act. There is still no sign of Oliver.
His notebook is tucked away in her suitcase, protected from the wet and the mud and curious eyes. Beatrix doesn’t need to see the page to know what it says: Woodstock, August 15–18, 1969. But the fifteenth is over—the sixteenth just begun—and she hasn’t found him. He hasn’t found her.
There must be half a million people huddled against the rain, listening and singing and hoping together. Hoping love and music can bring peace. Solve the world’s problems and make this war the last war.
Beatrix wants to tell them they’re wrong.
That their hope is pointless. That there is always another war.
Because humans are cruel, their lives short, their memories shorter.
Because sitting in this muddy field, surrounded by people full of hope and love, she feels completely, utterly alone.
Because she is pathetic for wanting this life. Because the faerie was right.
Joan Baez’s lilting voice cuts through the darkness. She tells the audience she will sing one more song, the last song of the night. An ending.
The chill of the rain has settled into Beatrix’s bones, and she shivers as she listens to the woman sing a song from another time, a song of hope and resilience and faith. The crowd sings with her, but Beatrix can’t.
The music ends and the spotlights go dark. A hush falls over the crowd, and any hope Beatrix has of finding Oliver washes away with the rain.