Summer Solstice, June 21
By Ann Miner, High Desert Branch
Every year on this date, I’m reminded of the summer of 1983 when I was in England traveling with my three young adult children. One sunny day, we boarded a train in London’s Victoria Station and headed towards Salisbury. From there, we took the local bus to Stonehenge.
Along the two-lane country road, we noticed people who looked a lot like the ‘60s hippies walking in small groups.
Ahead, we saw a sea of color on one side of the thoroughfare directly across from the giant statuesque monuments of Stonehenge. We learned shortly that the colors were of the tents set up to house hordes of young people celebrating the Summer Solstice.
It was a bit chaotic, to say the least. The youth were wearing belts and other accessories with spikes and sporting various colors of hair. The odor was not what one would expect of an English meadow in the summertime.
A more memorable moment was when I looked beyond the tents out to the rolling terrain. There was a tall, skinny man wearing a black coat and top hat and, apparently, nothing else.
He had a small, portable shovel with which he dug a hole in the earth. Then he lifted his coat and squatted over the hole.
One couldn’t blame him, really. The large portable restrooms brought in by the government had an eternal line of people waiting to get in. This was made even worse by the event of a girl evidently fainting inside, causing authorities to make everyone wait outside until she was cared for.
We walked across the road and observed the ancient stones for a few minutes. The anticipated atmosphere of awe and quiet in such a mystical place was replaced with a desire to just get out of there!
But it was not to be an immediate escape. We waited an hour amid the unpleasant milling crush for the bus to return and take us away.
Once we were back in Salisbury, we sat on the shady lawn near the cathedral and had a nice, quiet picnic until the train pulled in to take us back to London.
“Summer Solstice” originally appeared in the September 2023
Inkslinger, newsletter of the High Desert Branch