 REED THE MAP: A guide to Renn Fayre from Reed College’s student paper.
IMAGE: Andrew Williams |
I’m sitting on the toilet, reading the stall-wall wisdom in one of Reed College’s restrooms during this year’s Renn Fayre extravaganza.
The scrawl was obviously written a few days before my May 1 visit to the annual festival: “Renn Fayre is coming up, have you been tested yet?”
That sounds intriguing.
WW reported on Renn Fayre a year ago (see “Higher Ed,” May 14, 2008), examining the tolerance of drugs at the private school in Southeast Portland. The piece inflamed students and administrators, generating 562 comments—many of them critical of WW—on wweek.com.
Reed College spokesman Kevin Myers says the school has since limited the number of visitors at Renn Fayre to help with crowd control, and also looks at its drug and alcohol policy on a “pretty regular basis.”
“We have a moral, legal and institutional responsibility to report serious violations. If we didn’t see it and nobody points it out to us, we can’t do anything.” Myers says of Reed’s drug policy in general. “We’ve taken it seriously in more instances in the past year. We’ve gotten the Portland PD involved more.”
During my three-hour visit to Renn Fayre this month, little seems changed—many of Reed’s 1,400 students enjoy a three-day festival at the end of the school year geared toward chemical enhancement. The naked kids covered in blue paint who call themselves Picts are still here. Lube wrestling? Yes. A giant slide and skate ramp? Absolutely. Fireworks, fire show, and Glow Opera, yes, yes and yes.
Even the “Informed Decisions” column in the school’s newspaper, The Quest, looked the same as last year’s column: “But most of you won’t be doing a single drug, will you? Nope, you’re going for double or nothing and betting on drug cocktails.”
And just like last year, drugs were at the center of it all.
I walk onto campus, past signs lining the front lawn, warning outsiders like me that Reed was closed for the weekend, admitting only students and their friends—identified by $25 purple plastic wristbands. I follow the music to the Green Lodge, an open tent in a dark corner. The sweet rank of pot smoke wafts up from the cluster of couches and hangs in a deep green cloud below the tent’s ceiling as the DJ spins jungle music. The “green” lodge. I get it.
Inside the Gothic architecture of a dorm hall is the Black Lodge, lit with black lights and filled with the driving beat of trance music. There’s a table where people are painting huge balls in neon paint that fluoresces crazy bright in the black light. There’s also a raised platform of mattresses covered in glowing white sheets with clothed bodies squirming on top.
When I leave, I pass a security officer with a walkie-talkie squawking at his hip. He glances at my strategically covered wrists; I walk on and he doesn’t bother me.
Down the stairs of another building, in a small room, is the White Lodge. In the middle of the floor is a white shag rug with mattresses; warm white lights are strung on the walls and hanging from sculptures like twinkling chandeliers. White powders, spread on a large mirror, are bought and sold by students and snorted with a $20 bill. Someone says, laughing, that at least it’s not the standard $1 bill.
“Yeah, remember when we used a $100 bill?”
Molly, 2-CB, coke. It’s all here. A boy comes in and a girl with dinner-plate pupils asks him for “K.” He’s already out of ketamine, but the guy next to her has some to sell. And whippets, too. The empty nitrous oxide canisters click metallically as they’re kicked around the floor. Kids prescribe drugs to one another with clinical assurance, assessing what would bring the best effects when combined with what has already been consumed.
I’m supposed to tell you this is all safe—to say the Karma Patrol passes out bagels and water, and there’s a first aid tent. The Renn Fayre is, I’m told later by two “border patrol” kids who very kindly escort me out, a tradition created by the Fayre’s hippie founders, meant to be a safe place to experiment and expand minds.
But I’m left wondering if Renn Fayre is true to the founders’ counterculture that spawned it. Because these are privileged kids with money to burn while satisfying every drug craving, it feels and looks more like the established culture of instant gratification.
Which would be fine, except these are also very smart kids, and while I heard them discussing world affairs in the White Room, no one mentioned Mexico, where all that coke came from, or that America’s consumption of those drugs has driven a bloody drug war in that country.
Reed’s guide book says “social responsibility is a necessary companion of social freedom.” Renn Fayre is an act of social freedom, but the questions it raises about Reed’s social responsibility don’t seem to have been asked.
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Something about these last three paragraphs rubs me the wrong way. If the "established culture of instant gratification" "would be fine," why devote the vast majority of the article to a sensationalist and lurid description of what is only part of the Renn Fayre tradition? The appeal to social responsibility that happens in the last two paragraphs is a tacked-on attempt to hide what this really is: an biased attempt to recreate last year's shitstorm and to garner some pageviews and some attention.
Which would be fine (print media's in dire straits, I know), except that the reporter clearly did aggressively little research (the drug advisory column, for example, used the phrase "you're doing for double or nothing" in a distinctly disapproving "aren't you, you dumb motherfucker" paragraph) and biased that which she did. Conversations with Reed students beyond attempting to evade Border Patrol ("strategically covered wrists?" You reprobate, you.) could have written about the large minority of students who are sub-free during Renn Fayre and the much larger group, such as my over-21 self, who only had about as much alcohol over Renn Fayre as the typical Portlander on a weekend. Or the debate and widespread campus outcry that has been taking place all year as Reed student and administrators review the school's drug and alcohol policy and try to debate a responsible acknowledgment and response to the drug culture that Reed, like every (maybe not Bob Jones) college or university, must address. Or the ways in which the Reed community continues collectively dealt with the tragic death of a student last year, and what that's meant for such a close-knit community (maybe some reporting that didn't take place at Renn Fayre, where people are taking care of other things).
But a quick piece with some drugs and some nudity is sexy and fun. Please just don't try to give it an air of legitimacy by tacking on a quick bit of social concern (which I share, but maybe your editors should have given you more space to work it in to the actual article). Call it what it is: good dirty fun.
[Reedies, I hypocritically encourage you not to comment if you're just going to be grumpy like me, because the WW will take it as a further invitation to notch up the pageviews and comments and share them with their advertisers. I'm just full of PMS and done with finals and had to write something.]
When you write "many of Reed’s 1,400 students enjoy a three-day festival at the end of the school year geared toward chemical enhancement. The naked kids covered in blue paint who call themselves Picts are still here." Are you referring to the chemical enhancement of tempera paint?
Over half the students are on financial aid so you really should stop insinuating that they are all "privileged kids with money to burn while satisfying every drug craving". It makes you sound incompetent.
This article is just as inflammatory as last year's. Stop whoring for hits and try some real journalism.
truth is, the only thing unsafe is that we had trespassers like yourself on campus hiding from the CSOS. Another great job Willamette Week. you never cease to amaze me .
Also, great job on admitting to only being there for three hours and then describing activities that happened over three different days.
you guys are all pitiful journalists.
1) Renn Fayre is NOT a celebration of drug use at Reed. It never has been, and never will be. The intent is to celebrate the end of classes and the graduating seniors. Yes, many people indulge in drug use, but a very large percentage don't. It's unfair to represent all Reedies as wealthy hedonist drug-users who enjoy anonymous orgies when in fact I and most of my Reedie friends are none of those things.
2)It's ironic that you write about a "culture of instant gratification" when this piece is nothing but an indulgence in bashing a controversial event on a college campus. You have no decent analysis or any suggestions on how we should discuss Renn Fayre in the larger Portland community. There are many, many things that Reed needs to improve on - I'd be happy to read an article that includes constructive comments and criticism, rather than muckraking.
3) Go to other college campuses. PSU, Oregon State, any UC. You will see the exact same kind of drug use. Perhaps it is not so easily accessible to assholes like you (who deliberately trespass on closed campuses to write a sensationalistic, biased story), and no, other schools don't have Renn Fayre, but the drugs are there. Molly, pot, E, 2-CB, Ketamine, coke - it's all there, and it's being used. And yes, while our Drug and Alcohol Policy may not be the best, and our attitude towards drug use may be lax, at least we try for a veneer of safe and responsible use. Karma Patrol, Whitebird, and the Community Safety Officers are all there during Renn Fayre to keep the people who do choose to indulge safe, and to keep the Reed community safe from them.
If you want to make an impact at Reed and in Portland in general, I'd stop with these idiot columns, and write something that looks deeper into the culture and the community. What should we do about drug use at Renn Fayre? Why does it happen? Why are drugs so readily available to college students around the country? Put some thought, time, and effort into your writing, and then I'll read your articles.