Under skies darkening from multiple forest fires I head east, returning home from the 2026 Oregon Country Fair. Despite approaching doom, I am hopeful. Four days on festival time have me contemplating the sublime wisdom of Vaclav Havel’s famous bon mot: The situation is fatal, but not serious.
Some background may be in order:
The Oregon Country Fair is an American cultural phenomenon on par with Burning Man, Mardi Gras or the Rainbow Gathering. The weird party in the woods celebrated its 57th year in 2026, and while pioneering fair contributor (and original psychedelic cowboy) Ken Kesey has long since moseyed on to the carnival in the sky, his psychic resonance looms large. A festival stage bears his name, and the multicolored school-bus Further, which crisscrossed the country dispensing electric Kool Aid, lies at rest just outside festival grounds.
The narrator himself is no stranger to Bacchanalian festivals. At 15, I hitchhiked from my home in New York City to a Rainbow Gathering in rural Pennsylvania. My only surviving memories of this decades-ago event are of sharing a spliff on the side of the NJ turnpike with my friend Christopher (a dreadlocked white dude back in the days when folks like that raised eyebrows), and of returning home a week later wide-eyed, disheveled, and barely able to explain my absence to a mother who’d largely given up on me.
I remember slightly more about the next year’s gathering. It was in one of the Carolinas, and my friend Eric and I managed to catch a lift all the way down from the city with hippies in a school bus. We both made out with the same girl at different points during the long ride down, and camped with crusty hippie elders from the American southwest who introduced us to Peyote.
Beyond these highlights, my clearest recollections from the event were of Eric and I winding up in an arena parking lot waiting for the Grateful Dead to finish playing so that we could scrounge a ride back to New York.
Participation in multi-day gatherings became sporadic as I got older. I never made it to Burning Man, and at this point probably never will.
But I will return to the Oregon Country Fair, to camp with festival family current and yet unmet, to share the joy, celebration and porta-potties for as long as mind, body and zeitgeist allow. After decades of wandering, I have found tribe among the artists and artisans, partiers and spiritually minded, Gen Z flower children and hippie elders of the OCF.
As with the previous year, I’m here as part of an entertainment troupe with my dear friends Danielle and Anthony, with whom I’m putting on two daily performances of an interactive children’s play based on Lewis Carroll’s work. D&A are an OCF family. They exchanged vows on the grounds during off season, and their two children (Arianna, 6, and Izzie, 2) attended fairs in utero and onward.
Being an entertainer grants me a coveted bracelet imparting nigh-mystical privileges including proof against the sundown sweep separating staff from day trippers.
Almost as precious – at times, more – the bracelet lets me pass freely through the multiple gates leading between the festival proper and the mystical interzone between the fairgrounds and the outside world. The Oregon Country Fair is an interlocking human machine, one that functions through the dedication, energy and vision of thousands of volunteers. And interzone is where the folks who make the festival run conduct the thousand-and-one behind the scenes logistical tasks that make the magic happen.
It’s also where the cleanest port-a-potties and best open air showers are.
To experience the Oregon Country Fair is to surrender to a maelstrom of art and music, of food and festivities, and of searching for recently serviced porta-potties. Even after two years, it’s difficult to summarize. But in the name of journalism, I’ll give it a shot.
An attempt to summarize the Oregon Country Fair
- The Oregon Country Fair is a mythical circus, an open air bazaar in which the surviving characters in any Dungeons & Dragons campaign are rewarded post-adventure with a chance party and exchange of treasure.
- It is annual gathering of people seeking connection, community, and new ways of being, of dreamers and doers who dance and celebrate while serving and seeking.
- The Oregon Country Fair is a Bacchanalian celebration in the face of Armageddon. In the waning days of Babylon, it is humanity breathing hope into a world gasping for air.
So let’s get to the art and artificers that put the Oregon Country Fair among the greatest parties on the planet. From musicians and acrobats who’ve come to perform, chefs running artisanal food trucks, and actual artisans looking to sell their wares, everyone working in the supply side of arts, nourishment and fun have one thing in common: They all bring their absolute A game to the festival.
Art on the path from the 2025 Oregon Country Fair
The magic begins before the front gates as volunteers steer thousands of festival goers into parking lots, campgrounds, and other staging grounds in Veneta supporting the fair. Most fair-goers are day-trippers, coming for anything from a single day to the full three-day weekend. These people are the lifeblood of the festival, largely funding both the event and the myriad booths within. Their passes grant them access to the festival during daylight hours, during which the sheer breadth of entertainment available is mind boggling:
…Kirtan Chanting & Sacred Music…Shake Your Asana With Laura Black…Razzle Dazzle Presents Queen Bee-A-Trice And Her Royal Bee-Atches…Coyote Rising Giant Puppets…Frick Frack Blackjack…Linda Yapp The Lemon Drop Fairy
And these are just a handful of the acts taking place on the morning of the first day, some on stationary stages and others moving through the festival and labeled handily as ambiance on the path.
Whimsical entertainment is only part of what draws folks to the fair. Education and connection are another major component, with numerous cul-de-sacs inviting those in search of knowledge and connection. In between giving performances and wandering the path, I visit Energy Park and soak up information on cutting-edge green technology, and spend several hours at Community Village meeting up with people promoting intentional living, social justice, and tantalizing visions of the world as it could be.
But it’s at night, after the evening parade known as the sweep winds through the fairground and gently pushes the day-trippers towards the exit that another dimension takes shape.
When the sun sets, the night carnival begins.
It’s difficult to explain the magic of the Oregon Country Fair at night without sounding like someone describing an acid trip, fever dream, or some combination thereof.
Getting a full night’s sleep on the festival grounds is nearly impossible, and by the second night the boundary between sleep and wakefulness starts to blur. Between sunset and exhaustion, strange and mystical things occur throughout the fairground.
At one point I find myself sitting on one end of a wooden bench, hypnotized by a woman who may well be the ghost of Nico playing dirges on a harmonium.
At another, I lie down on cushions beside a grand piano on which quiet, ambient music is being played by a stranger. At some point the vibe shifts as an Afro-jazz fusion marching band approaches, its Mardi Gras sound first adding to the Eno-esque ambience, then overwhelming it, before fading out with the passing of the parade.
Did I actually come across musicians in alien masks performing an eerie folk song banjo and saw duet, or did I just imagine it?
Other performances are simultaneously more surreal and less easy to write off as hallucinations.
Stumbling through the darkness on Saturday night I hear sultry women singing lustily about cunnilingus, golden showers and menopause. As my eyes adjust, I make the group out: Three women wearing full-body vagina costumes who call themselves Menage Ah Twats. I offer one of the trio Buddhist beads from Taiwan before moving on. Two weeks later, and I am still in love with them.
The Greatest Shows on Earth
But musical ghosts, aliens, and bawdily vulvacious songstresses all vie for well-deserved second place on my most memorable OCF experience list, with top slot going to Three For Silver.
I’ve been to hundreds of shows, and seen dozens of verifiable musical legends perform. Frank Zappa, The Grateful Dead and King Crimson, just to scratch the surface. Like many aging hipsters seeking refuge in nostalgia, I catalogue concerts long passed, sharing mental top ten lists with fellow music snobs.
Three For Silver shows fill two of my ten slots.
The first time I encountered the band was last year, wandering dazedly along one of the trails, between twilight and midnight. I heard the music first. Screaming gypsy rhythms worthy of Gogol Bordello, bass proficiency on par with Les Claypool, Tony Levin or Jaco Pastorius … And the lyricists…a growling, fantasy team-up between Kim Gordon and Tom Waits.
Somewhere in there, an accordion, a flute.
The entire trail was blocked as wanderers were drawn to a stage about the size of a parking space. No one could get through, and nobody tried. The crowd just grew. Some danced. I stood transfixed, trying to determine how much of my awe-struckedness came from raw talent, and how much was a product of heavily enhanced biochemistry.
Days later, on my return to digital civilization, I sought out Three For Silver videos on youtube. It wasn’t biochemical.
Wandering into one of the greatest concerts of my life during an evening’s stroll at the Oregon Country Fair would forever cement Three For Silver as the most unique musical experience of my life.
Until this year’s festival, when I saw them perform naked.
Some final background exposition is probably in order:
Celebrating its 50th year as an OCF mainstay, the Ritz is an open-air communal shower and sauna facility with a small stage set up by a fire pit. It’s among the most unique performance venues on the planet, clothing optional for audience and band alike. Admittance to the Ritz is extra, making it the only performance venue at the festival not included in the general ticket price.
At $20, it’s worth every dime.
I’ve experienced few moments more beautiful than showering naked in the moonlight with hundreds of other festival attendees, all sharing the same magical smorgasbord. Doing so with one of the best live bands in the world performing fifteen feet away is nothing less than religious, a pagan ceremony most sacred.
I can’t name a single song the band played. But I know that I danced. Having stood transfixed in dazed amazement on the path at last year’s Three for Silver Show, this year I danced – but not, as the saying goes, as if no one was watching. I danced like everyone was naked. Because for the most part, they were. Including the band. Except the accordion player, for obvious safety reasons.
And when Three For Silver lurched into the encore, chanting What Happens Next, I took it as an existential query aimed straight in the face of events happening outside the fairgrounds, of fire and war, and ongoing cataclysm of biblical proportion. Still, I danced, danced in the company of hundreds of other good and kind people, all facing the same uncertain zeitgeist together.
When the band struck their final note, I felt reborn. I’d come to the Ritz a festival tourist, dusty and uncertain. I left a baptized believer, remaining in the afterglow for the next two days of fair time and onward through the long drive home under heavy skies.
The magic has yet to wear off. May it last until next year’s Oregon Country Fair.
~ JSB
To learn more about the Oregon Country Fair, check out their website.
