The summer solstice celebration has never really caught on throughout most of the U.S. But there is one great event that has made the summer solstice one of my two favorite holidays.
I speak, of course, of the Fremont Summer Solstice Parade. Fremont is the counter-culture district of Seattle, traditionally the home of hippies, although in recent years a few high tech companies have settled there.
Where else in America would you find a huge troll lurking beneath their bridge, grasping a full size real Volkswagon Beetle, as if it had been plucked from the overpass above? Where else would you find a huge statue of Lenin, liberated from Russia and erected in the park? Where else would you find life-size sculptures of people standing at a bus stop, which the locals have fun dressing and re-dressing year round? Fremont is sort of San Francisco Haight-Ashbury North - and it is no accident that the Volkswagon has California license plates.
Anyway, each year there is a big parade to celebrate the summer solstice. It is exactly what you would expect of the community. No signs with words allowed. No motorized vehicles (except wheelchairs for the disabled). And very distinctly counter culture in values. The floats and costumes are commonly either environmental (save the whales, hug the trees) and pagan (sun, moon, forest, plant) and celebrating fertility, which is what the summer solstice is all about.
The unique thing about the parade, other than its down-home, non-commercial character, is the tradition of the naked riders. The parade is led by hundreds of people on bikes, most wearing nothing but body paint or nothing at all. In recent years, the cyclists have been joined by people on roller blades, skate boards, or even just walking, also wearing nothing but paint or nothing at all.
Complete nudity is illegal within the city limits of Seattle, and the city early on tried to stop this, but over the years, the number of painted participants has increased. What are they going to do? Chase them in their police cars? Handcuff them in front of the thousands of people lining the streets? In a community that is decidedly anti-authoritarian anyway? Not likely. So now, city police ride bicycles in the parade, just to keep people safe and help with traffic control.
There are entries on Wikipedia for the parade
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solstice_Cyclists and for the community itself
http://seattle.wikia.com/wiki/Fremontand thousands of photos of the parade on the Web
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/solsticeparade/clusters/fremont-seattle-parade/I'm not going to post pictures here, and I would recommend that, if you are politically conservative, religiously fundamentalist, or disturbed by nudity, just pass this by entirely, since it will only make your blood boil.
For all the rest of us --- Celebrate the Solstice!
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