“If you could go back in time would you kill Hitler?” I asked my friend Kevin.

“Nah, I’m not your guy,” Kevin answered. “If I could go back in time I’d go to Woodstock.”

Now, when my time-travel opportunity arrives I’m sure as hell not wasting it on Woodstock. And I won’t be attending the 50th anniversary either — unless I can return as a twenty year-old.

Looking back, it’s a miracle anyone showed up for the original Aquarian Exposition — so named for a shift in constellations responsible for a new era of peace and love (as it turned out, a wildly overblown expectation). There were no cell phones, no computers, no social media back then to spread the news. I only learned of the event when my college roommate Newt called me a couple days beforehand.

It had already been a hot, tense summer. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated in March. Campuses were a tinder box of anti-war protest and violence. College deferments were still in place, however taking a gap year back then likely earned you the privilege of studying abroad — in Southeast Asia. It’s no wonder a half million kids were ripe for three days of peace and music.

Newt and I planned to meet on Friday at a farmhouse on a high ridge overlooking Troy, New York, which housed an unlikely commune of engineering students from nearby Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The weathered house sat at the end of a three-mile long dirt utility road, beneath two immense radio towers.

The towers had been my sole navigational aid in getting me to our rendezvous spot. I wandered inside and found Newt in the kitchen talking to Steven, one of the RPI students from Newt’s hometown of Holyoke. Newt also introduced his friend Michelle, who would be joining us on our pilgrimage. The three of us headed south on the Thruway in my mother’s Chevy Malibu convertible — deemed only slightly less embarrassing than Newt’s parent’s station wagon, which we left at the farmhouse.

Newt rode shotgun, with Michelle in the back, hanging over the front seat.

“You guys, you guys,” she said, rapping Newt on the shoulder insistently with her knuckles. The familiarity of the gesture made me wonder if she and Newt were more than just friends.

“I peeked in the refrigerator and there was a box of sugar cubes in there.” She lowered her voice conspiratorially, “I think it was LSD.”

“Come on, Steven’s an engineer, for Christ’s sake,” Newt said, as if that explained everything.

“But why would they keep sugar in the refrigerator?” Michelle asked.

In my rearview mirror, her dark eyes sparkled so mischievously, I wondered if she had popped one of the sugar cubes for the ride.

What should have been a two hour drive stretched into six. Eventually we were barely moving, slowed by cars abandoned in the breakdown lanes, then clogging the highway itself. Hundreds of kids on foot streamed by us like third-world refugees, carrying their possessions in their arms. By the time we inched off the main road and found a place to park, it was midnight and teeming. We agreed to sleep in the car and worry about a plan in the morning.

Bedding down three people in a car with two bench seats is fraught with social awkwardness. I couldn’t cuddle up on one seat with either Newt or Michelle. And I didn’t want to force them together — in the event they really were just friends. So, I volunteered to sleep in the trunk. I removed the spare tire, propped the trunk lid partially open with the jack, lined the space with my sleeping bag and crawled in.

The mosquitoes, sharp angles, and an inexplicable hissing noise made sleeping impossible. At dawn I discovered and tossed out a punctured aerosol can of Foamy Lemon-Lime shaving cream (which, when you think about it is an odd thing to bring to Woodstock). When I emerged from the trunk, Newt and Michelle witnessed a ghost covered in desiccated shaving cream, imbedded with dead mosquitoes. The rain ticked insistently on the Chevy’s vinyl top as we sat inside discussing what to do next.

Somehow we surmised we were five miles from the festival. That may have been wishful thinking, given that none of us could pinpoint where we were on our roadmap. Driving any further was out of the question due to all the cars left helter-skelter on the roads. Newt and Michelle argued that we should walk the rest of the way. Embarrassingly, I admitted to worrying about my parent’s car getting towed, trashed, or stolen.

“Here we are, a five mile walk from what may be the countercultural event of our lives,” Newt said. “And you’re worried about a car?”

Newt and Michelle had the votes, but I had the car. So, just five miles from Woodstock we drove home.

As it turned out, Newt was right about one thing. Woodstock did become the defining countercultural moment for our generation. Officials put the attendance at Yasgur’s Farm at 400,000, while Joni Mitchell’s lyrics counted “half a million strong”. A hundred thousand “Children of God” unaccounted for is a lot. Newt, Michelle, and I were undoubtedly in that number.

It’s no wonder so many of us were stranded or lost along the way. Nearby thruway exits were closed, forcing us to navigate serpentine back roads. Adding to the confusion, the town of Woodstock had backed out just a month before the scheduled date, and the organizers hastily relocated the event forty-six miles away to a farm field in the hamlet of White Lake. It’s entirely possible we had erroneously followed thousands of others to the wrong town.

I never admitted it to anyone but as the legend of that weekend grew, so did my relief over having missed three days of rain, mud, no food or water, and overflowing portable toilets. I did however wrestle with where our near-miss placed us in history. It would be a lie to say we were at Woodstock. But in my mind we did go— we just never arrived.

The sixties’ cosmic haze of protest, pot, idealism and patchouli oil dissipated over the ensuing years as the Woodstock Generation built marriages, careers, and families. Twenty years passed, at which point the event felt ancient and abstract amidst our thicket of bills, work deadlines, and dirty diapers — until late one evening when I drove our Last Chance babysitter home.

“So, did the kids eat their dinners?” I asked.

My wife and I called her Last Chance because she wasn’t good with kids and she lived too far away. I especially dreaded driving her home, because she had either no desire, or ability to carry on a conversation.

“Yeah, I guess,” she said, snapping her gum.

“Did they go to bed with no trouble?”

She distractedly riffled the pages of a thick, dog-eared paperback in her lap.

“Did you get to read your book,” I tried.

“A little,” she said.

“What’s it about?” I asked.

Her head spun toward me so fast, I feared it might go full-circle, Linda Blair-like.

“Omigod, it’s unbelievable,” she said, her voice revving up to 78 rpm. “It’s about this rock concert, and this girl really, really wants to go, and her mother won’t let her, and she goes anyway, and there’s like drugs, and peace and free love…” She ran out of steam and gasped to a halt, staring at me wide-eyed for several uncomfortable seconds.

Reverently and hopefully, she asked, “Were you from — THEN?”

“Meaning?” I asked, buying time.

“I mean, did you go to Woodstock?”

I wheeled into the babysitter’s driveway, fished out my wallet, and overpaid her.

“Yeah, I went,” I said, hoping that would send her on her way.

“Omigod, what was it like,” she shrieked, now back to her 78 rpm voice. “Did it really have all the drugs, and rock and roll, and free love?”

I weighed my answer carefully, which only increased her impatience.

I recalled the sugar cubes that may or may not have been LSD…sleeping in the trunk…possibly being the only person to have brought shaving cream and a razor to Woodstock…the rain…the abandoned cars…and fighting our way to (perhaps) within five miles of the event.

“So, was it just like in the book?” she prodded.

“Yeah, it was pretty much like that,” I said.