A story from the 1980s

This is a true story.

I was attending my first gatherings back in the early 1980s and in a discussion with some others I wondered what kind of instruments one would play to get the fairies to attend... We soon decided that flutes, drums, and bells might work. Afterward I went back to a small mountain village where I was selling geodes to the tourists. Several weeks went by when I can called into the local road house by a phone call. The person had gotten a group together to perform the ceremony to invite the fairly. I was not in the mood then as I was running a fever, but they needed me to be there, so I got into my VW bug and drove into Santa Fe New Mexico and met up with the and we drove up into the mountains.

Being in middle September, most of the summer crowd was gone, so there was just a few camping people when our seven or eight cars drove in and parked. We got out the flutes drums ad bells a few gallons of water and back packs full of other stuff. So lining up we began to troop up the mountain the fading twilight banging on the drums, playing the flutes, and ringing the various bells. We had no idea where this ceremony was going to take place and we kept going still we found a place with not to great of a tilt, then cleared off the pine needles and set up a small ring of stones for a small fire. We didn't want to start a wild fire so we cleared the needles for quite distance leaving them in piles to re-scatter afterward.

As I mentioned I was in the midst of a fever so I did not take a main part, I was just there and sort of faded into and out the ceremony. We did our ceremony then did a bit of wine and sacks. Afterward we put out the little fire, used four gallons of water to drown out the embers. Once that was done we re-scattered the pine needles.

Lining up again but with flashlights, we started trooping back dow the mountain. Just outside of our ceremony site we passed a young couple that had followed us an spied on our little ceremony. They seems a bit startled at being discovered, but we just smiled at them as we trouped down the mountain beating our drums, tootling our flutes, and ringing our bells as we wound our way through the trees back to the parking lot and camp ground.

I don't know if we did raise any local fairies but we certainly acted like the fey. That group of guys later formed the Jackalope Coven after that mythical southwestern animal that looks like a jack rabbit but with antelope horns. That was thirty years ago. I have no idea how long that coven lasted.