Nara Narayan: Here it is the moment of truth actually. You see, we’re pulling the Rathayatra cars out into the street more or less in front of the temple on 518 Frederick Street. I’m in the middle of all of this because I figured if anyone’s going to get squashed, I’m the designer and architect, I should be the one to get squashed. When we had finally built them and realized how massive they were, we were scared stiff as to what would happen when we took them off the blocks and started rolling them down the hill. We thought they would continue to roll and go right through the temple door and out the back and down into the Bay. I might add, it had no brakes whatsoever and, therefore, if it had gotten away, it would have gotten away. What we did with the paint was we used natural earth pigments. I took deep tone latex base and mixed the pigments with water and had it shaken up at the paint place. So what we did was we used the same pigmentation that they use in Jagannatha Puri. You see how many men it was required to brake the Rathayatra car. All of this was designed and built custom within a matter of a few weeks. I think we had about six or eight weeks in which we built everything from scratch, and we were able to acquire lumber. We spent very little cash for lumber. Most of it was acquired from donation and wood that was left inadvertently lying around.
The tops were designed so that the whole Rathayatra car could slip under a 15-foot-high overpass. So the entire part came down. We had it all designed the year before, we just took a pole and lowered it down, but that cart was only 35 feet tall. These were over 60 feet tall. So we just were building it, we didn’t think. Then Srila Prabhupada was in Los Angeles, he happened to talk to Tamal and said, “And how is the lowering mechanism going to be designed?” Tamal said, “Oh, Nara Narayan is working on that. He knows all about it. He’s a genius engineer, he can do it.” So Srila Prabhupada said to Tamal, “So who is checking on Nara Narayan?” Tamal said, “Oh, you don’t have to check on Nara Narayan, he knows what he’s doing.” And Prabhupada said, “Why not ask?” So Tamal phoned up, he said, “Ha, ha, ha, I hate to ask you this, I mean, it’s so silly, but how are you doing the mechanism, how is it raising up?” We said, “Well, we’re just…we’re…uh…” We hadn’t thought of how to do it. So Locan, myself, Madhudvisa and Jayananda, we all sat there for four days without sleeping, day and night, not able to figure out how to raise the top. Finally, somehow or other it came to me how to make this telescoping tube that could be raised up in increments, which is sort of the model that’s been used ever since except it’s been made much more sophisticated since then, much better design. Then Prabhupada said sternly, “No one should ever be in charge completely of something, there should be committee to make sure.” Because Prabhupada, if anyone, had tremendous confidence in what I could do and Tamal had complete confidence in what I could do, and yet I had made the biggest blunder that could have destroyed the whole festival if we had not stopped and worked that out.
Oh, these are the horses. This is interesting. My father made the horses. My father was a dramatic Holocaust survivor. His heart had flames coming out of it from the Holocaust in the Warsaw Ghetto. And so he built these horses. He painted them with fire and with smoke – they looked as though they were smoldering – and he put them on the front of the Rathayatra cars, which was quite a contribution, four for each Rathayatra car. I wanted to engage him, so I asked him to do it. But when I saw the horses, I was absolutely horrified. They looked like horses of the apocalypse coming out of hell. So my father was very proud of them, they were rather dramatic horses. My parents, I should say, were separated for 40 years. So my mother was also at the Rathayatra Festival, and my mother and father hadn’t seen each other for maybe five years. My mother walks up and said, “Who has made these horses?” She recoils in horror seeing these smoldering, burned, crazed horses with wild rolling eyes. “Who has made these horses?” I look at her and say, “Uh, my dad made them.” She said, “Well, this will never do!” So she went and grabbed buckets of paint and painted them all up with a nice merry-go-round design, caparisoned and white and clean and healthy-looking horses. And they looked at these horses together and they sort of felt, “Yes, this is what we’ve done to honor our son’s choice,” and I could see that they both felt great satisfaction. From my perspective as a budding transcendentalist, two years in the movement, I thought, “This is their devotional service. This is the moment that was created for them by Lord Krishna to accomplish something in their lives and to give my brother and myself permission to go forward with the power of the pitris behind us.”
Things started out well, but they quickly got worse. One of the carts had a certified weld that cracked, and Balarama’s car was out of commission. The newspapers wrote an articled called “Harried Krishna.” That was just after we were attacked by the Black Panthers. So they had all these Black Panthers all in afros, black T-shirts and black pants and they attacked with some martial arts. So Brahmananda and others were fighting them. We had poles to keep people from getting crushed under the Rathayatra cars, very beautifully decorated poles. So we used these poles to fend them off. My father was dressed like an Old Testament prophet of old with his white beard, and he stood there and he had a staff and he was crashing it onto the ground crying, “Tolerance! Tolerance! Tolerance!” We marched literally seven miles to the sea. At one point, there were cars parked on either side. I cried out, “Move the cars!” and 25 people would grab each car and just send it skittering. Subhadra’s cart had an interesting miracle attached to it as well. What happened is we came along and Shyamasundara had used a piece of malleable iron as the axle for Subhadra’s cart, and it had started to get worn through after two years of Rathayatras, which we weren’t aware of. So we warned everyone not to ride on Subhadra’s cart because we were worried about it not being strong, but guess what? People got on anyhow and the wheel bent almost horizontal. We thought, “Oh, no, we’ve lost Balarama’s cart, now we’ve lost Subhadra’s cart. What on earth are we going to do?” So it suddenly occurred to me and I said, “Wait a minute, I want 50 people to lift Subhadra’s cart,” and 50 people rushed forward and lifted Subhadra’s cart. “And I want another 50 people to grab the wheel and bend it down again,” and they did. They came and they took the wheel and that piece of iron that was two-and-a-half inches thick, they just bent it back again so the wheel was perfectly vertical.” Then I said, “Now I want another 50 people to guard it so nobody gets on,” and nobody got on.
We marched literally seven miles to the sea. Nobody thought of complaining or why don’t we have buses to take us or something. People marched seven miles to the sea; and when they got there at the Family Dog Auditorium, which was run by Chet Helms who did all the Janis Joplin and Grateful Dead concerts and Moby Grape and Quicksilver and all that…there are those horses again…he let us use that place, and there were 10,000 people waiting at the beach who hadn’t wanted to go through the ordeal of marching.
