This headline greeted me on the Albuquerque Journal’s Web site yesterday: State’s fasted growing city? Cuba.

Ahh, another story about the Rainbow gathering, I told myself, referring to that annual event that where thousands of folks converge for a week to live in an intentional community.

Rainbow gatherings are unique events. Think the 1960s hippies crossed with political and social protesters who who want an alternative to 21st century American consumerism, capitalism and the mass media.

Cuba, the little town up a ways on U.S. Highway 550, is the host of the Rainbow gathering this year. This year’s gathering started Wednesday. But for the past few weeks, every other day or so, I’ve noticed small groups of people, some flashing signs with the letters “C-U-B-A” at motorists along U.S. 550.

I first heard about the Rainbow gathering in the 1980s when some enterprising reporter from the Philadelphia Inquirer, I think it was, wrote a long, whimsical piece in which he described the alternative culture that takes root at one of these annual revelries. The story brimmed with strange anecdotes and profiles of individuals who struck me as a foreign as Old Testament prophets or wild-eyed back-to-landers. I loved that story.

So it was in that context that I clicked on the Journal story yesterday.

And, lo and behold, the story wasn’t a profile on the Rainbow gathering. It was a Census story. Apparently the small mountain town has experienced an explosion of growth in recent years — explosion being a relative term.

Here’s an excerpt from the Journal story:

According to U.S. Census Bureau estimates released Wednesday, Cuba has experienced a veritable population boom during the past eight years. The town had 590 residents according to the 2000 census, but 2008 estimates put the population at 1,358. It was the fastest-growing city in the state during that time.

It was an interesting fact, and I dutifully read the small item. But I did with a sense of disappointment. I had hoped to read about the Rainbow gathering. About what it is that causes an individual, or small group of individuals, to trek across the country to an annual gathering, where they meet up with thousands of other similarly minded individuals. About what such a gathering of people smells like, or looks like, or sounds like.

But all I got was that census story.