EVAN KELLY IS BARE-CHESTED and barefoot. He looks at the trees through dark sunglasses, a Beachland ball cap unable to contain his graying shaggy 'do. He describes himself as a hippie. That's not wrong.

Kelly is also the manager of Nelson Ledges Quarry Park , a chunk of land on the edge of the rural radio static zone between Cleveland and Youngstown . The summer landscape is tinted with rural clutter — an old car here, a trailer there, the hand-painted signs for firewood, bait and tomatoes. But the dominant force in the neighborhood remains the hills and trees, the tiny cemeteries and the fields of rising corn.

He tours the place on a golf cart, pointing out trees and beehives. It's not quite sleepy on a Wednesday afternoon. A few dozen people are there to swim. Lifeguards are on duty. A steady pace of guys looking for shovels and girls tending organic gardens keeps a functional rhythm.

To say “abuzz with activity” would be exaggerating.

The park evolved from gravel pit to hippie swimming hole, home to squatters, and eventually a campground — albeit one with a rough reputation for loud parties, bikers and occasional gunfire. There's a decades-old rumor on a nearby college campus that someone once kept a caged monkey on the grounds, occasionally feeding it LSD. There's the fact that Kelly keeps an AK-47 and ammo clips behind the door of his cluttered office. He says the gun helps him deal with geese, which would settle in and befoul the water with shit if he didn't scare them off.

It was on the July 4th weekend 11 years ago that two 19-year-old men, Gabriel Oates of Cleveland and Gary Gibson of Mentor , drowned in the quarry. Another was injured in a fireworks accident on the grounds. The same weekend saw 27 arrests on fireworks, drug and public intoxication charges there. The Akron Beacon Journal reported that the crowd set a car on fire, and people threw firecrackers and beer cans at Portage County Sheriff's deputies.

“Every holiday weekend it's the same thing,” an unidentified deputy told the paper at the time. “That place just gets out of control.” Later that year the park would be closed by court order while the management tried to rectify health code violations.

But these days public officials agree that Kelly and his wife, Kristina, have the campground on the road to recovery. They've cleaned up, enforced some rules and developed a working relationship with the Portage County Health Department and sheriff.

On weekends, the Ledges is still jam-band central, with a couple thousand people grooving on the kind vibe. An avenue of tie-dyed vendors will help you stock your hippie kit. Ekoostic Hookah plays every year. The Dead's Mickey Hart has played the Nelson Rhythm Fest, and jamgrass masters David Grisman and Sam Bush have both done shows. This weekend, the place celebrates independence with jam circuit regulars, the Dark Star Orchestr, headlining the four-day Grateful Fest. Half a dozen such festivals each summer bring out the kids in whirling skirts and dreads.

Evan and his family have owned the park since 1996, when he sold his parents on a dream: they'd help him buy the land, and he'd take a place with a decades-old reputation as a no-holds-barred party mecca and turn it into a family campground with music festivals on the weekends. For decades the place provoked the neighbors and the Portage County Sheriff's Department, and Kelly says they're still trying to shed that reputation — if not still the reality.

So he persuaded his mom and stepdad, Joretta and Glenn Frohring, to mortgage the house they had owned outright for years. He got a few dozen grand from an uncle and grandfather, and cashed in all his savings bonds. And they swapped $360,000 for 110 acres of Ohio's finest land — rolling hills covered with oaks and maples, towering over quartz pebble cliffs, all surrounding a spring-fed quarry. Now Kelly has become a family man himself. He and Kristina have two daughters.

“All the old hippies,” he says, “have kids.”

Their 2-year-old daughter, Alia, runs barefoot across the sand and gravel, chasing kittens named Caterpillar, Michael and Tooth. Jessica, now 9, is afflicted with a debilitating neurological disorder called Rett's Syndrome, and attends Happy Days School . She can't talk, but she laughs. What does Jessica know? Her mom doesn't miss a beat.

“She knows everything.”

The Kellys live in a cinderblock building near the entrance to the park. They keep organic herb, vegetable and flower gardens, and half a dozen beehives. Developers occasionally offer to buy the place, but Evan turns them away. He wants to preserve the landscape. It's his big piece of the American dream.

As he talks about it, Kelly drives into all the corners of what's now a 260-acre property. Back in the woods we pass an old garbage can with a well-worn pot leaf painted on it. He pushes the nearly silent golf cart like it's a four-wheeler, pounding the fat tires over deep trenches carved by the runoff of spring rain. Maybe we'll tip.

SEATED AT HIS DESK in Ravenna , DuWayne Porter cracks a smile. “Why is that place so interesting?”

Campgrounds get their licenses and permits from county health departments, and Porter is Director of Environmental Health for Portage County . He's been on the job 19 years and can talk from experience about the Nelson legend.

“During the day it was a nice place to go swimming, but at night it became pretty rowdy. They had one party where they surrounded the police car and were rocking it back and forth.”

He pulls out a phone-book-sized file that details a history of health violations, from unsafe water to over-occupancy. From the first time the park was licensed as a campground, it was supposed to have no more than 25 campsites. Not that anyone ever paid any attention to that rule. The health department reports aren't the stuff of party legend; they're about the logistics of waste disposal and crowd control. On file are letters from Nelson trustees looking for help with the hazards.

Neighbors don't want to say anything bad about the place, but they knew there had been some beer. Wells says there was a time when EMS and firefighters wouldn't go past the gate without a sheriff's escort.

Don Harris, who has served on nearby Garrettsville's all-volunteer fire department for 30 years and is now chief, confirms the rumor. He says it wasn't a reaction to a specific event so much as the general conditions during the '80s.

“It's just the way the crowds were at the time.”

Prior to the drownings in '93, he says there were three or four others. People swim into submerged caves in the walls of the quarry and can't find their way out. Whenever someone falls or drowns, he says, they're from Warren or Cleveland. He didn't respond to the later drownings, but he heard from other firefighters about the burning car. And he knows there were other fires that never got municipal attention.

“At one point they had an A-frame house up front. It burned down one night, and nobody called us. Nobody was home at the house, and I guess the neighbors didn't care. The owner came home the next day and called us asking what happened. ‘Fire?' we said. ‘We don't know anything about a fire.'”

BUT NO ONE CAN TELL THE PARTY STORIES like Evan. His relationship with the Ledges began in the early '80s, when he was a high school student in Newbury, and he'd go there to drink beer with friends.

“I was one of the biggest partyers out here, and now I'm enforcing the rules.”

Kelly was hired as a lifeguard in 1983 and worked there summers while he attended Hiram College and eventually Kent State University . He pursued an education degree but never graduated. He laughs when asked about the monkey-on-acid story, and it's as if he's run into an old friend who has changed through the years.

“That's funny, because I'm, like, the only person who could have told that story, and I never told anyone. This is what happened. There was a lady who lived up the road and had a petting zoo with lots of animals, including a monkey. The guys who worked at the Ledges then — this was probably about 1978 — were old hippies, and I guess acid was like weekend activity back then. So they had black lights and fluorescent posters and the whole thing. One time they kidnapped the monkey. And so they're hanging out tripping one day, and somebody decides to paint the monkey with fluorescent paint. So they get the monkey out of the cage, and that's what they do. Well, the monkey gets pissed and jumps up on the one guy's chest screaming, and everybody's freaking out. They finally got him back in the cage and returned it. It was a practical joke. That's what happened.”

Does Evan believe this story to be true, or is it just part of the wild Nelson Ledges apocrypha?

“It's absolutely true,” he affirms.

The golf cart slips quietly through the trees on rutted roads, dodging puddles that look innocent enough, but which Kelly says are three feet deep.

“The place was going hell's bells in the late '80s. The back lot was a four-wheel-drive truck bog. These were monster trucks with these big knobby tires. They'd get in there and floor it, Waaaauwww, Waaauwww , and just tear up the dirt, with mud flying everywhere, and they'd churn these deep pits. We call that one the Lake of Justice , because people who aren't supposed to be driving back here get stuck in it.”

We drive around the puddle.

“One time four guys with trucks tied their bumpers to the old pavilion and pulled it into the bonfire. People danced around it all night. The owner was never around. The manager knew what was going on, but he didn't care. He walked out of the office, saw the trucks and the fire, and walked back inside. What was he going to do?”

The picture becomes increasingly clear as we drive. This was rural Ohio , and all the fun was homegrown. Streaking? Why not? It was the kind of place where, if you've got an M-100, you might as well light it. And if you've got enough of them, you might as well do it all night long. Or if you've got a gun, you might as well shoot it. And if you've got a buddy who's a welder, and he's got an acetylene tank, you might as well fill up one of those big black plastic garbage bags with the gas, tie it with a wick, light it, and let it go up in the air to make a big flash.

Whoooooom!

“This was the country back then,” Evan says. “There was nothing else out here, so nobody gave a shit. It was like Escape From New York, with mobs of people cheering for whatever happened. It wasn't bad people. They weren't shooting each other. They were having a good time. But as far as the danger factor, was it probably about a 9.5? You're damned right.”

“I think a lot of people were like me. They stood back and watched and said, ‘now this is a hell of a good time.' But it was a train looking for a wreck, and it inevitably went down. In fact, I'm surprised more people didn't die.”

Evan met Kristina when she was in college and came to see his band du jour, Sapien, in Rochester . He had played with a string of forgotten Cleveland bands through the '80s — the Mirror Image Band and Just Desserts among them — and headed for the Empire state to take a crack at the scene there. It was your typical dude-meets-chick, chick-digs-band kind of story. And they discovered that they had something in common: even though she grew up in Batavia , New York , she had been to Nelson Ledges.

When music in Rochester didn't pan out, Kelly came back to Ohio . He called his old boss looking for work, and got a job managing the land of his youth. The drownings had just gone down. The Portage County Prosecutor's office had persuaded the judge to shut the place down for two weeks. Meanwhile, Kristina called from New York . She was following the Dead and needed a place to stay. The Ledges was it.

When he became manager, Evan says he started to enforce rules and kick out the most outlandish offenders, especially people using harder drugs. There was Oxycontin, morphine pills and heroin. He says they mostly kept the police out of it, and let the people know they were getting off easy. But some folks just didn't want to leave. When a piece of land acquires a loyal congregation of pilgrims, and you want to preserve the happy part of the zeitgeist, what can you do?

Life was good for Evan. Just married, he and Kristina had a baby daughter. They were living in the cinderblock building with a kerosene heater and a five-gallon bucket for a toilet, but it was in the middle of an idyllic setting that made the future look very bright indeed. Mormile ran into financial trouble in 1995, though, and for the first time in 20 years, the place was sold. Partners Gary Harris and Douglas Carpa formed a company called Concore Holding Trust, and envisioned a different kind of party, a more urban scene with all-night raves. Their vision didn't mesh with Evan's. The man who had been told he could be manager for life was unceremoniously fired.

But Concore's ownership would be short-lived. Facing financial problems of their own, they were susceptible to Evan's interest in the property and his mother's persuasive skills. He saw the chance of a lifetime. She and the rest of his family took it with him. Mom's business acumen keeps the books straight and gets the bills paid. She's 70 years old.

Even the transfer of the property has become the stuff of Nelson legend. Some kids once told Evan they heard he won the park in a card game with some bikers.

“Yeah, that's it,” he said. “Now that's what I tell people all the time.

Once the family names were on the bottom line, the drive to bring the place in line became more urgent. So Evan learned about town politics. He met with the health inspector and the sheriff. He worked to make peace with the Nelson trustees. They cleaned up litter, satisfied EPA water and sewer regulations, and built a crew of handymen, lifeguards and friends.

They continued fighting history with rules enforcement. Kicking out the obviously intoxicated became routine. They confiscated beer from the under-aged. And the crowds were not happy. One angry guest fired a shotgun into the house as they drove out the driveway, missing Kristina by about four feet and threatening to come back for more. Another tossed an M-100 with a lit cigarette stuck on the wick. Seconds later, the kitchen window was in pieces.

But again, that was a long time ago. Passing years and what Evan calls “better show skills” slowly tamed the craziness. He experimented with country and blues festivals, but found that nothing brought the crowds like jam bands. Perhaps the hippies just like to camp.

Evan tries to make the shows fun by building the spectacle. Grateful Fest this weekend will come with a professional fireworks display, launched over the water. Once in a while he has skydivers descend on the crowd, landing on the beach. During intermissions and after some shows, local stunt man Burning Ted Batchelor sets himself on fire. An accomplice stands back with a super-soaker full of fuel, keeping the flames high while Batchelor walks and dances on the island in the middle of the quarry. He burns for over two minutes. The crowds go crazy with the pyro affinity that lurks within so many rockers, but they get nervous as the seconds tick slowly. Sometime this summer Batchelor plans to go for a world record.

Fire chief Harris checks the place out to grant a permit for the fireworks, but says no permit is required to set yourself on fire.

“I checked with the state fire marshal,” he says.

Harris says the fire and EMS workers will enter the park without black-and-white support these days, and that he has a good relationship with the current ownership.

Health Director Porter says the same. His office granted Kelly a license for 180 camp sites — more than five times the previous limit. And for special events he'll give temporary permission for more. A man who helped shut the place down a decade ago says the turnaround is significant. “We haven't had anything like that since the new owner took over. We haven't always seen eye-to-eye, but they want the place to be safe, and they've done a good job bringing it into compliance.

Nelson Ledges was on the smooth road last year when news broke that Insane Clown Posse would play there during its three-day Gathering of the Juggalos. The word spread like wildfire in the conservative township. The neighbors downloaded music with bitch-fuckin', Eminem-stompin' lyrics and worked themselves into a terrified frenzy at meetings of the Nelson Township trustees. Evan reports that one man stood on the podium and pointed as he shouted, “ICP will play here over my dead body!”

“I think he's still alive,” Evan said.

“Who was that?” Kristina asks. She was home watching the kids.

“That was Bill.”

But the health and fire departments eagerly credit ICP management skills, and the event went off without a hitch. The sheriff's department would add extra officers and send Psychopathic Records a bill for the overtime.

“We asked them to build an access road so that ambulances could get back into the camping areas in case someone got hurt,” Porter says. “They built a road.”

As Bernice Wells recalls, “They came and there was all kinds of extra police, but they didn't have any trouble. I kind of enjoyed it, watching all the kids with the black clothes and purple hair, all their faces painted red and black the way they do.”

Locals report that all the area the hotels were filled, the kids went to town and spent money, and apparently they were all polite. When it was all over, merchants and trustees saw revenue. And so the juggalos will come back this year, but with a friendlier reception. Security will still be high, but Garrettsville councilor Terri Eirmann has proposed arranging transportation to help bring them into town. Mayor Craig Moser gave the idea the green light for further discussion.

So the Kellys spend their days, cultivating rows of zinnias, planning hospitality for bands, and working hard to keep authorities and the neighborhood happy.

“This place gave me some of the best times of my life,” Evan says. “And I just want to keep it going. Especially the shows. Lots of smiles and lots of happiness. It almost makes me teary right now to see kids dancing with streamers and hula hoops, little kids with their moms and dads. We want this place to be a family campground.”