It was never my intention to break my Mother’s heart or to make her cry. But I was sixteen, and my friend Roger and I wanted to take a vacation. It was cold and rainy in Eugene in late December, and rumor had it conditions were more temperate in Tuscon. I thought my cousin Tommy might be there; he was a hard guy to track down, having lived on the road for at least a couple years. Seeing him would have been a bonus to a pretty special vacation, but he had already moved on.
I had laid the groundwork with my Dad for months. He loved to regale us with stories of his time in the Navy during the Second World War … how he didn’t need a car, because a guy in uniform need only stick out his thumb, and people would go out of their way to get him to his destination. He made it sound fun, and I encouraged him to talk about it, to eke from him something approaching permission for me to follow his example. The note I left referenced his stories, and asked politely that he and Mom not report me as a runaway.
We had made arrangements for a ride as far as San Diego before we left, through a ride-sharing billboard notice at the Odyssey Coffee House in Eugene. All we had to do was buy a tank or two of gas, and make sure we could afford our own food.
It was a nice drive down the coast with six passengers arranged in a big station wagon. Somewhere north of San Francisco, I saw my first hillside that didn’t have trees on it, for any reason other than clear-cut logging. It confused me at first until they explained that there are hills all over the world that aren’t covered with trees. Eye opening! The drive was pretty uneventful, other than being pulled over and questioned with some suspicion in San Luis Obispo. Since Roger and I were minors, the officer checked our IDs against the five-state alert that is shared for runaways. We weren’t on it, so he had no reason to hold us.
As we dropped down into the Los Angeles basin I got my first look at serious industrial air pollution. We had smoke in Eugene every August, when grass-seed farmers burned their fields after harvest, but this was something different. From the hillside above, it looked like a huge toilet bowl, way overdue for a flush, with a diffuse reddish hue that seemed to permeate everything. As we descended into it, it irritated my throat to breath it. It took two hours to drive through Los Angeles. I had never conceived of a city that took as long to cross as it took to drive from Eugene to Portland.
It felt good to leave the L.A. basin.
When we got to San Diego, Roger and I found our way to Mission Beach. It was December 31, and as evening approached, we found a place to stash our backpacks, and walked up and down the boardwalk, inviting ourselves to parties. Strangely, most people let us join them without giving it a second thought. I tasted my first screwdriver, and saw two men kissing for the first time. They were wearing Navy white uniforms, and it was San Diego - but it was New Years Eve, so these may have just been costumes. Because nobody else in the room seemed to react to the kissing, it didn’t affect me either. I made a mental note, but nothing more. At the end of the evening, we found our way back to our backpacks, and slept in our sleeping bags beneath some shrubbery, just outside the fence of some kind of carnival.
The next morning, we headed out from San Diego, this time actually hitchhiking. On the way, I saw another marvel for the first time. The desert alongside Interstate 8 glittered in the sun. I don’t know if it was some kind of mineral crystal embedded in the rocks, or what, but it was spell-binding.
When we got to Tucson, we found our way to an area of coffee shops and other counter-culture hangouts along a main street called ‘Speedway’. We settled into one, and waited to acclimate and become part of the local crowd.
We met this guy on our second day; not another young person, but by an older guy. He seemed like a hippie-type guy, so we took to him pretty readily. He said his name was Johnny Christenson, but sometimes made reference to Julius Caesar, and occasionally Jesus Christ - anything with the initials 'JC". We thought it was pretty cool that this local guy had chosen to adopt us so readily. We hung out with him throughout the day. As evening came around, he asked us where we were staying, and when we said we didn’t know, he said he’d set us up with something. Turns out he was staying at the YMCA, and was happy to get us rooms. As it turns out, he got me a room, and invited my friend to stay in his room. It was starting to feel strange to me, and I suggested to Roger that we find another option, but Roger was less a skeptic than I was, and assumed everything was fine.
In the morning, Roger wanted to get the hell out of Dodge. We packed up and left, without saying goodbye to J.C., and headed out. Turns out, Roger had spent the first half of the night fending off this creep’s advances, and the rest of the night zipped up tight in his sleeping bag, not sleeping. It was a hard-won lesson about not being too trusting, and we were very happy to be on our way somewhere else. I don’t know if the term ‘chicken-hawk’ was used then, but this guy meets the description – looking for rootless young people, then taking advantage of them. It didn’t work out for him this time, but he no doubt went right back to it the next day, looking for his next victim.
We headed north from Tucson that morning, and got to Phoenix about mid-day. Our last ride was a woman who had a boy not much older than we were. She let us stay at her place – without any ulterior motives. It was a very nice difference from the day before.
When we left Phoenix, our first ride dropped us off in Sun City, a retirement community just north of there. The grocery store had as many golf carts in the parking spaces as cars – craziest damn thing I’d ever seen.
That day, we got as far as a town called Kingman, Arizona, then all traffic stopped. We learned a new lesson about Arizona that night … the place is not uniformly blazing hot, especially at night, and especially the first week of January. Kingman is in the mountains, and it got well below freezing. We were lucky to find an abandoned laundromat, so we would at least be sheltered from the not-insignificant wind. But the cement floor was hardly welcoming. It was as cold as it was hard. I had to change positions every few minutes, as the circulation was cut off, and the bloodless body part began to freeze. I can’t think of a time I have so looked forward to morning.
The next day, we only went as far as Bakersfield, where a girlfriend from junior high lived with her Dad, who had the distinction of being Buck Owens' private pilot. They put us up in comfortable beds, fed us a nice dinner and breakfast, and put a little money in our pockets for the rest of the trip … another kindness that a road-kid would never forget.
It took us a couple more days to get home. Roger was in a bit of trouble, but all I had to deal with was the guilt of knowing I had scared my mother half to death. I would continue to hitchhike around the country for another couple years (San Francisco that summer, Wisconsin the next year, right after graduating), but I never left without saying goodbye, and assuring my Mother that I loved her.
After we got back from Arizona, I learned that my cousin Tommy had left Tucson long before we went down. He found his way to Texas, where he would die a few months later, at the strangling hands of a jailer in Austin.
I guess when you’re sixteen or seventeen, you presume yourself ‘bullet-proof’, and really don’t grasp the very real fear that you cause for your parents, and those who love you. Among the many things that make me grateful every day, it is that my daughter has found much less hazardous ways of exploring. I still manage to be fearful – less for the adventures she pursues than for the idea that the universe may feel it owes me an unpleasant karmic payback.
