Hitchhike

Did I ever tell you about the time I hitchhiked across the country? It was in July of '69.  I was out in California studying Vietnamese at the Army's Defense Language Institute in Monterey. It was a nine month course and the whole place shut down for two weeks in July. You could hang around the barracks if you wanted, but most people went home.

You could fly pretty cheaply on standby, but I got the idea to hitchhike to my parent's home in Hull south of Boston. My classmates thought I was crazy and I asked them not to mention my plan to the authorities who would have frowned on my venture.

After class on Friday I picked up my army-brown laundry bag and a small cardboard sign that read "Boston." Drivers waved and smiled as they read my sign. I wanted to tell them I'd accept any ride no matter how short. Finally someone stopped and took me a few miles down the road.

It took a half dozen short rides to get up to the east side of San Francisco. These were hippie days and lots of hitchhiking was going on. I fell in with a couple of guys about my age and we shared a ride in a van. It was getting dark now and we were standing on a freeway on-ramp in the middle of nowhere. No one was going to pick up three yahoos in the dark.

One of my new friends pointed to a giant spruce tree in the distance and suggested we camp there. The branches of the tree reached the ground forming a perfect tent. I stretched out on the soft needles and went to sleep. I realized later that this was probably the most foolish thing I did on the whole trip.

I awoke the next morning with my throat unslit, but it looked like my bag had been gone through. Perhaps they were looking for something to eat. Back at the on ramp, I suggested we split up and walked further up the ramp and soon had a ride.

By early afternoon I was enjoying the beautiful Sierra Nevada Mountains skirting Lake Tahoe. I began to realize you had to see a place before its name had any meaning. Later, standing just west of Reno, an old farm truck picked me up. He was going to Austin. In this old thing? No Austin, Nevada, just down the way. He took me through downtown Reno, which struck me as a small town. I drove through there a couple of years ago. It's a gleaming metropolis now.

An old Idaho potato farmer picked me up in his plush Cadillac. He told me something I always remembered. If you've been driving your vehicle at high speed for a lengthy time like he was doing, you should let it idle a bit before shutting it off. Give the engine a chance to resume its original shape.

He dropped me off in the Nevada mountains by a crossroads bar. He bid me adieu and popped into the bar for a drink before heading north to Idaho. It was pitch dark by now and traffic was light. I began to look around for a spruce tree to climb under when a young woman pulled over. No, it's not what you think. Maxine was a high school teacher in Monterey of all places and said she stopped because I reminded her of one of her students. My youthful looks had paid off.

We had an enjoyable chat through the Utah night. Maxine said she liked to drive at night when it was cool and traffic was light. All I saw of Utah was some knobby eastern hills as the sun came up. Just into Wyoming, Maxine let me off. She was going to a motel off in the distance. She had told me she was a member of the Sierra Club and said I should join in on one of their hikes when I got back to Monterey. She gave me her number, but, fool that I am, I never followed up.

Traffic was light in Wyoming that morning. Maybe I'd be there in the evening when Maxine hit the road again. Then Denny pulled over in his big wagon. He was heading for Detroit. Alright! Could I help with the driving? Certainly. Denny had just moved his family to California and was driving back to Detroit to get another load of their stuff. He showed me the stack of postcards on the dash that his wife had made up. He was supposed to put one in the mail every day to let her know he was ok.

Maxine had been a listener. Denny was a talker. He told me he used to hitchhike a lot in his younger days. He said he had once accidentally ended up in Minnesota. It was winter and he could not catch a ride. He was so cold he pulled an old tractor tire out of the ditch and managed to set it on fire. Soon the police stopped by. They didn't arrest him, but they let him sleep in the jail and got him a bus ticket out of town the next day. I shivered on that hot July day listening to his yarn, little realizing that in a few years I'd be living in the land of ice cold winters.

I was behind the wheel out on the Nebraska prairies when the State Patrol pulled us over. Denny began blubbering that he had just picked me up and didn't know who I was, etc. Thanks for throwing me under the bus, Denny. The officer said he stopped us because I looked too young to be driving. Good grief! Once the officer checked my license and sent us on our way, Denny and I were buddies again.

We stopped at a café in a small town so Denny could fill his thermos. He loved his coffee. He asked the kid at the counter, "What do you folks do for fun around here. Go to the barbershop and watch people get haircuts? Haw haw haw!"
"I'm not with him," I told the kid.

Denny was providing cheap, long range transportation and I appreciated that. He gave me a piece of advice I've remembered. "When you're hitchhiking, don't let the person who picks you up know you have any money." We were somewhere in Iowa around one a.m. when Denny asked me to take over. He was soon asleep and I began to experience the effects of sleeplessness: hallucinations of multicolored small animals running across the road. I pulled over. I knew Denny wanted to keep going so I grabbed his thermos out of the back. Sipping on that got us across the Mississippi into Illinois.

When the coffee ran out, I pulled over. Denny woke up. "Hey, why are you stopping?" We changed places. I started to fall asleep, but not before I heard a strangled gasp. "You drank all the coffee!" I also remember Denny going into a restaurant for more coffee. I doubted he was in the mood to ask what they did for fun in these parts.

Denny dropped me off somewhere in Indiana, still a long way from Boston. I had been making notes on the back of my sign. I had gotten two long rides and a dozen short ones to get where I was. I could really use another long one. And sure enough, a guy going to Worcester, Mass. picked me up. He was a college professor who did not seem to require naps or sleep. He said he just needed someone to chat with to keep him going, and I did my best.

He dropped me off early in the morning by the entrance to the Mass. Pike, fifty miles west of Boston. I was picked up by an elderly banker who was going to work downtown. After he dropped me off, I hopped on the subway for the final few miles. On the subway train I met Vinnie Natale, our old next-door neighbor when we used to live in the city. I showed him my sign and told him about my adventure. He was gobsmacked.

Everyone was gobsmacked. I was a mini-celebrity, though I refused to take my story on the road.

The body craves home, the soul, the open road.