Driving across country in the 70s was a rite of passage for hippie late-comers. Boston – Frisco could be driven in less than 50 hours, but a week on the backroads felt more like Kerouac’s ON THE ROAD. In 1974 my good friend Andy, a flaxen blonde coed from Harvard and I motored west in a drive-away car. A Station wagon. Its destination – Lodi outside of Sacremento.
The fifth day we crossed the Colorado border into Utah. US Route 191. Night fell fast on the high plains. Darkness erased the desert scenery. Two-lanes of black asphalt straightlined into Roosevelt, Utah. A speck on the map,except I spotted the lights of a bar. THE ID LOUNGE. I insisted on having a beer there.
“I don’t think it’s a good idea.” Andy was a pot smoker. The coed agreed with him. She wanted to make time.
“I’m thirsty and we owe Freud the honor of drinking in his name.” I swerved off the road into the scrabble dirt parking lot. Mostly pick-ups. The clientele was a mix of farmers and cowboys. The jukebox was playing Merle Haggard. MAMA TRIED. I ordered a beers. Olympias. I sang along with Merle. Andy shook his head. he hated the way i tried to meld into the crowd like I came from nowhere.
Two men sat at the nearest table. A goat-roper and a sodbuster. They challenged each other to an arm-wrestling contest. The prize was the next round. The cowboy lost, but said, “I might have lost that contest, but I could kick your ass in the alley out back.”
The farmer retorted with a sucker punch to the cowboys skull. A general melee ensued between the two camps. The coed fled the bar well before Andy and I figured that these people probably knew each other from childhood and if they didn’t have any trouble fighting each other then they would even be more freehanded when it came to stomping hippie strangers.
Leaving Roosevelt Utah for the first and last time of my life the coed said, “Smart move.”
“None of us got hurt.”
I could say that then because back in 1974 most bar fight were with fists.
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