Written 2011
The flatness of the Midwest dominated travel across Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and the stunted panhandle of Pennsylvania. The great industrial cities of Gary, Toledo, Cleveland, and Erie were connected by I-90. Summer was at its height, as my good friend, AK, and I hitchhiked east from San Diego. We had experienced 117 degrees Fahrenheit heat in Needles, California. Wind devils had chased our trail across New Mexico. The sky across Nebraska had been the color of an over-boiled potato.
It was late-August 1974.
Every day seemed hotter than the previous one. Rides were hard to find. We were longhairs. Our last bath had been in Tulsa. The previous night we had slept in a cornfield off Route 66. I was so drunk from drinking moonshine with three Okie ex-cons f that I had crashed on the cold earth. My stained jeans looked like I had been picking cotton for weeks and a thin sheen of dust and diesel fumes lay on my face. Motorists slowed down to pick us up, then sped up upon seeing my scarecrow apparition. We were stuck on the wrong side of Buffalo with four hours left of daylight.
“Stand behind me or else we’ll never get a ride.” AK had saved a clean change of clothing for the last leg and washed his face at an Erie truck stop, while I slept in the back of a pick-up truck.
“We could always stop at Jackie’s place.” My ex-girlfriend lived in Buffalo. She had dropped me for a high school sweetheart. I hadn’t spoken with her for a half year.
“She’s probably back at school and I doubt her parents want two smelly hippies knocking on their door.” The New Yorker was only interested in getting to Boston. His girlfriend was waiting for him on the South Shore. He had a music teaching gig starting in a week.
“No, I doubt they would want that.” The Summer of Love had been over for years. Richard Nixon was president. The Silent Majority was in power. I stepped behind AK and stuck out my thumb.
Twenty minutes later a semi-trailer pulled over to the shoulder. The driver was deadheading to Gloucester after dropping a load of frozen fish in Gary, Indiana. He explained that he had been driving this route ten times a month for five years.
“I can drive it with my eyes closed.”
“Me too.”
I crawled into the back to sleep. AK played his Kalimba for the forty-one year-old trucker. He played a surreal LIGHT MY FIRE on the or African thumb piano and I didn’t wake until twenty miles west of Albany.
“Be in Beantown within two-three hours. Not Boston, but 128.” The driver drawled with a mouth filled with chaw. He spat out the wad and wiped the spittle with the back of his hand. The Kenworth hummed over the Berkshires at 75.
“Three hours.” I had graduated from college in May. My only job prospect was driving a cab. No banks wanted an economics major with a sin laude diploma. I had celebrated my twenty-seconnd birthday in Reno. A big winner at blackjack, until I had my first glass of bourbon. Now I had $20 in my wallet and three cans of beans. I pulled out a map of Northern New England. My eyes plotted out an alternative route to the Interstate. Everything became very clear.
The humid air blew through the open window. The temperature had dropped under 90. I tapped AK on the shoulder. We had been together most of the month.
“You mind if I get out at Troy?”
“No one gets out at Troy.” The driver regarded the lingering light of the day. The sun was fifty minutes shy of the western horizon. Darkness was no man’s friend in a crime-ridden city like Troy. "Albany is the asshole of the world and Troy is ten miles up its ass."
“I’m not staying in Troy. I’m heading into the mountains.” The higher altitude of US 2 over the Berkshires Mountains were cooler than that on I-90 an I intened to head north into Vermont after Williamstown.
“At this time of night?” AK had someplace to go. Someone was waiting for him. His girlfriend on 2 Shannon Road in Brighton. We had met there as neighbors a year ago.
“I’ll find someplace to sleep.” I had nowhere to go other than my parents’ house south of the Neponset River, but they would be just as happy to see me in five days as tonight. “Drop me at the Troy exit.”
“It’s your life.” The driver shook his head and AK paralleled the side to side movement.
“You sure about this?” AK was a good musician. His fingers magic on the keyboards. I iffered nothing to the world, but I wasn't feeling sorry for myself. I was still on the road.
“I’ll see you in a few days.” Our cross-country trip had its share of highs and a small percentage of lows. LSD on Black’s Beach. Lust-hungry lesbians in Big Sur. Driving across the Rockies. Beer at the Id Lounge in Roosevelt, Utah. Drinks with the Spear sisters in Tulsa. Losing $2000 in Reno. Bourbon and cards don’t mix even on your birthday.
The driver put on the radio. POPCORN, the summer's inescapeable hit. The Kenworth downshifted to the exit. I climbed down from the cab. The driver tooted his horn and AK waved from the passenger side. I walked off the highway and stuck out my thumb. No one stopped for me and I picked up my bag to hike the short distance to Route 4. A SS Chevelle stopped within three minutes. The long-haired driver was heading into Vermont.
We smoked weed and listened to the Allman Brothers LIVE AT THE FILMORE on his 8-track. He loved hearing about my orgy with the lesbians in Big Sur. The driver's name was Earl. I recounted a few more tales of the road without mentioning the menage a trois in LA with a straight man and his wife or a tryst with a trans-woman outside Monterrey. The passenger seat of his muscle car was not a confessional. The sun set adn the sky was getting late early, as summer came to an end.
“Sky’s looking funny.” Earl pointed west. The clouds darkened the dusk. “Looks like rain. You want to come north to Burlington.”
“No, I’ll jump out at Route 4.” This Vermont road led over the Green Mountains to Killington. “I’m not worried about a little rain.”
“Suit yourself.” Earl handed over two joints of Acapulco Gold at my departure spot. There was no light left in the west and the sky overhead was starless. A few drops of rain struck my face. A farmer stopped in a pick-up heading to Mendon. It wasn’t on my map. Within five minutes his windshield wipers were swishing back and forth at top speed. The rain was hard. The air cold.
“I’d invite you home, but my wife don’t like strangers. Sorry.”
The farmer dropped me atop the pass. The rain was torrential and lightning scorched the black night. No cars were out in this weather. A flash revealed a house in the woods. I ran for cover. The two-story house was dark. I shined my flashlight inside. I tried the door. It was locked from the inside.
Lightning struck the treetops. Sulphur filled my nose. I wrapped a towel around my fist and smashed the window pane of the door. I shouted out ‘hello’. The word died in the kitchen. No one had lived in this house for years. The smell of mildew was strong and the roof leaked slightly. The downstaris bedroom had a lumpy mattress on the floor. I spread my sleeping bag and then stripped off my clothes to shower outisde in the rain and within seconds washed most of the dirt off my body. I entered the house shivering and toweled myself dry adn clean.
I found several candles and lit them in the bedroom. I opened a can of beans with my Swiss Army knife. They tasted okay cold. Anything does to a hungry man. I smoked a little grass and pondered my universe. I was twenty-two years-old. My economics sine laude degree guaranteed no future. I was good-looking in a Neanderthal way. I inhaled a last puff of weed and slipped into my sleeping bag. The rain pounded the roof with a relentless rattle. The lightning shook the walls. I fell asleep several seconds after blowing out the candles. I was not scared of the dark and not even of tomorrow.
Something awoke me several hours later. The rain was less than before. I heard a noise. Loud and almost animal. A grunting timbered by a growl. I reached for my Swiss Army knife. A bear was in the house. I had left the door open. The beast had smelled my beans.
The growl grew louder from the hallway. The bestial slavering increased in rapidity almost as if the bear was hyperventilating on nitrous-oxide. My right hand tightened on the knife, as I escaped from the warm cocoon of the sleeping bag. A rabid snarl echoed from the hallway. The bear was not alone either. A smaller creature was at its mercy. A mewing deer. Murder was murder even in the animal kingdom and I encircled my left arm with a towel. Bears had claws. I breathed deeply three times and pulled open the door.
The flashlight revealed nothing in the hallway.
The snorting terror was two doors down beind an ajar door The runting fever pace accelerated in chorus with the alto panting. I pushed the door open and the flashlight beam fell on a naked couple in coitus. The young girl was a hippie. The man too. She looked like a runaway. The man my age. They saw me at the same time.
A man with a knife.
The girl screamed with her eyes closed.
“No, no, no, no.”
I dropped the knife on the floor and quickly explained how I thought they were two animals hunting me. I told them that I had pot. The man had a bottle of cheap wine. We sat up for an hour telling stories of the road. The young girl was atypical of the women traveling with communes. Long straight hair, skinny body, piercing gaze. She had seen her share of promises wandering across America for the two years. I figured her for nineteen. She said her name was Shane. Her tales traveled from Woodstock, Berkeley, Sedona, and Austin. The hippie road was her home. The man was from Kansas. Ray was heading for Maine to fish the Grand Banks. He had a bad left eye. A scar bisected his face. He was no hippie, only a long-hair.
“Never seen the ocean before, but I work hard.”
I wished them good-night and returned to my bedroom and braced the mattress against the door. The Manson Family had its imitators. I slept uneasily through the short hours until dawn. The sun came streaming through the pines and the air was fresh and clean. A good time of day to start on the road. I creeped down the hallway with my bag in hand.
“Is that you?” Shane’s timid voice called from the room off the hallway.
"Yes."
"Where you going?"
“Yes, I’m heading into the White Mountains.”
“Could you help me?”
“Help you how?” I pushed the door inward. Shane was lying on the floor naked. Ray was nowhere in sight.
“Ray took everything.” She wasn’t the type of girl to cry. Her body was too young to be sorry about a bad decision. This must have happened to her more than once before. Hippie girls were everyone’s victim. “You have something for me to wear?”
“Nothing that would fit.”
“Better than a birthday suit.”
I rummaged through my bag. She swam in my tee-shirt. My towel was her skirt. We shared a can of beans. She touched my hand as thanks.
“We better go. We don’t want the police to find us here.”
“You mind if I join you.” Shane pushed her blonde hair from her face. She knew where she was going and she knew where I was going too. The White Mountains were fine this time of year and $20 could last a week if we were careful of the bears.
They ate everything, but not us.
