Craig Mains: Hitchhiking Journals 1973

One Giant Cushion
by Craig Mains

Following my hitchhiking adventure to Seattle earlier in the year I had decided that I wanted to spend the summer on the road. The Seattle trip had convinced me that it was possible to see the country without spending a lot of money, which I didn't have. I was determined to satiate my wanderlust, at least temporarily.

I told my on-and-off-girlfriend-at-the-time, Vickie, of my plans and she told me she was coming too. I had mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, it would be nice to have some female companionship. However, it also, I felt, imposed a lot more responsibility on me since I'd be accountable for her safety. It was one thing to engage in risky behavior on my own but something altogether different to involve someone else in it—at least that was my reasoning.

The whole thing was complicated further by Vickie's father who was horrified by the idea of his darling daughter hitchhiking around the continent—especially with me. I had visited Vickie at her family home in Charleston the previous summer. Her father, although he was an unflaggingly polite host during the entire three-day visit, through subtle but pointed comments, let me know that he didn't think too highly of me. I was too scruffy and didn't have acceptable career ambitions. To be honest, at the time, I had no career ambitions, so I could sort of see his point.

Besides the parental issue, I was expecting that I'd be camping out almost every night and I wasn't sure Vickie was up for that. Her family went on an annual vacation to the beach in South Carolina and they always stayed in a hotel. I wasn't sure how well she'd adapt to sleeping outside. Also, although we'd been seeing each other for more than a year, we'd never been together 24 hours a day for any extended length of time. Would we drive each other crazy after a few days?

In the end Vickie convinced both her father and me that she was coming. She could be persuasive and persistent. At the time she was living in an old house on Fifth Street by the glass factory with her roommates Chris and Betty. I stayed there with them for a week while we waited for some sleeping bags we ordered to arrive.

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• Introduction
• June
• July
• August
• September

We left on June 6th, heading east towards Shenandoah National Park. At the time the road that eventually became I-68 was still under construction. There were still long stretches of old US 40 that were two lanes. Somewhere not far outside of Morgantown we got a ride with a guy we both knew named Orm. He was a big guy who looked like a Viking—light-haired with a bushy beard. He took us as far as Cumberland and invited us to his brother's house for lunch. His brother, Tom, looked just like him. I realized I'd already met Tom and his wife once at a party in Morgantown. Tom and Orm had both been Hells Angels in California, although they were both such jovial guys, I had a hard time imagining either of them ever smashing people's heads.

Tom was home because he and the other workers at the Kelly Springfield tire factory were on strike. After lunch, as Orm was riding us back out to the highway we heard a huge explosion and saw a cloud of smoke. Orm told us it was at the tire factory and had to be strike-related.

Vickie and I made it as far as Big Pool, MD that day. It started raining around the time we started to look for a place to spend the night. We were traveling without a tent. We each had a rain poncho and a big sheet of plastic and some cords. We found an old school that appeared to be abandoned. We decided to spend the night in its recessed entryway rather than try to set up a makeshift shelter in the rain. Vickie cried a little.

June 7th
We got rides to Hagerstown and then headed south on I-81, getting off on US 522 at Winchester, VA to head towards Shenandoah National Park. We stopped around Matthews Arms for the night, found a nice place in the woods, and set the tarp up. During the night there was a rain shower. We mostly stayed dry but we discussed getting a tent. I wasn't sure if we had enough money to get one if we were going to try to travel for most of the summer.

June 8th
We got rides a little further south in the park and hiked a few miles along a trail near Elkwallow. We found a shelter and decided to spend the night there rather than hassle with setting up the tarp. The shelter had 15 or 20 bunks but we were the only ones there—at least until early evening when a troop of noisy Boy Scouts arrived. We could hear them coming for 15 minutes before they came into sight. They set about putting up their tents and making dinner.

Up until the early evening we still had the shelter to ourselves—all the Boy Scouts, who looked to be mostly about 12 or 13 years old—were tenting. But there was another evening shower and a bunch of the Scouts abandoned their tents and migrated into the shelter until it was full. Later, after everyone had mostly settled down for the night, Vickie sprang from her sleeping bag. She was convinced there was a mouse in it. I was shaking it out for her when some of the Scouts came over to offer assistance. Vickie was standing there in panties and a T-shirt that didn't cover much. Before long all the Scouts were there to help with their flashlights, some of which, I noticed, were pointed at Vickie's bottom. I suspect that it might have been the high point of the hiking trip for some of them. Vickie, upset by the mouse, was temporarily oblivious that she was surrounded by a pack of admirers.

The Scout Master, who I heard the Scouts refer to as either Dr. Wisden or Dr. Wisdom, told us that, if we wanted, we could spend the night in the tent his son had abandoned after the rain shower. I got the feeling he had been a little uncomfortable with the boys being in close proximity to a woman in her underwear, so we took him up on it. It was much better since there was now room for us to zip our sleeping bags together. The bunks were too narrow to allow us to do that. And, no more mice.

June 9th
We left the park and headed west to visit our friends Jamie and Peg near Franklin in Pendleton County, WV. In retrospect, I wonder why we took such a roundabout way to get to Pendleton County from Morgantown if we were planning to visit Jamie and Peg to begin with
The only thing I can think of is that I had hitchhiked from Morgantown to Franklin a couple times before and it was usually hard to get rides once I got east of Elkins.

What I was now learning was that hitchhiking with a girl made getting rides easier. People seemed to perceive a guy and girl hitchhiking together differently than a guy hitchhiking alone. We often got rides from people who I suspect would not have picked me up had I been on my own. Near Rawley Springs, we got picked up by a car full of teenage girls in their bikinis who were just leaving the local swimming hole. Would they have picked me up if I hadn't been with Vickie? Who knows?

It was nice to see Jamie and Peg again. After leaving Seattle they had driven down the Pacific Coast and come back east through the southwest. Somewhere along the way their ancient step-van, "Ol' Barney," had developed transmission problems. As Jamie's father told me, "Peg had to wail back on the gear shift clear across the country just to keep it in gear." Somehow Barney had made it back to the farm in West Virginia but hadn't moved under its own power since. Jamie's father had hooked Barney to his farm tractor and towed it up the hollow behind the cabin where it was now being used as a guest house. Jamie gave us a foam pad and Vickie and I moved in for a few days.

The three days we spent with Jamie and Peg were relaxing. I helped Jamie with their garden, all four of us went up towards Petersburg to pick strawberries one day, we ate fresh asparagus and fish, and just generally hung out being lazy. June 11th was Jamie's birthday and he and I hiked up on Panther Knob while the girls hung out together at the cabin. When we got back, we all went skinny dipping in the South Branch of the Potomac, which flows through the valley below the cabin. At that point the South Branch was just a big creek—in most places it was wadable from bank to bank. There were a couple nice deeper holes though. I learned that if I crept up to the edge of one of the holes quietly, I could occasionally see a bunch of colorful native trout.

Photo source: Kent Mason, wvphotographs.com

Panther Knob

June 13th
Vickie and I decided it was time to move on. Vickie had asked if we could go to North Carolina. She had one more year of school at WVU and was thinking about possibly going to graduate school. She was interested in textile science and wanted to visit North Carolina State University since they had a well-regarded textile science program. I didn't particularly want to head south because I was of the opinion that the percentage of rednecks increased as one traveled further south. However, I agreed because I thought Vickie should have some input on the itinerary.

We had a hard time getting a ride south on US 220. It wasn't that a lot of people passed us by—there just wasn't much traffic headed that way. We eventually got a ride into Monterey, VA and started heading east on US 250. A guy named John picked us up there. He was about 50, wiry, with white hair and an odd accent and way of talking. When he pulled over, he told us to throw our backpacks in "the boot." Although I've heard that term since, I had never heard it at the time and we stood there for a while not knowing what we were supposed to be doing. Once we figured out he meant the trunk, we were underway. He was heading to Waynesboro and asked me if I would drive. Shortly after I got behind the wheel, he was asleep.

As we were going through Staunton he woke up and started talking. He was quite entertaining. He told us he knew we weren't married but he didn't care. He said his youngest daughter had "hippied" her way across the country and back like we were doing and didn't seem any the worse off for it.

As we came into Waynesboro, he told us he was in the process of tearing down two houses to make way for a nursing home. He asked if we wanted to make a little money helping him out. We both kind of liked John so we told him we would but only for two or three days. He directed me to the houses. Instead of knocking the houses down with heavy equipment he was mostly tearing them down piece by piece and recycling whatever he could, which I found commendable. He got a phone out of the boot of his car and plugged it into a jack in the second house and told Vickie he would pay her to answer the phone. He had me pulling down lath and prying up floor boards while he cut weeds. He left and came back with a bag of food from a nearby Hardees and we all three ate together.

John invited us to stay at his house but we told him we'd just stay in the second house, which, although it was old, was nice—a shame it had to be torn down. Almost as soon as John left, one of the neighbors came by. He told us that John couldn't be trusted, that the houses were supposed to have been razed 10 weeks ago, and the reason he was so behind was that he never paid his workers. He also told us John had borrowed their phone without asking, sticking them with some long-distance charges, and once, without asking had used their bathtub! A second neighbor came by and told us that he himself had worked for John for a while and had never gotten paid.

Vickie and I found this new information somewhat disconcerting since we sort of liked John, in spite of or because of his odd behavior. While snooping around in the house we were staying in I came across John's notebook in which he had appeared to write our names and how many hours we had worked. It was mostly illegible scribbles. Vickie and I decided we'd just leave the next morning—it wasn't like we had invested that many hours. Vickie said the phone never rang so it was like she hadn't worked at all.

June 14th
Vickie and I were up and headed toward downtown and the Blue Ridge Parkway when John pulled up behind us. Naturally, he couldn't understand why we were leaving so abruptly. We were reluctant to tell him the neighbors had ratted him out so we told him we'd decided to head to a bluegrass festival we'd heard about. He paid us on the spot. He only owed us $18 but he gave us $25. (That doesn't sound like much but minimum wage in 1973 was $1.60/hour and he was paying us $3.00/hour.)

Now Vickie and I both felt a little guilty but, we were also in motion and not inclined to go back with him. Vickie asked him if there was a place in town where we could buy a tent and he accompanied us to a local hardware/general store where we found a two-person pup tent. Vickie got herself a new knapsack as well that was a little bigger than the one she was using. And, we still had a little money left over.

John hung around and rode us out to the entrance to the Blue Ridge Parkway. He tried one last time to talk us into staying—he even offered to pay us in advance. He must have had some idea about why we had really pulled up stakes. He gave us his business card and told us if we were ever in the area to give him a call.

We got a few rides down the Blue Ridge Parkway but stopped around mid-afternoon near Groundhog Mountain. We spent some time rearranging our stuff trying to find the best way to pack our gear now that we had a tent. We found a nice place to camp under a massive oak tree.

June 15th
I can't remember whose idea it was to go to the bluegrass festival near Marion, VA. We got off the Blue Ridge Parkway at Fancy Gap, headed east and caught I-81 to Marion. Our first impression was that Marion was a town full of rednecks. We noticed a lot of people giving us hard looks. There was, at the time, still some noticeable friction between conservative, country people and sorta-hippies like us. That was one of the reasons I had some reservations about heading south—I just felt like we were more likely to encounter rednecks.

We bought a two-day ticket—a benefit for the local volunteer fire department. We seemed to be the only people there who weren't local. While some people were friendly, we also got some sideways glances as if people were thinking, "What are they doing here?" The music was good. There were a couple of girls who played a lot—the Hardin Twins, who had fantastic voices. We jokingly referred to them as the Hard-On Twins. Every band played three numbers and fiddlers played in between while the next band was setting up. There was a lot of clog dancing and flat foot dancing. One of the fiddlers was missing his right hand. He strapped the bow to his stub and still played faster than most of the other fiddlers.

There was also a lot of moonshine flowing, and associated hootin' and hollerin.' It started to rain and the field turned into a muddy mess. As people got more and more drunk some got friendlier but there were some that didn't seem so friendly. Vickie and I decided we'd leave early the next day. It rained again during the night but the tent held up well. We stayed dry.

The next morning, we were up fairly early and were able to sell our tickets outside the gate. They were still good for the second day and people were still coming in—tearing up the wet field even more. We were relieved to get out of there. We saw that the drunkenness was working its way towards a climax on the second day. We sensed the potential for some violence and didn't want to be there for that. We just stuck out too much as outsiders.

We backtracked northeast on I-81 to Wytheville and then south on US 21 and 221 to get back on the Blue Ridge Parkway. The parkway wasn't the quickest way to Raleigh but since it was a tourist road we figured we wouldn't have to rely on getting rides from the local redneck population and there were plenty of places to camp nearby. We'd decided to stop at the Great Smoky Mountains as well and the parkway led to the national park.

We found a place to camp that evening not far off the parkway in a grove of pine trees. We now had a tent but we weren't carrying pads so it was nice to have a mattress of pine needles beneath us. Someone else had camped in the same spot some time before and left behind a fire ring so we built a small camp fire and spent a pleasant evening. We were somewhere just across the VA/NC state line near the town of Laurel Springs, NC.

June 17th
We noticed a motel nearby that advertised people could get a shower there. The guy at the desk said that people hiking the nearby Appalachian Trail often stopped by asking for showers so they started providing them for a dollar each. I jokingly asked if there was a discount if two people showered together. He wasn't amused. Later, as we were showering and getting dressed, he kept banging on the door telling us to hurry up. I think he was afraid we'd use the opportunity to have sex in the room. Or maybe that we'd use too much water. We weren't being slow so it seemed unreasonable.

Back on the parkway we got a ride with a couple in a Volkswagen van. Bud, was from Florida and this was the first time he'd ever seen mountains. Paulette was from Massachusetts so she'd seen the Berkshires. Bud was a journalist and was writing an article about how hard it was to drive in the mountains. I thought the difficulty of driving, besides him not being used to curvy, up and down roads, had more to do with the VW bus, which seems underpowered for the hills.

They were nice folks though and we rode with them all day since they were going to the Smoky Mountains as well. We shared some food and they let us put up our tent at their campsite on Mt. Pisgah where they stopped for the night. Vickie and I went for an evening walk where we enjoyed the view from behind the lodge that was across the road from the campground.

Photo Source: Carlene Galloway

The view from behind the Pisgah Lodge

Bud and Paulette dropped us off in the park the next morning. They were in a hurry to get to a park campground and get a campsite before they were all taken. They had good reason—it was the most visited US National Park at the time, getting about seven million visitors a year. We got a ride up to Clingman's Dome, which was probably the worst place to be in the park since people were everywhere with their kids, cameras, and campers. There was a nice view there from the viewing platform though.

We hiked about five or six miles back on the Appalachian Trail and camped in an area called Double Springs Gap on the NC/TN border. There was a nice spring there as well as a profusion of mosquitoes and biting gnats. There was a shelter nearby but we chose to tent. To her credit, Vickie didn't seem bothered by the insects.

We hiked down off the mountain and caught a ride into Gatlinburg to get some food. I figured Gatlinburg would be something of a tourist town but was horrified to see plastic motels, cheap gifts shops, and wax museums from one end of the town to the other. We managed to find a grocery store, got some food, and fled back into the park. We found what we thought was a secluded spot along a stream with a nice pool and went skinny dipping. Fortunately, we had our clothes back on when an older couple with about five or six of their grandkids showed up. They told us they had grown up in the area—before it even became a national park in 1934—and had been coming to that spot on the stream for decades. They said they had watched the Smokies and Gatlinburg go downhill before their eyes but especially in the past several years.

(I can only imagine what it looks like today. In 1973, seven million people visited the park, which seemed like a lot. In 2021, more than 14 million people visited the park. And the tourist trap of Gatlinburg had metastasized and spread over into nearby Pigeon Forge.)

June 20th
Our plan for the day was to head east to visit NC State University. First, we had to get to I-40. A local hippie gave us a ride into Sevierville. He warned us that it was "a little redneck cubbyhole of a town." We got a few stares but it didn't seem to harbor the same level of suspicion and hostility as Marion. Or, maybe we were just getting used to it.

Somewhere along I-40 we got a ride with a trucker named Jimmy. He was heading toward a small town called Olanta, where he said he owned a trucking business. He had five trucks, counting the one he was driving. At one point we stopped at a truck stop where he bought us all a meal. He said he was feeling generous because it was his birthday. Tomorrow, he told us, he was going to Raleigh, so, if we wanted, we were welcome to come stay at his house on a lake and he would drop us in Raleigh the next day. He had left the table briefly while we were eating and he said he'd called his wife so she knew he might be bringing some guests. I looked at Vickie and she shrugged her shoulders. At least, that's how I remember it. I agreed to the plan. He bought some beer as we were leaving the truck stop and put it in a cooler in the truck. He wasn't drinking but he offered me some and I had a few—they were the small bottles.

The main reason I agreed was that, in my mind, we were out to see the country and riding with Jimmy would give us a chance to see some of South Carolina without much effort on our part and we’d still end up in Raleigh. We took I-26 southeast to Columbia and then US 378 east towards Florence and Olanta, going through pine woods and blackwater swamps that were a lot different from the mountains we'd been in for days. We passed a bunch of run-down, unpainted wooden shacks along the roadside, which were where black people lived, Jimmy told us. Many didn't look habitable.

As we neared Olanta, he pulled over to a small, run-down motel made of concrete blocks. The owner, he said, owed him some money so he got a room for free. He wanted to drink some of the beer before we went home, he said, because his wife was after him to drink less. Once inside though things got a little tense. "Let's all take our shoes off, sit on the bed, and have a little party." It wasn't so much what he said as how he said it. I could tell Vickie was scared. She went to the bathroom and while she was in there, I asked him what he had in mind. He said he was hoping maybe I'd share my girlfriend with him. Although I was pretty scrawny at the time I didn't feel physically threatened by Jimmy—he was a short, chubby, tired-looking guy. When I told him no, he didn't protest; he just left and told me he'd be back to pick us up early the next morning to take us to Raleigh. We wondered—did he even have a wife and a house on a lake?

Within 15 minutes of Jimmy leaving the air conditioner cut out. I went to the office but the only people around were two black housekeepers, neither of who would make eye contact with me, but told me they'd tell the owner and he'd come by. He never did. The motel room only had the one window with the broken air conditioner in it. Since it didn’t open, it soon got hot and stuffy. Between the heat and the situation with Jimmy, we were both in bad moods.

Vickie said she had more experience than me when it came to telling who was OK and who was a creep. She said she knew that Jimmy was a lech right away—he had short, stubby fingers and everyone she'd met with fingers like that was a lech. I told her I thought her creep-radar was not that much better than mine. We had gotten a couple rides with guys, who happened to be young and good looking, that I thought were creepy but she thought were OK. That was the down side of hitchhiking with a girl—we got rides easier but not always with someone with the best of intentions.

Jimmy didn't come early the next morning but, after we checked out, the owner let us sit in the office with him and watch I Love Lucy while we waited for Jimmy. We mentioned the air conditioner and he told us no one had relayed him the message. He was friendly and Vickie mentioned later he seemed like a nice guy. She didn't like it when I pointed out that he also had short, stubby fingers. Jimmy called later to let us know he wouldn't be by until around 2:00 so we set out on our own. It was probably for the best for all of us.

We got the strangest looks walking through town, not so much hostile looks as just looks of amazement, as if they had never seen or even imagined anyone who looked like us. At one point we passed a jail work crew—they were mostly all black guys and they were wearing those black and white-striped jail uniforms, which I had thought were a thing of the past. There was a guard on a horse, with a rifle across his legs. As we walked by the prisoners stopped working—they were cleaning out a roadside ditch—and stared at us with their mouths gaping open. The guard was looking at us about the same way. I don't know about Vickie but my mouth may have been hanging open too because the whole scene seemed to me like something from the distant past. The only part of the picture missing was that the guys weren't chained together.

Photo source: Wikipedia/Evanoco

Downtown Olanta, SC

While waiting for a ride on I-95 we discussed the need for a signal so Vickie could nonverbally warn me that she felt threatened. We decided she would give me an inconspicuous hand signal in a similar circumstance—her hand shaped like the letter "L," (for Lech). I told her the next time I hitchhiked with a girl, she would be plain looking so she didn't attract unwanted attention. She laughed a little so I knew we were close to being back on good terms. We got lucky and got a ride with a guy on his way to DC to get married. He said he always picked up hitchhikers but we might be the last ones he ever picked up because his fiancée told him he had to quit doing it. He let us off in Smithfield, NC and, by noon, we got a ride into Raleigh with a talky telephone operator in a yellow VW bug.

We spent most of the afternoon strolling the NCSU campus. The telephone operator told us that Raleigh was the liveliest town in North Carolina because it had a large university and was also the state capital. It didn't seem that lively though because it was summer and there didn't seem to be many summer classes in session. Vickie found the department she was interested in, talked to some professors, and got some information but decided the out-of-state tuition was way more than her family could afford.

Freshmen Orientation was happening and we sort of followed one group around just to get a tour of the university. We were carrying backpacks so I didn't see how anyone could mistake us for incoming freshmen. One of the guides came up to us though and said, "Hey, you guys somehow didn't get a name tag." She gave us a name tag and we borrowed her marker to write our names. The name tags came in handy because they got us into the cafeteria later for a free dinner. I guess everyone was too polite to ask why we were carrying packs around. Later, Vickie relaxed on campus with the packs while I looked around for a place to sleep. I found a spot in the university arboretum and Vickie and I got the tent set up just before it started to rain.

Vickie requested we spend some time at the beach so the next day we thumbed east on US 64 to Cape Hatteras. That took us through Zebulon, Rocky Mount, Tarboro, Sandy Point, and Manteo to the cape. US 64 then was mostly two-lane the whole way. Once on the cape we got rides down to just below Salvo and stopped for the day. Since we had left, Vickie had gotten pretty patient at waiting for rides and pretty good at walking when we needed to. She hadn't, however, fully accepted my practice of stealth camping. She wanted to sleep in the national park campground, which was flat, full of RVs, and had a fee. I was in favor of walking off into the dunes on the other side of the road. The sky was starting to look ugly and I thought the tent had a better chance of surviving the wind if it was tucked down in the dunes. She convinced me to stay at the campground.

It started storming not long after it got dark, with high winds, thunder, and lightning. The tent got knocked down just before dawn. At the time I didn't know the trick for setting up a tent in sand using sand doggies. The straight tent stakes just didn't hold well in sand in high winds. Vickie abandoned the tent and found shelter in the campground restroom. I set the tent back up and went back to sleep.

While I was sleeping Vickie walked up the road and got us a motel room for the day and evening. We argued a while about that because we didn't have much money and I was hoping to spread it as far as possible, plus we hadn’t discussed it first. She countered that it was her money so why did I care. I told her she had even less money than I did so when she ran out, we would both be living on what I had in my pocket. So really, we just had a pool of money between us. But it was already done so we agreed we should just enjoy being dry since the bad weather looked to continue.

The island is so low that when it stormed, water came up everywhere. Although we were hit by winds, at least our camp site wasn't a pool of water like some of the others were. We gathered our gear and headed to the motel, which was surrounded by stormwater. We sloshed through it to get to our room, where we hung all our wet stuff up to dry.

During a break in the rain, we hitched up to Nag's Head to look for a cheap seafood restaurant, which we never found. Most of the rides we got going back and forth on the island were with local people, who were all friendly. One of the older locals who picked us up pointed out all the original buildings on the island, which he said was, at one time, primarily a Coast Guard station. It should have been left that way.

He told us, since it was Saturday, we could get a good seafood dinner at the Salvo Volunteer Fire Department, which was within walking distance of our motel. For a buck and half, we got some fried whitefish, french fries, hush puppies, cole slaw, rolls with honey, and even a couple of scallops.

We walked on the beach after dinner—it was still windy, drizzly, and now foggy but we enjoyed the walk. We found a small family graveyard tucked in among the dunes. There was no road to it, only a narrow footpath through the dunes. All the gravestones were old and mostly illegible, but people had placed some beautiful seashells on the stones even though it was unlikely that there were many people alive who remembered the people who were buried there.

June 24th
We thumbed up to Virginia Beach and found a place to stay at Seashore State Park. The beach and the official campground were on one side of the highway that split the park. The other side, once you got beyond a string of rental cabins, was mostly all woods, a pleasant mix of dunes and scrubby trees. That's where we spent the night. Unlike at Hatteras, Vickie raised no issue with us stealth camping here. Perhaps it was because she thought we were better hidden here. At the time, there weren't any trails or signs that people ever ventured into the woods beyond the cabins. People were there for the beach. It felt like our private woods.

We snuck over to the beach and just lounged around the next day—technically it was only for people who were either camping or renting a cabin at the park. The park also had a nice shower house, which we took advantage of. There were a lot of French Canadians in the park, one of who, an older woman, laughed at us for being at the beach in hiking boots. We got to talking with some the Canadians and they said if we traveled north, we should see Nova Scotia. We had already talked about heading in that direction. The park had a little grocery store and we bought some things we didn't normally have with us—a tomato, cottage cheese, some orange juice.

We spent the following day at the oceanside beach in town. It was more touristy and more crowded but the waves were bigger than those at state park, which fronted more on the bayside. We went to a laundromat and got our clothes washed and splurged on a submarine sandwich. We camped at our regular site, which was beginning to feel like home. After we had the tent up, we wandered around in our woods and found that there were areas of cypress swamp.

Photo source: Grandbrothers/stock.adobe.com

Bald cypress swamp at Seashore State Park.

I don't feel guilty for all the camping we did in places we weren't supposed to be. I don't know if low-impact camping was even a term at the time but that was our aim. Most of the time, there wasn't a clue that we'd been there after we broke camp. Sometimes, if we were camped in a grassy area, the tent would leave an imprint after we took it down. I'd then fluff the grass back up the best I could. The only time we ever built a fire, which was rare, was if someone had already camped where we were and had left a stone fire ring.

June 27th
On our way to the beach the previous day we had seen this place called the Edgar Cayce Institute. They had a sign out that said, "Free Tours," so, out of curiosity, we decided to drop by. Neither of us had ever heard of him. Cayce, who died in 1945, was known as the Sleeping Prophet of Virginia Beach. Twice each day he would go into a hypnotic trance and would speak on various topics including reincarnation, psychic healing, dream interpretation, Atlantis, and prediction of future events. Upon awakening he reportedly didn't remember anything he had said, but more than 14,000 of what he referred to as "readings" had been recorded by stenographers and later on audio tape. He is considered by many to be the father of the New Age movement.

Cayce and his supporters founded the Association for Research and Enlightenment (ARE) and erected the building we were visiting, which, early on, was called the Cayce Hospital. It was not a conventional hospital but attempted cures using magnetism, massage, homeopathy, osteopathic manipulation, chromotherapy, mud baths, enemas, and essential oils.

Some of the things we learned from the free lecture were:

* We are all corpuscles in the body of God.

* Everyone chooses their place in life. For example, deafness, even if congenital is by choice.

* Reincarnation is a reality. People reincarnate to other people, never a plant or a machine.

* Souls that are not ready to reincarnate go to Saturn to get it together and develop some solid matter.

* Atlantis was a reality. The people of Atlantis were spiritually and physically highly developed. (Cayce seemed obsessed with Atlantis; many of his readings concerned Atlantis.)

As much as I may have wanted to believe some of the occult stuff at the time, it seemed like a mixture of the ridiculous with the pseudoscientific. To their credit, the people who ran the institute were friendly and weren't pushy in any way with either what they believed or in selling Cayce merchandise. After the tour and the lecture, they told us we were free to wander around the building. At the time, the building had a screened-in porch that ran the entire width of the front of the building. On the porch were some of the most comfortable chairs I had ever sat in. We relaxed on the porch before heading back to our campsite in the woods.

Today the Cayce facilities are much bigger—the building we toured is now part of a campus of buildings and looks much different from when we were there. And, the name of the park where we camped was changed from Seashore State Park to First Landing State Park. (Reportedly, many local people still call it by the older name.) The area where we camped is now crisscrossed by a network of hiking trails, including a wooden walkway through the bald cypress swamp. It would be a little more difficult, but not impossible, to do today what we did then.

June 28th
We left our hideaway the next morning and caught a ride to the entrance to the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, which wasn't far away. We waited there a long time but finally got a ride with an elderly corpuscle in the body of God, Mrs. McKenzie, and her Bassett Hound, Aristotle. I think she picked us up because she was afraid to drive across the bridge by herself. The bridge is 13 miles long and there are three places where it is tunneled under the bay so that ships can pass overhead.

The Delmarva peninsula on the other side seemed like a world apart. It was flat and heavily agricultural. At the time there were lots of black farm workers out laboring in the field. It had an old south aura that I didn't expect that far north

Around Accomac, VA, we pulled over to a diner for lunch. Afterwards, exiting the diner, Mrs. McKenzie pulled out into the highway without looking and caused a collision. A guy hit her car with a kind of glancing, sideswipe on the right side. Fortunately, no one was injured, mainly because the other guy reacted quickly. As far as the car we were riding in, it helped that it was a big land yacht of a Chrysler. The other guy's wife and daughter were a little shook up though, as was Mrs. McKenzie. She was off to the side talking to her dog. The other driver was initially upset and didn't want to talk to us until we told him we were just hitchhikers and then he became more civil. Vickie helped calm his daughter down, which he seemed to appreciate.

We got the cars off to the side of the road and waited for the cops to show up, which took about a half hour. None of us knew it at the time but the police station was in sight of the accident so why it took a half hour I have no idea. The cops were both assholes. At first, I thought it might have something to do with my presence but they were jerks to everyone present including the people in the other car, who were not at fault in any way. We drove up to the station—it was so close we could have walked—and they took statements from everyone. There were some different cops involved by now but they were jerks as well. One of them got a lot of amusement out of calling me "miss" because my hair was kind of long then. The others chuckled. The cops, eventually let Vickie and me go. Everything they did seemed to be in slow motion and with a bad attitude. I could only imagine how they would have treated someone who actually committed a crime or someone who was black.

When I talked to people about hitchhiking around the country one of the things that many people often asked was wasn't I afraid of being murdered or robbed. I always told them, while that was always a possibility, the much bigger hazard was riding with people who were poor drivers or driving under the influence. We had noticed that Mrs. McKenzie was not a very good driver but we hadn’t anticipated her pulling out into traffic without looking.

We started thumbing just down the road from the police station and quickly got a ride with a guy heading towards Ocean City. We were relieved to get a ride quickly because we were anticipating further harassment by the cops if they came by while we were hitchhiking. The guy who picked us up was a leather craftsman. He and his wife made hats, belts, handbags, sandals, and various other items that they sold in gift shops in the beach towns along the peninsula. Unfortunately, he told us they made most of their money selling cheaper items like sun visors and tabs for key rings, which they had to make in bulk and were boring to make. We rode with him to Ocean City, MD where he made a stop to restock his merchandise. He said we were welcome to ride with him to Rehoboth Beach, if we didn't mind waiting. Vickie and I took a walk on the Ocean City boardwalk while he conducted business.

When he left us off in Rehoboth, he warned us that hitchhiking was illegal everywhere in Delaware and was strictly enforced. He said the State Police had troopers cruising roads in unmarked vehicles looking for hitchhikers to harass and fine. However, it wasn't illegal to stand by the side of the road, he told us, if we didn't put our thumbs out or try to flag someone down. He said we would still eventually get a ride if we looked like we needed a ride and made eye contact with the drivers.

It was getting dark by then and we had a hard time finding a patch of woods in Rehoboth Beach to spend the night. Finally, we found a spot that we thought looked half-way acceptable and set up the tent. While we were breaking camp the next morning, we realized it wasn't so much a patch of woods as it was an untended corner in an otherwise, very well-kept yard in the back of what looked to be a mansion. Had someone been up early and taking their morning coffee on the back veranda they might have spotted our tent. Oops. Anyway, we were gone before anyone noticed.

It had rained a little overnight and started to rain more. We sat out part of it in a cafe and talked about where we wanted to go next. We both decided we wanted to get further north into New England and eastern Canada, places that neither of us had ever been to. Between rain showers we managed to get rides—without putting our thumbs out—to the docks at Lewes, where we took the ferry over to Cape May, NJ. We found a cheap supermarket and loaded up on groceries and found a place to camp. It was a mix of woods and swampy areas but we found a high spot. Tons of mosquitoes. We had a good dinner and a good night's sleep despite the rain, humidity, and the handful of mosquitoes that got into the tent.

June 30th
We headed north on US 9 towards Atlantic City and then northwest on US 322 towards Philadelphia. I had some apprehension about how we were going to manage to get past the urban conglomeration of Philly, NYC, and Boston. It was slow going and, by early evening, we ended up only as far as the New Jersey suburbs of Philadelphia.

Before we left Morgantown, we got some addresses from people we knew who told us we could drop in on them if we were in their area. On of them was a guy named Gary, who I knew from the dormitory at WVU before I dropped out. Gary volunteered his parents' address when he found out we were planning to travel—I don't think I even solicited it. He said his family was moving and he gave us the phone number and new address in Cherry Hill, NJ. He would be there all summer himself and said to come by anytime and that his parents loved visitors. Although I wasn't as close to Gary as I was to Jamie, who I had also met in the dorm, I decided to take him up on his offer because we were very close to Cherry Hill, where his family lived.

We called the number multiple times in between short rides, whenever we could find a public phone, but there was no answer. Eventually, we were actually in Cherry Hill but there was still no answer. We found the street and I left Vickie with the packs at a picnic table next to a gas station while I tried to find the house. Something didn't make sense—I walked the entire length of the street but there was no house with the number Gary had given me. I called the number one more time and Gary's younger sister answered. She sounded like a teenager. I told her who I was and that Gary had mentioned we could stay there if we were in the area. In a flat voice she told me Gary had been in Morgantown all summer.

I told her I couldn't find the house and told her the address Gary had given me. "Yeah, well my idiot brother gave you the number of the old house and the street of the new house," she said. I sensed that I had tapped into some deep wellspring of sibling resentment and that she wasn't going to invite us to stay at their house. I asked if it was OK if we set up our tent in their back yard. "We don't have a back yard," she told me. I think I laughed out loud because I'd been walking around Cherry Hill for hours including their street and all the houses had backyards. Cherry Hill was one of those suburban hellscapes that stretched for miles with houses that looked the same, punctuated occasionally by commercial avenues of fast-food places, shopping plazas, muffler shops, bowling alleys, and gas stations. I was about ready to say, "Look, I know you brother can be a real doofus and we're really not that good of friends, but my girlfriend and me are just looking for a place to spend the night." But, I didn't. I could tell from her attitude that she was thinking if she couldn't do something to irk Gary, at least she could irk his friends.

On the way back to where I left Vickie, I was checking out possible places to stay. I didn't see anything that looked suitable. It was pretty much built up everywhere. There were occasional empty lots but they were either too open or had standing water on them. Despite its name, Cherry Hill seemed like a low area and there had been recent rain.

Vickie though, had been talking to one of the guys who worked at the gas station and he told her about an abandoned tree nursery that was nearby. In a few weeks, he told her, someone was going to pull out all the trees and build some townhouses but he told her it would be a good place and it wasn't far. We had to climb a fence to get in but once we got into the middle of the patch of trees it was pleasant. A busy business strip ran along one side of it and an expressway along another, but the trees baffled the noise enough to make it bearable. Too bad its days were numbered. If there is a hell, I think it will be a lot like Cherry Hill but without an abandoned tree nursery, and Gary's little sister will be in charge.

Click/Tap here to view the interactive hitchhiking route map for June.

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• Introduction
• June
• July
• August
• September

July 1st
We left our hideaway in the doomed tree nursery after breakfast and headed to the nearest entrance to the New Jersey Turnpike. Our goal for the day was to somehow get beyond New York City. Before we even got to the turnpike entrance, a guy driving by saw us with our packs, pulled over, and offered us a ride. He was headed to New Hampshire and said he wouldn't mind having some company. That was a relief to me since I was a little worried about getting stuck somewhere in the NYC area. As we approached the city, he switched from the Turnpike to the Garden State Parkway, which took us a little further west of the city. He said the traffic was slightly less crazy.

We passed the giant Bayway Exxon Refinery near Linden—1500 acres of pipes, tanks, and stacks. It was hot and humid already and the refinery seemed to shimmer and pulsate in a layer of polluted air. Our ride (I didn't record his name) told us that on clear days you could see the New York City skyline from the parkway, but not today. It was lost in a cloud of pinkish-gray smog. Although the Clean Air Act had been passed a few years earlier, it really hadn't had much of an effect yet on tailpipe emissions from cars and trucks and practically every big city was sometimes smogged in, depending on the weather. This was one of those days. Besides all of the vehicle traffic, NYC still had thousands of garbage incinerators in apartment buildings as well as some municipal garbage incinerators. The last incinerators weren't shut down until the 1990s.

Photo source: Chester Higgins/National Archives and Records Administration

New York City enshrouded in smog, May 1973. Some people today might have a hard time believing how bad the air could be in American cities in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Although Los Angeles was more notorious for its smog, NYC generated more pollution. The difference was the mountains around LA tended to hold the bad air in place, while NYC was more open and wind would often—but not always—disperse some of the polluted air.

We crossed the Hudson on the Tappan Zee bridge, took I-684 north, and then I-84 northeast across Connecticut. Vickie had asked me earlier if we could visit a friend of her's in Boston, Jim, and I agreed—I knew Jim a little bit. We parted with our ride at Sturbridge, MA at an entrance to the Massachusetts Turnpike and quickly got a ride into Boston with some young Asian college students driving a VW van. They dropped us off in Cambridge and we walked over to the Boston University campus, where Jim was going to school. Vickie found his address but learned from his neighbors that he was gone for a few days. We probably should have figured there was a chance that he might be away because of the extended Fourth of July holiday.

We were now in a similar situation as last night—we were in a developed area where it would be hard to find a secluded place to sleep. I called a few switchboard organizations to see if there were places to crash—they had places for guys, places for girls, places for gays, but no places for guys and girls traveling together. We were hanging out in Harvard Yard talking to people, asking if they knew of any places when a guy came up and asked us if we were looking for a place to stay. He said we could sleep in his living room; he shared an apartment but he said his roommate wouldn't mind. I looked at Vickie, expecting her to maybe show me an L signal but she didn't. He seemed a little odd to me but Vickie told him, yeah, we'd appreciate that.

His name was Joel and he said he was a court stenographer and an aspiring artist. At first, I couldn't quite tell for sure if he was a guy who was somewhat effeminate or a kind of pudgy, flat-chested woman who preferred men's clothes. I also couldn't tell whether he was an older guy who looked younger than his age, or a young guy who dressed older. I suspect that he was in his late 20s or early 30s. He showed us his apartment and his artwork. They were all pencil sketches, quite a few of them were female nudes, most of them of black girls. They weren't bad. The three of us shared a dinner during which he asked Vickie if she would be willing to pose nude for him. After the whole thing with Jimmy in South Carolina, I wasn't sure how she was going to react but she just told him, "I'd prefer not to."

Later that evening, Vickie and I spread our sleeping bags out on the living room floor. Around 10:30 or so a white-haired woman who looked to be in her 80s burst into the living room shrieking, "Get out! Get out! This is not a refuge for bums." She was livid, wildly waving her hands above her head while she was yelling. I half expected her to beat us with a broom. Joel came out and said we'd have to sleep in his room. "Who the hell was that?" I asked. He told me it was his roommate and he hadn't expected her back that evening. Oh, brother.

We tried to get some sleep but it wasn't easy—it was cramped on the floor and the whole situation was just weird. I dozed off at one point only to feel Vickie poking me. I woke to see Joel lying in bed, propped up on his elbow, staring at Vickie. He asked me if I minded if he said something to Vickie. Yes, I told him, I mind and that we just wanted to sleep and I was pissed off about him lying to us about his roommate situation. He didn't bother us anymore but I couldn't really sleep much after that.

We woke early the next morning and, without talking, somehow we conveyed to each other that we would try to leave without waking Joel, who was still fast asleep. We got up and stealthily carried our packs to the kitchen and put our shoes on. We were expecting to be ambushed by the wild, white-haired woman at any second. We were almost out of the apartment when we heard Joel rustling. From his room we heard him say, "Wait, don't leave yet." We pulled the door closed behind us and kept moving.

We found a small cafe near Harvard Square and got breakfast. I expected Vickie to be upset but she wasn't. I asked why it was different from Jimmy and she said she didn't know. Partly, she said she just felt sorry for Joel, that he seemed to have a sad life. We figured that it must have been the white-haired lady's apartment and she was renting a room to him. Maybe she was a widow making ends meet. Vickie thought Joel must not have any friends for him to live in those circumstances. You do seem to attract some odd characters, I told her. Odd characters are the ONLY ones I seem to attract, she said. I knew she meant that included me.

As we ate breakfast, we discussed what we wanted to do next and decided to spend part of the day downtown. We took the subway downtown and stuffed all of our gear into a storage locker. We visited the aquarium, which we both enjoyed, and then just walked around checking different places out. Just after lunch we decided we needed to get out of the city. We retrieved our packs and took the subway to the end of the line at Quincy and started hitchhiking towards Cape Cod. At Vickie's suggestion, we had decided to visit Provincetown at the far end of the cape. We got as far as South Duxbury, not far from Plymouth, not really even onto the cape yet. It was still early, but we were tired because neither of us had slept well the previous night. We could have gotten further but we found a big stretch of woods and set up the tent. It was a pretty place, but had more mosquitoes than any place we had been so far.

We napped for a while. Early in the evening the wind shifted and there were fewer mosquitoes. Vickie hung out in the tent writing letters and I explored the woods. I found an abandoned sand quarry and the charred frame of a burnt house, which the forest had grown up around. Today, those woods have been replaced by a wealthy suburb of the town of Duxbury.

July 3rd
Vickie's birthday. We slept in a little, but had no problem getting rides out to Provincetown and were there by lunchtime. Vickie found a public phone and called her parents since she knew they would want to wish her Happy Birthday. Things sort of went to hell from there.

We had been discussing our plans for the coming months. She had one more year of school at WVU and had to return to Morgantown by the beginning of August to find an apartment. She wanted me to return with her and we would find an apartment together. I said I wanted to continue to travel for August but, she could return, find an apartment, and I would rejoin her later in Morgantown. She didn't like that idea—she believed that if I continued traveling on my own, she would never see me again. She told me I wasn't committed to us being together. I reminded her that during the couple of interruptions we'd had in our relationship that it had always been her idea.

With what seemed like no warning Vickie erupted—it was the angriest I had ever seen her. She said she was done; she was going home. I was carrying both sleeping bags and she demanded that I give her one. She also made me give her all of the other items in my pack that belonged to her. All this was happening under a tree in someone's small front yard. I was vaguely aware that the residents of the house were sitting at a table at the window drinking coffee observing the drama.

By the time we had separated all the gear I was probably as mad as she was. It takes a lot to make me angry, but we had been together long enough for her to know what set me off and she had pushed practically all of the right buttons. I had been afraid that something like this would happen—that being together 24 hours a day would eventually drive us apart. I took off walking, leaving her under the tree, although at the time I didn't even really notice the tree.

I became aware that she was following me but I pretended I hadn't noticed. She was about three blocks behind me and I turned right up one street, and left at the next block. I knew by the time she got to where I'd turned right that I would be out of sight. I then walked into the dunes at the edge of town where I knew she'd be unlikely to find me. It was a mean trick on my part. I knew if she was following me, she must be ready to de-escalate but I wasn't ready myself.

I found a low spot in the dunes and flopped down. I laid there asking myself, what just happened? Despite the weirdness with Joel, I thought we were on good terms right up until the explosion. I heard someone calling nearby and a woman who was trying to find her lost dog came into view. I helped her for a while until we found him. By then, I had cooled down and decided to head back into town and find Vickie. I probably hadn't been gone more than an hour or two. I wasn't too worried about finding her—Provincetown was not very big.

As I got into town a hippie couple and their child approached me. The guy said, "Hey man, is your name Craig? There's a girl named Vickie looking for you and she's really sad, man. You should go find her." She must have described me to a bunch of people. I also noticed that she had posted notes on multiple phone poles that read, "Craig, meet me under the tree. Vickie." What tree, I thought? Was there a tree where we split the gear? I headed there. On the way a gay couple, holding hands, and later a cop asked if I was Craig. There were more signs on poles and one chalked on the sidewalk. Where did she even find chalk?

When I got to the yard where we split our gear, there was, indeed, a tree. Vickie came running out of the house. The people who lived there had seen her sitting under the tree, invited her in, and gave her a glass of wine. She told me she thought for sure I'd already left town. I'm pretty sure the people in the house applauded when we hugged.

We went to a seafood restaurant for dinner and a couple drinks—it was the first time we'd splurged since the motel in Salvo. On the way to the restaurant two or three groups of people stopped us to tell Vickie how glad they were that she had found me. Argh, it felt like all of Provincetown was part of our little drama. We slept that night in the dunes. I neglected to completely zip up the screen on the tent and got bitten by ants.

Photo source: Shutterstock

The dunes at Provincetown.

July 4th
We spent the following day relaxing in Provincetown, hanging out in the dunes and on the beach, and walking around in town exploring the shops and art galleries. I didn't really know anything about Provincetown other than it was once known as an artists' colony. I didn't realize that it was also a haven for gays and lesbians. It seemed like half the people in town were gay—including quite a few who were flamboyantly so. There was a lot of high heels, sequins, and boas. We watched the town's 4th of July parade and even a couple of guys on the Volunteer Fire Department's fire truck were wearing high heels.

Little by little, we deconstructed yesterday's meltdown. The phone call with her parents hadn't gone well. Her father told her to put an end to all this foolishness of hitchhiking around. We'd been on the road for almost a month—I don't think he had expected her to last that long. He wanted her home. She was a daddy's girl and, while he was used to giving her what she wanted, this wasn't one of those things he was going to give in to easily and it wasn't easy for her to defy him.

Looking back, I wonder if there was something more to it. Within a year, Vickie would acknowledge her bisexuality and I came to realize that it was something she had been struggling with for some time. (Her friend Jim, who we had unsuccessfully tried to visit in Boston, was gay and I later learned she had confided in him some time earlier.) Did she want to come to Provincetown specifically because it was a gay haven? Did I say something negative about gay people that sent her over the edge? I don't think so. In general, I thought gay people should be free to be themselves. At the same time, I didn't spend much time thinking about it—I wasn't gay so it didn't affect me. I could maybe see why my sort of clueless indifference to what gay people had to deal with might have bothered her. At the time, she clearly did not feel like she could confide in me about her bisexuality. Since she never did until much later, it's hard for me to say how I would have reacted.

The anger of the day before had dissipated. Nothing was resolved but we seemed to have agreed to push our conflicts aside for the time being. Now that she had cooled down, Vickie told me she wasn't planning on going home yet. While we were breaking camp the next morning, we talked about where we would go next. I found a certain joy in us deciding day-by-day where we would go. I'd been told most of my life that I had two choices—get a job or go to school. Yet here we were deciding each day where we wanted to go. It seemed to me like the epitome of freedom.

We started heading west on US 6, leaving the cape. Near Barnstable (which I had, until then, thought was a fictional town invented by Kurt Vonnegut), we got a ride with a guy named Jack going to the Catskills. He told us we were welcome to ride as far with him as we wanted. We talked it over and decided to see the Catskills. At the time, the outer loop around Boston, which became I-495 had a big gap on the southern end so we took MA 3 to the inner loop, which at the time was MA 128 (and the scene of some wild driving by the locals). We stayed on 128 until it intersected I-90, the Mass Turnpike, which we took the rest of the way across the state. We rode from one end of the state at the tip of Cape Cod to the other, at the western border. We then headed south on I-87 and west on NY 23 to the small town of Windham where we parted with Jack.

We walked around in town for a while and then found a hideaway in the woods not far outside of town. The following day, we walked back into town and picked up some food and got a ride to a nearby trailhead we had spotted on the way in. I convinced Vickie to hike to the top of Windham High Peak and spend the evening there.

It was slightly more than a three-mile hike to the top. The elevation at the peak was 3524 feet according to a USGS survey marker at the top. The elevation gain was about 1750 feet so it was noticeably uphill the whole way but only really steep in a few places.

The trail was marked with metal disks that had been nailed into the trees and we noticed that some of them had little crescents missing. They looked like something had been nibbling on them. We couldn't imagine what type of animal would find the metal disks palatable. Not long after we saw a porcupine hanging on a tree nibbling on a trail marker. Neither of us had ever seen porcupines up close.

During a break we decided to find a place to set up the tent for the night and then continue the walk to the peak without packs. We found a nice spot about three-quarters of the way up. Windham High Peak is on the northern edge of the Catskills and the land is much flatter to the north so the views in that direction are expansive. We encountered only one other party of hikers.

We must have set up camp in porcupine heaven because all night we were serenaded by the nearby eerie calls, mumblings, and occasional joyful-sounding shrieks of porcupines. Some of the sounds reminded us of the voices of small children. We were enchanted. It was a clear, moonless night so we spent some time admiring the stars. Nights like that made up for some of the other times that were less than enchanting.

July 7th
On the way down the mountain, we saw three more porcupines hanging out on trees along the trail. Vickie said it was like they were seeing us off. We engaged in what had become our daily ritual where one of us would say, "Well, where should we go today?" We decided to head north through Albany and then head east into Vermont.

We got through Albany alright but then spent big chunks of time walking across the towns of Watervliet and Troy in order to get to a good spot from which to thumb. We didn't mind. Troy was a blue-collar town; the houses were old and somewhat rundown but it was hilly and scenic in its own way. I enjoyed walking through the old towns almost as much as being in the woods.

We followed NY 9 east, which turned into VT 7 at the state line. We stopped for the day at Bennington, which was a tidy little New England town with many old houses. We talked to some people in town who told us there were nice places to camp just outside of town. We found the stream they told us about and set the tent up on a little island. We could tell there had been recent high water because the low vegetation on the island had been matted down. There was no further rain in the immediate forecast however.

We liked the stream so much that we spent the whole next day hanging out there. It was a fairly hot day, and the water was cold. The stream was not very deep in most places but there were a few holes here and there—not big enough to do much swimming but big enough to immerse oneself. We spent the entire day naked. We became aware that there were some other people nearby and briefly considered whether we should clothe ourselves. Then we realized they were naked too.

We continued east the following day, in no particular hurry. We got a ride into Brattleboro, where we wandered around town and hung out in a cafe for a while. The Connecticut River between Vermont and New Hampshire was still high from the recent rain, which we had missed. In New Hampshire we got a ride into Keene, where we wandered around town some more. We found people in the New England towns to be friendly towards us, which was in stark contrast to the reception we had received in the south. We spent the night on a wooded hilltop near or in (we didn't know for sure) Otter Brook State Park.

July 10th
We continued east on NH 9. Somewhere around Henniker we got a ride with a guy named Dave, who was heading to Portland. He was a nice guy although he really only wanted to talk to Vickie. He was driving a pickup and Vickie would always have me sit in the middle in such circumstances. Every time he spoke, he would lean up to look around me so he could talk directly to Vickie. It wasn't the first time or the last that that happened. Dave did give us a little driving tour of Portland and left us off at a good place to get a ride, just north of Casco Bay, where Vickie and I took a lunch break. We were wondering about the pleasant odor and then we noticed we were within sight of the B & M Baked Beans Factory. We must have been downwind.

We got a ride up I-95, which was still under construction in places in Portland. Around Bath, we headed northeast on US 1, along the coast. We got a ride with a couple named Liz and Pat. Pat was studying to be a minister—what denomination I failed to record. Whatever it was it didn't seem to be a pushy one as he never seemed at all concerned about our salvation. They were from New York City, on their way up the coast to Belfast, where they had rented a cottage for their honeymoon. They were pleasant people and, for honeymooners, they seemed happy to have some company.

Liz was, according to herself, a big talker and a little bit ditzy. She was driving as we were going through one of the little Maine towns on Highway 1. We reached a section where the street was closed for repaving and a cop was motioning her to turn left to take a detour. She somehow got flustered and continued past the cop, did a U-turn on the fresh asphalt, which was still soft and steaming, and then took a right-hand turn. The cop was livid and was yelling and chasing us on foot. Liz got even more flustered and just kept driving. It was a comical scene and I had to try hard not to laugh. Once we got down the road and felt secure there was no police cruiser in pursuit, we all had a laugh.

They seemed to like us and invited us to eat dinner at their honeymoon cottage. Vickie and I were both thinking that wouldn't they rather be getting busy on their honeymooning, but they practically insisted. We stopped at one of the little towns and they picked up some groceries. Once at the cottage they treated us to a very nice spaghetti dinner with garlic bread, a salad, and some wine. They both liked to talk and before we knew it it was getting dark and they said we were welcome to sleep in the living room. We were relieved when they agreed to let us set up our tent in the back yard instead. We were starting to feel a little weird about being such a big part of the honeymoon of two people we had just met.

It rained overnight and, although we mostly stayed dry, everything was a little damp just from the air. We said goodbye to Liz and Pat. Vickie and I joked that whatever kind of a minister Pat was becoming it must have been a sect that wasn't too concerned about premarital sex because they didn't appear to be basking in the afterglow of finally consummating their marriage. Maybe they were Unitarians.

We got a ride into Belfast, which was one of the few towns in Maine on US 1 that had a by-pass around the town. Because the through traffic didn't go through town, it seemed to have a slightly different character than the other towns—a little less touristy. The downtown seemed to be mostly buildings from the mid-1800s, without much modification.

It continued to be intermittently rainy, foggy, and damp the entire day. We got a ride with a local land speculator in a Mercedes who told us how much different pieces of land had sold for as we drove by them. Later we rode with two local worm diggers who were quite friendly. One of them had a heavy Maine accent with the dropped Rs. They dropped us off in Ellsworth and we thumbed to Mt. Desert Island where we spent the night just inside Acadia National Park near the Tarn.

I didn't record why we didn't spend more time in Acadia but I assume it was because of the weather. It rained more overnight and we were chilly and damp. Vickie had adapted pretty well to life on the road but she didn't have much tolerance for being cold and damp. We walked back into Bar Harbor and washed and dried some of our clothes and the sleeping bags. We hung out in the bandstand on the village green for a while waiting for the rain to stop. We considered taking the ferry from Bar Harbor to Nova Scotia but decided it was too expensive. Instead, we thumbed back out to Ellsworth and continued northeast on US 1.

One of our rides took the cutoff road (Maine 182) that he said was shorter than US 1. Near Cherryfield he stopped and showed us a river, which must have been the Narraguagus, that he said still supported an Atlantic salmon run. We eventually got a long ride with a salesman going to Calais, which we learned was pronounced "callous." We crossed the St. Croix River into New Brunswick and the town of St. Stephen. Customs didn't even ask us to open our packs.

As we walked across St. Stephen, we noticed there were gangs of young boys every few blocks just hanging around in front of stores. They looked to be 10- to 12-year-olds. They gave us odd looks but none of them said anything to us. It seemed odd though how many boys there were of about the same age.

On the east side of town, we started thumbing again and got a ride with a well-dressed, middle-aged couple in a big Buick. They seemed very interested in how we were traveling. The woman asked us where we usually spent the night and we told her we typically would set our tent up in the woods somewhere. She was horrified. In a voice that I remember to be sort of dripping with disdain, she said, "In Canada, we do not sleep by the side of the road." Unsaid, but implied, was, "regardless of what you do in the US." We tried to explain that we didn't sleep by the side of the road either, to no apparent effect.

It was early evening by then and she asked us where we were staying that evening and we told her we didn't know yet. As we passed a sign for Oak Bay Campground, she asked her husband to pull in. She then proceeded to pay the owner three dollars for us to spend the night camping there. After they sped off, we asked the elderly owner, who I thought might be running the campground as a sideline to a farm, where we should set up our tent. He just nodded his head in the direction of a rocky, treeless field that was right next to the highway. Vickie and I just looked at each other. The lady had paid for us to end up doing exactly what she said Canadians did not do. Neither of us wanted to sleep where we would have to listen to the sound of traffic all night. We might have stayed if he had had showers, but when we asked, he just shook his head. He may have been mute. We left and crossed the bridge over Oak Bay and found a nice patch of woods and camped along the edge of the bay, out of sight and earshot of the highway. Much nicer.

Friday the 13th
When we left the woods, we noticed there was a hand-lettered sign on the opposite side of the road that said "Fresh Milk." Vickie asked the elderly lady who happened to be putting a letter in her mailbox if she sold milk by the glass. The lady told us she'd be happy to and shortly came out with two large glasses for which we paid a quarter each. She also brought out what must have been her grandchildren to have a good look at us—clearly as some kind of a cautionary example. It didn't occur to us until later that fresh milk probably meant raw milk, but neither of suffered any digestive upsets.

Our goal for the day was to get to St. John and take the ferry over to Nova Scotia. A couple of rough looking guys, who turned out to be quite friendly, picked us up and said they were headed to St. John but had to run a couple errands. They left it up to us to decide whether to stay with them or to try to get a ride where they turned off. We chose to stick with them.

They both worked at the Connors Brothers sardine cannery at Black's Harbour on the Bay of Fundy. Although they weren't working that day, it was payday and they were headed to the cannery to pick up their checks. The checks, they made clear, were crucial to them for a weekend of carousing in St. John. The cannery was several miles off the main highway but the sights and sounds when we rolled up to the cannery were memorable. At the time the cannery must have disposed of fish entrails and other wastes in a way that attracted gulls because the number of gulls was incredible. There had to have been tens of thousands. It was quite a visual and auditory experience.

Photo source: New Brunswick Museum

Shown above is a photo of the Connors Brothers sardinery taken around 1930. While the boats looked somewhat newer when we were there the buildings looked about the same. There are now more modern cannery buildings at this location.

For years afterwards, whenever I would buy the occasional tin of sardines I would think of that cloud of squawking, shrieking gulls because often the sardines were from the Connors Brothers cannery. They're still in business, although the fish are canned under the Brunswick label rather than as Connors Brothers. It's the last sardine cannery in North America.

Once they got their checks, our friends the cannery workers still needed to make a stop at a bank in Black's Harbour to cash them in preparation for the weekend. Then we were off to St. John. Vickie sweet-talked them into dropping us off at the ferry dock. There was a wait for the ferry and then the trip itself across the Bay of Fundy lasted about four hours. It was foggy so there wasn't much to see. At the other end in Digby, we left the ferry and headed for the woods where we quickly found a suitable, but damp, spot for the night.

July 14th
Rain, rain, rain. It was raining when we got up. We walked into Digby, got some groceries and then sheltered in a city park pavilion to eat breakfast and hope the rain stopped. It had been five days in a row that it had been either raining, drizzling, or about to rain. Out of all the things there were to deal with, it was rainy weather and being cold and damp that put Vickie in a bad mood. I think what further annoyed her was that it didn't bother me that much. In between, we headed east on NS 1 but only got as far as New Minas before finding a place for the night in the damp woods.

Almost first off, we got a ride into Halifax the next day. We didn't have any particular desire to see Halifax—we were trying to get to the Cape Breton Highlands. Because of the way the roads were configured, however, there was no straight shot from New Minas, so we had to take a roundabout route that ran through Halifax. We had run into some hitchhikers earlier in the day and they told us about a government-run youth hostel on Summer Street. We found the hostel but it wasn't open until the early evening so we wandered around the waterfront, the Citadel, the Public Gardens, and socialized with the other travelers.

The hostel had a room for guys, one for girls, and another for couples. We were the only couple so we had a room to ourselves, which allowed us to hang up our tent, clothes, and other gear to let them dry out. The hostel was part of the national system of youth hostels started about 1970 by then Prime Minister, Pierre Trudeau (father of the later-to-be Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau). Pierre Trudeau believed that for the country to be unified, Canadians should be familiar with their country, and travel was the best way to get to know the country. In the late 1960s, there were already a lot of young people hitchhiking and driving across Canada and Trudeau believed that was a positive thing. And, since there were so many young people exploring Canada, he felt the government should help them out with places to stay.

It seemed to me like an amazingly radical idea that would never even be considered in the US, much less implemented and it gave me a good impression of Canada. What I didn't know at the time was that there was plenty of opposition in Canada to the idea and, just as in the US, many Canadians considered hitchhikers to be bums and freeloaders who were too lazy to work. On the other hand, it seemed like hitchhikers were less vilified in Canada than in the US. It rained again that evening but for once we were inside.

July 16th
We left Halifax on the same bridge we walked in on. A toll taker in one of the toll booths called over to us and asked us if we had enjoyed our visit. He must have seen us walking in the previous day and remembered us. We hitched east and north on NS 7, the Marine Drive. We camped in the woods in a cloud of mosquitoes, somewhere close to Antigonish. One of the locals told us we're lucky to have missed the blackflies, which he said were further up the coast.

July 17th
More rain and more competition from other hitchhikers on the Trans-Canada Highway. We made it as far as the town of St. Ann's on the east coast of Cape Breton Island. We found a nice spot in a fragrant pine forest that had a huge variety of mushrooms on the forest floor. Ordinarily, we would have enjoyed it but it was getting cold and damp even for me.

July 18th
More rain, at times heavy. Vickie asked if we could turn back. She was convinced it was going to rain every day in Nova Scotia. That seemed unlikely but I didn't want to make this into an ordeal for her. So, we started heading west. We made it back to Antigonish, near where we'd camped the night before last. We learned there was a hostel nearby and we opted to stay there since more rain was imminent.

The hostel, we learned, was not a government hostel, but was privately run. The owner, a guy named Mr. Whidden, could have been the brother of the owner of the Oak Bay Campground we stayed at earlier. He was grouchy, and replied to questions mostly by shaking his head and pointing at stuff.

There was a room for guys and one for girls. Vickie came and got me later. She said she was the only one on the girl's side so there wasn't any reason I couldn't come over. Mr. Whidden had nailed half-inch plywood around the edges of all the beds that extended about 6 inches above the surface of the mattress. I assume he did that to keep people from sitting on the mattresses when they weren't sleeping. It felt like sleeping in a coffin though.

We took advantage of the hostel's pay showers and used the laundromat as well. The hostel was just a sideline to a mobile home park that Mr. Whidden operated. Some of his tenants were in the laundromat with us and told us he was a miser. None of the dryers even have heat, they told us, which was true.

Some fellow travelers at Mr. Whidden's hostel recommended we visit Prince Edward Island so we decided to head that way. There was a wild scene at the Pictou ferry dock. The ferries, at the time, were part of the Canadian National Railroad, which was on strike. The strikers weren't totally closing down transportation—just slowing it down. They were running the ferry less often than it was regularly scheduled, creating a long line of cars waiting to get on the ferry. People were standing next to their cars, smoking and cursing. At the time, there were no bridges between PEI and the rest of Canada. PEI residents really depended on the ferries if they needed to get to the mainland. As foot passengers, we weren't affected and were able walk by the line of cars to get on the first ferry available.

On the way over on the ferry, the clouds dispersed and the sun actually came out—probably the first time it had actually been sunny since sometime in Maine. The scene at the PEI ferry dock was even more chaotic, with an even longer line of vehicles waiting. We thumbed from the south shore of the island through Charlottetown to the hostel, which was near Rusticoville on the north shore. Unlike the woods of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, PEI was mostly all fields, intensely green fields.

The hostel was outdoors, right on the coast. They had teepees set up for the use of anyone who didn't have their own tent. People were hanging out playing music and volleyball. We ran into some people we had met at the hostel in Halifax. Later we made friends with a bunch of French Canadians. We took advantage of the shower house and Vickie shaved her legs. Her mood improved—almost like a week of rain had never happened.

We had oatmeal with raisins, peanut butter and bread, milk, and an orange. Some combination of these was the typical hostel breakfast. I talked for a while with the hostel manager and he told me there were about 40 government-subsidized hostels from coast to coast in Canada. He gave me a pocket directory. It was about 3 inches by 3 inches when folded; it unfolded accordion-style to a strip about 3 inches by 18 or 20 inches. It had a list of all of the hostels with a matrix that provided information such as the address, the number of beds, whether it had showers, whether meals were served, whether it was indoors or outdoors, the maximum number of nights one could stay, and whether it had a kitchen that travelers could use. Most of the hostels cost either 50 cents or one dollar. The Rusticoville hostel, the only one on PEI, was 50 cents including the breakfast.

We spent the whole next day at the at the hostel, just hanging out with people and playing volleyball. We went for a hike along the shore in the afternoon. That area is now a national park but I don't think it was at the time. The hostel may have been on federal land that later became part of the park.

Photo source: unknown

The beach near Rusticoville, Prince Edward Island

July 21st
We left the following morning heading back towards Maine. We walked and thumbed to the ferry terminal at Port Borden and took the ferry over to Port Elgin, New Brunswick. Today there is a bridge at that location, but not in 1973. We got a ride with some of the Quebecois we had met at the hostel and they got us very stoned. Two of them were bi-lingual but one spoke only French so we tried to speak French with them the best we could. They taught us how to say "I'm stoned" in French—"Je suis gele’," which translates as "I'm frozen."

They left us off at Sackville, on the Trans-Canada Highway, where we got a ride with a guy named David. (Later, when we talked about him, Vickie and I both thought his name was David, but neither of us were 100 percent sure.) He told us he played chamber music with a group called the Dorian Wind Quintet and that he lived in Boston and had a summer cottage on PEI. Somewhere west of Fredericton he had a flat, which he stopped and had repaired, but he had them switch it out with his spare. Vickie called home and found out her grandfather had died. The funeral had been that day. Her dad was still upset and wanted her to come back home. Remarkably, even after all of the wet weather she told me she wasn't ready to go back yet.

(I was never nearby when Vickie called her dad so I never heard her end of the conversation. She always sent me away when she talked to him. I finally asked her why she didn't want me around, because later she always told me what they talked about anyway. She said it was so that if her dad ever asked her to put me on, she could say, without lying, that I wasn't nearby. She was convinced, probably with good cause, that things wouldn't turn out well if her dad and I were on the phone together.)

Down the road again, it occurred to David that the tire guys may not have put the repaired tire back in the trunk. He checked and, sure enough, they had not. On the way back to pick up the tire, he had another flat, the other tire on the same side. I remembered at one point he had run over a board, which must have gotten both tires on that side. We stuck with him while he got that tire fixed as well. Due to all the tire repair work, it was early evening before we pulled up to the border crossing at Houlton, Maine.

The Customs people checked our packs and found nothing illegal since we never carried anything. I don't think they would have even bothered with searching David's car except it was something for the other Customs guy to do while Vickie and I were being searched. In the pocket of a light jacket that was in the back seat of the car, the Customs guys found a camera film canister with about enough pot for two joints and a pack of Top rolling papers. They asked Dave if it belonged to him and he said "No, they must have planted it on me." He mentioned I'd been sitting in the back seat, which was true.

They had been on the verge of waving us through and now we were in for hours of interrogation. It was clear that they believed David—he was a straight-looking, buttoned-down guy and we were a couple of shaggy hitchhikers with backpacks. I could hardly blame them myself. They brought State Troopers into question us, including a female trooper who had to come in from a half hour away in order to strip search Vickie. They separated us so they could ask us the same question and try to get us to contradict each other. The trooper who was interrogating me was a white-haired guy, who looked older than he probably was.

I refused to admit that I smoked pot. I was convinced that if I admitted it then they would have some basis to pin it on us. They kept saying things to me like, "This guy was nice enough to give you two a ride and then you're low enough to turn around and plant your dope on him so he's the one who gets in trouble." Or, "C'mon. You might as well confess, we know you planted it. It's just a fine, there's no jail time involved." I didn't trust them. They asked me if Vickie smoked and I told them not that I knew of.

Vickie later told me that she admitted that she had smoked pot before. When they asked her about me, she told them not since she knew me. I had never carried weed when I traveled for just this reason—it wasn't worth the hassle. I enjoyed getting high occasionally but didn't need to have it with me. Plus, people who picked us up would occasionally get us high just like the French Canadians did that morning. I refused to take the fall for David.

The cops were so sure that we were guilty that at one time David asked if he could get something from his car, and they let him! And, when he came back, they let him go into the bathroom where shortly thereafter he flushed the toilet. The only time they only slightly waivered in their belief that we were guilty was when one of us mentioned that David was a musician. You could see them briefly pondering whether they should consider that and then deciding not to.

They tried to wear us down but, in the end, I think we wore them down. They couldn't find anything substantial that either of us said that was incriminating. Even though they thought David was innocent they still had to detain him since technically the pot was in his possession. Sometime around midnight, they let Vickie and me go. As we were leaving, the white-haired trooper told us it was illegal to hitchhike anywhere in Maine (a lie), even with a sign and if he saw us anywhere again, he would find some reason to arrest us. It seems amazing now that so much fuss was made over such a small amount of weed considering that there are now almost 150 state-licensed recreational cannabis dispensaries in Maine.

We wandered down the nearest road, which fortunately was wooded and dove into the woods at our first opportunity since, by this time, we were paranoid that the State Troopers would be out looking for us. (They were.) We didn't have a flashlight but we had a candle, which we lit so that we could find a place to put up the tent—there were too many bugs to go without a tent. We had no sooner gotten the tent up—Vickie was inside spreading the sleeping bags and I was still outside when I heard a car coming down the road slowly. I could hear the tires in the gravel on our side of the road. I told Vickie to put out the candle, stay low, and keep quiet. I ducked down.

I heard a car door slam and someone walking along the road on our side shining a flashlight back into the woods. Shit. Now I was wishing that we'd gone further back in the woods. I was afraid we might be spotted. I couldn't tell for sure because he had his trooper hat on but I think it was the white-haired guy. Fortunately, our tent was green and not fluorescent orange because the beam ran across the tent but it must not have stuck out and they kept going. We were both able to exhale.

Later we realized that, in our haste to get out of sight, we had put our tent up along the outside of a curve. So, anytime a car went by the headlight beams shone into the woods and, at first, every time that happened, we would get paranoid all over again. Neither of us slept well that night. Besides the lights and the paranoia, we'd hurriedly pitched the tent over a bunch of tree roots.

It meant nothing to me at the time, but years later I heard or read a reference to the Dorian Wind Quintet and after a little research learned that it was a well-known and highly regarded group that had been around for a long time. From their website: "...known worldwide as one of chamber music's preeminent and longest continuously active ensembles." "Since being founded at Tanglewood in 1961, they have toured in Europe 18 times and performed in the Middle East, India, Africa, and Asia." "They have collaborated with numerous well-known composers and held residencies at some of the world's most prestigious music festivals and educational institutions." And, so on.

For a group that has been around for more than 60 years, there have been a lot of different musicians in the lineup. When someone retires, they just find a replacement. I've looked at some of the old photos of the members at various points in time but there was no one I could say for sure was David. He was an average looking guy who wouldn't stand out in anyway so that isn't too surprising. And, I wasn't even sure if his name was David. (A wind quintet usually consists of a clarinetist, a flutist, a bassoonist, an oboist, and a french hornist.)

July 22nd
We woke early, all stiff from sleeping on top of tree roots. We were half-expecting to be hassled by cops but we figured our best option was to try to get out of the area as soon as possible. And, not long after we got out to the interstate, we caught a long ride down I-95, catching a view of Mt. Katahdin off to the west along the way. We got off I-95 at Newport and stopped at a diner for an early lunch, in part, to celebrate being away from Houlton.

Of course, we talked about what had happened the previous night. We had questions for each other since they questioned us separately. We were also asking each other questions about David. What was he thinking? Did he forget it was in his jacket? Why take a chance for such a small amount? We could have just pulled over and smoked it. Why didn't he at least hide it better? There was so much that didn't make any sense. At this point though, we were able to laugh about it. The weather was beautiful and all was well again.

From Newport, we started heading west on US 2, stopping for a while in Skowhegan to relax under a mammoth oak tree across the street from the Fire Department station, which was on an island in the Kennebec River. (Sadly, the oak tree is now gone.) We continued west, but quit for the day around Wilton. It was still early, but we hadn't slept well the night before and were still tired. We found a nice forest to walk into to spend the night.

Another day of good weather followed as we continued west on US 2. We had a rather long wait in Rumford, ME but didn't care, then a series of short rides into New Hampshire where, at one spot, we had a splendid view of Mt. Washington and the Presidential Range. We continued on US 2 into Vermont, through St. Johnsbury, and then Marshfield and Plainfield along the Winooski River.

At Montpelier, we found a phone and Vickie called home. Her dad was still upset that she didn't come home for her grandfather's funeral (it was too late by the time she learned he had died) and because she was still out traveling around. We found a wooded hill outside of Montpelier and slept in the woods surrounded by ferns.

West of Montpelier, US 2 and I-89 run together and we thumbed from the bottom of the entrance ramp, where we got a ride with a girl driving a white van. I let Vickie sit up front, while I sat on a mattress in the back. She told Vickie that she'd been traveling all over the country and she always picked up hitchhikers. I wasn't really paying attention to their conversation since the driver wasn't talking very loudly so I couldn't hear her very well over the engine.

Vickie filled me in later that she gradually divulged that she liked to pick up single male hitchhikers and have sex with them in her van and then drop them off somewhere up the road, sometimes still in a post-coital daze. Vickie said she delicately asked her how many? and she told her something like "TFMTC." When she saw Vickie looked a little puzzled, she said, "too fucking many to count, sister." I caught only a few bits of the conversation but enough to know Vickie wasn't making it up as a joke.

She left us out at Burlington. After relating the conversation Vickie told me if I'd been traveling alone, I would have been one lucky hitchhiker. I teased Vickie it was a shame that we never even found out what her name was. Otherwise, I'd nominate her for sainthood.

We took US 2 over the bridge onto Grand Isle in Lake Champlain and then the ferry over to the New York side to the intersection with I-87. On the spur of the moment that morning we had decided to head to Montreal so we started heading north again. We got a ride with a pharmacist from Nebraska. He was returning from a conference somewhere on the east coast and was returning by a convoluted route. He told us he was trying to milk as much time out of being away from Nebraska as he could. We rode with him all the way into Montreal.

We found the hostel, which was near McGill University and left our packs there while we wondered around the city. We hiked up to the huge city park that was Mount Royal and made it to the Belvedere Kondiaronk, an overlook at the summit, just as the lights of the city were coming on.

The hostel had separate bunkrooms for males and females, but none for couples, so we spent the night apart for the first time since we left Morgantown. The following day we started heading west. It took us half the day just to get out of Montreal, first on the Metro, and then on a city bus to get to a suitable place to hitchhike from. We were trying to get to the Trans-Canada Highway Route 17 that ran west to Sault Ste. Marie. The bulk of the traffic was going towards Toronto.

When we finally got there, we found that we were in competition with several other hitchhikers. That was one of the things about hitchhiking in Canada—unlike the US, where there are multiple east-west highways, in Canada, there is really only one—the Trans-Canada Highway or TCH. There were some parallel routes, which were part of the TCH system, but they were considered to be secondary routes. And, there was sort of a thing among Canadian hitchhikers. It was a point of honor to be able to say one had thumbed the entire length of the TCH from the east coast of Newfoundland to the coast of British Columbia (or vice versa). All of this sometimes resulted in bottlenecks where hitchhikers tended to cluster to an extent that only occasionally seemed to happen in the US.

The spot we ended up at was one of the few places in Canada where I ever saw a sign that said "Hitchhiking Prohibited," although everyone was ignoring it. We were told it wasn't being enforced. We waited a while but eventually got rides including one with a guy who was rabidly anti-American. This happened occasionally. The leaders of the two countries, Nixon and Trudeau, disliked each other and relations between the two countries had deteriorated due to disputes over trade, fishing, and the Viet Nam War, among other things. Some Canadians took Nixon's bullying personally. Others considered Americans to be cultural imperialists, which was not totally untrue. Some resented the influx of young men who moved to Canada to avoid the draft. (This was not an issue for me because I turned 18 during one of the years that a draft lottery was in effect and drew what was considered a "safe" number, 130.)

The guy who picked us up was pleasant enough at first and we all got along fine for a while, mainly because he had assumed we were Canadians. He started criticizing the US role in Viet Nam, with which I totally agreed with him. At some point he asked us where we were from so we told him and his whole demeanor changed. It didn't matter that we told him there were lots of things about the US we didn't like either—to him, we were Americans so we were evil seed. When he finally left us out, he did everything but say, "Good riddance." It didn't happen very often but it wasn't the only time.

We got about 30 miles west of Ottawa for the day and stopped to camp near a little place called Carp. We continued west on TCH 17 through the Ottawa River valley the next day, getting rides to Cobden, Pembroke, and Chalk River. At Mattawa it started raining, the first time in about a week. We stopped at a gas station/grocery store to get out of the rain. The owner was friendly and inquisitive. It was early evening by then and he told us of a place we could stay for the night. During a lull in the rain, however, we decided to push on to the hostel at North Bay.

We got a ride into North Bay only to learn that the hostel was several miles outside of town in an old school. One of the people we were talking to volunteered to drop us off. He said the hostel had a shuttle bus to take people back and forth from the hostel to the highway but the last bus for the day had left. We got there just in time to have some of the soup and bread that was the dinner. We ate with a bunch of rowdy kids who had been riding freight trains across Canada—about 10 or 12 wild teenagers all traveling together. Four or five of them were girls. They had gotten busted earlier in the day by the railway inspector but had been left off with a warning. That wasn't going to stop them they said, but the railroads were on strike again, which did.

After sharing a cold shower the next morning, we continued west on TCH 17, getting a ride into Sturgeon Falls. From there we rode for several miles with a guy who we slowly realized was on the wrong road. We figured out he wanted to be headed north on Highway 11 and didn't know he was on the wrong road. We had him let us out, then we turned him around and sent him back towards North Bay where the junction was.

The next guy who picked us had a big chaw of tobacco in his mouth. We thought he told us he could take us as far as Sault Ste. Marie, so we were a little surprised when we got to Sudbury and he said that was as far as he was going. It took us a while to realize that with his golf-ball-size plug of tobacco, Sault Ste. Marie and Sudbury sounded almost exactly the same.

Sudbury, at the time, was notorious for being devoid of vegetation because of pollution from the nickel/copper smelters in the area. Due to a combination of decades of pollution from open coke ovens and sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, and heavy metal emissions from the smelters, the area surrounding Sudbury looked like a moonscape. In fact, NASA astronauts from two of the Apollo missions did some training in Sudbury because of the similarity. (Once they got to the moon, they said it was nothing like Sudbury.)

The previous year one of the smelters had completed the construction of the Inco Superstack, a 1250-foot-high smokestack that was intended to emit the pollutants high enough that they would be dispersed further downwind—the existing 500-foot stacks weren't getting it done. At the time we were there it was the tallest freestanding smokestack in the world. It emitted an opaque brown plume that was blown horizontally in the wind. In the past 25 years there has been a major effort to "regreen" Sudbury with millions of trees planted and it reportedly no longer looks like it did when we were there.

The Superstack was taken out of service in 2020—after a major reduction in sulfur dioxide emissions it was no longer considered necessary. However, the smelter is still considered to be one of the biggest emitters of arsenic, lead, and nickel in North America.

Later we got a ride into Sault Ste. Marie with a guy who mainly just wanted to ogle Vickie. The Sault Ste. Marie hostel, I was told, had been an old YMCA summer camp. It had a main hall where people ate and then a bunch of scattered cabins. Sault Ste. Marie, we learned, was a major bottleneck for hitchhikers going west. This was because there were only a handful of small towns between Sault Ste. Marie at the east end of Lake Superior and Thunder Bay, 435 miles away at the west end. It was important to get a ride all the way to Thunder Bay. But, there were a lot of hitchhikers and not much traffic going west, and, of course, not everyone going west was willing or able to take a hitchhiker.

Photo source: Wikimedia Commons

The Inco Superstack, which was completed in 1972

To me the solution seemed simple—instead of going north, above Lake Superior, just go into the US and travel south of the lake. For most Canadian hitchhikers that wasn't acceptable though. They wanted to be able to say they had hitchhiked coast to coast in Canada. As a result, people got stuck for days and even weeks at Sault Ste. Marie. It was probably the only hostel that didn't have a limit on how many days people could stay. The hostel had an old beat-up GM school bus and they would drop people off at the highway in the morning and pick them up at the end of the day. We met people at the hostel who had been there for more than a week trying to get a ride.

The circumstances gave rise to a warning and a Canadian hitchhiking legend that I heard several times over the next few years. The warning was: "Don't take a ride to Wawa." There was a poster hanging in the hostel that said the same thing. Wawa was a small town about 140 miles up the coast of Lake Superior from Sault Ste. Marie. It was fairly easy to get a ride from Sault Ste. Marie to Wawa but practically impossible to get a ride out of Wawa towards Thunder Bay. This was because any driver who was inclined to pick up hitchhikers would have already picked someone up in Sault Ste. Marie. When they got to Wawa, they wouldn't have room to pick up another hitchhiker.

The version of the often-repeated cautionary tale I heard was that a couple years previously a hitchhiker made the grave error of accepting a ride to Wawa. Each day he would go out and stand all day trying to thumb a ride to Thunder Bay. At the end of each unsuccessful day, he would walk over to the local A&W and order a hamburger and a root beer. Over the course of several days, he gradually struck up a friendship with a waitress at the A&W. Ultimately, he gave up trying to get a ride, married the waitress, and never left Wawa. Although some people swore to me it was a true story, I'm positive it's a fable. It is so well-known that, if it was true, by now, someone would have tracked this guy down and wrote a magazine article about the living embodiment of a hitchhiking legend. Nobody has. It was, however, an effective way to warn people not to accept a ride to Wawa going west.

The cabins were gender separated. Vickie was assigned to share a cabin with twin girls, Christina and Karenza. They were from Toronto, the children of Indian immigrants. When they found out Vickie was traveling with me, they told her it was fine if I stayed in the cabin, so Vickie came and got me. We enjoyed their company. We had a long conversation about the mind-expanding benefits of travel and the occasional ecstatic experiences that travel generated. They told us the Mounted Police had stopped and questioned them that day while they were hitchhiking because they were laughing so much. The police thought they were on drugs. They told the MP they were laughing because they were happy. The MP, after telling them to try to control their happiness, left confused.

The girls were a lot of fun. Their parents, they said, were very conservative and the girls were still marveling at the fact that they had somehow convinced them to let them hitchhike around Canada for the summer. They were reveling in their sudden freedom. They talked fast and if one of them paused to search for a word, the other one would take over. They were a verbal tag team.

I asked them at one point if they were sure they didn’t mind me staying in the cabin. They found the question hilarious. The hostel had cabins for girls, guys, and couples. However, earlier in the week the camp manager had messed up and mistakenly assigned two guys to the cabin the twins were staying in. The guys almost immediately began having gay sex in front of the twins. The girls weren’t bothered by their breach of good manners. They told us they knew almost nothing about boys. They had no siblings and their parents had forbidden them from even dating. They found the episode “fascinating” and “very educational,” along with a string of other adjectives.

The next morning it was raining so Vickie and I opted to stay put. No one was permitted to hang out at the hostel during the day however. That was true at almost all of the indoor hostels. During the day, the staff, which was usually only one or two people, cleaned up and did whatever other chores were necessary. We rode the bus into town with the people who were going to take a shot at getting a ride to Thunder Bay. We just wandered around town though—browsed at the book store, relaxed at the public library, and, when it wasn't raining, took a walk along the canal on the Canadian side and watched the long boats go by on the American side. In the late afternoon we caught the bus back to the hostel—it was mainly the same people we rode in with in the morning, including the twins.

During the course of the day Vickie and I had come to an agreement. We would head toward Wisconsin where Vickie would take a bus back to Morgantown to search for an apartment. I would continue to travel for a month or so and rejoin her in Morgantown in the fall.

July 29th
In the morning, we again took the shuttle bus into town, where we again said goodbye to the twins. There were about 35 or 40 people on the bus. Most of them headed to a spot to try to get a ride west to Thunder Bay. The girls told us they lined up strictly according to who had been waiting the most days for a ride. A handful of people were heading east. Vickie and I were the only people heading south into the US. No pedestrians were allowed on the international bridge. We got a ride with a long-haired cabbie who was returning after dropping someone off. We had no trouble going through customs—they checked us pretty thoroughly but were polite. They made us eat our oranges before we could come in. We let the cabbie go on without us since the customs people were done with him before us.

On the US side we got a ride with a guy named Eric who was driving what looked to be a brand-new Volkswagen camper, the kind with a pop-up roof. We figured out that we were all heading towards Wisconsin and he said we were welcome to ride with him. He picked up three female hitchhikers but since they were heading south into lower Michigan, he let them out when we turned west on US 2 across the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

It turned out to be a nice day and we enjoyed the parts of the drive where US 2 ran right along the north shore of Lake Michigan. Eric liked to talk. He told us about his work training horses and about a girl in Madison that he wanted to see but wasn't sure about. He said he couldn't decide whether to go see her in Madison (and risk being rejected) or just to head out west. In Norway, MI the road split and we continued west, but now on US 8.

We stopped for the night at a campground in the Nicolet National Forest near a little town called Cavour, WI. Eric offered to fix us dinner. We realized that he had an extremely well-equipped travel van, including a whole cabinet of freeze-dried dinners. He offered us our choice of Tuna a la Neptune or Turkey Tetrazinni, along with some vermicelli soup. We realized he was something of an equipment freak. He had a fancy double burner gas stove and a deluxe set of cooking gear, all of which, like the van, looked brand new. The bits of cheese, crackers, and carrots that we added to the meal seemed kind of shabby in comparison. Later when we went off to set up our tent, he offered us our choice of three different kinds of mosquito repellent.

After a breakfast of scrambled eggs (freeze-dried powder) and oatmeal, we continued west on US 8, stopping later near Rhinelander at the intersection of US 8 and US 151. Eric said he couldn't decide whether to continue west or head south to see the girl. (I had thought he had already decided to go west because there was a more direct diagonal route from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan if he had wanted to go to Madison.) He told us he was leaning towards heading west but then he would feel bad because he had told us he would drive us to Madison. Vickie and I laughed and told him that that was irrelevant—that we'd been hitchhiking around for almost two months and it was no big deal; we'd just get another ride. Still, he couldn't decide. We must have sat in the van for 45 minutes while he debated himself and sought our input. Finally, he decided to head south and we all headed down US 151.

The closer we got to Madison the more he seemed to second-guess himself. At one point he said, "I shouldn't have let you talk me into this." Vickie and I just looked at each other in wonder. We had Eric leave us off outside Madison and wished him good luck with the girl. Neither of us thought it was going to end well. We found a county park to relax in. It was still early in the day but we were feeling kind of lazy. We still had a couple of days before Vickie had to head back and we were just going to take it easy until then. The park, Token Creek Park, at the time was mostly open but there was an untended area that looked thick enough to hide in for the evening.

A local cop came by and started to harass us. The park did have a campground and he told us if we weren't going to stay at the campground to move on. That was ridiculous because it was also a day-use area. We didn't challenge him though. We looked around for another decent patch of woods to spend the night but couldn't find anything suitable so later we circled back around to the park and snuck into the untended corner from the back side. This required us to scale a fence. Vickie didn't object—I had slowly converted her into a stealth camper. And, she had gotten pretty good at scaling fences.

July 31th
We had one more day before Vickie headed back to Morgantown. We were planning that she would catch the Greyhound from Milwaukee. Instead of staying at Token Creek, we hitchhiked over to New Glarus Woods, because I wanted to see some of the Driftless Area. Today, New Glarus Woods appears to be a fairly well-developed state park. At the time though, it seemed to me to be mostly a big patch of woods. We may have just missed the developed part of the park but the section we were in didn't even have any trails. We found a nice spot to set up the tent and just took it easy for the day.

Map source: Internet Archive Book Images

A 1930s era map of the Driftless Area

The New Glarus Woods were in southwestern Wisconsin in a multi-county area known as the Driftless Area. Somehow, during the last glacial period there was a section of land that remained unglaciated, while being surrounded by glaciers. That area lacks the sand, silt, gravels, and boulders, referred to as "drift" that was left behind by glaciers in the rest of the upper Midwest. Covering about 24,000 square miles it laps over into parts of Minnesota, Iowa, and Illinois, although most of it is in Wisconsin. Because it wasn't glaciated the surface was not abraded like in other nearby areas so the region is known to have steeper hills and deeper river valleys, as well as cold-water trout streams. The New Glarus woods are located between Madison and Mineral Point. After setting up the tent and ditching our packs, we enjoyed hiking around and carrying on in the woods for our last full day together for a while.

Click/Tap here to view the interactive hitchhiking route map for July.

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• Introduction
• June
• July
• August
• September

August 1st
We made the fairly short trip into Milwaukee and found the Greyhound terminal. It was a dreary day, drizzling off and on. Vickie was hoping at the end that I'd get a ticket and ride back to Morgantown with her. I told her I'd see her in about a month. I hoped to see as much of the country as possible in that month. She asked me not to get myself killed. After her bus rolled out of sight it occurred to me that I may have underestimated how much I was going to miss her. Her bus didn't leave until early evening so by the time I got out of Milwaukee it was dusk. I got a ride back west on I-94 with a commuter who rode me out to an exit near Delafield. I didn't see any woods to sneak into. It was all open fields. In the distance I saw a little clump of trees and headed towards it.

It was a little diamond-shaped patch of bushes and trees, maybe 15 feet by 15 feet. It was kind of buggy so I put the tent up in the middle on a little grassy spot. The patch of woods was barely big enough to render me invisible. The tent seemed suddenly big without Vickie. Although I knew I was going to miss having a travel companion, there was another part of me that was relieved that I no longer had to worry about her safety.

Later that night a deer wandered in. It must have been his or her usual spot to bed—I could hear it snorting in irritation that there was an intruder. Nevertheless, it bedded down right next to the tent. I wasn't alone after all. The deer, displeased about having to share its hideaway, continued to snort occasionally during the night. It was already gone by the time I got up in the morning. I could see where it had lain by the matted grass, which was only about four feet from where I slept.

There was hardly any traffic getting on I-94 that morning from Delafield and what was getting on was heading east to Milwaukee. I had an urge to get out of Wisconsin so I headed out on to the interstate shoulder to thumb. I hated the interstate highways. I thought they were unjustifiably destructive with their multiple lanes and wide median strips. They encouraged even more motorized travel, generating more auto and truck emissions. I considered roads and highways to be the mycelia of an ever-expanding human fungus that was destroying the natural world.

Because the interstates were recently constructed, most of the land around the interchanges was often not yet developed. I could see though how they provided nodes for potential commercial development. The area around the Delafield exit where I spent the night in a tiny patch of woods a few feet away from an irritated deer in 1973 is now a typical suburban wasteland of a Walmart Supercenter, Marshall's, Kohl's, Best Buy, La Quinta Inn, Target, Olive Garden, Home Depot, and various other smaller businesses including a host of strip malls and fast food places. I knew development would follow the interstates but I probably underestimated what a mess it would create and how Americans would end up being forced to drive further to do their shopping.

As a hitchhiker, the irony that I was a participant in the run-amok American car culture that often horrified me was not lost on me. I rationalized that I was using the space in vehicles that was otherwise being wasted. Nevertheless, I knew I was a fungal spore just like everybody else.

Although it was posted at the foot of each interstate entrance ramp that pedestrians were prohibited, many states didn't enforce it, or if they did, they would give you a warning first. I was counting on that in Wisconsin. Everybody who picked me up that day told me I could get busted for being on the highway, but I never saw a trooper the whole way across Wisconsin. Around Tomah, I-94 and I-90, which had been running together, split and I continued west on I-90, getting a ride with a trucker who took me to La Crosse. I walked the bridge over the Mississippi, looking down on green, wooded islands on my way into the town of La Crescent, MN, where I got some groceries and took a break.

Later, I continued west on I-90, across the southern tier of Minnesota. Around Austin I finally get a warning from a Minnesota trooper. I got a ride with some teenagers going to a fair, who got me stoned. They were surprised when I told them I never carried anything when I was traveling. I made it as far as the vicinity of Albert Lea for the day and walked off into the fields again to a small patch of short, thorny trees. Just like the previous night it was the only patch of trees in sight. I knew they wouldn't be there for long—there were surveyor stakes everywhere.

August 3rd
I lucked out the next day—the interstate is still under construction from Albert Lea to Worthington so all of the traffic is routed to the old two-lane highway, US 16, that runs alongside of it. I'm in Worthington in no time. At Worthington I got a ride with a girl who told me she knows a place where we could go mess around. This was an extremely rare occurrence but I politely turned her down. I didn't find her very appealing, which saved me from having to wrestle with my conscience. The next ride was with a small, elderly, Bible-quoting guy who begins praying for my soul and is crying by the time I get out.

At Sioux Falls, SD I ran into two other hitchhikers, a friendly couple from the Twin Cities heading to the Black Hills. A young guy named Jeff picked all three of us up. He was driving a huge boat of an Oldsmobile so there was plenty of room. The couple sat in the back and I rode shotgun up front where Jeff asked me to roll a joint. He said he picked up hitchhikers all the time.

We stopped for gas at a little place called Murdo, which is about half way across South Dakota. When it was time to get going again the car wouldn't start. Fortunately, the gas station was also the local mechanic shop. They figured out the starter was cooked. However, they wouldn't be able to get to it for a while because they had to find a replacement starter and they had to let the old one cool off. It was about 101 degrees out so it would take a while. The couple from Minneapolis decided to head out to the highway. Jeff had this look on his face like he didn't want to be left by himself in Murdo. At first the guys at the gas station/mechanic shop came off like rednecks but after we had been there for a while we realized they weren’t so bad. There was also a pretty female mechanic working there. I decided to wait with Jeff, partly because of the heat, partly because of the pretty mechanic.

Jeff was on his way to a friend's cabin in the Black Hills near Custer for the weekend and told me I was welcome to crash there—it would just be him and three or four of his old high school buddies. Eventually the mechanic found and installed a rebuilt starter and Jeff and I were off again. He stopped and picked up another couple hitchhiking. It wasn’t the ones from the Twin Cities. We never saw them again. The new couple were also friendly but they both quickly fell asleep. We had to wake them up at the turn-off to the Badlands, which was where they told us they were headed.

West of Rapid City, I could tell Jeff was getting tired and he wasn't very good at driving on winding roads so he let me drive the boat and he navigated me to his friend's cabin, which had a sign that said Canton Buck Club. His friends told me I was welcome to sleep inside but, after hanging out with them for a while, I put the tent up outside under some fragrant pines.

Photo source: Ben Holcomb

The Needles, Black Hills of South Dakota.

I was up early the next day and went for a walk in the vicinity of the cabin, from which I could get a good view of the Needles. Later, back at the cabin, Jeff told me he and his friends were headed to Deadwood to see a rodeo. They offered to take me that way, which would get me back out towards I-90. Back on 1-90, I got a ride to Spearfish with a businessman who bought me a beer and then with a church lady who rode me to Buelah, right on the Wyoming line. She made me take a book, which she called a "more readable version of the Bible." It must have only hit the highlights because it looked considerably shorter too. She made me promise to read it.

Buelah was a dead ramp so I went out on the interstate and quickly got a ride with two guys, Tom and Jerry, driving a yellow VW. (I was able to keep their names straight because Tom was a lot bigger than Jerry, just like in the cartoon.) They were driving from Chicago to Seattle and were heading for Yellowstone. I ended up sticking with them for a big chunk of two days. At Buffalo, we got off of I-90 and followed US 16 toward Yellowstone through Ten Sleep Canyon, Worland, Greybull, and Cody. At a rest stop we talked to some people who told us the Yellowstone campgrounds were full. After passing the palisades of the North Fork of the Shoshone River we found a campsite in the Shoshone National Forest in the Absaroka Range.

Photo source: yellowstonetrips.com

The Palisades along the North Fork of the Shoshone River.

Tom and Jerry had sleeping bags but no tent. I told them that one of them could share the tent with me but they both declined and slept out. It got cold and windy at night and they were both stiff with cold and dampness the next morning. The cheap tent Vickie and I bought didn't breathe very well but it did seem like it kept the inside about five degrees warmer than outside. It also helped with the wind a little.

August 5th
I continued with Tom and Jerry into Yellowstone. We all got showers at the lodge and then we did a loop around the park viewing wildlife and some of the geysers and paint pots. After a few hours in the park, we headed north on US 89, hitting I-90 at Livingston, where we then headed west through Bozeman, Butte, and Deer Lodge. I had them let me off just west of Missoula. It was quite a ride—I had been with them for about 750 miles through some magnificent scenery.

Some Indians from the Flathead Reservation gave me a ride to Polson, getting me stoned along the way. I then got a ride with a middle-aged couple in a pickup. They told me they never pick up hitchhikers but they thought I looked alright. They rode me to Kalispell and even gave me a little driving tour of the town. I found a place to sleep just outside of Columbia Falls.

I picked up some groceries in Columbia Falls the next morning and got a ride into West Glacier with a cowboy who tried to recruit me to fight forest fires. I briefly considered it. I had him let me off by Lake McDonald and hiked up to Snyder Lake, found a spot to set up camp later, and stashed my pack. I spent the rest of the day exploring in the vicinity including a hike up to the upper lake.

Photo source: theoutbound.com

Snyder Lake, Glacier National Park. It was more overcast on the day I was there.

August 7th
I hiked down from Snyder Lake and caught a ride over the mountains with two guys in a van. They were headed to Canada so they conscripted me to help them smoke up the last bit of their weed supply before they crossed the border. Going to the Sun Road was spectacular; we pulled over at practically every turnout and would all get out and admire the views. This was mainly because the driver felt like he wasn't getting to enjoy the view while he was driving—the road was windy and narrow so it was really not possible to drive and sightsee at the same time. It's about 55 miles from one side of the park to the other but it took us the whole morning to get across.

Photo source: Stephen Moehle

Going to the Sun Road

I had them let me out in the town of St. Mary's on the east side of the park where I picked up a letter from Vickie at the post office. [1] I got a ride north with someone going to Calgary, which was where I was headed for the day. However, the Canadian customs officials spent a lot more time searching me than they did my ride, who got tired of waiting and went on without me.

On the other side of the border, I got a ride with three Indians. They were in a pickup and I went to jump in the back but they insisted that I squeeze in up front with them. I soon noticed that the driver, Richie, was extremely drunk. After the first of two near accidents I asked if maybe someone else should be driving. One of the other two (who were both also drunk but not as drunk as Richie) just shrugged his shoulders and said Richie was a chief and the chief drives. Fortunately, they were only going to Cardston, which wasn't that far. It was the scariest ride of the trip to that point, however.

It must have been Indian country because the next couple rides were also with Indians. First to Fort McLeod and then to Claresholm. There were Indians along the road trying to get rides as well. They didn't put a thumb out. It was just understood that if someone was standing by the road, they needed a ride. And the Indians with vehicles appeared to stop and give a ride to anyone who needed one, even when they didn't have much room.

As I got closer to Calgary, there were more cattle and grain elevators and fewer Indians. I finally got a ride into Calgary with a cowboy and found the hostel, which was downtown. It wasn't as lively as the other hostels I'd been at. People were just hanging out by themselves or maybe a couple people; there was very little socializing and it was almost all guys. No food. And, they kept some lights on all night, which made it hard for me to sleep. You never knew what you were going to get with the government hostels.

I was up early the next day to head west to Banff and the Canadian Rockies. But already there were almost a hundred people on the road trying to get rides. I saw no point in waiting in such a long line so I just started walking down the road, well beyond the end of the line. Someone stopped and offered me a short ride; I walked some more and got offered another ride while I was walking. Shortly after I started actively thumbing again and got a ride into Banff.

There were two hostels in Banff but I liked the one called Mountainview best. It was outside—a tent city that seemed to be set up over a gopher colony. People were noticeably friendlier than the people at the Calgary hostel. I set my tent up, then played some volleyball, and went for a walk. Beautiful site.

August 9th
The hostel was at the foot of Cascade Mountain and it was possible to hike up the mountain from the campground. There were no trails. It started out open and grassy, then forested, then a narrow strip that was open and grassy again, and then rocky. I got part way up the rocky section until I reached an area that was too steep to climb. I hung out up there for a good part of the day. I ran into some other guys from the hostel on the way down. We slid down a long scree slope. I didn't feel like I had hiked that far but I was tired by the time I got back and had a good night's sleep, which made up for the night before.

Photo source: unknown

A view of downtown Banff, probably from the late 1960s.

I didn't spend much time in town but enough to notice that the local merchants didn't seem very friendly. I found out later that there had been a history of tension between the townspeople and the transient young people who drifted through in the summer. The downtown merchants objected to what they considered excessive shoplifting and panhandling. They also seemed to fear that if there were too many ‘hippies’ in Banff, they would scare away the regular tourists who spent more. The hostel, I heard, had been located outside of town specifically to minimize the number of drifters in town.

Cascade Mountain is the peak that looms over downtown Banff. Although it doesn't look like it from the view above, the mountain is a long ridge. The view from downtown Banff is of the tail-end of the ridge. In 1973 the hostel was outside of town at the base of the ridge. In other years the hostel was at other locations. By 1973 there were a lot less hitchhikers coming through than in 1969 and 1970 but they still weren't very welcome.

August 10th
I left the hostel early but there were still 10 people lined up trying to get rides going west from Banff. I took my place at the end of the line and had worked my way down to the fifth position when a couple stopped and offered me a ride to Lake Louise. They were a typical middleclass couple in a blue Rambler Ambassador—the kind of people who almost never picked up hitchhikers in the US.

There was also a line of hitchhikers at Lake Louise but it was shorter and after a while I was the only one there. Shortly, after, however, some other people showed up including a couple of French-Canadian guys who refused to go to the back of the line. Some RCMPs later came by and searched everyone's pack. After about an hour there I got tired of waiting and took off walking.

I had probably walked a few miles when a park worker pulled over and offered me a lift. He pulled over again down the road to show me an overlook from which we could see part of the Spiral Tunnels of the Canadian Pacific Railway. The project is spread over a wide area and it wasn't possible to see the entire thing from our vantage point. It was only later when I read about it that I realized what a marvel of engineering it was. I believe he showed me the lower tunnel. There is about a 50-foot difference in elevation between the entrance and the exit of each of the two tunnels. The park worker rode me as far as Fields, BC.

Photo source: S. Wetzel/Wikipedia

Above is a photo of a model showing the layout of the Spiral Tunnels in Kicking Horse Pass. The original rail line through the pass was so steep it turned out to be unacceptably dangerous. In what was considered a major feat of engineering, two tunnels (the red segments), which each make three-quarters of a turn, were bored inside of two different mountains on the opposite sides of the valley. The tunnels and connecting line added more distance compared to the original line and reduced the slope from 4.5 percent to 2.2 percent, which is still steep for a railroad and derailments continue to occur regularly. The project was completed in 1909. The black line is the Trans-Canada Highway.

I wasn't in Field long before some people in a Saab pulled over and offered me a ride. They were a couple guys who I had noticed at the hostel in Banff. The driver told me his friend in the back was very sick, probably dying, and they were trying to get him to a hospital in Vancouver. He did look pretty bad. I got the feeling he was a dope-sick junkie. There was also a teenage girl who looked to be Native American, who I hadn't seen before. She was holding his head in her lap. They asked me if I could help with some gas money and I gave them a little. Down the road they picked up another hitchhiker from Massachusetts and asked him for money as well.

Photo source: Alamy

The scenery along the TCH in Banff and Yoho National Parks was spectacular, as well as in Glacier National Park (the Canadian one) going over Rogers Pass.

Our ride left me and the guy from Massachusetts off in Revelstoke and we found the hostel. It was outdoors and they had some tents set up for people to stay in. They were, however, full so I set my own tent up on the hill where I figured it would be quieter. The hostel served a pretty good dinner during which I had a nice conversation about traveling with a girl from the Netherlands who had been living in New York City.

August 11th
I left the hostel after breakfast with the guy from Massachusetts. We decided we'd have better luck if we each hitchhiked solo. We flipped to see who got the first position and he won. After he was gone, I got a ride with two college-age girls, who were friendly until they found out I was an American. They had been making a series of insulting comments about "Yanks" every time a car with American license plates passed them. They were a little embarrassed when they finally got around to asking me where I was from and I told them. They told me I seemed OK for a Yank.

I had them let me off at Salmon Arm. I teased them that I felt so unwelcome in Canada I was going to head south, back to the US. I got a ride to Vernon and then to Kelowna, BC, where there was a hostel. It had the best food out of any Canadian hostel I ever stayed at. Most of the government hostels seemed to provide a breakfast, but not a dinner.

Some of them had a kitchen that was available for people to use. Occasionally, a bunch of people would get together and inventory what kind of food supplies they had in their packs and attempt to cook something using whatever was at hand. That could get interesting. The Kelowna hostel, however, actually had a cook. She was an older, motherly woman who made a home-cooked meal that included a pot roast, potatoes, vegetables, and pie. I found out that the Okanogan valley, where Kelowna was situated, was the fruit basket of Canada and the cherry and peach pies she made contained local fruit. It was the best meal I'd had in a long time.

Hostel breakfasts typically consisted of some combination of oatmeal, bread, peanut butter, and maybe coffee. Sometimes they gave you an orange. I had no complaints—I didn't expect much for 50 cents. The Kelowna hostel, however, also had a breakfast cook, although not the same person who cooked the wonderful dinner. The breakfast cook didn't show up that morning, however, and I somehow got conscripted, along with another traveler, to help make breakfast. I was assigned to fry eggs, probably not the best choice for my skill set at the time. Everyone wanted their eggs over easy but the eggs kept sticking to the thin enameled frying pan I was using and I broke several yokes. It ended up benefitting me, I guess, as every time I broke a yoke, I just set that egg aside and ate it later. I probably had eight eggs for breakfast. Someone else was frying bacon. I don't think I ever had eggs and bacon at another hostel. Why the Kelowna hostel had such a well-stocked pantry I have no idea.

I helped the manager clean up the kitchen afterwards. For helping with the breakfast and cleanup, the manager let me pack away some bacon and bread for lunch. I then leisurely made my way further south. After being in the Rockies, the Okanogan Valley seemed hot and dry and I took occasional breaks to get out of the sun. I got a series of rides down Route 97 through Penticton and Okanogan Falls. I crossed the border into the US at Osoyoos in the late afternoon with minimal hassle by the US Customs people.

Back in the US, I got a ride with three people in a pickup going to Oroville, not far down the road. They were friendly but had that kind of haggard look of chronic alcoholics. They said they would drop me up the road but needed to swing by their trailer first. I jumped in the back. At their trailer they invited me to have some drinks with them. They were a couple, Tom and Betty, who I guessed were probably in their mid-40s to 50, but looked about 15 or 20 years older and their friend, Cap, who looked like he might be part-Indian. All three said they were apple-pickers by trade. That seemed like it left a big part of the year with no apples to pick.

I didn't feel like drinking the bottom-shelf vodka they were having, but I did drink a couple Olympias to be sociable. I realized they were probably already half wasted when they picked me up. I just hadn’t noticed because I was in the bed of the truck. We were sitting around on metal lawn chairs in front of their dilapidated trailer. They had a little black and brown mixed-breed dog, who wouldn't come to them. "He doesn't like it when we get drunk," Tom explained.

As they got drunker and drunker I learned that they had picked me up because Tom and Betty's son was also on the road (Tucson, the last time they heard from him) and I reminded Betty of him. She worried about whether he could take care of himself. She was getting weepy drunk. I told Betty that he wouldn't be on the road if he couldn't take care of himself. I didn't really believe that was always true but I felt compelled to say something half-way comforting. Cap, who was now slurring his words, said, "Thass beautifuul. Say thaat again."

They invited me to spend the night and since it was dark by now, I accepted. They gave me their teenaged daughter's room, who I learned had recently ran away—another source of sadness for Betty. I was getting ready to crash for the night when Cap put his head in the room and told me they were going into town to get something to eat and wanted to know if I'd like to come. I told him I was tired and would pass. That was true but I also didn't want to ride with them.

About an hour later a guy who said he was a neighbor from the trailer park banged on the door. He told me they were in an accident and were in jail for drunk driving and public intoxication. He wanted to show me something and drove me down the road in his Jeep to see their pickup, still crashed on the side of the road. They had only made it about a mile from the trailer. He told me that none of them were hurt but a friend of his who was on a motorcycle swerved to get out of their way and was hurt. He made it clear that he didn't hold any of them in very high regard. "And, who are you?" he asked me. When I told him, he said, "You need to gather up your stuff and clear out."

I didn't though. I had nowhere to go in the middle of the night and I didn't see what business it was of his whether I stayed or not. It wasn't easy to sleep though. The dog paced all night because I was there and Tom and Betty weren't. It felt weird being there. There were no curtains on the window in the daughter's room and the moon, which was bright, shone in like a street light. Eventually I dozed off.

August 13th
In the morning light, the trailer was depressing in a way I hadn't noticed the evening before. I looked around to see if I could find anything to eat. There was nothing but a bunch of empty cabinets. There was a half jar of mustard in the refrigerator, part of a bag of white rice, and a half a bag of potatoes that had shriveled up and sprouted five-inch tentacles. No wonder the kids left—it was either that or starve. I found a bag of dog food, fed him, and put him on a chain outside with a bowl of water. I left a note for Tom and Betty thanking them for letting me stay. I walked around the trailer park until I saw the neighbor's Jeep and left a note on his windshield asking him if he'd feed the dog later.

I wanted to get down the road. I felt a profound sadness for the lives of Tom, Betty, and Cap. As far as I could tell, they weren’t bad people, but their lives, and likely their kids' lives, were ruined because of their alcoholism. I wanted to get far enough away so I could stop thinking about it. I continued south on US 97, through Tonasket and Omak. Somewhere below Okanogan I got a ride with a woman driving a Cadillac on her way to Wenatchee. A little later she picked up another hitchhiker, a young guy named Rob, who was from Omak. He didn't have any gear and I had a hunch he was a runaway.

At Wenatachee he asked if he could travel with me and I told him we could see how it goes. We continued south on 97, through Ellensburg and Yakima, through some Indian country around Toppenish. We crossed the Colombia River at the Dalles as it was getting dark and found a place to sleep in a wild corner of the city park. Since Rob didn't even have a sleeping bag, I let him wrap the tent around him. There were no bugs and it didn't look like rain so there was no need to put the tent up.

Rob and I got a breakfast of pancakes at a cafe in town the next morning. Rob admitted to me that he had gotten angry at his parents and ran away. His parents were both military people but Rob had spent his entire life in the sagebrush country around Omak. I was conflicted about whether I should encourage him to go back home. Rob didn't tell me anything about what made him want to leave. I thought about Tom and Betty's son and whether going home was always the best thing. I suspected that it wouldn’t take Rob very long to decide to go home on his own. At least he had some pocket money and wasn't relying on me to keep himself fed.

We headed west on I-80N (now I-84) through the Columbia River valley, past Mt. Hood, into Portland. We found a big patch of wild blackberries in Portland. You could tell local people had been picking them because there were paths beaten down between the plants, which were huge, and someone had left some planks that were actually supported by the canes so they could reach the higher berries. I had never seen these types of blackberries—the bushes were probably 10 feet tall, the canes were thick and strong, and the berries were huge. Rob and I gorged ourselves. I found out much later they are called Marionberries and they are a hybrid cultivar developed in Oregon. That big patch may have been planted.

We got messed up coming through Portland—someone let us off in the wrong place and we ended up walking across a big chunk of Portland trying to get to a good place to start hitchhiking again. We took US 30 through St. Helens and hit the coast at Astoria at the mouth of the Columbia River, then started heading south on US 101. We made it about as far as Seaside and started looking for a place to spend the night.

As we headed into the woods along the road, I could tell Rob was kind of agitated and I asked him if he was OK. He told me he didn't like the woods. I had noticed he had seemed anxious the night before as well. He said he had never been any place this thickly vegetated. In Omak, he told me, everything was always wide open and he could always see for miles. Here, he felt hemmed in and claustrophobic he said. I told him he'd get used to it, although I was not so sure about that. He looked pretty nervous. We slept out on the ground again and I again let him use the tent as a blanket.

The following morning, we woke up to find several banana slugs on both my sleeping bag and the outside of the tent Rob had wrapped around himself. Some of them were five or six inches long when they were stretched out. This really unnerved Rob—I think he may have thought they were some kind of blood-sucking leeches. He watched me in wonder and revulsion as I gently picked them off the sleeping bag and tent and placed them on the ground. It wasn't the last time I'd pick slugs off my sleeping bag.

Photo source: Redwoods National Park

Although some banana slugs are a bright yellow, their color varies. The ones I picked off of my sleeping bag and tent were brown. They were anywhere from four to six inches when they were stretched out. They would sometimes scrunch themselves up into shorter, circular form that reminded me of a half of a walnut shell, only bigger.

We continued south on US 101. Somewhere around Lincoln City, Rob saw a sign for a public phone and went into a store to make a phone call. When he came out, he told me he called his parents and he was heading back home. We shook hands and I wished him luck on the return. I wondered if I did the right thing letting him travel with me as far as I did. I think the slugs were the last straw.

I got a ride down to Newport with two friendly guys who bought me lunch at Mo's in Newport. It's been in business since 1946 and is famous for its clam chowder. I later got stuck for a couple hours in Yachats since there is some competition for rides along the coast. It's a beautiful day though so I don't mind. I finally got a ride down to Florence, where I was expecting a letter at the post office from Vickie. By the time I got to Florence though the post office is closed so I found a place to camp nearby.

I picked up Vickie's letter the following morning. Back on 101 there was a thick mist blowing in off the ocean. I got a quick ride to Coo's Bay but after that it was slow catching rides. It was a beautiful day though and I found some more blackberry patches in places. I quit early and headed to the beach at Port Orford and spent most of the afternoon climbing on the rocks along the beach. I talked for a while with a guy who was bicycling down the coast and later found a spot to spend the night in the woods above the beach.

Photo source: Greg Vaughn Photography

The beach at Port Orford, OR.

August 17th
It took a while to get a ride out of Port Orford. I finally got a ride with a girl going to Crescent City, CA, who had me roll a joint for us. I spent part of the day in the redwoods near Crescent City and then continued south. I made it as far south as Myers Flat and spent the night in a redwood grove, just laying out on the ground. It hadn't been buggy, windy, or rainy and I hadn't bothered to put the tent up since I was in the Canadian Rockies.

Photo source: planetware.com

A redwood grove at Jedediah Smith State Park near Crescent City, CA. I spent part of the day hiking around at Jed Smith. Later, that day I hiked around in the Humboldt Redwoods and slept there in a redwood grove.

August 18th
What a joy it was to wake in the morning and gaze up into the canopy of redwoods. I was beginning to feel like the earth was just one giant cushion for me to lie on. I hitchhiked down to Leggett, where US 101 and CA 1 split, with 1 going closer to the coast. I decided to spend the afternoon along the South Fork of the Eel River, where I ended up almost injuring myself.

I was coming down the side of a little canyon that was a feeder to the river. It was steep but didn't seem all that steep to me—I'd walked across steeper slopes. But then the soil and loose rocks just started sliding out from under me and I was sliding down the slope out of control. I was able to stop myself but every time I moved a little bit I started sliding again.

I thought about just letting myself slide to the bottom but when I looked down it looked like there was a drop-off at the bottom and I couldn't tell whether it was two feet or 20 feet. I realized that if I took my pack off, it changed my center of gravity and I was able to move around a little better without sliding. But what was I supposed to do with my pack? I finally just gave it a push and let it slide down to the bottom and over the edge. Then I was able to slowly creep off the side of the slope, staying low. I had never experienced that type of crumbly, unstable, non-cohesive soil. No wonder California has so many mud slides.

Then I had to find a way to the bottom to retrieve my pack. I was more careful about what types of slopes I went casually walking across after that. The drop-off at the bottom of the slope was about 10 feet and rocky so it was good I didn't just slide down the hill. Apparently, local people sometimes dumped difficult-to-get-rid-of garbage down the hill because there were a couple of old washing machines, an old console TV, and, ugh, the putrefying carcass of a dead mule. Unfortunately, my pack came to rest a few feet from the mule, which was emanating the most god-awful stench. It was all I could do not to retch when I retrieved the pack, stirring up a cloud of green-bottle flies in the process. The pack frame was dented a little but other than a little abrasion wear and tear it was OK. I spent the rest of the day hiking and relaxing along the South Fork of the Eel and found a place to spend the night in a grove of young redwoods.

August 19th
I got a ride down CA 1 to Mendocino with a young mom and her baby, a rare occurrence. I spent the rest of the day exploring the town, which was kind of touristy, and the beach, which was beautiful. I spent the night at a free campground there.

August 20th
Some guys from New York in a van gave me a ride further south the next morning. They were picking up all the hitchhikers they could fit, including three girls who were hitchhiking to San Francisco together. I was planning to stop in Jenner to pick up some mail and the NY guys stopped to take a break there when they let me out.

The post office was combined with a general store and tavern. It has since been torn down. The people who ran it were nasty. The woman who gave me my letters didn't say anything but gave me a decidedly hostile look. I bought a few groceries and when I was checking out, I told the cashier I didn't need a bag. For that, she called me a dirty bastard, which caught me off guard. I jokingly told her I might be a little dirty but I was pretty sure I wasn't a bastard. She wasn't amused. I don't know what she said to the three girls but I later noticed one them crying on the porch of the store. I was used to getting occasional dirty looks so I wasn't bothered by it or the insult. I told the guys from NY I was going to spend some time on the beach so they and the three girls went on without me.

Down on the beach I struck up a conversation with some hippies who were living on the beach in driftwood huts. They invited me for lunch—they had cooked up some split peas in a cast iron skillet over a wood fire. It was too thick to call soup—it was a sort of split pea paste. I'd bought a loaf of bread at the general store and I shared that with them. What was the deal with the people at the store? I asked them.

They told me they'd heard that a few years before, some Oakland Hells Angels had gone for a ride up the coast and stopped at Jenner. They wanted to buy some liquor and the owner, who had pulled out a shotgun, refused to serve them. When one of the Angels attempted to come behind the counter, the owner discharged a load of rock salt into his leg. Shortly after, the Sheriff, some deputies, and the Highway Patrol arrived on the scene and escorted the Angels out of the area. Ever since then, the locals considered everyone they didn't know personally as some kind of a threat or an undesirable. They didn't make any distinction between Hells Angels, your garden-variety hippies, and sometimes, regular tourists. Of course, the locals didn't like people like them living on the beach but they hadn't driven them off yet. I spent the rest of the day hiking along the beach and ended up sleeping there as well.

August 21st
The following morning, I planned to head into San Francisco. I got a ride down to Marin County and from there got a ride with a pretty girl named Carol in a convertible. She lived in Mendocino County and had borrowed her grandma’s Chrysler convertible to spend a few days visiting friends in the city. So, here I was crossing the Golden Gate bridge with a pretty girl on a pretty day in a convertible with the top down. That was a rare combination of low-probability events since I only very occasionally got rides with pretty young solo women and never in a convertible.

I think I sort of developed a crush on Carol within about five minutes. We got along well. She had a good sense of humor and we were able to make each other laugh, instead of me being tongue-tied, which often happened. She asked me where I was planning on staying and I admitted that I had absolutely no idea. She had figured out that I was looking for someplace dirt cheap and/or free. “I have a friend,” she told me, “who will know where you can crash—he was ones of the Diggers. [2] If he doesn’t know where people are crashing, he will know someone who does,” she said.

We dropped by his place. He was a big Native American guy with a long ponytail. Carol hadn’t seen him in some time, and, after introductions, they spent some time catching up. He told Carol he’d become a printmaker and his prints were bringing in big money in galleries in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Some of them were hanging in chrome frames on his apartment walls. They weren’t easy to describe or categorize—all non-representational with big areas of soft-edged shapes of various colors. I didn’t find them that interesting.

He admitted to Carol that he was no longer in touch with what was going on on the streets and had no idea where people could crash. The whole time we were in his apartment he was taking practice swings with a golf club. He was wearing one of those polo shirts with a little alligator embroidered on it. I couldn't quite put my finger on it but somehow it seemed to me that there was some inherent conflict between Native Americans and the game of golf. I don’t know... it seemed to me like it was one thing to appropriate someone’s land and something else to turn it into a golf course. Once we said our goodbyes and were back out on the sidewalk, Carol said, “Well, he seems to have gone through some changes.”

Carol and I went our separate ways shortly after. I knew she had other stuff she wanted to do, and I didn’t want to cut into her time in the city too much. I missed her as soon as she was gone though, and kicked myself for not at least getting her address so I could drop her a postcard later.

I eventually wandered down around the Civic Center where I met some people who invited me to lunch at a nearby soup kitchen. The guy who did most of the talking was a big guy named Fred—long hair down his back, a big Old Testament style beard, one dangly earring, a long overcoat, a few big rings with gemstones, and a walking stick with pieces of inlaid abalone shell. Over lunch we got to talking about places to stay and he told me about an empty place where people were staying that he referred to as the Carousel Ballroom. He drew me a map with instructions on how to get in.

“There is just one thing,” he said. “There’s a watchman you will have to get by. He is there 24-7. He stays in a little travel trailer.” (He had even marked the trailer on the map.) “He’s a mean drunk and he’s usually in his trailer drunk. Just don’t let him see you.” One of the other guys at the table added, “Yeah, if he finds out we’re in there, we’ll all get run out. Don’t fuck it up for the rest of us, man.”

I wandered around for a while but eventually headed to the ballroom in the late afternoon. Fred’s map was remarkably detailed and accurate. The bigger building that the ballroom was a part of took up a whole triangular-shaped block. The front sides were on Market and South Van Ness. 12th Street was the diagonal street forming the third side of the triangle. There was an open industrial-sized garage door on that side that led into a big parking garage, then up a ramp and onto a big flat rooftop where more cars were parked. I saw the tiny travel trailer but no sign of the watchman. Fred had marked the entry point on the map. It took some bodily contortions to get in but it wasn’t difficult.

Inside, I could tell it had been some kind of a concert venue. It was mostly empty but there was still a stage and there were a bunch of handbills scattered on the floor. They were mostly multiples of the same three or four concerts—some at the Carousel Ballroom and some at the Avalon Ballroom. The only bands I can remember were the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and Quicksilver Messenger Service. I was beginning to wonder what sort of place this was.

I didn’t have to wait too long to find out. Fred showed up later in the evening and then later a black guy named Simon. Talking to Fred and Simon I realized that the Carousel Ballroom (the name meant nothing to me then) had more recently been the Fillmore West, where all sorts of concerts had taken place during the psychedelic heyday. Simon had worked there as a painter and repairman and had taken tickets at concerts. He got kind of sentimental talking about what a beautiful scene it was when it was in operation and what a shame it was that beautiful things always had to die. Somehow, Simon had access to the building so that he didn’t have to sneak in like everyone else. He must have still had keys because he always seemed to come up the stairs from the proper entrance at the corner of Market and South Van Ness. One evening he came in and borrowed an extension ladder and left.

Simon and Fred took me on something of a tour. Fred had claimed a room for himself, which he was gradually filling with what he referred to as “urban artifacts.” There was little sign of the ballroom’s previous psychedelic incarnation—Simon said all of the portable artwork had been removed. There were still a few large psychedelic style murals that had been painted directly onto the walls—mostly cosmic type things like constellations, starships, and exploding nebulae.

Photo source: rwcpulse.com

Shown above is the Fillmore West in its heyday between 1968 and 1971. The Carousel Ballroom started out as a swing-era "dance palace." It became known as a rock and roll venue in the late 1960s. Briefly in 1968 the Carousel Ballroom was jointly operated as a "social/musical laboratory experiment" by the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and Quicksilver Messenger Service.
Shortly after the experiment came to an end, concert promoter Bill Graham began using the ballroom as his primary west coast rock and roll venue. (Graham's original Fillmore venue was at the corner of Fillmore St. and Geary Blvd and operated there from 1966 to 1968.) The Fillmore West closed in July 1971 with five days of concerts.

I spent the next few nights at the ballroom. During the day I’d stash my pack in a locker at the bus station and walk around all day. Sometimes I’d show up at the soup kitchen for either lunch or dinner. I enjoyed getting up early when it was still foggy and seeing the fog gradually burn off. I walked all over town—not even trying to figure out the streetcar system— Chinatown, Russian Hill, Telegraph Hill, the wharves, Haight-Ashbury, Golden Gate Park, heading back to the ballroom in the evening.

The ballroom had two disadvantages. One was that there was nowhere to go to the bathroom. That tended to get me up and out early, which I figured was likely to be before the watchman was up and about. The other was that it was pitch dark inside if I came in too late in the evening. I had taken to sleeping on the stage and after the first night, I counted off the steps so I could find it in the dark. I didn’t carry a flashlight.

The number of other guys who spent the night there seemed to fluctuate. One night there were eight to 10. Another night I think I may have been the only person there. The second night, three guys came in late and sat down with their backs to the edge of the stage about five feet from where I was laying on top in my bag. They had no idea I was there. They had been drinking at a nearby bar and had met an out-of-town person who had carelessly revealed to them a walletful of cash. They began hatching a plan to go back to the bar and separate him from his wallet. One guy said he knew where he could get a big sack and they could lure him into an alley, throw the sack over him, grab his wallet, and take off. It sounded very amateurish and I wasn’t sure how serious they were.

I briefly debated whether I should let them know I was there but decided not to. They eventually left to return to the bar. They never came back so I have no idea whether they were successful or whether they even tried to put their plan into action.

August 24th
After three days in the city, I decided to go to the other side of the bay and check out Berkeley. On the morning I left, I was up a little later than usual. While walking across the rooftop parking lot I saw a guy holding a cup of coffee walking towards me. Shit! I knew immediately he was the watchman who I’d been able to avoid for the past three days. It was too late—I knew he’d seen me, so I just kept walking toward the ramp. When we got closer, he said, “Are you the last one out? Have all the other boys left for the day?” I told him yes; I was the last. He said, “OK, then you have a good day, son.” Then I realized I’d been pranked. Nice one, Fred. Unfortunately, since I was leaving the city, I didn’t get to tell him that.

I got a ride over to the East Bay with no trouble, admiring the driftwood sculptures on the Emeryville mud flats on the way. I found my way to the UC campus at Berkeley. I liked dropping in on college campuses—there usually seemed to be something going on, there was always the possibility of meeting girls, and I could usually sneak into a dorm to get an often much-needed shower. Dorm security was a lot looser then and residents either assumed I was someone’s guest or just didn’t care.

After a dorm shower and a free lunch courtesy of the local Hare Krishnas, I walked around exploring, checking out the bookstores and vendors along Telegraph Ave. There was a place to crash for free on the porch of the Free Clinic and I spent the night there. It was not ideal though. It was crowded; people were coming and going all night and making noise. Someone’s puppy shit on the porch and they didn’t bother to clean it up.

I did meet a couple of other hitchhikers there though and had someone to hang out with for a change. They were both named Mark; one was from Florida and one was from Georgia. They had just met on the porch a couple days earlier. We hung out together until Florida Mark got thrown in jail. We mostly hung around Sather Gate on the campus. There was usually someone playing music there. It was also where the Hare Krishnas provided a free lunch for anyone who wanted it. The Marks referred to it as the Daily Glop. It wasn’t particularly visually appetizing but was actually quite tasty. The Free Clinic offered a dinner for 35 cents (free if you didn’t have it), which we also took advantage of. For breakfast each day I bought a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice from a beautiful young girl who had a cart outside of Sather Gate.

Georgia Mark had some weed and the three of us got stoned and went for a ride on the BART, which hadn’t been open that long. There was a line operating along the East Bay and a line in San Francisco, but the cross-bay line was still under construction. For 80 cents you could buy an excursion ticket, which allowed you to ride as much as you wanted along the East Bay as long as you got off at the same station you got on at. We rode to the south end at Fremont, back to the north end at Richmond and then back to Berkeley. The BART fare card was the first time I saw a card with a magnetic strip on it, which shortly after seemed to be ubiquitous.

That evening the three of us decided we didn’t want to subject ourselves to trying to sleep on the Free Clinic porch again and headed up into the wooded hills east of campus. We got stoned again and admired the city lights around the bay. It was much better than the noisy chaos on the porch.

The following morning, as it was just getting light, I awoke to the sound of twigs snapping and cracked my eye open to see a couple of pairs of very shiny black shoes and sharply creased khaki pants. I remember thinking that this couldn’t be good. We were shortly after rousted by the UC campus police. The woods where we were sleeping, they informed us, were UC property and camping was strictly forbidden.

One of the cops seemed like an OK guy; I suspected he would have left us off with just a verbal warning had it just been him. He explained that some years ago the university had planted some Eucalyptus trees, which were now considered a major fire hazard because of their oily wood and bark. As a result, the university was concerned about people camping in the woods. The other guy was a little older and much more by-the-book and wasn’t even remotely swayed by Georgia Mark explaining that we were just sleeping, not camping and obviously we hadn’t built a fire.

The by-the-book cop took our IDs and ran a check on all of us. Georgia and I came up clean but Florida had a warrant for an outstanding ticket for hitchhiking on a California freeway. The by-the-book cop wrote up warning tickets for Georgia and me for trespassing on the property of the sovereign state of California and told us that, as non-residents, we could be jailed if we were ever caught again on any California state property. That seemed a bit extreme.

They then hauled Florida off to turn him over to the state authorities. Georgia and I spent the morning trying to get Florida out of jail. Unfortunately, his bail was more than Georgia and I had between us so there was nothing we could do for him. California didn’t mess around when it came to hitchhiking on the freeways. Georgia Mark decided he’d had enough of Berkeley and was going to move on, so we said our goodbyes.

At dinner at the Free Clinic, I met a couple guys from Michigan who suggested that we go hear a lecture by Alan Watts at the Alston Way Community Center. On the way over they told me they were tripping on Zodiac acid. We didn’t have tickets but when it became clear that it was not going to be a full house, the ticket taker relented and let us in for free. In addition to Watts, there was music by Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan, which was intended to add some non-verbal reinforcement to the lecture. Ravi Shankar, of course, was well known for teaching George Harrison to play the sitar. What little I recall of the lecture seemed to dwell mostly on living in the present. I did enjoy it. I felt like I'd been doing a half-way decent job of living in the present.

I still couldn’t bring myself to sleep on the concrete of the Free Clinic porch, so I headed back to the woods on my own for the night. I’d realized that there was a jeep trail that ran through the woods that made it possible for the campus cops to drive through and they had easily spotted us because we were laying out in an open clearing on the downhill side of the trail. I told myself I would never have been so careless as to be that visible if I were on my own. I also figured they would never spot me if I was deeper into the woods on the uphill side of the jeep trail so that’s where I headed.

August 27th
I got one last glass of orange juice from the pretty vendor and then got moving again. It took me most of the day to get not very far. I wanted to get back to CA 1 and go further down the coast but that meant getting back across the bay and then getting to a good place to get a ride. That took a while. When I finally got over to the coast there was a thick, fast-moving fog coming in. CA 1 was a freeway in places, which meant I had to thumb from entrance ramps—I knew the CHP didn't give warnings.

I got a ride down through the artichoke fields to Santa Cruz and then a ride around Monterey Bay as the fog was burning off. I ended up near Moss Beach for the night sleeping in a brushy area that wasn't really anywhere near a beach. The sunset was splendid. There was a cloud cover but it didn't reach the horizon. The sun descended from the clouds and, for a brief moment, the sun perfectly spanned the distance between the bottom edge of the cloud layer and the horizon, illuminating the underside of the cloud layer in various shades of amber, pink, and violet.

August 28th
My first ride the next morning dropped me off at Nepenthe in Big Sur. I was expecting some mail at the Big Sur post office. The only problem was I couldn't find it. The regular post office had slid off the side of the hill in a mudslide. When I asked directions to the post office, people kept directing me to the one that was over the side of the hill. I walked up and down the road trying to find the temporary post office, which was in a trailer. That was border-line hazardous since CA 1 through Big Sur at the time was narrow, windy, with practically no shoulder to walk on. I finally found it.

After all that effort I took a break back on the terrace of Nepenthe, which was a beautiful spot on the cliffs overlooking the ocean. Starting out as a redwood log and stone cabin, it had been a restaurant since 1949. It was known as a social hub for artists, writers, and local and visiting bohemians including Hemingway, Arthur Miller, Anais Nin, Janko Varda, Man Ray, and Hunter Thompson. It still had that bohemian vibe and I felt welcome on the veranda overlooking the ocean where I got a glass of grapefruit juice. It is still in business, although, from its website, it looks considerably more upscale these days.

Photo source: Jeremy Woodhouse/Getty Images

A view of the Big Sur coast looking south from the terrace of Nepenthe. On the day I was there, there was a layer of low, dense clouds hugging the ocean and the cliffs rose out of the clouds. The Big Sur coast here is subject to frequent mudslides and the people who live along CA 1 have to keep an emergency supply of food on hand since the mudslides can isolate them from the outside world sometimes for weeks.

After getting my mail and hanging out at Nepenthe for a while, I spent the rest of the day in Pfeiffer Big Sur State Park. The park extends on both side of the highway but I wandered around in the part on the uphill side of the road. That part of the park had a fence along the road and there was an entrance fee to get in. However, while I was walking up and down the road looking for the post office, I noticed a place where a big drainage culvert ran under the fence. It was a big corrugated metal pipe that was probably four feet in diameter. To me it looked like an inviting alternative park entrance. I crawled through, stashed my pack, and hiked around in the park for the rest of the day. And, I spent one last night sleeping under the coastal redwoods.

August 29th
I exited Pfeiffer Big Sur the same way I came in. I then started down CA 1 looking for a wide place in the road that I could hitchhike from. That wasn't easy because there weren't that many places where a car could get off the road. On the way down the road, I met some other travelers and struck up a conversation. There were three of them—two guys about 24 or 25 and another guy probably in his mid-30s that they had fallen in with. They had been sleeping in the woods along the road and were just waking up.

They explained to me that they had hidden their packs in the woods the previous day and when they came back later, their packs were gone. They thought they'd been stolen. Later, they found out the property owner had moved them off of his property and they found where they been relocated to. They told me they had spent most of the night at Nepenthe drinking ouzo and absinthe to celebrate the recovery of their "holy venerated bundles," as one of them described the packs. I think they were still half-drunk. They were goofy but hilarious. All three of them had a good sense of humor and we sat around on the side of the road chatting for a while. The older guy told me he was a free-lance pornographic novelist. I thought he was joking but he showed me something he was working on. He said the nice thing was he could work from anywhere.

They said they were looking for the Harvest Festival. This was the second or third time I'd heard about the festival the marijuana growers organized. People were looking for it, but no one seemed to know where it was. It wasn't the kind of thing you could hang up posters for. They invited me to hitchhike with them, but I couldn't see how anyone would be likely to pick up four guys with packs, so I said good bye and continued down the road.

My plan was to start heading east. However, there weren't many roads heading east over the Coast Range. I was trying to avoid Los Angeles. The guys on the beach at Jenner had warned me not to get too close to LA because, they said, it was like a black hole—it would suck you in and you'd have a hard time getting back out if you were hitchhiking. That seemed to be true. I somehow missed the road I was looking for and before I knew it, I was in Santa Barbara. By then, it didn't seem worth retracing. I got a ride into the San Fernando valley, coming in on the Ventura Freeway/US 101 and I got dropped off around Encino in the early evening.

The good part was that I was in the northern part of the LA area so it wasn't like I had to find my way across the entire urban expanse. However, it still seemed like the San Fernando basin stretched on for block after block after block. I started heading north on Van Nuys Boulevard. I didn't realize it at the time but Van Nuys Boulevard was then the cruising capitol of southern California. There were all kinds of cars cruising up and down the strip—low-riders, muscle cars, tricked-out vans and pickups, surfer station wagons, and retro-hotrods. As far as I knew, people might have been cruising every boulevard in LA like this. That wasn't true though—people came from all over southern California, I found out later, just to cruise on Van Nuys, especially in the summer. And, I just happened to be there on a Wednesday night, which was the big cruising night of the week. People cruised on the weekends, of course, but, for some reason, Wednesday had become the big night.

Photo source: Rick McCloskey

Above is a photo of the cruising scene on Van Nuys Boulevard, taken in 1972. Besides people cruising up and down the strip there were people parked along the side of the street hanging out as well. I've read that the Van Nuys cruising scene, which began in the 1950s, disappeared in the 1980s after store owners along the boulevard got tired of having to clean up in front of their stores on Thursday mornings. Photo by Rick McCloskey as part of a photo-documentary series. His photos look very much how I remember it.

I didn't feel threatened by all of the action—it seemed that the whole purpose of the cruising was just to see and be seen by other people and cars were the attention-getter, at least for guys. For girls it seemed to be shorts that were cut really tight and high. Very few people seemed to notice me walking by. Every once and a while someone would talk to me but no one hassled me. There was a noticeable police presence. The problem for me was that it was a solid urban landscape for miles and miles with no patches of vegetation to hide in for the night. Every square foot seemed to be covered with either a building, a street, or a parking lot.

After hours of walking, a guy pulled over and asked me if I needed a place to stay for the night. I talked to him for a while and he offered to let me spend the night at his apartment, which was nearby. His name was Don and, I found out later, he was still in high school. He lived with his dad, who he said was a playboy and would most likely not be home that night. He told me he had gone on a hitchhiking trip the previous summer but it didn't turn out too well. Someone had robbed him of his pack and all of his money. Since then, he said, he kept his eye out for hitchhikers.

He was a nice kid—he fixed me a dinner of steak and green beans, and let me use the shower. It looked like his dad was rich. It wasn't a huge apartment but it was modern, with lots of glass, metal, tile, and modern art work, both paintings and sculptures. They must have had a housekeeper because it was immaculately clean. There was something sad about Don I couldn't quite put my finger on—I got the feeling he spent a lot of time in that fancy apartment by himself, while his dad was out being a playboy. He never mentioned a mom.

August 30th
I met his father the next morning. He stopped in on his way to work—Don was not very clear on exactly what he did for a living, but it had something to do with the film industry. He did, indeed, seem like a playboy though. I talked Don into dropping me off at a good entrance ramp heading north. After being on the ramp for a while I realized it wasn't a good ramp—almost no one was getting on. There was some graffiti nearby that indicated people had waited there for days for a ride. Later, three guys hitchhiking to Oregon showed up. When they saw that no cars were getting on, they were pretty discouraged.

We got lucky though, as the only car that came by in about a half hour stopped and picked all of us up and took us to Bakersfield. The guy’s clunker overheated going over the mountains though and we had to stop by the side of the road while it cooled off. We pulled up right behind a woman whose car had also overheated. She gave us all oranges and some goat cheese she made herself.

In Bakersfield, where it was 103 degrees, I started heading east on CA 58. Two brothers picked me up and offered to buy me a meal at a barbecue joint run by an elderly black man in east Bakersfield. They bought me barbecued spare ribs, mashed potatoes, and beans. It was the best meal I'd had since the hostel in Kelowna and I was stuffed. The brothers left me off at a decent ramp near the edge of town.

A guy named Lee, a roofer driving a pickup, picked me up there. He was heading home to a former mining town called Red Mountain in the Mojave Desert. We talked for a while and he invited me to spend the night with his family and I accepted. There was a newspaper sitting on the seat between us and at one point I picked it up—I went days sometimes without knowing what was going on in the world. When I picked it up, it revealed that there was a handgun underneath it. Lee was embarrassed and said something like, "Well, you can never tell what kind of hitchhiker you're picking up." He put it underneath the seat.

Lee's wife Pat, who I thought was beautiful, was very welcoming. She had fixed a big supper and kept putting more food on my plate. I wasn't all that hungry because I'd had those ribs in Bakersfield but I didn't want to insult her cooking so I ate it all. Besides Lee and Pat, there were two teenaged kids, a boy and a girl. The girl, about 15, looked like a younger version of Pat.

Pat invited me use their shower, which I probably needed after being outside in the heat and dust in Bakersfield. Lee had gone to the town watering hole, the Silver Dollar, which was right next door. When I came out of the shower, Lee's son, who was probably about 12, was outside filling the pickup from a gas can. He came inside and said something I didn't quite understand about Lee wanting me to go somewhere with him. Lee came from the bar and told me to get in the truck. Pat came out of the house, looked at me and said, "Please don't let him do anything foolish."

Lee started flying down the dirt desert roads outside of Red Mountain, fishtailing around curves. I could tell he was seething angry but I had no idea what was going on. He did not respond right away when I asked him where we were going, which gave me enough time to briefly ponder whether he was unstable enough to shoot me and dump me in the desert, where my carcass would be scavenged by coyotes and vultures.

He later went into a convoluted explanation about what it was like living in a small place like Red Mountain where everybody knew everybody else's business and you couldn't help running into people you didn't want to. Gradually it came out that while he was at the Silver Dollar, Pat's ex-husband from many years ago was also in the bar—the town only had one. He made what Lee considered to be a disrespectful comment of a sexual nature about Pat. Lee didn't want to take it up with him in the bar but was determined to confront him now. What exactly that meant, I didn't know. I was well aware that he had a handgun under the seat.

We eventually pulled up to what looked like an old prospector's shack out in the middle of the desert. He aimed the headlights at the shack and told me to stay in the truck. I could see him kick in the door of the shack—it didn't take much. I wasn't sure if Lee had the gun with him or not and I half expected to hear gunshots. He came back out and told me no one was there, but there was another place he might be. We went careening through the desert again. A desert fox ran across the road ahead of us, its eyes reflecting red in the headlights. We came up to an old dilapidated trailer sitting on top of a little knoll. He again aimed the headlights at the trailer—both places, I figured, were so remote there was no electricity for lighting. Lee told me to wait in the truck. I got out to admire the stars. He couldn't kick in the trailer door because it opened outward. It was locked but he came back and got a tire iron and easily popped it open. He walked around inside with a flashlight and then came out. No one was there either.

By this time, Lee's anger had ebbed, and, it seemed he didn't know where else to look for Pat's ex. We started back towards Red Mountain at a slower speed. Out of curiosity I asked him why he brought me since he told me to wait in the truck anyway. He gave an evasive answer but, reading between the lines, I concluded that he didn't trust me enough to leave me alone with Pat and his daughter. It was OK when he was just next door at the Silver Dollar but not when he was farther away.

I felt like I hadn’t done a single thing to prevent Lee from doing anything foolish although I wasn't sure exactly what I should have done. I felt relieved that the ex was nowhere to be found. Otherwise, it might have been hard to explain to Pat that while Lee was doing something foolish, I was leaning against the truck admiring the desert night sky.

Photo source: unknown

Above is a 2011 photo of the Silver Dollar, Red Mountain's only watering hole at the time I was there. Lee's family lived next door. Their former house is now gone. The Silver Dollar looks considerably more weathered in more recent views on Google Earth and appears to have been out of business for some time now. The big sign above the front door is gone.

Considered a ghost town today, Red Mountain had an interesting history that I was unaware of in 1973. Originally called Osdick, it was a mining boom town starting around 1919 when silver was discovered nearby and was known for liquor, gambling, and prostitution. The main road through Red Mountain, now US 395, was once lined with hotels, saloons, casinos, and small one-room shacks called cribs that prostitutes worked out of. Some of the cribs are still standing. During prohibition, the Silver Dollar was a well-known speakeasy. It is believed that some of the casinos and brothels had secret underground passages, where prostitutes were hidden during the occasional raids. Some old-time Hollywood celebrities spent time in Red Mountain and it was something of a mini-Vegas before Vegas became a gambling destination.

In 2010, 130 people reportedly lived in Red Mountain. One site I looked at said that 17 people lived there in 2020. It is hard to find reliably accurate information because Red Mountain is unincorporated and appears to get lumped in with other areas for census purposes.

August 31st
Pat fixed Lee and me a very early breakfast since Lee had to leave early to get to Bakersfield. He said he would let me off at what he called Kramer's Corners, where US 395 intersected with CA 58. Pat made me promise to send them a postcard when I got off the road to let them know I'd made it back OK. I promised her I would. She took my hands in her's and thanked me for everything in a way that made me think she somehow thought I'd actually had some impact on the outcome of the previous night.

Lee left me off at the corners. As soon as he was out of sight, I realized I had forgotten to get their address so I could send Pat a postcard. Once again, I was letting Pat down. It was still dark out and there was hardly any traffic so I laid down in the desert and waited for the sun to come up. It came up beautifully.

I got a ride into Barstow and from there I was able to get a ride into Las Vegas on I-15. I was on the strip in Vegas by noon. I didn't really have much interest in hanging around in Vegas and I started heading southeast towards Lake Mead. I stopped and got lunch at one of the hotels/casinos on the way out though. At the time, they practically gave away food to lure people into the casinos. I probably walked the length of most of the strip before I started hitchhiking. It was not as big in those days. Las Vegas had a population of 288,000 in 1973. It has more than 10 times as many people today. I got a ride to Boulder City where I got some groceries, then stopped for the day at a free campsite on Lake Mead where I spent the rest of the day and the night. I put the tent up for the first time in a long time—primarily just to show that the campsite was occupied.

I spent the next day hanging out at the lake as well. I met a friendly family, who I learned couldn't find a campsite—the campground was full because of the Memorial Day Weekend. I offered to let them park their camper at my site since my tent took up hardly any room. They had a big cookout and shared their food and beer with me.

Click/Tap here to view the interactive hitchhiking route map for August.

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• Introduction
• June
• July
• August
• September

September 2nd
I got a ride out of Lake Mead with two French guys who were heading towards Flagstaff. We took US 93 to Kingman, AZ where it now connects with I-40. At the time, I-40 between Kingman and Seligman was under construction so we had to take a longer way along old US 66, which ran through Truxton and Peach Springs.

They wanted to go see the Grand Canyon before they went to Flagstaff, where they were going to visit some friends. They invited me to come and see the Grand Canyon with them, which I did. We enjoyed each other's company and shared a lunch at the South Rim. They spoke English fairly well but liked that I tried to speak some French. When we got to Flagstaff, they told me that they would have liked to invite me to stay with their friends but they could not, because they were guests themselves. I told them not to worry that I was practiced at sleeping outside.

I had them let me off north of Flagstaff along US 180 and spent the night in the juniper/pinyon forest. I had a good view of the San Francisco Peaks to the east. It got cooler at night than I expected after having been at Lake Mead, where it was downright balmy at night. At the time I wasn't aware that Flagstaff had an elevation of almost 7000 feet.

The following morning, I got a ride into Flagstaff, got some groceries, and headed back into the woods east of the city. I was thinking about catching a ride up to the San Francisco Peaks and hiking around there but I never got around to it. I was feeling kind of lazy and was content to spend the day among the pinyons and junipers and admire the peaks from afar.

Two stray dogs wandered into my campsite. I had seen them running around in the woods chasing each other. Eventually they came over to investigate me and then just flopped down on the ground and stayed for about a half hour before wandering off again. The area where I camped has since been converted into a suburb. Flagstaff grew from a small city of about 26,000 people in the early 1970s to about 76,000 people today.

Photo source: Jack Share

The San Francisco Peaks as seen from the west. The six highest peaks in Arizona are part of a cluster forming a circular ridge. At the time I was camping nearby I thought they were gorgeous mountains but I was unaware that they were the remnants of an extinct volcano. All of the peaks once formed one large cone-shaped volcano similar to Mt. Fuji in Japan. If the slopes on the left and the right of the photo are extended upward at the same angle until they intersect it gives a good approximation of the earlier shape of the mountain, which would have been almost 4000 feet higher. Geologists debate whether the side of the mountain collapsed in one major event (such as at Mt. St. Helens) or was gradually eroded away. The only alpine tundra in Arizona is found on the peaks above 10,600 feet. The San Francisco Peaks are considered sacred by 13 different Native American tribes.

September 4th
I continued heading east on I-40 the next morning and caught a long ride with a guy heading to New York State. He had just gotten a divorce and was towing a U-Haul with some of the material remnants of the marriage back to his parents' house. I probably could have ridden all the way to Pennsylvania with him. Later he picked up another hitchhiker, who had just returned from Mexico, where he had some kind of conflict with the authorities. He came back without his 1971 Dodge Charger and his buddy, who was still in jail there. He suggested that he and I hitchhike together. I had a hunch that he was the kind of person who attracted trouble though so I was not too eager to partner with him.

I rode with them across the eastern half of Arizona into western New Mexico. I had them let me off near a little place called Prewitt. It was in the area of the Navajo reservation known as the checkerboard area, which is within the borders of the reservation but is a mixture of tribal, federal, and private lands. I stopped at a little store there to pick up some food. The Indian woman who ran the store had to come from her home next door to open it up for me.

I considered trying to catch a ride to Blue Water Lake, which was a nearby state park, to spend the night but there was practically no traffic heading that way. It was flat open country, noticeably drier than the area around Flagstaff. There were some pinyon trees but they were pretty widely spaced. As it was getting dark, I finally decided just to bed down on the other side of a huge jagged rock pinnacle that was not far off the side of the road. It at least provided a blind so no one would know I was there.

For the most part it was a quiet place. Every once and a while I would hear a train off in the distance. The rock pinnacle was on the outside of a curve, however, and every so often a car would come by and someone would hurl an empty bottle at it. I wasn't worried that I would get hit since I was safely on the side away from the road. It must have been a local custom since the sound of breaking glass happened at least a dozen times over the course of the night. The next morning, I noticed there was a huge pile of broken glass at the base of the pinnacle that I hadn't noticed the night before.

Back on the road, I got a ride into Albuquerque with a pretty girl named Maya who told me all about Scientology. I got a short ride with a couple east of Albuquerque to Tijieras. They were nice people, a black guy and his white wife, who lived up in the hills east of the city. They invited me to visit them but it was still early and I wanted to keep moving.

A guy named Edgar Hayes picked me up in Tijieras. He was driving a 1964 Chevy panel truck and had his name painted on the driver's side door: "Edgar Hayes, St. Louis, Mo." He was in his sixties and was a good story teller. He told me tales about traveling across the country hopping freight trains, traveling with carnivals in his younger days, and various other escapades. We stopped in Clines Corners, where I was expecting some mail, but there wasn't any. I think I had gotten there before my mail arrived.

We continued east through Tucumcari, into the northern panhandle of Texas. We stopped to eat at a truck stop near a little place called Groom, east of Amarillo. As we were eating, he told me that when he was younger, he and his girlfriend, who he referred to as a "honky-tonk type girl named Kitty," had gotten into trouble for possession of weed—Edgar called it "reefer." He took the rap for both of them and served some time and she got off. He never saw her again after he got out but always kept an eye out for her. The problem, he said, was that after so many years it was hard to tell what Kitty might look like. I noticed that while he is telling me the story, he is looking at a woman about his age sitting at a nearby table.

Edgar walked over and asked, "Your name wouldn't by any chance happen to be Kitty, would it?' Before she could answer, an unfriendly guy came by and told Edgar to shove off. As we were leaving, he told me he knew the odds of running into her were slim but he thought that might have been her. The thing was, I couldn't help but notice that neither she nor the guy she was with had told Edgar that he had the wrong person, which seemed odd. And, I thought there was something in the woman's expression that made me think that she possibly, just possibly recognized Edgar. Or maybe it was just that Edgar reminded her of some older version of someone she knew long ago.

Photo source: unknown

Edgar's vehicle was similar to this except his was a dull red color on the bottom and white on top, with patches of rust here and there. It didn't always start very well so I sometimes had to push him to get it rolling so he could catch it in gear. I'm sure that was one of the reasons he gave me a ride.

We continued through Texas into Oklahoma. We got off of I-40 near a town called Hinton, west of Oklahoma City. As it was getting dark, he parked his truck in a wide spot off of a side road. He slept in the back of his truck and I put my tent up beside the truck so that it couldn't be seen by people passing by.

It rained overnight. I had to go back and look though my journal to see when the last time it had rained on me was and determined it was the day I put Vickie on the bus in Milwaukee, which was 36 days ago. After all that cold, damp weather that Vickie endured in Nova Scotia, what would she say if she knew that practically the whole time I'd traveled without her it hadn't rained at all?

September 6th
Edgar and I had breakfast at the Sunrise Cafe in Oklahoma City. I could have rode with Edgar on to St. Louis and probably should have because it rained off and on all day. I'd been over that stretch of I-70 between St. Louis and Pennsylvania though and wanted to see some new country so we parted in Oklahoma City, where I continued east on I-40. I got a ride east of the city with a woman in pink hair curlers. Then I sat under an overpass for an hour while it rained hard. During a lull I got another short ride east and then more rain. I waited it out inside a gas station, where the people who were running the station barely tolerated me.

During another lull I got a ride with a guy driving a Corvair, whose name I've forgotten. He was heading towards Florida and was planning to cut south somewhere in Tennessee. We continued east across Oklahoma, into Arkansas. We stopped for the night at a rest area near Russellville. I told him I was going to put my tent up in a wooded area of the rest area where it wouldn't be seen. He had a sleeping bag and asked if I minded if he slept in the tent with me. He said he'd been sleeping in the Corvair and it hadn't been very comfortable. I said OK. Neither of us slept very well though. He kept tossing and turning, which kept me awake. It had stopped raining, but it was hot, humid, and uncomfortable.

We continued east through Arkansas, still on I-40. For some reason, it seemed like the Corvair guy and I started to get on each other's nerves. He had told me he was planning to head southeast toward Florida at Nashville. However, as we came up on Memphis, he announced he was heading south from there. I think he was just tired of having me in his car. I didn't mind that much because I had gotten tired of riding with him as well. It was cloudy, but it wasn't raining anymore.

It took me a couple rides to get around Memphis on the by-pass. The Tennesse state troopers would stop and tell me to get off the highway but that was it—they didn't even bother to write up a warning. One person who gave me a ride told me how he and his daughter had rented an RV the previous summer and drove across Canada, picking up hitchhikers along the way. One guy, he told me, said he had hitchhiked more than 5000 miles. I didn't say anything but I was pretty sure I'd hitchhiked more than twice that by that point.

Not far east of Memphis, I got a ride with a couple of young antiques dealers from Texas. They had come to Tennessee to buy antiques to take back to Texas. They made a lot of stops but I didn’t mind. I enjoyed riding with them more than with the Corvair guy. We stopped to fix the tail lights on the trailer they were towing; we stopped to eat a catfish lunch; and we stopped at an antiques mall where they bought some stuff—at what I thought were not very good prices. How they were able to make a profit buying antiques from other dealers at retail prices and then hauling it all the way back to Texas I have no idea.

In the evening, they let me out in Knoxville where I was planning to head north. They were concerned about where I was going to sleep. By that point I was pretty confident about being able to find a place. It didn't take me long to find a little clump of bushes not far from the highway where I was certain no one would see me and I had a good night's sleep.

September 8th
I made it from Knoxville to Morgantown in one day, which I thought was pretty good. Morgantown is northeast from Knoxville but there is no straight shot diagonal highway so I had to go north, then east, then north, then east, then north again.

I got a bite to eat at the bus station then headed out to I-75. There were a couple guys hitchhiking from the bottom of the ramp. They told me they'd been out on the interstate and some state troopers had told them to get off. I figured I might as well go ahead and see if I could get a ride before I got a warning. Almost immediately I got a ride with someone going to Cleveland who took me to Lexington, KY.

It took me four rides to get from Lexington to Charleston on I-64. One of them was with a guy who told me stories about things that he'd done that were borderline psychopathic. But, he insisted on sharing the food that his wife had packed for him. It took two rides to get from Charleston to Parkersburg on I-77. (I-79 between Charleston and Clarksburg was still under construction.) It took two rides to get from Parkersburg to Clarksburg on US 50 and two rides to get from Clarksburg to Morgantown on the part of I-79 that was complete. I was in Morgantown by early evening.

Shown above is a 2023 photo of the building on Willey Street where Vickie rented an apartment and where I landed in the fall of 1973. Her apartment was in the attic and was all one room with sloped ceilings. The building looked somewhat different in 1973. At that time the building had the original siding and a porch on the front. An addition with the brick front was added sometime later. There was a barbershop on the ground floor in 1973 as well.

Click/Tap here to view the interactive hitchhiking route map for September.

 

Hitchhiking with Craig Mains - 1973
• 13,535 Miles
• June • July • August • September
31 States and 7 Provinces

Google Earth Map by EpicRoadTrips.us

• USA


• Arizona
• Arkansas
• California
• Connecticut
• Delaware
• Kentucky
• Maine
• Maryland
• Massachusetts
• Michigan
• Minnesota
• Montana
• Nevada
• New Hampshire
• New Jersey
• New Mexico
• New York
• North Carolina
• Oklahoma
• Oregon
• South Carolina
• South Dakota
• Tennessee
• Tennessee
• Texas
• Vermont
• Virginia
• Washington
• West Virginia
• Wisconsin
• Wyoming


• Canada


• Alberta
• British Columbia
• New Brunswick
• Nova Scotia
• Ontario
• Prince Edward Island
• Quebec

 

Notes

[1] I learned from some other travelers that I could get mail while I was on the road by having people send a letter with my name on it addressed to General Delivery at a specific post office. I usually picked a small town and told whoever was writing to try to send it to arrive there on a certain date. I figured a small-town post office would be easier to find. Post offices hold a General Delivery letter for 10 days and if no one claims it, they send it back to the return address. The trick was picking a post office that was at a distance that would allow me to get there within the 10-day window. I occasionally arrived there either too early and had to wait a day or two, or I arrived too late and missed a letter altogether.

[2] The Diggers were a group of street-theater performers and community activists who were trying to form an anarchist, non-capitalistic society in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco. They operated in the city from about 1966 to 1968.

Sources

* Dorian Wind Quintet
* The Driftless Area Driftless Area - Wikipedia
* The Spiral Tunnels/The Big Hill Big Hill - Wikipedia
* Banana Slug Banana slug - Wikipedia
* The Diggers Diggers (theater) - Wikipedia
* Carousel Ballroom History Grateful Dead Sources: 1968: The Carousel Ballroom, San Francisco
* Fillmore West Fillmore West - Wikipedia
* Rick McCloskey photos of Van Nuys Cruising Scene
* Red Mountain History
* San Francisco Peaks Written In Stone...seen through my lens: San Francisco Mountain

 

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