After spending the summer of 1973 hitchhiking around, I returned to Morgantown in September where I spent the fall sharing an attic apartment on Willey Street with my sort-of-girlfriend-at-the-time, Vickie, who had accompanied me on part of that summer travels. I took a job in one of the local glass factories that was close enough to walk to. Vickie was working on her last year in school at WVU.
Photo credit: West Virginia History OnView: West Virginia & Regional History Center
A 1920s photo of the glass factory where I worked in the fall and winter of 1973 and 74. It was the Bailey Glass Factory when I worked there. Bailey only existed for several years but glass had been made in that factory since 1900 by various companies. The hot end where I worked was only minimally mechanized. The work was probably pretty similar to what it was in 1900 when the factory opened. The factory was demolished in the 1980s to make way for a power plant.
Gradually, as fall became winter, things fell apart. Vickie eventually told me she had started seeing someone else. Surprisingly, she didn’t ask me to move out. Her father was paying her rent but I had been giving her rent money as well and I think she liked having the extra pocket money. She came back to the apartment less and less and most of the time I had the garret apartment to myself.
At some point I learned that the new person she was seeing was female. For some reason, getting dumped for a woman stung less than getting dumped for another guy. It seemed more like a system correction rather than a personal rejection. When she did come back to the apartment, we got along OK and ate meals together. That’s not to say that my feelings weren’t hurt but I wasn’t devastated. I had not expected it to be a long-lasting relationship. I started making plans to hit the road again as soon as it got warm, in yet another quest to try to be everywhere at once
I had become friends with a girl named Janet and at one point she told me she wanted to go to New Orleans but didn’t have enough money to buy a bus ticket and didn’t want to hitchhike alone. I volunteered to accompany her. Three or four agreed-upon departure dates came and went over a two-week period. Something always came up that prevented her from going. After a while she stopped providing me with new departure dates. Something had come up that prevented her from going altogether it seemed.
However, by that time I had decided I wanted to go to New Orleans whether Janet went or not, so I left Morgantown heading south on April 16th. Vickie was away from the apartment when I left so there was no parting scene. I made it as far as the Beckley area, where I camped for the night.
April 17th, Rogersville, TN
It had gotten pretty chilly during the night. There was some snow on the ridge tops. I went into Beckley and had a lousy breakfast at a place called "Mom’s." Mainly I wanted to warm myself up with some hot coffee. Afterwards, I continued south on I-77 into Bluefield, where I started heading southwest on US-19. Big sections of the interstate highways in this area, including parts of I-77 and I-81 were incomplete at the time.
I caught rides to Abingdon, Virginia and Bristol, Tennessee, following US 11 through Kingsport, where I got a ride with a guy named Norman, who was determined to save my soul. He called our meeting "a divine appointment." Norman bought me lunch and invited me to his church near Rogersville, which was having an early evening service and supper. He referred to his church as a Primitive Baptist church. I was somewhat curious about what went on in a Primitive Baptist church. Plus, the supper sounded enticing, so I accepted his invitation.
There was a lot of a cappella singing (no sign of an organ or any other instruments) and people yelling "Praise Jesus," and "Hallelujah." Eventually the preacher called for people to come down front and be saved. With his elbow, Norman encouraged me multiple times to go down but I declined. I could see they had a pool built into the floor of the church up front, which I assumed was for a full-body-immersion baptism. They didn’t use it that evening but I wasn’t entirely sure whether they might. The only way I would have considered going down front is if Jesus had made an actual physical appearance.
After the service, a feast was served downstairs. Norman introduced me to a bunch of people and told them I wasn’t quite ready to accept Jesus as my Lord and Savior but he was working on me. After having some fried chicken, macaroni salad, green beans, and biscuits, some of the women insisted that I sample a slice of the pies they had made. I had multiple slices. It was hard to say no when someone walked over specifically to hand me a plate. It occurred to me that I could probably keep myself well fed traveling around in the south if I gave the impression that my salvation was a possibility. Norman invited me to spend the night at his house and since it was dark by that time, I accepted.
April 18th, Trenton, Georgia
The following morning, Norman fixed me breakfast. He appeared to be in his late 50s or early 60s. He told me he had lived alone since his wife died a few years earlier. I told Norman I was surprised that none of the pie ladies from the church had snatched him up. He chuckled but said that it was up to the will of the Lord.
After breakfast, Norman took me back out to the highway. Before he let me get out of the car though, he asked if we could pray. I wasn’t serious about taking advantage of Baptists to get free meals. However, if there was even a small part of me that was considering it, that prayer would have convinced me it wasn’t worth it. It wasn’t that I didn’t appreciate the thought of Norman praying for my welfare; it was just that I thought his prayer would go on forever. I found myself praying for Norman’s prayer to end.
I got a ride into Knoxville, where I met two other hitchhikers, who were from Michigan. We shared two rides, which got us to Chattanooga, where we split up. I spent most of the rest of the day walking across Chattanooga to get to I-59. I would often get a ride into a city and then walk to the other edge of town. That gave me time to get some walking in and see some of the city. I ended up for the day in the woods outside of Trenton in the far northwest corner of Georgia. It was a pretty area.
April 19th, Pascagoula, Mississippi
It took me most of the morning to get to Birmingham. In downtown Birmingham, I stopped for lunch at a packed diner. I was sitting at the counter when a black guy trotted past the front of the diner. A couple guys sitting at a window table remarked that a n----r had just run past. Someone from another table added that that almost certainly meant he had stolen something. Before long the entire diner was buzzing just because a black man had run past the restaurant. I probably shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was shocked that in 1974 it was a hazardous activity for a black man to be seen running.
Somewhere south of Bessemer, I got a long ride with a guy named Gary heading to Pascagoula, Mississippi. Pascagoula was the site of the Ingalls Shipbuilding facility, where Gary was hoping to get hired. I had heard employment advertisements for Ingalls on the radio earlier. Gary said they continuously advertised on TV and radio across the southeast and it was one of the biggest employers in both Mississippi and Alabama. They made various types of ships for both the Navy and the Coast Guard.
Gary got me across southwest Alabama on two-lane Highway 5, through Mobile and into Pascagoula. I rode with him right to the Ingalls employment office. The shipyard was a mammoth facility. At the time, more than 20,000 people worked there and there was a constant turnover of employees. I wished Gary good luck getting hired and I found a wooded spot on the edge of town to spend the night.
April 20th, New Orleans
I had a pretty straight shot into New Orleans the next morning. I got a ride to Gulfport and then a ride with a black guy named Mike (I think) driving a restaurant supply delivery truck. He was a talkative guy and got us both stoned. The only problem was I could understand only a tiny percentage of what he said. Mike had a very heavy accent that I thought might be part Deep South and part some kind of Caribbean Creole. He was also, I think, using a lot of local and black slang that I was not familiar with. I could make out a word here and there, but not much. Being stoned was not a factor since I couldn’t understand him before we got stoned either.
Mike was telling me what I took to be a funny story because he kept chuckling. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him I couldn’t understand him so I just sort of nodded. At the end, he started laughing and I found myself laughing along. I had no idea what the story was about but I started laughing hard, both because Mike’s laugh was infectious and because it seemed absurd that I couldn’t understand someone who ostensibly spoke the same language as me. He seemed to genuinely appreciate how entertained I was by his story, not knowing that I didn’t understand any of it.
Since he was delivering to restaurants, Mike took me right into the center of the city. As we parted, he gave me a friendly farewell slap on the back, probably for being such a good listener. Or maybe he had concluded I was an idiot who was only capable of laughing and nodding and he was wishing me good luck, figuring I’d need it. Who knows?
I learned that I had fortuitously arrived in New Orleans during the Jazz and Heritage Festival so I stashed my pack in a locker at the bus station and walked to the festival, which was on the infield of the New Orleans Fairgrounds and Race Track.
I liked the set up. They had about six stages set up around the field with a lot of music going on concurrently. Because there were multiple stages, there was not a big crowd at any of the stages. I caught sets by Roosevelt Sykes, Lu Barker, and others whose names are no longer legible in my water-damaged journal. [1]
Despite the name of the festival, there seemed to be little of what I thought of as "jazz" and there were musicians from all over, not just New Orleans. I heard mostly blues and some traditional Appalachian music but there was also Cajun, gospel, and Caribbean music. I missed the first two days of the festival but there was one more day and I made plans to come back the next day.
Photo credit: Spirit of Professor Longhair alive at New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival - The Washington Post
A photo of Professor Longhair during the 1973 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. The crowds were not nearly as large in the early years of the festival as they are now.
I couldn’t find anything that resembled a cheap hotel and someone directed me to the Baptist Mission on Magazine St., where I spent the night. Norman probably would have told me it was his prayer that guided me to the Baptists.
April 21st, New Orleans
We were rousted at 5:30 at the mission. Breakfast was grits and gravy, a slice of bread, and a cup of coffee. As I was dining, the person next to me struck up a conversation. He looked to be in his late 50s and was slightly less disheveled than most of the rest of us. He had a severe speech impediment, but I was able to understand him. He told me he was a free-lance Egyptologist and he spent his time translating hieroglyphics texts that no one else was working on.
He pulled out an unlined notebook and showed me some of the text he was working on. He had several hand-written tables that showed different hieroglyphic characters and what the equivalent was in Greek, Coptic, and Demotic (which I had never heard of) and pages of what he said were translations. At first, I thought he was some kind of crackpot but his notebook, drawings, and hand writing was scrupulously neat and organized. He told me he tried to get employed in the field but couldn’t get hired because of his speech impediment and now he thought he was too old anyway. He had at least a dozen other notebooks that were already full he told me. I had no way to tell if he was actually translating hieroglyphics or if it was all just an elaborate self-delusion.
After breakfast with the Egyptologist, I walked to the bus station to store my pack and then walked around the city, but heading in the general direction of the Fairgrounds, where I spent most of the day. I moved around from stage to stage, seeing Lightin’ Hopkins, Clifton Chenier, Johnny Shines, Roosevelt Sykes (again) and a group called the Red Hot Cajuns, among others. Professor Longhair closed out the festival. I was not familiar with him at the time but was told he was held in high esteem by the New Orleans community of musicians even though he was not that well known nationally at the time.
I met some people at the festival and one guy told me about a crash pad on Dumaine Street called Head Inn. It sounded like it might be nicer than the Baptist Mission so after the festival closed, I walked down to Dumaine Street and talked to the people who ran it. It was not an easy place to find. There was no real sign—just a faded, laminated business card taped above the doorbell that one rang to get buzzed in. I got the impression that they were flying under the radar of city regulatory officials.
It was pretty spartan—50 cents a night got you a spot to sleep on the balcony. There was no kitchen but they did have a shower. In the end though I realized that once I walked to the bus station to retrieve my pack that I would be a lot closer to the Baptist Mission so I decided to spend one more night there and then switch to Head Inn.
Music Sampler from the 1974 Jazz and Heritage Festival, (selected songs found online of musicians I heard performing at the 1974 festival, not taken from festival recordings)
Clifton Chenier - Wikipedia
"I'm on a Wonder" -YouTube
Lightnin' Hopkins - Wikipedia
"It's a Sin to be Rich, It's a Low-Down Shame to be Poor" - YouTube
Lu Barker Blue Lu Barker - Wikipedia
"Trombone Man Blues" - YouTube
Roosevelt Sykes - Wikipedia
"Drivin' Wheel" - YouTube
Johnny Shines - Wikipedia
"Too Wet to Plow" - YouTube
Professor Longhair - Wikipedia
"Mardi Gras in New Orleans" - YouTube
April 22nd, New Orleans
Up again at 5:30 at the mission and the same breakfast of grits, gravy, bread, and coffee. I looked for the free-lance Egyptologist but did not see him. It was good that I was switching to Head Inn because I was told that if I stayed more than three days at the mission, I was required to get an X-ray to prove I didn’t have TB. One of the people running the mission handed me a Moon Pie on my way out the door.
I took my time walking over to Head Inn. The front door was always kept locked but if you pressed a buzzer, someone upstairs would unlock the door remotely—you could hear the bolt retract. Once inside, you went up a narrow, steep stairway. At the top of the stairwell was a full-length mirror angled in such a way that the staff could see who was coming up the stairs from their desk. I registered, paid my 50 cents, and enjoyed a quick shower (I was told to keep it brief). One of the benefits of the Head Inn was I could stash my pack there during the day so I no longer had to go to the bus station.
I had most of the day ahead of me to do whatever I wanted so I walked around the back streets of the French Quarter and spent some time people watching at Jackson Square. I splurged on a Muffuletta, which I stretched into two meals.
I saw a few posters for a benefit concert for Professor Longhair, which was happening that evening. I learned that his house had burned to the ground about a month earlier and he escaped with only the clothes on his back and the concert was to raise money for him. I decided I would check it out.
The concert was in an old warehouse on Tchoupitoulas Street. I didn’t know how far away it was so I started walking in mid-afternoon. In 1974, Tchoupitoulas Street was an area of many warehouses and light industry. I walked by foundries, metal fabrication shops, industrial supply shops, and machine shops. There was lots of banging, thumping, showers of sparks from cutting torches, and molten metal being poured into molds. I found it at least as interesting as the alleys of the French Quarter.
Photo credit: Times Picayune 'A Warehouse on Tchoupitoulas' makes its TV debut Thursday on WYES | Movies/TV | nola.com
A view of the Warehouse. It was primarily a venue for rock concerts but the managers also made it available for special events such as the Professor Longhair benefit concert. It opened as a concert venue in 1970 and closed in 1982. It was demolished in 1989.
Since I had left so early, I was one of the first people there. The doors weren’t supposed to open for another couple hours so I hung out with the handful other people already there. I ate the other half of my muffuletta. A guy with a raspy voice came by and sat with us and starting talking about New Orleans music. He asked me what I liked about New Orleans music and I told him I was a visitor and didn’t know that much about it. I told him that I had seen Professor Longhair at the Jazz Festival the day before and had liked what I heard. I added I thought it was for a good cause. After chatting with us a while, he got up and wandered off.
The doors opened sometime after 7:00 and since I was there so early, I had a front-row "seat." In reality, there were no seats. It was just a cavernous empty space. People just found spaces on the floor, which was covered with pieces of carpet remnants, and flopped themselves down.
I thoroughly enjoyed the music. There was a bit of different kinds of music— R&B, soul, funk, and Professor Longhair’s rumba boogie piano. I expected that each performer or group would play a few songs each, but it seemed like each one did a full set. That meant there was a lot of music. The music started around 7:30ish and kept going well past midnight. It was as much a tribute concert as it was a benefit concert. Practically everyone who performed gave some testimony to how Professor Longhair had influenced, encouraged, or mentored them. I realized that it was unusual to have so many New Orleans musicians gathered to play at one event.
Dr. John appeared towards the end. As soon as I saw him, I recognized him as the person with the gravelly voice who sat down and talked with us outside. I had thought the voice sounded familiar but hadn’t made the connection. I think I expected him to be bigger. He must have been drinking while he was waiting to perform because he looked a little wobbly getting on the stage. Someone helped him out getting his guitar strap onto his shoulder.
Photo Credit: Michael P. Smith. Allen Toussaint Mural - New Orleans Music Map
A photo of Dr. John playing with Allen Toussaint during the concert. Dr. John typically would be playing piano but since there was only one piano, Dr. John was on guitar. I was probably almost as close as the photographer.
The only thing that limited my enjoyment was that I started getting tired. I’d been up since 5:30 in the morning when they rousted us at the mission. In between sets I found myself dozing off. I stayed until Professor Longhair appeared. He was touched by the tributes paid by the other musicians and by the people who turned out. He was at times crying.
After Professor Longhair performed, I decided I couldn’t keep going, even though some other performers, who weren’t listed on the handbill had shown up to perform. I got a lift down Tchoupitoulas as far as Canal Street with some other concert goers and walked from there to Head Inn. Fortunately, Head Inn had a night clerk to unlock the door for me. I spread my sleeping bag on the balcony above Dumaine Street and joined the 10 or 12 other people who were already asleep. It started raining almost as soon as I laid down. It was not a hard rain though and we were sheltered by the balcony on the third floor and stayed dry.
I kept a copy of a handbill from the benefit concert. I didn’t collect many souvenirs during my wanderings but a piece of paper didn’t weigh much or take up much space. Creases are visible from where I folded it and kept it in my journal. In the early days of the Warehouse, it was referred to as ‘A Warehouse.’ They later started referring to it as ‘The Warehouse.’
Fire Relief Benefit Concert Sampler (selected songs from the internet; not from the concert recordings, which have never been released)
Professor Longhair - WikiPedia
"Red Beans" - YouTube
Dr. John - WikiPedia
"Iko Iko" - YouTube
Allen Toussaint - WikiPedia
"Life" - YouTube
Tommy Ridgley - WikiPedia
"Jam Up" - YouTube
The Meters - WikiPedia
"Hey Pocky A-Way" - YouTube
Willie Tee - WikiPedia
"All For One" - YouTube
Earl Turbinton - WikiPedia
"All Tied Up" - YouTube
Snooks Eaglin - WikiPedia
"Drive it Home" - YouTube
The Wild Magnolias - WikiPedia
"Smoke My Peace Pipe" - YouTube
Benny Spellman - WikiPedia
"Life is Too Short" - YouTube
Ernie K-Doe - WikiPedia
"I Got to Find Somebody" - YouTube
April 23rd, New Orleans
After all the walking and the long day yesterday, I just took it easy. I hung out again in Jackson Square, where I started to get a sense of who was there regularly. I spent some time in the Cabildo, which was next to the square—a former municipal government building during the Spanish colonial era. It now housed some displays on local history.
I had decided to start heading back north the next day so I laid my sleeping bag out on the balcony early. In the early morning, it rained again. But this time it was hard enough that the third-floor balcony provided no cover. This meant that the dozen or so of us sleeping on the balcony had to hurriedly grab our shoes, clothes, sleeping bags, and anything else and head inside and resituate ourselves. It probably would have been comical to see a bunch of people, half asleep, mostly in their underwear, stumbling around gathering their stuff, some cursing, if one weren’t part of the chaos.
April 24th, near Washington, Mississippi
I took the airport bus to get me outside of town and headed toward Baton Rouge. I got two rides in a row with gay men who propositioned me. It wasn’t that unusual to get rides with gay men—some gay men with time on their hands appeared to drive around looking for hitchhikers. But it was unusual to get rides from two gay men in a row. And what was stranger was that they were very similar. They were both 50ish, slightly balding, similar build—they looked like they could have been brothers.
In the south I seemed to get about an equal number of rides from gay men and from Christian proselytizers (which I sometimes referred to in my journals as Bible thumpers or just thumpers). I really didn’t mind either. Of the dozens of gay men who gave me a ride I don’t remember any of them being pushy after I turned down their offers. The proselytizers often tended to be more persistent. [2]
I got left off in a bad spot in north Baton Rouge. I was in a black neighborhood that didn’t seem to appreciate my presence. A car of black teenagers drove by, then came around again. One of the kids stuck his upper body out of the rear passenger-side window. He had an empty beer bottle in his hand and he pulled his arm back as if he was going to hurl it at me. They were pretty close so it would have been hard to dodge it if he had actually thrown it. He didn’t throw it fortunately and I could hear all the kids in the car laughing as they drove off.
I got a bunch of short rides until I was in Natchez. I walked around in town for a while and then got a ride just outside of town where I spent the night in the woods, somewhere close to the town of Washington.
April 25th, somewhere between Kosciusko and Mathiston, Mississippi
I had decided to follow the Natchez Trace Parkway, a scenic highway that runs from the southwestern part of the state to the northeastern part. At that time, the section between Natchez and Jackson was still under construction so I took some state highways toward Jackson.
It took a long time to get through Jackson because Richard Nixon happened to be making an appearance there that day and there were traffic jams and throngs of people everywhere downtown. Official impeachment proceedings because of the Watergate break-in had not yet started but they were imminent. Nixon, the media thought, wanted to demonstrate to Congress that he had the support of the people so he had arranged to give a talk in the state where he had the most support during the election. Nixon had gotten more than 78 percent of the vote in Mississippi in 1972. Because of the traffic I walked across most of Jackson. I didn’t get to see Nixon; he was probably inside somewhere giving his talk.
On the other side of Jackson, I picked up the parkway. I was told that I couldn’t hitchhike on the parkway but I didn’t see any signs prohibiting it so I did anyway. There wasn’t a lot of traffic but it was a pretty road and I didn’t mind. I spent part of the time walking. I ended up in the middle of nowhere, northeast of Kosciusko in the evening where I found a place to camp for the evening.
April 26th, Bowling Green, Kentucky
I continued on the parkway, which at that time ended near the town of Tupelo. Today it continues into Tennessee. I took some state highways cutting across the northwest corner of Alabama, where I got a ride with a thumper named Art, who inquired into the state of my salvation. He was heading to a town called Rogersville, Alabama. I couldn’t help thinking of Norman, who had given me a ride into Rogersville, Tennessee and was also concerned about my soul. Art wasn’t as persistent as Norman and we ending up having a good conversation. I had lunch with him at his house.
Eventually, I hit I-65 and started heading north. I got one ride in the back of dump truck. There were already two older hitchhikers in the bed of the truck when I climbed in. They would not have looked out of place in a Dust Bowl Era photograph. They were traveling with beat-up cardboard suitcases that looked to be at least 40 years old. One of them was held closed with a piece of twine. They appeared to have spent their entire lives in the sun, rain, and wind. I rode with them in the back of the truck to Nashville.
North of Nashville, I got a ride with some young, long-haired people heading to Bowling Green, Kentucky where they lived. They invited me to spend the night at their house, which was shared by five people and a dog. Very nice people. I got a much-needed shower.
It took me a while to get everyone’s name straight. Susie was the most talkative of the group and made me feel welcome. Tim was Susie’s boyfriend. Marsh was also pretty out-going but not quite to the extent of Susie. He was pretty witty with one-liners. The other woman was Marsh’s girlfriend. I don’t know what her name was but everyone called her Toad. She did not look anything like a toad. There was also a guy named Jeff. He was kind of quiet but was good-natured because everyone else seemed to delight in teasing him. The dog’s name was Wart. The three guys had a band called Web of Rock. They had gig the next day in Frankfort and they invited me to come along if I was headed in that direction, which I was.
April 27th, Frankfort, Kentucky
I tried to make myself useful loading the vehicles with amps and speakers for the trip to Frankfort. The gig was for a weekend outdoor concert where people could camp out. Once we arrived, I again helped with moving stuff around.
Web of Rock played around mid-afternoon. Tim was their drummer but also played some banjo and acoustic guitar. Jeff played electric lead guitar and Marsh played electric bass. Toad operated the sound board and a light show. Susie and I were the roadies.
I really enjoyed their music. Their style reminded of Wishbone Ash, a group I liked. They were pretty versatile musicians and even threw in a bluegrass number. However, the audience was not appreciative of their tightly structured type of music. It seems they wanted something closer to heavy metal music. One of Tim’s songs, which he wrote and that I liked a lot, was closer to a folk ballad. Some guys in the crowd started yelling, "Rock and Roll." At one point, someone reached onto the stage and knocked down one of their mic stands. Afterwards, I told Marsh and Jeff how much I enjoyed the music even if the crowd didn’t. Marsh shrugged his shoulders and said they got paid the same amount regardless of whether the crowd liked it or not. Still, I felt bad for them.
The groups that appeared after Web of Rock seemed to better meet the expectations of the crowd but I didn’t hear anything I liked. By that time, it seemed like everyone was roaring drunk. The crowd seemed to be composed of long-haired rednecks and their girlfriends. I found a place on the periphery of the field in a patch of woods to put up my tent. The music went on well into the night but I had heard enough.
April 28th, somewhere near Tazewell, Virginia
We all went out for breakfast at a Frisch’s Big Boy. Afterwards, my friends started heading back to Bowling Green and left me out on an entrance ramp to I-64 to head east. Susie asked me to send them a letter or a postcard but I don’t think I ever did.
At this point, my goal was to visit my friends Jamie and Peg, who were now living in Harrisonburg, Virginia. It had become almost a ritual to visit them when I was out rambling around. Also, I was running low on money. I didn’t like to travel around with a large amount of cash so I usually started with 60 to 80 dollars in traveler’s checks. I would leave additional traveler’s checks with some friends and would have them mail me some when I ran low on money. I had left some with Jamie and it seemed easier to go visit him than to have him mail me some.
Somewhere east of Lexington, I got a ride with a guy named Jim, who was heading to Virginia Beach. He was from southern Illinois and was on a road trip, he said, to recover from a break-up with his girlfriend. As he put it, "she got a wild hair up her ass and ran off with another guy." I could relate I told him except in my case she ran off with another woman. If that wasn’t enough, he told me his house had recently burned down. I guessed that Jim was maybe a couple years older than me.
He had decided to take US Route 460 all the way to Virginia Beach. At the time, US 460 ran from St. Louis to Virginia Beach. (It has since been reconfigured and is considerably shorter.) US 460 ran through Jim’s hometown so he wanted to follow it all the way to the coast. Most people driving from southern Illinois to Virginia Beach would have taken some combination of interstate highways, but Jim had chosen to take one of the narrowest, windiest two-lane highways in the country. It also had practically no shoulders, at least in Kentucky. It was the kind of impractical, eccentric project that I could appreciate.
We spent most of the day crossing the hilly Cumberland Plateau of eastern Kentucky. I liked that Jim seemed in no particular hurry and we would occasionally stop and explore. We made a slight detour and visited the Natural Bridge State Park where we went on a short hike. By the late afternoon we were in Virginia and stopped and camped for the night in Jefferson National Forest in the Clinch River Valley. We had left the plateau area of steep hills and were now in the region of long parallel mountain ridges.
April 29th, Virginia Beach, Virginia
We continued heading east on 460, stopping in Blacksburg for a coffee break. I told Jim I would be heading north on I-81 when we reached the intersection east of Blacksburg. Jim asked if I would consider continuing on to Virginia Beach with him—he seemed to enjoy having some company. I think it took his mind off of his ex-girlfriend. I was hesitant because I was down to only three dollars but Jim said not to worry about it. I enjoyed Jim’s company as well, so I continued on with him, figuring that I could head to Harrisonburg in a couple days from Virginia Beach.
We drove up and over the Blue Ridge and a few smaller ridges and got to Virginia Beach sometime in the late afternoon. Traffic was bad coming through Norfolk and Portsmouth. It seemed like a place that had grown rapidly and the road system hadn’t kept up. We ended up staying at Seashore State Park. I told Jim how Vickie and I had camped clandestinely in the same park last year. Because Jim had a car though, that would have been more difficult. We weren’t sure where we could leave the car and be sure it would still be there later.
Jim paid for a campsite, which turned out to be a nice spot. We were on a dune overlooking the beach. Jim bought a couple of quarts of Falstaff and rolled a joint. We relaxed and enjoyed the evening breeze off of the bay.
April 30th, Virginia Beach
The nice thing about camping at the park legally was that I was able to get a shower without having to sneak around. We then got some breakfast and caught the lecture at the Cayce Institute, which I had also heard last year. We had seen some signs for another campground and we thought we would check it out to see if it was nicer or cheaper than Seashore.
We had gone grocery shopping and, because Jim’s Pinto was small and full of our gear, I was holding a paper bag of groceries on my lap. I’m not sure what road we were on. It was a busy two-lane road, with no left-hand turning lanes, and traffic was moving pretty fast for that type of road. Up ahead somewhere, someone slowed down to make a left turn. Jim and the cars ahead of us slowed and stopped but the car behind us didn’t and slammed into us, probably at about 45 to 50 miles per hour.
It was a pretty forceful collision. A quart of milk flew out of the bag on my lap and splattered against the windshield. For a tiny fraction of a second I thought it was my brains. When I realized I was unhurt, I started to worry. Jim was driving a Pinto and I had some awareness that Pintos were becoming known for bursting into flames during rear-end collisions. I could see that the passenger-side door was crumpled and wasn’t sure whether I could get out of the vehicle if it caught on fire. [3]
Fortunately, the car didn’t burst into flames and I was able to get out of the car. I had sustained a cut above my left eye, just below my eyebrow. I’m not sure how I got cut. There were no airbags in cars at the time but I was wearing a seatbelt and shoulder belt. I don’t think my head hit the dash board. In fact, I think having the grocery bag on my lap sort of cushioned any sort of impact that might have occurred. However, the cut was bleeding profusely and I ended up getting an ambulance ride to the local hospital.
The person who rammed into us we learned was a detective for the City of Virginia Beach. He told us he had glanced down at some papers on the seat next to him and the next thing he knew he was crashing into us. There were no skid marks indicating he had ever hit the brakes. The only skid marks were from Jim’s car where Detective Maleski's car had pushed it into the car in front of us, which was also damaged. Jim’s car was crumpled like an accordion. Looking at it, it was hard to believe neither of us were seriously injured.
In the emergency room, the doctors quickly determined I was not badly injured, which meant I sat around for a long time while they attended to others. I must have looked like a mess though because a woman who was in the waiting area with me got up and left, saying, "I can’t sit here and look at that." For such a small cut, maybe three-quarters of an inch long, my clothes were pretty bloody. I eventually got four stitches to hold it closed.
I was beginning to wonder how I was going to reconnect with Jim because my pack was still in his car. About that time, Jim showed up at the ER. He had hitchhiked to the hospital to check to see if I was OK, not knowing that my injury was pretty trivial. I thought that was beyond the call of duty but it was probably easier for him to track me down than for me to find him.
After I was released, we started hitchhiking to where the car had been towed so we could get some gear from Jim’s car. The first car that pulled over to pick us up was none other than Detective Maleski. He’d already been issued a new vehicle! He was pretty casual about the whole thing—I don’t think he ever said he was sorry. He did, however, give us a ride to where the car had been taken, where we gathered the most important gear and what was left of the groceries.
Detective Maleski then drove us to a nearby Holiday Inn Campground, which turned out to be owned by an ex-cop he knew. As a favor to Maleski, the owner allowed us to stay there for free for the night. It was a ridiculous spot for a campground and I would have hated to have paid to stay there. The economy of the Norfolk/Virginia Beach area was a weird combination of beach tourism and the biggest naval base in the world. The campground was at the end of one of the runways of the naval air base and jets were taking off over top of us on a regular basis—it seemed like every five minutes, throughout the night. I was so tired I managed to sleep some despite the noise.