August 1st. Jasper Free Camp, Alberta.
I felt perfectly fine when I got up, so I decided to do the Whistlers Mountain hike I had postponed from yesterday. It was a nice hike—starting out in a pine/spruce forest. Gradually, the trail emerged above the tree line into more alpine-like meadows where I found a lot of wild strawberries and raspberries.
A little more than halfway up I could see there was a tram line that went up the mountain, which I could tell was heading in the same direction as me. Until then, I had been expecting to be mostly on my own at the top. I believe it was about a five-mile hike to the top of the mountain, with another two miles or so to the official summit.
There was, indeed, a crowd of people at the top. Not only was there a tram from the side of the mountain I hiked up, there was a ski lift from the other side of the mountain that operated in the summer. Somewhere on the mountaintop there was even a restaurant. I was disappointed that there were so many people on top but it was still a nice hike up with panoramic views from the top. I spotted a ptarmigan, numerous pikas, and a marmot.
Someone told me that the tram only collected tickets going up so I could have gotten a free ride down if I wanted. I chose to walk back down. At the bottom of the trail I ran into some people from the free camp and got a ride back with them.
At dinner, people around the fire found it humorous that I had no idea that there were going to be so many people on top of Whistlers Mountain. The tram was run by the National Park and was a well-known tourist attraction. They found it hard to believe I’d never heard of it.
Most of the people in the camp were also hitchhikers. I don’t know if there was even a place to park a vehicle. I also talked to several guys who had been hopping freight trains. There were so many hitchhikers in Canada at the time that they had turned to riding trains to avoid the competition. The Canadian National went through Yellowhead Pass.
I didn’t stay up late but it seemed like everyone else did. After dinner, people sat around campfires playing music and singing. I fell asleep to the music.
Photo source: www.explorejasper.com
A view looking roughly northeast from the top of Whistlers Mountain. The town of Jasper is in the lower middle of the photo. The Athabasca River flows from the upper left to the lower right. I think the Free Camp would have been slightly off to the lower right of this photo, but, 52 years later, I am not sure.
August 2nd. Jasper Free Camp, Alberta.
In the morning, I hiked along the river, heading upstream. There were no real trails—occasionally some stretches of what looked like deer trails. The river was braided along the stretch I hiked, with multiple channels and small islands. I didn’t go far, maybe two or three miles upstream and then back.
As I came back into camp, I stopped and sat on the hill that overlooked the camp. Kathy, one of my neighbors in the camp, sat down and chatted with me. We swapped travel stories. She was from somewhere in upstate New York and was taking the summer off before looking for a new job. She had been at the camp for about 10 days and wasn’t sure how much longer she would stay. I thought she was with Will, but I wasn’t sure to what extent they were attached.
Around the evening campfire, I mentioned that I planned to continue west the next day and was offered a ride by a couple, Brenda and Jeff, from New Jersey. They were the only people I met in the camp who actually had a vehicle. [24]
August 3rd. Prince George, British Columbia.
I rode with Brenda and Jeff almost the entire way to Prince George. The ride through Yellowhead Pass was absolutely gorgeous. I liked traveling with them because they made numerous stops along the way to get out and admire the mountains and take some short hikes.
Photo source: Miroslav Liska/Pixels.com
The Yellowhead Highway passed by the southwest face of Mt. Robson, shown above, the highest point in the Canadian Rockies. Because the summit of the Yellowhead Pass has a rather low elevation (3711 feet), Mt. Robson at 12,972 feet, has 9760 feet of vertical relief. There is a large, but receding, mountain glacier on the northeast side, not visible from the highway.
Brenda and Jeff let me out just short of Prince George and I got one short ride into town and found the hostel. A couple guys, who I met over dinner at the hostel, asked me if I wanted to go to one of the local bars for a couple of beers. I agreed. It was one of the weirdest bars I’ve been to. It was in a hotel, whose name I neglected to record. The front entrance was elevated with a flight of 10 or 12 stairs leading up to it.
We found a table and a surly waiter came by with a bar rag and wiped it. It seemed like he left it in worse shape than it had been before he wiped it. He asked us what we wanted and we each ordered a draft, which was all they had. He called us faggots and left. We weren’t sure what to make of that. I noticed then that all the tables surrounding ours had multiple beers for each person. A table of four guys, many in cowboy hats, boots, and belt buckles would have 12 to 16 beers sitting on it. It was apparently the local custom to order multiple beers at one time. Two, it seemed, was the minimum number of beers that one could order and not have one’s sexual orientation questioned. It looked like most guys—I didn’t see any women in this bar—were ordering three or four.
I knew a band was supposed to play later and I mentioned that it must be a good band because the place was already full. A guy at the next table overheard and informed me that it had nothing to do with how good the band was—it was because there was a black guy in the band. I must have looked a little puzzled because he clarified that there weren’t any black people in Prince George and almost everyone was there because they wanted to see what a real black person looked like. They had only seen them on TV he told me.
We knew to order two beers each the next time around. Even two must have been borderline because the waiter rolled his eyes at us. One guy, who looked part Indian and was highly intoxicated, was creating a ruckus. The bartender yelled at him to sit his ass down. I was so confused about the multiple beer thing that I hadn’t noticed until that everyone in the bar was seated. It was apparently forbidden to stand or move around within the bar. The at-least-part-Indian guy was non-compliant and eventually two big guys grabbed him, dragged him to the door, and threw him down the front stairs.
About the time we finished our beers, the waiters started asking for a cover charge for the band. I decided to head back to the hostel. I didn’t feel like staying for the band and something about the two guys I was drinking with had started to annoy me. They were both a little too full of themselves. I expected the guy who had been thrown down the front stairs to be sprawled out at the bottom, but somehow he was on his feet and staggering down the street ahead of me.[25]
August 4th. Prince George, British Columbia.
I explored Prince George in the morning. It is a pulp mill town and had that characteristic sulfide aroma. In the afternoon I just hung around the hostel. I chatted with some of the other travelers but for the most part people weren’t that sociable. The two guys I went to the bar with left during the day.
August 5th. 100 Mile House, British Columbia.
I said goodbye to the Yellowhead Highway and started heading south on Highway 97. It took a while to get my first ride but it was a fairly long one. The guy who picked me up was a guy named Rob and we got along well. He was probably in his mid 30s and had had a lot of different jobs. I enjoyed hearing his stories. He also wanted to hear about where I had been and what I had been doing.
We stopped for a beer in Williams Lake. (I remembered to order two.) Afterwards, Rob dropped me off a little further down the road at Lac La Heche, where he lived. He said he would have liked to offer me a place to stay overnight, but his wife would be mad at him for the next week if he did. I got another short ride to 100 Mile House and found the hostel, which was in an old school building. I was just in time for dinner. The two annoying guys who I went to the bar with in Prince George were there. [26]
August 6th. Nanaimo, British Columbia.
I left early and caught a ride to Spences Bridge with a molybdenum miner. From there I got a ride with a guy going to Kelsey Bay on Vancouver Island. At Cache Creek we left Highway 97 and caught the Trans-Canada Highway heading west. TCH 1 between Lytton and Hope went through the rugged Fraser River Canyon.
Photo source: Exploring the Scenic Fraser Canyon - Peter Olsen Photography
Both the Canadian Pacific Railway and the Canadian National Railway pass through the Fraser River Canyon, one on each side. Between Lytton and Kanaka Bar they switch sides at the Cisco Bridges. The CPR laid their tracks through the canyon first and crossed the canyon (the black bridge in the foreground) to take advantage of less rugged terrain. When the CNR laid their tracks later, they were forced to switch to the other side of the canyon. This view is looking upstream in a roughly northern direction. The Trans-Canada Highway is in the upper right of the photo.
We parted at the North Vancouver ferry terminal since foot travelers boarded separately from those with vehicles. While I was waiting to board I saw Ed and Patsy’s champagne-colored bus go by on the street that ran by the terminal. There was no way they could have seen me but I would have liked to have been able to say hello to them.
The terminal on the Vancouver Island side was in Nanaimo. I found my way to the hostel, which was one of the largest ones I’d been to. It was quite lively and people were friendly, much friendlier than the one at Prince George. Like at 100 Mile House, it was in a school building. Sleeping quarters were in the gym, which had an accordion-like partition that separated the gym into a men’s dorm and a women’s dorm.
August 7th. Quadra Island, British Columbia.
I woke up to find a girl sleeping on one side of me. When she got out of her bag, I realized it was Kathy, one of the people I had met at the Free Camp in Jasper. When she figured out she was in the men’s dorm, she told me she got in late and must have accidentally ended up in the wrong place. We talked for a bit and she told me she had hitchhiked solo from Jasper, following pretty much the route I had taken.
After breakfast (oatmeal and an orange), Kathy approached me and asked if I would do her a favor. She told me that a guy at breakfast heard she was traveling on her own and was insisting on going with her. Even though she told him she preferred traveling on her own, he was persistent. She thought if she told him she was leaving with me that he would leave her alone. I said "sure."
I saw the guy later and was relieved to see that he was even scrawnier than me. Kathy and I left the hostel together but didn’t stay together long. She was going to head south to the US and down the coast to visit some friends. I would have offered to join her but, as we were walking along, she was talking about the many downsides of traveling solo as a female, but how it was important to her to be able to do it independently. I didn’t want her to think I was one more guy trying to attach himself to her.
I had arranged for a mail drop in Nanaimo and was heading for the post office, so I wished her good luck and we said goodbye. I had the minor consolation of feeling like I had done a good deed even though I hadn’t really done anything at all.
I had no mail waiting for me at the post office. I always had trouble timing mail drops so that my mail and I were in the same place at the same time. Instead of waiting around in Nanaimo, I headed north along the east coast of Vancouver Island. Someone had told me that Quadra Island was worth visiting so I headed that way.
The ferry from Vancouver Island to Quadra Island left from Campbell River. The fee for walk-on passengers was 40 cents. On the other side, I hiked around for most of the afternoon and found a place to camp in the verdant cedar/fir woods, one of the more beautiful places I’ve camped.
August 8th. Long Beach, Pacific Rim National Park, British Columbia.
I decided to head to the west coast of Vancouver Island. That meant catching the ferry back from Quadra Island to the big island. Rides were fairly easy from Campbell River and then across Vancouver Island on Highway 4 to the west coast.
I stopped in Port Alberni for some groceries and ran into a girl I had met in the Nanaimo hostel. She was dark-haired and very pretty. She went by ‘Shell’ or maybe ‘Chelle,’ which I thought might be short for Michelle. We talked for a while. She had just picked up some groceries herself and was also hitchhiking to Pacific Rim. She said if she was still waiting for a ride when I was finished getting groceries that we could hitchhike together. If not, maybe we would see each other at Pacific Rim.
‘Chelle was, of course, already gone by the time I finished shopping and got back out to the road. She was not the kind of girl who would have to wait very long for a ride. I got a couple rides to the national park and found a place to camp on the beach. At least at the time, there were designated areas where people were allowed to tent camp at the edge of the beach.
In other news, Richard Nixon sort of confessed today and resigned when it became clear that he was going to be impeached and probably removed from office.
August 9th. Long Beach, Pacific Rim National Park, British Columbia.
I spent most of the day hiking along the beach. It was not just a long beach—it was also a wide beach.
At one point, I ran into ‘Chelle. She was tented with a small group of people and ran over to see me. She was wearing one of the smallest bikinis I had ever seen. It seemed to be no more than a few small scraps of fabric and some strings. Even though I had had perfectly normal conversations with her at the hostel and later in Port Alberni, now suddenly, because she was quasi-naked, neither my brain nor my tongue were working properly. She must have wondered what was the matter with me. So did I. I forget exactly what stupid things I said.
Photo source: Wikipedia
A view of Long Beach in Pacific Rim National Park.
August 10th. Nanaimo, British Columbia.
I headed back to Nanaimo, back through Port Alberni and then along the east coast of the island to Nanaimo. I was thinking that if I had any mail, it would be there by then. However, the post office was already closed when I got there and since the next day was a Sunday, I would have to wait a full day to see if I had any mail. I realized I should have just spent another day or two at Pacific Rim.
The hostel didn’t open until 8:00 pm, so I just hung out with a bunch of the other travelers that were waiting for it to open. The two annoying guys I met in Prince George showed up. I seemed to keep crossing paths with them. After the hostel finally opened, and since the dorms were in a gym, we got together a coed basketball game. No one was any good and it was more of a physical comedy than an athletic endeavor.
The guy who tried to attach himself to Kathy was still at the hostel. He was a small Asian guy, who seemed very tense. I could see why he gave Kathy the creeps. I saw him looking at me and I’m sure he wondered why I was there and Kathy wasn’t but he never confronted me.
August 11th. Nanaimo, British Columbia.
I spent part of the day wandering around Nanaimo and part of the day just hanging out. There were a bunch of people hanging out on the lawn in front of City Hall, a mixture of locals and drifters. I played Crazy Eights with some of the people from the hostel. Later, I sat with people on the lawn in front of the hostel waiting for it to open.
August 12th. Vancouver, British Columbia.
I went to the post office to check for mail, but there was still none. I didn’t want to stick around any longer so I caught the ferry to Vancouver, where I spent part of the day exploring the city. There were multiple hostels in Vancouver and one central referral center that you were supposed to call first. They would then assign you to one of the hostels.
The hostel I was assigned to was at Queen Mary School. Unlike the Nanaimo hostel, the Vancouver hostel provided a dinner, which was not bad. Otherwise, my first impression of the hostel was that people were not as friendly as at Nanaimo. For part of the day and by evening it was quite foggy and the sound of fog horns in the inlet could be heard in the hostel all night.
Photo source: Queen Mary Elementary School
A view of Queen Mary Elementary School. It was the site of one of the government-sponsored hostels in Vancouver for travelers in the summer of 1974. Burrard Inlet is in the background. I do not think the white building on the right was present in 1974. The main building was built in 1909 and is still being used as a neighborhood elementary school.
August 13th. Vancouver, British Columbia.
My opinion of the hostel changed. People seemed friendlier at breakfast. The weather improved as well. It was hazy, but there did not look to be any chance of a shower. I joined a group of people who took a city bus down to Gastown, a section of old buildings with a lot of odd little stores. The restaurants smelled good, but unaffordable. I was running out of money again. We walked for a while in Stanley Park and then took a bus back.
In the evening, a girl named Wendy from Toronto, called me over on the playground. I had met her playing Crazy Eights on the lawn in Nanaimo. She had a little bit of weed and got me stoned. We had a pleasant conversation. My brain and tongue seemed to be functioning better, presumably because she wasn’t practically naked. There was a nice view of the inlet and the downtown skyline from the school playground.
August 14th. Wenatchee, Washington.
I left the hostel after breakfast and headed south back to the US, where there seemed to be a noticeable vibe shift. The customs officials at the border seemed unnecessarily rude. On the US side, I got a ride with a girl going down I-5 to Salem, Oregon. I rode with her as far as Everett. Because I was running low on cash, I was starting to think about work, and some folks at the Vancouver hostel mentioned that apple picking would be happening soon. So, from Everett I headed east toward Wenatchee, which I knew was in an apple-growing area.
Near Everett, I got hassled by a state policeman. Hitchhiking in Washington was tricky because it had, paradoxically, recently been legalized. It had for some time been illegal, although it was almost never enforced. The state had not long before legalized hitchhiking—but only from designated areas. And, state police rigorously enforced the new law if one was caught hitchhiking outside of the designated areas. Every hitchhiker I met in Washington unanimously agreed that hitchhiking was better in Washington when it was illegal.
The state cop told me I was illegally hitchhiking because I was on the side of a road with a speed limit above 25 miles per hour. But, I was only walking along the road—I wasn’t hitchhiking, so it seemed more like him taking an opportunity to harass me. He searched my pack but didn’t find anything so he left me off with a stern warning. I started to miss Canada.
Somewhere along the way, east on US 2, I ran into a couple of hitchhikers from Minnesota, who were also headed to Wenatchee. They were both big, good-natured guys. We got a ride in the back of a pickup to Wenatchee and found a place to camp along a stream. Another guy, named Dave joined us in our camp. I don’t know where he came from—he seemed to just appear. Dave seemed a little odd, but harmless.
August 15th. Mt. Rainier National Park, Washington.
Up early. Dave had a down sleeping bag that was falling apart and when he got up, his hair was full of little down feathers. I told him about it and he brushed his hair with his hand, but it didn’t make much difference. He had curly hair and the feathers seemed to stick inside the curls.
The Minnesotans, Dave, and I went to the local employment office to find out about apple-picking jobs. Dave seemed to have attached himself to me. There were a lot of guys at the employment office and, like us, they were waiting to find out if the orchards were ready to start hiring. I got the feeling that, like us, many of them were sleeping out and were taking advantage of access to the employment office’s restroom. It was not large and guys had to wait in line to use it.
Dave was sitting next to me and asked me to watch his bag while he used the restroom. Not long after he came out, a guy came over to me and told me, "Hey buddy, your feather-headed partner made a big mess in the restroom." He said it like he expected me to clean up after him. I don’t know why he addressed me and not Dave—maybe because Dave had a kind of vacant look on his face like no one was home. It must have been a big mess because everyone who came out of the restroom was cussing and people were pointing in our direction. I wanted to holler, "He’s not my damn partner."
The situation seemed to be getting tense, but about that time someone from the employment office announced that the orchards had tested the sugar content of the apples and determined that there wouldn’t be any picking for at least a few more days yet. The Minnesotans decided to head back to Seattle where they had been staying and then come back the following week. I probably would have stuck around and waited for apple picking to begin but I left just so I could ditch Dave, who I decided was going cause problems if I let him follow me around.
I told him I was leaving. When he asked if he could come along, I told him no. I felt bad that he was out in the world on his own—but not enough to take responsibility for him. I back tracked on US 2, then south on US 97, before heading west on US 12. Rides were slow and by the evening I was right outside of Mt. Rainier National Park. I found a nice camp site with a good view of the peak.
I probably should have stuck around to pick apples since it seemed like a sure thing if I had been willing to wait. Now, I was running out of money, without any obvious options. And, my shoes were starting to fall apart.
August 16th. Eugene, Oregon.
It took me two rides to get to I-5. I got stuck on a bad ramp with two guys who had been there for four hours. Someone stopped and told us he was only going down a couple of exits. The other guys didn’t want to take a short ride but I got in, figuring that it would likely be a better ramp, which it was. I got a ride to Portland after only a short wait.
From Portland, I got a ride with a guy named Kevin on his way to Sacramento. He had just quit his job in Vancouver, Washington and was moving back to his hometown. He was driving a VW Beetle that was stuffed to the gills with his stuff. We had to strap my pack to the roof rack and rearrange the passenger seat. He was looking for someone to drive for a while. I drove into Eugene, where I had him let me out. I was down to three dollars. I found a place to camp in a patch of neglected woods right in the city.
August 17th. Vacaville, California.
I was up early and spent some time just walking around in Eugene. Eventually, I headed out to I-5 and continued south. I got a ride to Grants Pass and was stuck there for a while.
I got a ride with two girls, Beth and Joanne, who looked like they were about 18 or 19 years old. They had landed some kind of non-military jobs at Travis Air Force Base in California and were moving there from somewhere in Washington. They were kind of goofy and I enjoyed riding with them.
They were hauling a good-sized U-Haul trailer with just a regular sedan. As we started to ascend Siskiyou Summit, Beth, who was driving, noticed that the temperature gauge was starting to climb. The girls decided that it must have been because of my added weight. I told them it was mostly because we were going up a mountain. They debated whether to pull over and put me out but while they were debating it, we crested the summit and the temp gauge started falling again. [27]
They left me off in Vacaville in the Central Valley. I found a place to sleep in a plum orchard. I was out of money and food. The plums were ripe and sweet though and that helped.
August 18th. Modesto, California.
Riding with the girls in the car the day before, I heard an ad on the radio for a cannery in Modesto that was hiring, so I decided to head there. It was hot and dusty in the valley and rides were slow. I got stuck on a bad ramp in Stockton for some time. I got the finger of scorn from a lot of black and Hispanic guys who drove by.
I got a ride into Modesto with a couple of guys who were buying and reselling dogs. They seemed sketchy and I suspect they were actually stealing and reselling dogs. Once I was in Modesto, I discovered there was a glass factory and thought that might be a possibility. However, it was a bottle plant for the Gallo Winery. I was told it was mostly automated and they didn’t need anyone.
I found a peach orchard to sleep in. They were not totally ripe, but close enough. Plums and peaches were all I had to eat for the day.
August 19th. Modesto, California.
I went by the Manpower office early on the off chance someone needed some day labor and lucked out. The office wasn’t open yet, but there was a truck from United Van Lines sitting there and two guys who were looking for some help. Darrell hired me on the spot. His coworker’s name was Mike.
They had driven the truck from somewhere in New Jersey to Modesto. Their client was a manager for Campbell’s Soup who had been reassigned to Modesto. He wasn’t present when we rolled up to the house, but his wife and two daughters were. Their name was something like Covelko.
On the way to their house, Darrell had told me to be careful not to drop, break, or scratch anything. Mrs. Covelko, he said, was fussy and was sure to file a claim if she thought something was damaged. He told me if I broke anything, he would have to deduct it from what he owed me.
The work, in some ways, was not too bad. The house was all on one level—there were no stairs leading up to the house and it was a single story. There was a hand truck for the appliances. They didn’t appear to own any books or record albums so there wasn’t much truly heavy lifting. They did have a lot of stuff though and it wasn’t a big house, so we had to stack things in such a way that everything fit with room to move around. It was good that the work wasn’t overly hard because I didn’t feel like I was at 100 percent—I could feel a cold coming on, plus I hadn’t had anything to eat.
The little girls were bratty. They were about seven and five and seemed to be constantly in the way. It seemed intentional. When no one was around, they would stick their tongues out at me. Once we moved the kitchen table and some chairs in, their mom set them up with coloring books and a giant box of brand-new crayons in an effort to distract them—but it was futile. The whole moving thing must have wound them up pretty tight.
Darrell, Mike, and I worked through lunch. Mrs. Covelko bought herself and the girls a bucket of fried chicken and assorted side dishes, which she laid out on the kitchen table. She did not offer any to us. There was no way the girls could have known how hungry I was but, when no one was looking, they would taunt me with the food. One of them waved a drumstick back and forth in front of me. The other one made exaggerated chewing noises and exclaimed how good everything was. Ignoring the girls, the food, and my growling stomach might have been the most challenging part of the job.
Sometime in the early afternoon, I slipped up and caused some damage. I had been hauling in pieces of a metal shelving unit and accidentally put a scratch on the door that led from the kitchen into the living room, where we were stacking stuff. Fortunately, no one was in the kitchen at the time to witness it. However, it was only a matter of time because the scratch stood out. The door was pine with a walnut-colored stain. The two-foot-long gash I put in it glaringly exposed the much-lighter color underneath. If Darrell charged me for the scratch or the door, I was afraid I might end up working all day for free.
I peeked outside and saw that Darrell and Mike were delayed, talking to Mrs. Covelko about something. The girls were running around in circles on the lawn shrieking like a couple of possessed banshees. I pulled a brown crayon out of the box of crayons the girls had never bothered to use and colored in the scratch. The color matched fairly well, and the sharp point of the crayon was almost the exact width of the scratch.
I didn’t have time to admire my handiwork because I had no sooner returned the crayon to the box when Darrell and Mike came in. I was sure that Mrs. Covelko would eventually discover the disguised scratch but I was hoping it wouldn’t be until later. We were done by about three and Darrell paid me twenty dollars. No one noticed the scratch and the girls didn’t notice that there was one brown crayon that no longer had a sharp point.
Later, I wandered by the Salvation Army and they gave me what they called a "bed ticket." They said if I also needed a meal to head by the Modesto Gospel Mission, so I did. Unfortunately, we had to sing hymns and listen to a sermon before they fed us dinner. While I was not-listening to the sermon, I was racking my brain trying to figure out who the preacher reminded me of. It wasn’t until he was done preaching that I realized he sounded exactly like the preacher in the Primitive Baptist church in eastern Tennessee that Norman took me to in April. It seemed like a decade ago.
The dinner was bland pinto beans, a slice of white bread, a stale donut, and coffee. It was hardly worth not-listening to a sermon for. I was, however, determined to stretch the twenty dollars since I didn’t know when I would be making more money. As I was leaving, I saw the preacher and asked him where he was from originally and he said "A little place you likely never heard of, son, called Bean Station, Tennessee." [28]
The bed ticket got me a bed in the Hughson Hotel, a large hotel downtown that had seen better days. The bed was in a room with seven other guys, which turned out to be OK because some of them had been looking for work and had some tips about finding work. I got a much-needed shower.
Most of them were older than me, but I struck up a conversation with a guy named Bob who was a little younger than me. He told me that he was heading back to Southern California to work for his uncle doing landscaping. He said his uncle always needed workers and he could get me a job if nothing came through in Modesto. He gave me an address and a phone number in Escondido, which was close to San Diego.
Photo Source: Modesto Arch - Wikipedia
The Modesto Arch spans I Street at its intersection with 9th Street. It was built in 1912 and sports the city’s motto, which is illuminated at night by 696 light bulbs. All four of the items in the city motto are present in Modesto, albeit unevenly distributed.
August 20th. Yosemite National Park.
Moving the Covelkos in must have been a little more strenuous than I thought as I woke up with sore arms, legs, and back. I definitely had a cold.
I went by the Tilly Lewis cannery, which had been advertising for workers. They referred me the the employment office, where I was told to come back the following week for an interview. I ran into one of my roommates from the Hughson Hotel and he told me that a problem with Tilly Lewis was that the first paycheck was delayed by two weeks, so you had to work a full month before you got your first paycheck.
I bought a four-dollar pair of tennis shoes to replace my shoes, which had fallen apart. I had been keeping the soles attached to the uppers with pieces of string, which Darrell had found hilarious. That was not going to work much longer. Those shoes weren’t new when I left in April but I had put a lot of miles on them and I thanked them for their service as I tossed them into a dumpster.
I decided to head down to Escondido and see about the landscaping job. Even though I wasn’t feeling that great, I decided to make a side trip to Yosemite since it was relatively close by. I had to take a rather roundabout route since part of the most direct route was closed.
During the course of the day, not only had my cold gotten worse, my ears started to feel like they were full of something. I couldn’t hear right—everything sounded a muted. By the time I got up in the mountains though, they opened up again. I didn’t feel up to much hiking but did walk around in the valley some, where I camped for the night.
August 21st. Sequoia National Park.
I would have liked to have spent more time in Yosemite but, between not feeling well and wanting to find some work, I kept moving, heading southwest, back into the Central Valley. By the time I got to Fresno, my ears had clogged up again. It felt like elevation had something to do with it, so I hitchhiked back up into the Sierras to Sequoia National Park.
I would have visited Sequoia, regardless of the trouble I was having with my ears. I had seen the coast redwoods the previous summer and I wanted to at least see the giant sequoia trees. I made it to the Giant Forest, which has some of the really big trees, including five of the 10 biggest single-stem trees in the world by volume. My ears did, indeed, open up again once I was at a higher elevation.
Map source: Save the Redwoods League
Map showing the current distribution of coast redwoods and giant sequoias. Although the two are related, they have evolved to live in different environments. The coast redwoods, Sequoia sempervirens, live in a strip along the coast from southwest Oregon to about Point Piedras, at elevations ranging from sea level to 3000 feet. It is a cool, humid climate with frequent coastal fog. They grow to heights of 380 feet, with base diameters of 10 to 15 feet. They rely largely on fog drip for their water needs—something I learned the previous summer while sleeping in redwood groves without putting up my tent.
Giant sequoias, Sequoiadendron giganteum, grow along the western slope of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, mostly at elevations between 5000 and 7000 feet. They have adapted to survive with less precipitation and with occasional periods of dry heat. They are not as tall as the coast redwoods, growing up to 300 feet tall. However, they have trunks that are up 36 feet in diameter at breast height and are the largest single-stem trees in the world by volume. [29] They rely mostly on snow melt for water.
August 22nd. Somewhere in the Los Angeles area.
My cold felt a little better today. But, by the time I descended to Visalia in the Central Valley, my ears were clogged again. My energy was returning, however.
I wanted to continue towards Escondido to check out the possibility of the landscaping job. However, Escondido was south of Los Angeles, which meant I would have to find my way across the urban mass of LA. There was no practical way to go around it. I considered LA to be a smoggy, sprawling, metastasizing expanse of concrete, asphalt, and motor vehicles. But that’s where I was headed.
It was slow going. California was strict about hitchhiking on freeways so I was thumbing only from entrance ramps, some of which didn’t have that much traffic. I went through Bakersfield and then up over the Tejon Pass through the Tehachapi Mountains into the San Fernando Valley.
I have no idea where I spent the night. That part of the entry in my journal is indecipherable and my memory fails me.
August 23rd. Dana Point, California.
I spent the whole day getting across LA, but it wasn’t as bad as I thought it might be. A young black guy picked me up and told me I should see a little bit of LA on my way through. He drove me down Santa Monica Boulevard, out of his way, to show me some things along the way. He warned me about the Freeway Killer, a serial killer who had been leaving bodies in the bushes next to freeways. He said he thought that at least some of those killed had been hitchhikers.
I wandered around on the beach for a while and stopped and did some laundry before continuing south. I’m not sure what route I took to get across LA—I had multiple rides—one of them warned me again about the Freeway Killer. I got one ride with a frat boy in a top-down convertible who, for some reason, seemed to get a lot of joy out of speeding up behind other vehicles, tailgating them for a while, and then whipping around them. He got me to Santa Fe Springs. Another ride got me to Huntington Beach. By the end of the day I was at Dana Point, which seemed to be the southern end of the LA metropolis, at least at the time. I found a secluded place to spend the night at Doheny State Beach. My ears were almost back to normal.
August 24th. Escondido, California.
I was up early, which was fortunate since I was all packed up when a ranger came by making his morning rounds. He asked me where I had spent the night and I told him at the campground of the nearby county park. I don’t think he believed me.
It didn’t take too long to get to Escondido. I got one ride to Oceanside and a ride from there with a guy (literally—since his name was Guy) driving a tandem dump truck. It was a dump truck pulling a good-sized dump trailer, something I only saw in California. We got along well. I told him I was heading to Escondido to check out a job doing landscaping. He gave me his phone number and told me if the job didn’t pan out to give him a call. He said he employed a Mexican gardener who had recently been caught and sent back to Mexico and that they could use a little help until their gardener snuck back into the country.
I decided I would wait until the next day to find out about the landscaping job. I discovered a place to spend the night on the grounds of a school. There were several overgrown areas and there was no sign that people regularly hung out there after dark.
August 25th. Escondido, California.
I called the number that Bob gave me a couple times and there was no answer, so I walked to the address, which turned out to be his uncle’s home. He told me that he did, indeed, run a landscaping business but that, at the moment, he had more workers than he had work and was not hiring. He seemed a bit put out that I had shown up at his house and said Bob wasn’t authorized to give people his phone number or address or to tell them he could get them a job.
I asked him where I could find Bob and he wrote an address on a scrap of paper and handed it to me. But it was a phony address. I walked over and there was no street number matching the one he had given me. So, I had traveled all that way from Modesto for nothing.
I spent the rest of the afternoon in the library where I wrote letters to Karla and Judy. I had also left some travelers’ checks with Jamie in Harrisonburg and I wrote him, asking him to mail me some. Even though they were replaceable if they were lost or stolen, for some unexplainable reason, I was reluctant to travel with a big wad of them.
I spent the night again on the school grounds. There was a big boulder on the grounds that was almost the size of a small room—maybe six feet tall, eight feet long, and 10 to 12 feet wide. At the base of it were some thick bushes—thick enough that once I was inside the bushes, I was invisible from the outside.
August 26th. Escondido, California.
I walked to the employment office on the off chance that someone would show up looking for some day labor like in Modesto or that there were some other types of jobs but had no luck. I spent some time in the library and in the county park, which were the only public places I knew of.
Later, in the afternoon, I remembered I still had the number that Guy had given me in case the landscaping job didn’t materialize, which was exactly what had happened. For some reason, I was reluctant to call him—I wasn’t one hundred percent sure he expected that I might actually use it. I thought I would try one more time at the employment office before calling. I slept again at what I had come to think of as "the rock" on the school grounds.
August 27th. San Marcos, California.
I again tried the employment office and again no luck. I spent the day hanging out at the library and the county park, where I was beginning to recognize the regulars.
I waited until early evening to call when I thought Guy would be more likely to be home. He answered and, when I told him my situation, he told me to hang on while he talked with his wife about it.
Guy must have set the phone down and walked away because I could clearly hear everything that was going on in the background. His wife, to put it mildly, was not happy. She couldn’t believe that Guy had agreed to hire someone who he had picked up from the side of the road to do work around their house while he was away at work. Guy’s wife must have been cleaning up after dinner, because their conversation was loudly punctuated with the sound of dishes and pots emphatically clanking and banging. I could hear Guy telling her that he could tell that I was not the troublemaking type and her reminding him about the multiple times he had misjudged people in the past.
I thought about Rob, the guy in British Columbia who told me he would have invited me to spend the night but his wife would have been pissed off for the next week if he did. From what I was hearing, it sounded like it would take Guy’s wife way more than a week to cool off. After what seemed like a fifteen-minute heated exchange—with most of the heat coming from Guy’s wife—he got back on the phone and told me that his wife, Sandy, was delighted that I would be coming to help them out and was very much looking forward to meeting me. I almost laughed but I wasn’t sure he knew that I had heard everything. He arranged to pick me up.
Guy rolled up driving a gold-colored Jaguar (!) and drove me to his home in San Marcos, which was close to Escondido. He introduced me to his wife, Sandy, who had an English accent. Considering the exchange I had overheard, she seemed incredibly gracious. They had two kids, a daughter named Philippa, who looked to be about 12 years old, and a son, whose name is indecipherable and forgotten. He was probably 14 or 15 years old.
They seemed to have a good-sized chunk of land. Their house was near the top of a hill. On the other side of the hill, out of sight, was California Highway 78, a busy freeway that connected I-5 and I-15. On their side of hill, however, facing northeast was an unbroken view of chapparal. Guy pointed me down a trail and said that I would probably enjoy camping next to their pond, which he said was about half a mile down the trail. He said to check in with his wife in the morning. He was right—it was a nice campsite with a good view. I could hear coyotes howling in the distance.
August 28th. San Marcos, California.
I reported to the house in the morning as Guy was leaving for work. Sandy fixed me and the kids breakfast. Later, after the kids left, Sandy and I chatted. She liked to talk but also had a lot of questions for me about my travels. She didn’t seem to be in a hurry for me to get to work. I don’t think she got around to telling me what she wanted me to do until close to 10 o’clock. It was mainly weeding flowerbeds.
Guy had offered me two dollars an hour, which was minimum wage, and said Sandy would also fix me breakfast. He didn’t say anything about other meals so I assumed I was on my own for those. However, Sandy came out and invited me in for lunch. After lunch, it seemed like we talked for another couple hours. For someone who was so dead set against me coming, she seemed fine about sitting around chatting with me. Unless she was really good at faking it, I think she had decided that I was all right after all.
I had dinner on my own at my campsite. Philippa came by later riding a horse to visit. She said she wanted to see how I was doing. Around dusk, the coyotes started howling again. They were a lot closer this time. It sounded like they were in the chaparral just on the other side of the pond. The pond was not very big—I could have easily thrown a stone to the other side from my campsite.
August 29th. San Marcos, California.
The day was like a repeat of yesterday. It felt like I spent half of the morning chatting with Sandy. She finally got around to showing me an area of weeds that she wanted to turn into an extension of their lawn. I spent part of the morning and part of the afternoon turning over the soil, getting rid of the weeds, and raking it smooth. Philippa kept me company part of the time and asked me some of the same questions Sandy had asked me. I was just finishing raking when Guy and his brother arrived from work. Guy gave me a can of Coors and told me to call it a day. I didn’t tell him that I was lucky if I had put five full hours.
I learned that Guy wasn’t just a truck driver. He and his brother owned an excavation company, which explained why he could afford a Jaguar, a big chunk of land, a personal gardener, and a horse. Sandy invited me for supper, which she warned were just leftovers—or resurrections, as she called them.
Guy later told me that they had gotten word that their Mexican gardener had slipped back across the border so they wouldn’t be needing me anymore. He paid me for 16 hours, plus a little bit more. I doubt I had put in more than 10 hours of actual work over two days, so part of what I got paid for was just sitting around drinking coffee and chatting with Sandy.
I spent the evening at my pondside campsite. Philippa came by on her horse to say goodbye. She said her mom had just told her I was leaving. The coyotes were howling again, but they were off in the distance.
August 30th. Escondido, California.
I left my campsite early the next morning and got a ride back into Escondido. I had already thanked Guy and Sandy and said goodbye to everyone and didn’t see the point of repeating it.
I had money in my pocket again and I felt like moving on. However, I had told Jamie to send me some travelers’ checks to Escondido so I felt like I should hang around and wait for them.
I spent part of the day in the park and part in the library. I had determined that the park was OK to hang out at in the daytime but maybe not the best place to be at night. I’m not sure what I based that judgment on. At night, I went back to the rock to spend the night. It seemed like a place where I was less likely to be disturbed.
Photo source: https://hiddenca.com/
Felicita County Park, where I spent part of my time while waiting for mail in Escondido, had some nice groves of live oaks.
August 31st. Escondido, California.
Another day of mostly hanging out in the park. I’ve gotten to know more of the regulars. One of them warned me about a raccoon acting peculiar that he thought might be rabid.
I made friends with one of the other regulars—Mr. Gossage, a 93-year-old, who said he comes to the park almost every day with his banjo, which he partly made himself. He called it a guitar-neck banjo. He had it strung with five strings.
I had been carrying around a harmonica most of the summer. It came in handy to pass the time while I was waiting for rides. I didn’t have any musical training, but I was able to learn some tunes by ear. Mr. Gossage saw I had a harmonica and suggested we play something together. The problem was most of the songs he played were hymns that I didn’t know, and I’m sure he wasn’t familiar with the handful of songs I knew. He suggested "When the Saints Come Marching In." I gave it a try. I think my part came out recognizable but not much more than that.
A Spanish-speaking family had been picnicking nearby and the father sent over his shy little girl with a can of Coca Cola each for Mr. Gossage and me. I wasn’t sure if he found the sight of an old timer and a sun-weathered wanderer struggling to play music together entertaining or if it was just his way of saying "please stop."
I spent the night again at my nest at the rock. There were visitors for the first time. Sometime around midnight a guy and a girl climbed up on the rock. I could tell they were smoking some weed and then they talked for a while and finally left. I knew they couldn’t see me from the rock, especially at night even though I was less than 10 feet away. I just laid there quietly until they left. Sometimes I felt like a ghost or a ninja.