July 1st, Québec City, Québec
I spent the morning hiking around the old part of Québec with Angela. She planned to head home to British Columbia and, since I was headed west, we had decided to leave together the next day. I told her I had noticed she was upset yesterday and asked her if everything was OK. She did not want to talk about it.
Later in the afternoon, all six of us were kicked out of the hostel. Most of the indoor hostels had a limit to how long a person could stay that varied from a few days to a week. Unbeknownst to us since it wasn’t posted, the Avenue Taché hostel had a three-night limit. We had all assumed we could stay another night. Not only was the manager adamant that we could not; he was irritated that we tried to stay an extra night—as if we were trying to put one over on him.
We were surprised how upset the manager was because it was an innocent mistake on our part and, up until then, he had been friendly with all of us. We were practically the only people staying in the hostel, so it wasn’t like we were preventing others from staying there. We packed up our gear and departed.
It did, however, present us with the problem of figuring out where we would stay for the night. We walked over to the Plains of Abraham to talk it over. Someone suggested that we just sleep in the park. At first it seemed too open for that but, employing a talent I had developed, I scouted around and found a cluster of bushes that had a little clearing in the center. We had to crawl in on our hands and knees but once inside we were invisible to anyone walking by and there was enough room for all of us.
We left Karla and Angela in the clearing with the backpacks, and the rest of us—Bill, Judy, Doug, and I (Steve had left during the day) went and got some food and a couple of bottles of wine to bring back. We shared the food and had a little party to celebrate our last evening together.
Photo source: Québec City Tourism/Luc-Antoine Couturier
Above is a recent view of the Plains of Abraham, the huge city park along the bluffs overlooking the St. Lawrence River.
July 2nd, Toronto, Ontario
We parted company in the morning. Karla and Judy were heading east. Bill and Doug were headed towards Montreal, and Angela and I were headed towards Toronto. [16] We caught a city bus to take us to the Québec Bridge across the St. Lawrence, which we walked across to get to the Trans-Canada Highway. I later learned the Québec Bridge was the longest cantilever bridge in the world.
Angela and I hadn’t discussed how long we would travel together. She was making her way back to British Columbia but didn’t seem to be in any particular hurry. She had made arrangements to have some mail sent to her in Toronto. I was heading towards Ann Arbor to visit a friend and Toronto happened to be on the way.
We didn’t have to wait long for rides and got a ride with some friendly people in a spacious air-conditioned station wagon. West of Montreal, the highway split, with the TCH heading west towards Ottawa and Highway 401 heading southwest towards Toronto. We got a few short rides and then a long ride with a trucker who left us off in west Toronto.
We called one of the hostels in Toronto and were told it was full. We decided we were too far away from the other hostels to bother trying to get to them, so we scouted the possibility of sleeping in a wooded section of a city park. We met a local guy in the park who showed us an abandoned house where he said hitchhikers sometimes slept. We ended up spending the night there. There was a lot of graffiti that indicated the place must have been well-known to hitchhikers. We had the house to ourselves though.
During the day, I had told Angela that I wanted to visit a friend in Ann Arbor and she was welcome to come along. Afterwards, if she was willing, we could travel together to western Canada.
We were both well aware of how much of a bottleneck for hitchhikers the stretch of the TCH between Sault Ste. Marie and Thunder Bay was. [17] I told Angela I really didn’t want to spend weeks waiting for a ride there like people I had met the previous summer. I proposed that we head to Ann Arbor for week or so and then head north to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where we could head west, going south of Lake Superior, and rejoin the TCH west of Thunder Bay—thus avoiding getting stuck in Sault Ste. Marie. She politely told me my suggestion was totally unacceptable.
Angela wanted to travel coast to coast across Canada. Like a lot of Canadian hitchhikers I met, that meant traveling within Canada the entire way. If she came with me to Ann Arbor, that meant she wouldn’t have traveled the entire distance in Canada. It was a point of pride among Canadian hitchhikers—dipping into the US would be cheating, even though the alternative was to potentially wait for days or even weeks for a ride out of Sault Ste. Marie.
July 3rd, Ann Arbor, Michigan
Ultimately, we decided to split up. We agreed that she would have better luck getting a ride out of Sault Ste. Marie on her own. She said she wanted to spend a couple of days seeing Toronto and then she would head north to reconnect to the TCH at Sudbury. I decided to continue southwest towards Ann Arbor.
We exchanged addresses. I wished her luck and headed to the highway. Even though she was the one who had suggested that we split up, I wasn’t completely sure that was what she wanted. At the end, she seemed put off by something. I seemed to have a knack for hurting women’s feelings while being oblivious to what I had done, didn’t do, said, or didn’t say.
Back on the road, I got a couple of rides in succession with young guys who were in the area picking tobacco. Up to then, I had been under the impression that tobacco was mainly a southern crop but they set me straight. They told me about how much tobacco was being grown in Ontario and why Canadian tobacco was superior to American tobacco.
I noticed also that some of the farms and homes along the highway continued to fly the old Canadian flag instead of the Maple Leaf flag, which had been adopted as the national flag almost 10 years before. Some of them were faded and tattered. I asked one of my rides about it and he said the old flag was preferred by people, including himself, who felt a stronger attachment to Britain. He thought the new flag was meant to appease the separatists in Québec and that the maple leaf on the flag looked too much like the fleur-de-lis on the Québec provincial flag. Never mind that there were also maple leaves on the old flag, although they were small. [18] - [19]
Even though I was thumbing from entrance ramps I was making good time. I was in Windsor, just across the river from Detroit, by early afternoon. It took some time to get across Detroit but I was in Ann Arbor by late afternoon.
Photo source: WikiPedia - Ambassador Bridge
I crossed the Detroit River into the US from Canada on foot across the Ambassador Bridge. Above is a recent photo of the bridge. In 1974, I’m almost sure it was a gray color, not turquoise. The bridge was completed in November 1929. At the time it had the longest suspended central span in the world at 1850 feet. The entire bridge is 7500 feet long. Since September 11, 2001, the bridge has been closed to pedestrian traffic.
Denis, my friend in Ann Arbor, and I had shared an apartment in Morgantown for about a year on Kingwood Street. I had visited him before in Ann Arbor and always enjoyed myself. Because the University of Michigan was there, the city had a lot more vitality than other cities of that size. There always seemed to be a lot of music, art, political debates, and general quirkiness.
Denis was working as a janitor at the UM School of Dentistry. He told me his shift started at 2:00 pm and that if I arrived after then, that his neighbor could give me a ride to the dentistry school and he would give me a key to his apartment. She worked in the same building but her shift didn’t start until later.
I located his neighbor, a recent immigrant from Pakistan, and rode with her to the dental school. Inside, she pointed to a door and said Denis was inside. She motioned for me to go in. I asked her if she was going in as well. Her eyes got wide and a look of horror crossed her face. She just said, "Oh, no" and then something in Urdu and walked away.
I knocked and walked in. There were about eight or 10 people inside, including Denis, and they were having a little party. Denis introduced me around. One of the guys, named Darby, filled me in on what was going on. They were all janitors in the dental school building, which had multiple stories and a couple of wings. Their shifts all started at 2:00, but they had been requested to keep a low-key presence until 5:00 when almost everyone else left for the day. Rather than all the janitors sitting around by themselves for a few hours, Darby explained, they thought it would be better for staff morale to have a daily happy hour (or three).
The room was the tastefully wood-paneled office of one of the dental school professors, who was on sabbatical. On a side table was a pitcher with a mixture of gin and lemonade and some snack food. In a corner was a tank of nitrous oxide and some balloons in case someone wanted to do a hit of laughing gas. A girl they referred to as Susie was dancing on the professor’s desk in her underwear. Darby, who I figured out was the social coordinator, requested that I avoid looking at her. They thought she did it to get attention and were trying to discourage her. Denis gave me the key to his apartment and I left just as Happy Hour was coming to an end.
July 4th, Ann Arbor, Michigan
Denis was living in a stately house that he said was once a fraternity house and before that the residence of a wealthy family. He had a large, single room. It didn’t have a kitchen but he had a refrigerator and a double burner hot plate. He shared a bathroom with a UM student named Sarah. Denis told me I was welcome to stay as long as I wanted. Denis had the day off for the Fourth of July so we walked to Nichols Arboretum. On the way back we were caught in a gusty thunderstorm that seemed to come out of nowhere.
July 5th, Ann Arbor, Michigan
Due to a freak solar storm, the northern lights appeared. The entire sky was filled with undulating, shimmering, almost neon-green, curtain-like lights. Denis, his neighbor Sarah, and I stayed up almost all night, laying on the front lawn admiring them. It seemed like the entire city of Ann Arbor also stayed out all night watching the lights.
July 6th, Ann Arbor, Michigan
I asked Denis if he minded if a hung around a week or two and tried to make a little money before traveling on. He said he didn’t mind. I had spent most of what I had earned with the circus socializing in Québec.
July 7th to July 21st, Ann Arbor, Michigan
Making money was not that easy. Permanent jobs were available but temporary jobs were hard to come by. I went by the Manpower office and they told me they were mostly placing office workers. They said I was welcome to take a typing test, which I did. They laughed at me and told me the 30 words per minute I tested at wasn’t good enough. As I was leaving, a guy came by and asked if I would be willing to help him move some furniture across town. I made $20 helping him out.
Someone told me the Ann Arbor Sun, the local alternative newspaper, was always looking for people to sell papers, so that was mostly what I did for two weeks. I didn’t write down how much I got paid per paper, but it wasn’t a whole lot. It was about as profitable as working for the circus. I didn’t mind though—I was working outside and I got to talk to people. I found a couple locations that seemed to be good spots. [20]
I was, however, competing with one of the colorful local characters, who also made money selling Suns. Shakey Jake was a middle-aged black guy who often wore suits and hats from the 1920s and seemed to be everywhere. A lot of people, when I asked them if they wanted to buy a Sun, would tell me that they only bought their paper from Jake. If I was peddling at a certain location and Jake showed up, which seemed to happen a lot, I would chat with him for a while and then just move to another location.
Photo Source: Ann Arbor News
Above is a photo of Jake performing in 1978. He died on September 16, 2007, age 82, although he once told me he was 99 years old. Jake has his own Wikipedia page at: Shakey Jake - Wikipedia
There was a free concert every weekend at Otis Spann Field and I found that to be the best opportunity to sell papers. I sold as many there as I did the rest of the week. The concerts attracted about 5000 people, including a lot of out-of-towners. People from Toledo and other nearby towns liked to take a Sun home with them as a souvenir it seemed. Fortunately, I never had to compete with Jake at the free concerts. Jake always carried a guitar with him and he often told me he had a weekend gig. I’d heard him play a few times and, although he was a nice guy, I saw no evidence of any musical training or talent.
I continued to go by the Manpower office. Sometimes people would come by looking for day laborers—usually someone needed help moving furniture. This usually happened outside of and independently of Manpower. Occasionally some guys in a band would give me some money to hand out or pin up some handbills advertising an appearance of their band. I slowly made enough money to hit the road again.
I had gotten to know Denis’s neighbor Sarah during the couple of weeks I spent in Ann Arbor. When she found out I was heading out, she invited Denis and me for a spaghetti dinner in her room. Like Denis, she didn’t have a kitchen, but she was still able to put together a nice dinner.
July 22nd, 1974 Harrisville, Michigan
Denis treated me to a breakfast of a bacon and cheese omelet and an egg roll at Steve’s Lunch. I had a stack of unsold newspapers to return to the Sun. The paper appeared to run on a razor thin, shoestring budget. They owed me a small amount of money and Frank, the guy I dealt with most of the time, offered me a choice of an IOU or a slightly used vinyl record from the Sun’s collection. I selected a Charles Mingus album and dropped it off at Denis’s before hitting the road.
It rained off and on and I spent part of the day hitchhiking from the shelter of overpasses. I made it as far as Harrisville by the end of the day, where I camped in a pine grove at Harrisville State Park. I could hear the waves of Lake Huron lapping at the beach before I drifted off to sleep.
July 23rd, 1974. Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario
Rides were slow and short. I got one ride into Alpena with a guy who had stickers of Bibles and crosses all over the outside of his vehicle. There were multiple Bibles on the dashboard as well. Surprisingly, he didn’t attempt to proselytize.
I got rides to Rogers City, Mackinaw City, and finally with a guy going to Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. On the spur of the moment, I decided to ride with him and see if Angela was still there waiting for a ride. I figured that as, a solo female, the chances that she had already gotten a ride were good, but I was curious, nevertheless. By the time we got to Sault Ste. Marie, the last bus to the hostel had left, so I found a place in the scrubby woods to spend the night.
July 24th, 1974. Iron River, Michigan
I was up early and was on the highway when the first hostel bus arrived. About 25 people got off the bus but Angela was not among them. I asked a few people if they knew her and they told me they didn’t, but they hadn’t been there that long—only a few days. They pointed out some guys who had been waiting for more than three weeks. I talked to them and they remembered her. They thought she had been at the hostel for about five or six days before she got a ride. I was glad to hear she wasn’t still stranded there.
Although I wanted to see some of western Canada, I wasn’t willing to wait for days or weeks trying to get a ride from Sault Ste. Marie to Thunder Bay. So, I headed back across the bridge into the US. I got a ride with a young couple in a pickup truck heading south. They rode me to the junction with US 2 where I started heading west.
A guy in a yellow Cadillac drove me to Manistique. Another guy, who I recognized as having passed me by earlier, drove me to Escanaba. As usual, I walked to the far side of town to start hitchhiking again. This gave me a chance to do some walking and to see some of the town. A high school kid in a beat-up Barracuda took me to Powers. A kind of preppy looking guy in a Corvair drove me to Spread Eagle, Wisconsin. (US 2 dips into a corner of Wisconsin for about 15 miles in that area and then crosses back into Michigan.) He told me he was dressed up because he was on a date. His date, he said, was behind him in another car and they were going to meet for dinner at a restaurant in town. I didn’t see anyone behind him and wasn’t sure if he was joking or if maybe he was unaware that she had given him the slip.
From Spread Eagle, I got a ride to the edge of Crystal Falls. I walked from one end of Crystal Falls to the other so I saw most of the town. A friendly couple rode me from Crystal Falls to Iron River, which was at the western end of the Upper Peninsula, close to the Wisconsin line. During the day, I had hitchhiked across almost the entire width of the UP.
One of the things I had learned from riding with Yoopers during the day was that Michigan consisted of two parts—the UP and Detroit. From the Yooper perspective—at least the ones I rode with—there was no "Lower Peninsula." Detroit started at the southern end of the Mackinac Bridge and greater Detroit covered all of Michigan south of the bridge.
I found a place to sleep in the woods outside of Ironwood. It looked like it had been logged not too long before and was starting to regenerate. There were blackberries everywhere and I picked and filled my mess kit with them. I got the tent up and built a little campfire. It started to rain right after I finished eating dinner.
July 25, 1974. Grand Forks, North Dakota
It rained most of the night, with some lightning that was closer than I liked. I was stuck wearing damp clothes and packed a soggy tent. I got a couple of short rides and then a ride with a guy going out west. Along the way he picked up another hitchhiker. I could have rode the whole way out west with him, but I had gotten it into my mind to head to the Canadian Rockies.
I still got a long ride out of it. I stayed with him through northern Wisconsin and across the width of Minnesota on US 2 the entire way. I had him let me out in Grand Forks, ND, not far over the Minnesota line. I snuck into one of the University of North Dakota dormitories and got a shower. Later, I found a secluded, wooded place on campus to spend the night.
July 26th, 1974. Winnipeg, Manitoba
I started heading north from Grand Forks towards Winnipeg. Rides were slow all day but I made it to Winnipeg by late afternoon, getting one longer ride with a couple of guys from the Royal Canadian Air Force. It took a while to find the local hostel, which was in what appeared to be an abandoned motel. The other vagabonds were friendly and hanging out in front of the building. Some seemed to have been there for a long time. I had a room to myself and was able to hang up my damp gear to dry.
July 27th, 1974. Insinger, Saskatchewan
I left the hostel early. Like the hostel at Sault Ste. Marie, it had an old beat-up school bus to haul people to the highway. I rode with several others out to the TCH. Despite the competition, I managed to get a ride to Portage La Prairie within a half hour.
From there, I got a ride with a guy from Québec to Brandon where there was a line of 10 or 12 people trying to hitch a ride. To avoid the competition, I decided to hitchhike north and then catch the Yellowhead Highway west. It turned out to be a good decision since there were practically no hitchhikers on the Yellowhead. [21]
My first ride heading west on the Yellowhead was with a family touring in an old retrofitted school bus. The parents were a couple named Ed and Patsy. They had an old school hippie vibe, probably in their mid to late-thirties. Ed sported a long braid and was starting to gray at the temples. They had three friendly tow-headed kids named Claire, Cait, and Noah. They were roughly eight, five, and three years old respectively. The bus exterior was an odd color, sort of a pinkish-beige color. Patsy joked that it was the color of champagne.
I enjoyed riding with them. I think they said they were schoolteachers in Seattle and hit the road in the summer. They didn’t seem to be in a hurry and would stop and check out whatever caught their interest along the way. Ed said they always picked up hitchhikers but hadn’t seen many besides me since they got on the Yellowhead.
Not long after he said that, Ed stopped for an older man. I don’t think he even had his thumb out—he was just standing by the road looking like he might need a ride and Ed had pulled up, opened the door, and asked if he could use a lift. He introduced himself but I didn’t catch his name. He told us he was from one of the Doukhobor communities and was going to visit a friend in one of the other nearby Doukhobor settlements. I had never heard of Doukhobors and I don’t think Ed and Patsy had either. He rode with us until Ed pulled into Good Spirit Lake Provincial Park. Ed said the park had a wastewater dumping station and the bus’s wastewater tank was due to be emptied. Conveniently, the Doukhobor village where the man was headed was nearby.
Patsy asked if I minded occupying the kids while they emptied the bus’s tank, so I took them on a little hike in the sand dunes that bordered the lake. We found a playground on the way back and the kids were happy to play on the swings and slide. Ed said they weren’t planning to stay overnight at the park. Like me, they tried to find places to stay that didn’t charge a fee. They found a secluded place off a side road near Insinger to park for the night. They shared their dinner with me and I put my tent up beside the bus.
July 28th, 1974. Saskatoon, Saskatchewan
Ed was sick all day. He felt so bad he barely got up all day. Patsy drove. We stopped occasionally to eat and take a break and let the kids run around. We stopped at a local history museum in a small town and there was a display about the local Doukhobor settlements, so a lot of my questions about who the Doukhobors were got answered. [22]
We got to Saskatoon around 3:30 and I had Patsy drop me off. I said goodbye to Ed, who was finally starting to feel better, and to the kids. I enjoyed riding with them but felt like it was time to give them a break. I wondered around in Saskatoon for a while and then headed to the Gypsy Mattress Hostel, in time for dinner. Later I wrote letters to Denis, Sarah, Angela and some people in Morgantown.
Photo source: Donald Hamilton/ Denholm – Grain Elevators of Canada
One of my memories of traveling across Saskatchewan was of the many towering grain elevators. Almost every town seemed to have one. Because Saskatchewan was relatively flat, I could sometimes see multiple elevators, some of which might be off in the distance. I especially admired the wooden ones and the fact that some brave souls had to occasionally repaint the structures, which were 75 to 100 feet tall. In 1970, there were an estimated 2750 grain elevators in Saskatchewan. Today there are less than 400. The photo of the one shown above was taken in 1972 in the village of Denholm. Since Denholm is on the Yellowhead Highway, northwest of Saskatoon, I very likely would have seen this elevator in 1974. There is no sign of a grain elevator in Denholm today.
July 29th, 1974, Edmonton, Alberta
I continued west on the Yellowhead Highway, getting short rides to North Battleford, Maidstone, Marshall, and Lloydminster, near the Alberta line. Finally, I got a long ride with a friendly family in a van who took me all the way to Edmonton. I caught a local bus downtown to the hostel, which was at the corner of 117th Street and 104th Avenue.
July 30th, 1974. Jasper Free Camp, Alberta
Rides came easily today. I took a city bus out to the highway. My first ride was with a guy on his way to work at a weather balloon tracking station. A trucker rode me to Wildwood, then a ride in the back of a pickup to Edson. Some people from Québec rode me the rest of the way to Jasper. I was there by early afternoon.
I explored downtown, bought some groceries, and then found my way to the Free Camp. Unlike the camp at Banff, where I had stayed last year, the Jasper Free Camp was not part of the Canadian hostel system but was operated by Jasper National Park. It was set up as a free place for people who were traveling without vehicles to camp. The idea was to designate a managed, confined area for people to camp so there would be less unauthorized, dispersed camping. It was also intended to discourage ragged vagabonds from loitering in town.
The camp was in a beautiful setting, sitting mostly on a flat meadow along a series of meanders of the Athabasca River. There were some wooded areas around the edge of the meadow, mostly aspens and pines. The river had a beautiful turquoise color because of suspended rock particles from glacial meltwater. Big mountains were on the horizon.
I found a place to put up my tent and met some of the other people who were tented near me. There were only a few official rules. Besides no motor vehicles, one was that camping had to be within the boundaries of the camp, which were intermittently marked with red tape. Another was that fires were only permitted in the 28 designated fireplaces using firewood that was provided. Because all cooking was done at whatever fireplace was closest, dinner tended to be a communal event with people pitching in whatever they had. After dinner, people brought out guitars and there was a lot of music.
July 31st, Jasper Free Camp, Alberta
Someone told me about a nearby trail that went up Whistler Mountain. I had intended to hike there but once I started moving around, I realized that I didn’t feel so great. I was hoping that I wasn’t getting whatever Ed had. So instead, I just hung around the camp all day.
I got to know some of my neighbors better including a guy named Will and a pretty blonde girl named Kathy, who were tented nearby. I talked a lot with them and listened to Will play guitar and sing.
The camp was a mix of people who were there short-term and people who had been there longer. Although the National Park discouraged it, there were some people who lived there all summer and had jobs in town. There was also at least one person who tented onsite and was a Park employee. He was tasked with diplomatically enforcing the rules and taking a daily tent count. During the four days I stayed at the Jasper Free Camp, there was an average of 281 tents [23], meaning there were probably at least 500 people staying at the camp.
I was impressed with how well the camp functioned. There was zero litter. Part of the reason was that, at least at the time, Canada had a deposit on all bottles—not just soda bottles, but beer, wine, and liquor bottles as well. If anyone did throw out a bottle, it didn’t stay on the ground very long. The boundaries of the camp were generous enough that people were still relatively dispersed and the vegetation wasn’t as trampled as I would have expected considering the number of people. There seemed to be an awareness by almost everyone that if things didn’t run well, the camp would be shut down. By dinner time I was feeling back to normal.
Photo source: istockphoto.com
The Athabasca River in Jasper National Park. The Free Camp was just above the flood plain of the river and included some higher ground as well. The color of the river when I was there was similar to that of the photo, perhaps slightly grayer.