How big was the moon? In the summer of 1971, as Jay and I slouched on our backpacks in the back of a pickup truck, barreling up and east on Interstate 80 over the Sierra Nevada, as the Milky Way spattered a Pollock painting across the black sky, there floated above the mountains that golden and magnificent lunar balloon. It was so clear you could see its craters. It lit the landscape like a lantern.
How big was that moon? Even though he knew the answer, that's the question that Jay asked.
There were four of us in the back of that open air pickup: Jay and I, and our two new and accidental hitchhiking companions, Michelle and Celeste, trying to get back home to Minnesota. Jay and I had started our cross country trip that morning, thumbs extended, on an I-80 entrance ramp in Sacramento. I was bound for Indianapolis to visit my brother and he was bound for Philadelphia to see his parents. I was nineteen and Jay was twenty.
Our first ride delivered us to Truckee, California, in late morning. There were already three sets of hitchhikers planted there, thumbing for luck to get back onto 80. Jay and I took our position in line and waited. And we waited. By late afternoon, none of us had gotten a ride, and gradually the others abandoned their posts and headed elsewhere. Jay and I had the ramp to ourselves, though it hardly mattered, and we took turns roasting and thumbing in the sun while the other lay in the shade of a nearby redwood.
Two eighteen year-old girls with suitcases were let out at the underpass, crossed the road, and took a spot near us to continue their journey. The tall girl, Michelle, was talkative and bouncy. The short girl, Celeste, was quiet and dour. Jay and I would wind up traveling with them for the next three days, and during that time, Celeste would speak no more than a hundred words and never lifted her mouth to the hint of a smile, at least that I heard and saw.
We got to talking with Michelle. They had flown to San Francisco earlier that summer, ran out of money, and now flat broke were hitchhiking back to Minneapolis. Michelle explained that one suitcase held their clothes and blankets while the other held their food. She opened the second one to show us, and there entombed were two dozen cans of Campbell's Soup, from cream of tomato to chicken noodle. As they had no camping supplies, I asked how they might consume their soup. Michelle and Celeste stared blanks at each another. They didn't even have a can opener or a spoon if they had. But nevertheless they lugged across America those twenty four cans in a bright red Samsonite.
After ten hours of waiting as darkness settled on Truckee, a pickup pulled over, and the four of us clambered into the open back. The driver was going to Reno, which at least was forty miles in the right direction. It was a magnificent night and all eyes were transfixed by that full and yellow moon rising above.
It seemed the right time for a nursery rhyme. I said, "Hey, diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle, and the cow jumped over the moon."
Michelle laughed. "And the cow jumped over the moon!"
"How big is the moon?" Jay asked.
We gazed upward for a while until the long silent Celeste allowed, "About as big as a golf ball."
"Oh, come on," Michelle replied. "Look at it, Celeste. It's as big as a basketball. And a cow can jump over a basketball."
"Cows can't jump," Celeste said.
"Cows can so," Michelle answered.
They argued about various aspects of bovine behavior for awhile before I interrupted. I decided to try my best. I explained that objects appear smaller the further away they are and did they realize that the moon is a quarter million miles away?
Michelle would have none of it. That made as much sense as a cow launching into outer space. "Why, just look at it," she pleaded. "The moon is right there over that mountain. You can almost touch it." Celeste had lost all interest. She seemed depressed. Or maybe she was hungry and was wondering how they had forgotten a can opener.
I don't remember where we slept that night in Reno. But I do remember as the truck idled at a stoplight how flattered I felt when a leggy woman on a sidewalk tried to summon me. In the coming days, as I was stranded in one place or another, I would dream of her. What if I had abandoned all plans and fallen in love in Reno?
The next morning broke sunny and bright, and the four of us took a spot on the entrance ramp that pointed us east. It became apparent that Michelle and Celeste -- well, Michelle anyway -- preferred to remain in Jay's and my company. By now they trusted us and knew it was far safer for them to hitchhike with males, than for two young women to beg rides from strangers. We decided to part company in pairs -- Michelle with Jay, and Celeste with me -- and planned to rendezvous at the Mormon Tabernacle Church in Salt Lake City, no matter the time.
Celeste and I hitched a ride first and off we raced into Nevada's parched interior. The driver dropped us in Winnemucca, and before long we got a ride to the far edge of Elko. And there we sat under a blazing and glaring mid-afternoon sun, she on her suitcase, me on my backpack. It must have been a hundred degrees with no shade close by, and Celeste whined a phrase here and there of useless complaint. Whenever she had something to say, which was rare, it always came as a complaint. "I'm so hot." "Why won't anyone stop?" To escape into solitude, I wandered a short way into the scrub, but thistle and other vicious plants stabbed and scraped my sandaled feet. I disrupted scores of scorpions. I did an about-face and headed back to pavement.
Our water bottles were already running low, so we tried to minimize our intake. But the asphalt compounded the oven-like heat, and wet with sweat and throats parched dry, we drank the last of it. Traffic was light and the drivers that passed averted their eyes, would not take mercy on our bone-dry souls.
We held there for an hour or two before resigning to backtrack into town for some shade and a lot of something cold to drink. Celeste would wear my backpack, and I would somehow manage her suitcase. But as we set out, an enormous vehicle approached, a luxury motor coach, slowed as it passed us, and came to a stop on the side of the road some thirty yards beyond. A spaceship on wheels with a brilliant metallic sheen, the size of school bus, waited there for us. Nowadays, of course, these gigantic RVs are a common sight. But on that day, the thing seemed surreal. Salvation at last!
As Celeste and I hobbled up to its side, the door swung open, allowing a puff of cold air to escape. And right inside, with his sweet and relaxed smile, stood, of all people, Jay. He held an unopened bottle in his hand and asked, "How about an ice-cold Coors?" I thought I would. Yes, I very much thought I would.
Jay, once again, proved the hero. His heroism took root when we became friends in Ankara, Turkey, in 1968. Our fathers worked there and we attended an American school on the outskirts of the city. I had arrived six months earlier, plucked from the cornfields of central Indiana and transmuted into cultural shock atop the central Anatolian plateau. I would acclimate to Turkey soon enough, but becoming accustomed to school and the American community proved to be hard going. I was desperate to fit in, desperate to discover a new normal.
There I found a current of anti-Turkey sentiment. Kids, mostly from military and State Department families, were used to changing schools, and the Turkish environment was considered a hardship compared to the likes of Germany, Spain, or Japan. While I increasingly enjoyed life in Ankara, I felt like an outsider when attending the American school.
Jay entered my world as I started my junior year and he his senior year. Here was a guy who confidently smoked Turkish cigarettes among his American peers, took delight in the language and conjugated its verbs, and brought with him from California the literature and music of the cultural revolution raging back home. We hit it off right away. He loaned me books by Eldridge Cleaver and James Baldwin. We listened to Hendrix and Dylan. We wandered into Turkish neighborhoods and sipped tea in tea houses with old staring men. We shared drugs on weekends and stayed up all night enthralled by our conversations. Jay had long Harpo Marx hair, wore beat up jeans with a macrame belt and wore beat up boots. Here was a guide from the brave new world back home. Here was a fellow adventurer in all things Turkish. There was no ugly in this American. I fell right in line. I wanted to be like Jay.
It was not a mirage. I stepped into the cool luxury of the motor coach and inhaled the beer. Michelle smiled from her leather chair and returned to her magazine. Jay introduced me to the owner, an older man who owned the company that manufactured these luxury vehicles back in California. He was on his way to Salt Lake City to rendezvous with his girlfriend and had picked up Jay and Michelle back in Reno. Celeste found a chair and fell asleep.
It was thus that we floated over eastern Nevada in the late afternoon. It was harsh as hell out there, but a cool heaven in this quiet confine. This is what rich was, the mahogany trim, the leather seats. When night fell, we were into Utah and soon our benefactor exited I-80 and dropped us nearby at an intersection in Salt Lake City.
It was a cool and starry night with the Mormon Tabernacle Church illuminating the sky from the city center. We hitchhiked as a foursome for an hour before giving up and finding food nearby. Our road ran along the grounds of an enormous corporate office building, surrounded by acres of lush lawns and sculpted landscaping. It looked like an exclusive golf course. A wooden fence, easy to climb over, separated the road from the property. Such soft grass seemed fine ground to bed down for the night. We scaled the fence, rolled out our sleeping bags and blankets, and now finally lying at rest, gazed straight up into the great beyond. There was that full moon again, but only for a minute before sleep eclipsed it.
It was four in the morning when the first blast hit, a direct blow to the forehead. I jolted from my sleep and came face to faucet with a frenzied sprinkler head. Right there at our beds, a series of these water cannons had popped up above ground that unleashed an automatic and ferocious deluge. We were caught in the crossfire.
We were pummeled and drenched. No wonder the grass was so damn green and so damn lush.
We rose to our feet and gathered our sleeping bags and blankets and backpacks and suitcases. And like foot soldiers between the trenches, staggered to the fence for safety. Standing and shivering there like hurricane survivors, we looked back at a dozen soaring and magnificent arcs saturating the sod with water. The Tabernacle glowed in the distance and our road in both directions was deserted. The moment was so absurd that Jay and I howled with joy. The moment was so forlorn that Celeste whimpered. Michelle, still stunned, just stared at the grand water show behind us.
We changed by the side of the road, from wet to less soggy clothes, and hung our laundry over the fence. And when a car or truck happened past, we stuck out our thumbs. No one seemed tempted. Fascinated by the sight of us perhaps, but no, not tempted. In an hour, the sky brightened and the air began to warm. We packed our things and within another hour, Celeste and I caught a ride that toted us eastward up into the mountains. The driver dropped us at jaw-dropping vistas at the Summit Pass exit.
Soon we were picked up by two friendly "cowboys" in their 20s who skidded to a stop at our entrance ramp. I doubted they were real-life cowboys but they were decked out in the familiar attire: western shirts, jeans, boots, and cowboy hats. We took the back seat in an old dented sedan among a dozen empty beer bottles and wadded up clothes. It was a tight squeeze. The cowboys were midway through a 12-pack of Coors positioned between them.
Off we throttled onto the interstate. "Where you kids headed?" asked the driver who called himself Bill. I explained Celeste and my separate destinations and that we planned to meet up with our traveling partners in Cheyenne that night.
"We'll get you as far as Coalville," said the driver. "I got a very important, uh, appointment there this morning." Bill and his companion, named Dwight, laughed hard and took long draws from their bottles. "How 'bout a beer?" Bill asked as he reached for a fresh one for himself.
It was hours before noon and these cowboys were already half drunk. I declined and with a frown and a sigh, Celeste closed her eyes to stay out of all interactions. It was sad that she withdrew. It was a spectacular morning. We cruised through green valleys and wound along timbered mountain elevations. We drove below the speed limit as cars and trucks passed fast in the left lane.
Bill and Dwight talked and laughed non-stop as they compared their tavern encounters from the previous night. The car swerved now and then while Bill fumbled with the radio.
He glanced back at me. "What kind of music you like? I suppose you probably go in for that hippie shit and broken eardrums." I said anything was fine.
He must have felt he insulted me. "Sorry, man," he said. "We ain't slept. We wound up in Summit Pass with a couple of, uh, damsels who wouldn't let us get no shut-eye." At this, Dwight opened his window and spit.
"You in college or something?" asked Bill. I said I was and learned that the two of them traveled around Utah together doing odd jobs, mostly in construction, and most recently helping with hay harvests at nearby farms.
"Yeah, we like outside work in the day, and beer and girls at night," Dwight said. He grinned and then Bill grinned.
And the two of them went back to their dialog, making fun of people mostly. Their humor took me over and I thoroughly enjoyed their chatter. Celeste, for her part, made a pillow of her jacket and turned her face to her window.
"Is the little lady sick or something?" asked Bill. And I explained that we hadn't slept much either, and regaled them with the misadventure concerning the corporate sprinkler system. They howled at every detail, especially at how a water cannon had smacked me square in the face.
It was thus that we rolled through the mountains. Beer and story telling and laughter. I noticed, though, that as Interstate 80 descended and headed north and straight to Coalville, we had slowed to about forty.
"There's too goddam many miles between piss stops out here," Bill said. "I recommend that your girlfriend keep her eyes shut." He unzipped his jeans, fumbled around with his underwear, grabbed two empties off the floor, and expertly positioned himself. He drained half his bladder into one and, while pouring that bottle out his window, simultaneously pissed into the other.
Dwight acted as if he'd seen this a hundred times before. "Why not just pour the beer right out the window and eliminate the middle man?" he asked. Bill acted as if he'd heard that line a hundred times as well. "Shut up," he said.
As we neared our drop-off town, I asked the question I had been wondering about. "So what's happening in Coalville?"
Bill replied, "I got me a court hearing with my old enemy, the Honorable Charles A. Wilkens. He gets to sentence me today and he will stare fire into my soul. I been up in front of him many is the time. This is my third drunk driving and I brought my toothbrush just in case. Wish me luck."
I did. I did wish him luck, although after they peeled and squealed away from us, Bill's luck would have served him better by not getting arrested for a fourth on the way to the courthouse.
By mid-afternoon and a few rides later, Celeste and I stood on the interstate near Lyman in southwestern Wyoming. Our goal was to meet Jay and Michelle on the capitol steps in Cheyenne, later that afternoon, that evening, that night, whenever we all arrived. Cheyenne was the whole State of Wyoming away, perched high on the Laramie Plateau.
There were so few cars entering I-80 from the road out of little Lyman, that we chose to abandon the ramp and hitchhike right on the interstate. Cars and trucks sped by so fast that drivers barely noticed us. But if we were to get a ride out there on the highway, there seemed a good chance that the driver would be traveling a great distance, and not just from Podunkville to Podunkville among the locals.
We stood there for an hour when I noticed an approaching westbound VW bus. I took little notice as it was heading in the opposite direction although the driver gave us a friendly wave as he went by and slowed down. He took the Lyman exit, took a left over the overpass, and another left onto our eastbound entrance, completing a u-turn. The van came to a stop, the side door slid open, and a Stones tune blared from within. Celeste and I clambered into a hazy den peopled by the driver and his three passengers, all quite friendly and all quite relaxed.
These folks had been to Woodstock which now was two years gone and it seemed they had been wandering as Woodstock refugees ever since. They were headed to San Francisco, or so they said, although now they were going in the wrong direction.
"So why did you turn around?" I asked the driver named Rick.
"To give you a ride, man," Rick replied. "To turn you on and get you down the road a ways."
Rick soon lit a joint and within a minute that barren and brown terrain transformed into a fertile and glorious place. Even Celeste took a hit, and for a brief moment an actual grin lifted her cheeks. I loved her for that. I loved the love in the eyes of my new fellow travelers. I loved that I felt love again. All was fine, all was so beautifully fine.
I wanted to know about Woodstock, and Rick held me transfixed as the legend came to life in first-hand, nitty gritty detail. His friends nodded off or stared at me with pleasant smiles.
"You ever hear of the Allman Brothers Band?" Rick asked. Oh, yes, most definitely yes! I had spent several days the previous spring visiting an old high school friend at Boston College where I had been introduced to their first album. Since then, their songs reverberated my brain waves, and the reel to reel in my dorm room shook the walls with their homegrown dixie rock and blues.
"Well, just listen to this," Rick said, and showed me the 8-track to their new album, The Allman Brothers Live at Fillmore East. He shoved it in, cranked it up, and for a glorious hour, that stretch of I-80 through southern Wyoming would never be the same.
I woke up this morning, I had them Statesboro Blues,
I woke up this morning, had them Statesboro Blues.
This bus carried drifters and I was a drifter among them. When people asked me where I was from, I hesitated. I grew up in Georgia not too far from the Allman Brothers. We moved to Indiana and then on to Turkey when I was sixteen. I came back to college in Michigan, another new state, and during summers I felt unanchored to bed or room. I was from Ankara, wasn't I?, where my "self" gained traction and where lasting friendships were born. My parents were still there but my friends had all come home and were scattered about the country.
For two summers I went to these friends and stayed before it became time to hit the road again. More than any other place, home became a room in a dormitory, a space like the interior of this floating VW bus, decked out in tie-dyed drapery and filled with yellow smoke and the iconic music of a rejecting generation. And my room was often filled with the drug-infused and bopping heads of fellow hangers-on whose hearts harmonized with the cultural chords of Woodstock.
I would buy my first car five years later, a deeply used maroon and cream VW bus replete with a pinned up tie-dyed sheet and blasts from an 8-track stereo. Just like Rick's. Where was I from? I was from that maroon and cream that threw a rod three months after I bought it. I was from drifting and searching for kinship with far-flung friends. I was from an hour of Allman Brothers bliss while cruising east towards Cheyenne. I was from places that never seemed to last. Or maybe I was from a feeling that just longed to stay.
Rick and crew dropped us about a hundred miles down the road, and on the spur of the moment they decided to head south to Colorado. I supposed they would make it to San Francisco by and by. They didn't seem to care one way or another.
Celeste and I made it to the steps of the capitol building in Cheyenne early that night where Jay and Michelle had been waiting. Jay had befriended a driver on the road who would put us up for the night. We walked to a house several blocks away where Jay's new friend, a college student named Nick, home for the summer, welcomed us within.
Nick fed us sandwiches and we unrolled our sleeping bags and blankets on his living room floor. It didn't strike me as odd that a student would open up his small home to four young strangers coming off the highway. Indeed, Nick took great interest in our hitchhiking escapades, and we (at least Jay and I) would find out about life in Cheyenne while from the stereo Santana sweetened the air around us.
There was an implicit trust and interconnectedness among youth during that time, a sense of an alternative community, cemented by anti-war, anti-establishment causes and vitalized by rock and roll anthems. From San Francisco to Philadelphia, there were sanctuaries, from the space within a wandering VW bus to a comrade's warm floor in eastern Wyoming.
In the morning, we were back on an I-80 entrance ramp with Iowa as our goal. Come what may, Celeste and I would meet Jay and Michelle on the steps of the capitol building in Des Moines some 650 miles eastward. They hitched a ride first, and after standing and sitting there for a few more hours, an enormous black Chrysler pulled over.
Celeste and I slid into the back seat. After such a long wait, I was especially grateful to the driver and his passenger sitting at his side. The driver was a large, beefy man with black, greased back hair and looked around forty. She was slim and very pretty with long blonde hair. They certainly were a couple, although she seemed much younger. His arm was around her as she leaned into him. Bench seats were the norm back then so a driver and his lover could nuzzle unimpeded by bucket seats.
I gushed on about how we were headed east, Celeste to Minneapolis, me to Indianapolis, that we were meeting our friends that night in Des Moines, that we had come from Sacramento three days before, and, wow, how kind of them to pick us up after being stranded there in Cheyenne. It can get discouraging with so many cars passing you by. But thanks to generous folks like yourselves...
"Okay," whispered the driver. And in no time our Chrysler Deluxe was rocketing down the expressway, passing every car and truck in sight. Inside, it was as quiet as outer space. Our hosts had no interest in us and Celeste never volunteered a word. She played the role of bored statue, either with eyes open or eyes closed. And so we soared, wordlessly and noiselessly, down the highway.
But I wanted to learn a little about them. The first thing I learned was that both their necks were heavily bruised with hickeys. From deep purple to mildly pink, from their jaw bones to shirt collars, on both sides and in front, their necks were covered with dozens of suck marks. We were traveling with a pair of vampires in training.
Thus distracted, it was hard for me to break the non-verbal ice. Plus, she was cemented to his side with her head lodged on his shoulder. I didn't want to disrupt their mutual enchantment. But by and by, I released a question.
"So... where you headed?"
"Chicago," he mumbled.
"And, where are you traveling from?"
"Vegas," he mumbled.
At which point, she freed herself from his arm, turned back, and, coming to life, extended her left hand to me. "We just got married! See? Isn't it beautiful?"
Celeste and I examined her wedding ring and agreed, yes, it certainly was a beautiful thing. She then told the story about how they had met few weeks before, had fallen madly in love, and decided on a whim to drive to Vegas to get married. She explained that her groom was a Chicago cop and could only get away for a few days, but it was all worth it because they stayed at the absolutely fabulous Tropicana Hotel. Had Celeste and I ever been?
Celeste and I had never been. And from the looks of their necks, it appeared the newlyweds hadn't spent much time outside their hotel room. "Well, you really should go some time," she said, and lifted her husband's arm to return to her original, draped position. Silence fell again and stayed.
In a few hours we had descended the rock-cropped plateau of western Nebraska onto the utterly flat plains of its farmland. The sense of being "out west" evaporated as silos pegged the landscape and endless expanses of corn, soybeans, and wheat engulfed us. Rolling across the plains inspires little by way of observation, other than to deliver the passenger into wayward daydreams, especially when entombed in the solitude and luxury of a careening Chrysler.
I daydreamed about my hitchhiking escapades. There in Nebraska at the age of nineteen, I already was a veteran of the long road. I remembered the first day I extended my thumb, in July of 1968, when high school friend Dave and I -- me at sixteen, he at fifteen -- hitchhiked across the boot of Italy, from Brindisi to Salerno, catching thirteen rides in all, including a horse-drawn hay wagon through the streets of Taranto. We had flown from Ankara to Athens to start a backpacking and hitchhiking trip that would take us up the spine of Europe, finally to Amsterdam. Our parents fully endorsed and paid for the adventure (I spent $150 over four weeks) and before we departed the airport in Ankara my father said, "How I envy you. I wish I was coming along."
I daydreamed about hitchhiking across Europe the following summer with friends Roger and Bob. While Dave and I never parted ways the previous year, the three of us often hitchhiked separately to maximize rides only to later rendezvous at a designated train station.
One ride that summer occupied my mind. In southern France, a friendly doctor in a red Peugeot picked me up near Lyon. His English was good and he wanted to know all about me and my journey. I learned about him and his family. This was a good vibe ride.
Talk petered out and we drove along for a long while when out of the blue the good doctor asked, "Tell me, Tom. Do you prefer ze woman in ze leather boots or ze woman in ze rubber boots?"
This was a first. Was it a riddle? "I beg your pardon?"
He smiled. "Simple question, Tom. Do you prefer ze woman in ze leather boots or ze woman in ze rubber boots?"
Over my life, I had not thought about women's shoes, or boots for that matter, for more than thirty seconds. It was a hard question to ponder. I preferred leather shoes to, say, rubber galoshes, so I told him that, well, I supposed leather was better.
"No! No! No!" the doctor exclaimed, wild eyed. "Ze woman in ze rubber boots is mooch, mooch better for you, mon ami! Rubber! Ooh, la, la, ze woman in rubber! Do not ever forget thees!"
To appease I heartily agreed. Rubber, of course. And when we arrived at the next town, I opened my door at a stoplight, blurted some hasty good-byes, thank you very much, and scampered away.
Day faded to night. The newlyweds had remained quiet and lovingly entwined across the whole of Nebraska. We held at 85 miles per hour the whole way, and I wondered at this rate if we had passed Jay and Michelle in spite of their head start. The cop and his young wife were driving straight through to Chicago and dropped us at the Iowa capitol building at midnight. She was full of smiles and wished us well. He had showed no feeling nor said much at all that day. And he had no words as we exited his Chrysler, but raised a hand to wave to us as they headed back to the interstate. Funny how that unexpected gesture of good-bye has stayed with me all these years.
There was that full moon again, hanging low and close over Des Moines. Of course, no one was about that time of night and I wandered around the capitol campus while Celeste slept under a secluded tree. In a couple of hours, Jay and Michelle dragged up from a side street, hungering for sleep. We had traversed a great expanse of the American prairie and now bedded down under Celeste's tree.
We awoke to an Iowa workday morning as the parking lot began to fill. It was the day to go our separate ways and the four of us hitched a ride to a spot near the confluence of eastbound I-80 and northbound I-35 which would take the girls to Minneapolis. I hugged Celeste as we parted, but she was unresponsive. We had spent almost four continuous days and nights together, but at this parting, as she had the entire journey, she sort of shrugged with the unspoken feeling, "I just want to go home." For some reason, the customarily chatty and bubbly Michelle was subdued that morning and offered only a perfunctory farewell. In a matter of minutes, they hitched a ride and were gone with their suitcases, one full of soup cans.
Jay and I made it to Davenport, Iowa, where we left I-80 for I-74 which would lead us south and east to my brother in Indianapolis. As we stood on an entrance ramp somewhere near the Illinois border, Jay cried out, "Oh, my God!"
What happened?
"Oh, my God!" he shouted. "That bitch! That bitch! She stole my clogs!"
It was true. He discovered they were gone while rummaging through his backpack there, emptying the contents on the asphalt shoulder. I remembered how Michelle adored his leather and wooden clogs. After she begged him mercilessly, he let her wear them for a day. Was it possible that she was wearing them this morning and simply forgot? No, Jay said, they were in his backpack last night. No wonder she was so subdued back in Des Moines, the thief. Whenever over the years we would reminisce about the trip, Jay would always begin by saying, "That chick stole my clogs!" He really loved those shoes.
By mid-afternoon, we were dropped off outside Bloomington, Illinois (not to be confused with Bloomington, Indiana, the college town). We thumbed there on the ramp for about an hour before deciding to head down to the expressway, a strategy we had had luck with before. Before long another hitchhiker was deposited at the Bloomington exit and he lumbered up to join us, a tall and friendly young man with a full and unmanaged beard.
His name was Scott and he carried an enormous backpack. Scott explained that he had left Alaska a week before and was heading home to Baltimore. He had been working for the U.S. Forestry Service fighting fires as a smokejumper. After training in Montana, he and his crew parachuted into remote areas of Alaskan wilderness to extinguish small wildfires before they grew into something catastrophic. Indeed, Scott had the look of someone more in the element of the Great Northwest than of the cornfields of central Illinois.
It was ill-advised to add a third male hitchhiker to the mix as the chances of getting a lift would plummet. But we were happy for Scott's company with his good cheer and an eagerness to get to know us. And as the semis thundered by, he said that after a week alone on the road, he was grateful to meet some like-minded comrades.
It was a hot and humid afternoon as the sun beat down on Interstate 74 like a heat lamp on the asphalt. Just yards away the passing cars and trucks provided momentary breezes of relief. Before long a police car approached on our eastbound side, slowly pulled off, and stopped some twenty yards in front of us. The Man made no gestures, did not exit the car, did not turn on his overhead lights, but just sat there idling, staring straight at us. The stare-down seemed to go on for a few long minutes before we decided to amble up to him.
His expression didn't change as we approached. He held to a scowl as his jaw slowly worked on chewing gum. He looked straight ahead through reflective sunglasses and slowly rolled his window down.
Jay leaned in to The Man with an ear-to-ear grin that beamed from under his mop of long, curly hair. Jay was a peace-loving kind of kid, and his friendly, relaxed demeanor could be disarming.
But The Man continued to stare straight ahead. In a matter-of-fact way, he stated, "You are hitchhiking on a federal highway."
Jay responded, "Would you like us to move?"
The Man turned to Jay, face to face, and erupted, "I SAID YOU ARE HITCHHIKING ON A FEDERAL HIGHWAY!"
Jay took a step back and raised his hands like a surrender.
The Man slowly got out of the vehicle and looked up and down the road while working his jaw and gum. He was young, tall, and lean, and hooked his thumbs on his belt. He thought for a moment, then nodding to Scott and me, said, "You boys there, step away."
Scott and I backed away five yards or so. When we stopped, he shouted his order again. "I SAID STEP AWAY!" We obeyed and headed further down the shoulder.
Jay would later recount that when The Man saw that we were out of earshot, he asked Jay, "Got any money? Got any money for me?"
Jay told him that all he had was twenty bucks. The Man then paced back and forth next to his car deciding what to do. Jay stood mute.
The Man stopped, pointed at Scott and me, and yelled, "YOU THERE, YOU WITH THE UGLY BEARD, GET OVER HERE!"
Scott trotted back up to the cop car. The Man ordered them spread-eagled against the car, frisked and then cuffed both Jay and Scott before steering them roughly into the back seat. He drove up next to me and demanded that I throw their backpacks into the vehicle. As I did, Jay and Scott sat stunned and silent.
The Man then drove a ways down the interstate, cut left across the median, made a u-turn by cutting left onto the westbound lanes, and at high speed pulled off at the exit ramp and headed into Bloomington.
In a span of ten minutes, all had been upended. One minute three travelers were swapping stories about Alaska and Utah and hitchhiking luck, the next I'm standing alone in the sun. In the flash of a moment, I felt transformed into an unwelcome foreigner. Approaching traffic lost all promise and became hostile.
Why had The Man arrested Jay and Scott but not me? I looked young for my age and could pass for a 16 year-old. I reckoned that The Man hadn't wanted to hassle with the rigamarole of arresting a supposed minor. And if I, like them, was breaking the law, why hadn't he at least ordered me off the interstate? Sitting there on my backpack, melting in the grass, I pondered this and I pondered my forlorn situation. I sure didn't feel fortunate for having been spared. I felt alone and abandoned.
But before long, my spine began to harden. I got mad. I would get even. I would rescue my fallen comrades. I would bring my case to the Supreme Judge of the City of Bloomington, and forcefully decry the tyranny of The Man and demand freedom for the innocent! The time of the revolution was at hand!
So, therefore, I walked up the entrance ramp and hitchhiked into town.
I walked into the police station in downtown Bloomington and through a plexiglass window inquired of the clerk about my friends. Were they in jail? How could I get them out? The Man himself overheard me because out of nowhere he appeared behind the glass and let me have it.
"You can't do anything," he sneered. "Your boys are getting booked. They're going to jail."
"Do they need a lawyer?" I asked.
"Well, I guess that's up to them, isn't it?" He smiled and walked off.
I wandered out the door and into downtown Bloomington. Passers by either stared at me or averted their eyes. I was a long-hair in a t-shirt, cut-off jeans, and sandals. Even in 1971, the sight of me must have seemed strange to residents of this small, conservative, agricultural city.
I found a phone booth out on the street and found the number of a lawyer in the Yellow Pages section of the phone book that dangled from a cable. I deposited a dime and when I got through to him and told the story, the lawyer had but one question: "Is the cop's name, the one who arrested your friends, is his name Officer Jett?"
It was! I'll never forget the J-E-T-T on the silver nameplate over his silver badge. Well, it was no wonder, offered the lawyer. Officer Jett had built quite a reputation in the city for dubious arrests and overall harassment. But if I had the money, he said, I should be able to get them out once the boys were processed.
I returned to the small lobby in the police station and told the unfriendly clerk that I wanted to bail out my friends if I could.
"You mean, you want to pay off their tickets?" she asked. "That will be $37.50 for each."
Tickets? Like parking tickets? No matter, that was a lot of money. Jay only had twenty, Scott was down to a few bucks, but I had about ninety left, meant to last me the summer. So in the late afternoon, paid for and free at last, three long-hairs in cut-offs group-hugged outside on the sidewalk.
We hitched the mile back to the interstate where Scott decided to head out on his own. He was eternally grateful, he said, that I was able to pay his fine, and promised to mail me the $37.50 after he got home to Baltimore. In minutes, a pickup picked him up and Jay and I watched from atop the entrance ramp as the Alaskan smoke jumper merged eastbound onto I-74. His check was waiting for me when I arrived back at my sister's in Detroit a few weeks later.
As the sun was dropping in the west, Jay and I finally got a ride that took us to an exit in that perpetual corn country near the Indiana line. It was dark by then and we devoured burgers at a restaurant by the overpass. Now fed but exhausted, there was nothing left to do but drop our backpacks and spread out our sleeping bags in the thick, chest-high grass that filled the triangular island between the interstate, exit ramp, and overpass.
The traffic had thinned but semi trucks regularly thundered by. Lying there in our grass-walled coffins, our only view was straight up into the stars. It was a warm night, so I lay on top of my sleeping bag and soon the insects came to accept our presence and resumed their percussive music. In no time, Jay joined in with snoring and I was left to contemplate the galaxy on my own.
Tomorrow, with good hitchhiking, my brother, Mark, would welcome us after we arrived in Indianapolis. The bare floor, in an empty room in the old and decrepit house he rented, would be my temporary encampment before my spirit rose to push on again. Mark would advise me to sleep in the middle of the room in order to avoid the occasional rats that crept along the baseboards.
In 1971, I simply rolled with the rides, and was not infected by self doubt. But two years later, I would be sitting in a ferry terminal in Harwich, England, waiting to board a boat bound for Holland. A college friend named Paul and I would be hitchhiking across Europe and, after haunting smoky pubs in London, find ourselves headed to the drug-friendly confines of Amsterdam.
A bearded and greasy-haired English backpacker would wander up to our bench for conversation. A bold but unfriendly fellow, he asked where we were we going. He said he was headed to Prague to meet up with some like-minded socialist friends. He was "into" socialism, he said. He was "into" working for social justice, and he was "into" jazz, and he was "into" being a vegetarian. And what about me, he wanted to know right then and there, what was I "into", what made me tick. Show me your values, he demanded. I've shown you mine.
I was caught off guard. No one had ever asked me such a thing. I hemmed and I hawed. "I don't know," I finally confessed. "I suppose I'm into, well, traveling."
"Traveling?" he mocked. He shook his head and took a step toward me. "Traveling is just scenery zipping by your window. It's never staying in one place. How can you stand your ground if you're here today and gone tomorrow? What do you hope to find in yourself by hitchhiking from place to place? You won't find it because it's not there. So, you want to be like a cloud that just wanders the sky?"
"Well, I suppose not," I allowed. "Er, maybe yes, I guess that's sort of true."
And with that, or insults to that effect, the disgusted young Brit walked off.
His words would burn and occupy a hollow space in my craw for years to come. A healthier response might have been to hurl my backpack at his jaw, but no matter, he left me deeply wounded. Paul, for his part, would reflect in the decades that followed that our European journey had been pivotal to his coming of age. Traveling through strange lands had opened his eyes to the broader world, its art, its people, its languages, and it had had that final effect on him. But Paul's transformation occurred because he had never lost his centered, foundational sense of home.
But I was just nineteen in 1971, and those scorching words in Harwich, England, were still two years off in the receiving. No, I was hunkered down in the grass somewhere near the Illinois/Indiana border with stars spying across the sky and that old moon making an encore sweep from its eastern stage. No, I was nineteen and hadn't yet come to the raw realizations of my undiscovered self. I knew Dylan's lyric but the words had not gained meaning. I was on my own, with no direction home, a complete unknown.
Jay and I would arrive in Indianapolis the next day and say good-bye after he spent a night at my brother's. I would drive him out to the interstate in Mark's car and we embraced at his thumbing spot near an entrance ramp before he traveled on to Philadelphia.
Before our trip, Jay had subsisted for months in a crowded and impoverished Christian commune where he shared his discovery of transcendent peace with young people of the same heart. He had found Jesus, he said, but in our days together that summer, he never played the preacher nor tried to bend my beliefs to his. Jay eventually would return to the commune, but his stay would be short-lived as he came to some basic terms. He concluded that he preferred the life style of the middle class as opposed to waiting in long lines to use a foul latrine.
Jay would return to the middle class, an advanced degree, and a whole lot more. But I will always see in him the gentle mentor who opened my eager eyes in Turkey. There in Indianapolis, he got a ride right away. Farewell, and until we meet again.
Back at the Indiana line and with Jay snoring on the grass nearby, I scouted the sky for shooting stars. My mind was full and I wouldn't yet fall off to sleep. I remembered hitchhiking from Ann Arbor to East Lansing the previous fall. It was a Sunday afternoon and two young and friendly brothers picked me up. They asked about me and I got to talking about living in Turkey for three years, and how great it had been to travel the country, learn the language, and steep myself into its culture.
And from out of the blue, as God is my witness, the driver said, "You must know the Bohnhorsts."
Wait. "What? Say that again."
"I said, you must know the Bohnhorsts," he repeated.
"Holy shit!" I cried. "I AM the Bohnhorsts! I am Tom Bohnhorst! How in the world would you know about me?"
It turned out the brothers and their family lived next door in Plymouth to my parents' closest friends. The neighbors were all good friends as well and the brothers had often heard stories about the Bohnhorsts' adventures in Turkey.
Small world. And hitchhiking seemed to make it smaller still. It wasn't the world's expanses of land or its mountains and seas that stand out. It wasn't the cities of Europe and its charming towns. It was the cast of charitable characters who like a fire brigade handed me off from car to truck to car again. And it was the characters who stood on the sidelines of it all. It was locking eyes with a Reno hooker whom I would never meet but wished I had. It was the French doctor who loved women in rubber boots. It was the student in Cheyenne who gave us his floor, and drunken and doomed cowboys, and the stoned, aimless refugees from Woodstock. It was poor Celeste who couldn't seem to smile. It was the Plymouth brothers who knew me before we met. It was the rude English socialist who had no business telling me the truth.
The moon was creeping over Interstate 74, now lessened by a sliver of wane. But the moon inside me was full to the brim. Tonight, the stars above seemed frozen in place, peepholes into souls adrift on the dark side of the Earth. As the surrounding insects drummed away, all felt right and serene even as random and rumbling semis blasted by. They bellowed, "Let's go! Move on! Move on! Move on!"
How big was that moon? Even though he knew the answer, that's the question that Jay asked.
There were four of us in the back of that open air pickup: Jay and I, and our two new and accidental hitchhiking companions, Michelle and Celeste, trying to get back home to Minnesota. Jay and I had started our cross country trip that morning, thumbs extended, on an I-80 entrance ramp in Sacramento. I was bound for Indianapolis to visit my brother and he was bound for Philadelphia to see his parents. I was nineteen and Jay was twenty.
Our first ride delivered us to Truckee, California, in late morning. There were already three sets of hitchhikers planted there, thumbing for luck to get back onto 80. Jay and I took our position in line and waited. And we waited. By late afternoon, none of us had gotten a ride, and gradually the others abandoned their posts and headed elsewhere. Jay and I had the ramp to ourselves, though it hardly mattered, and we took turns roasting and thumbing in the sun while the other lay in the shade of a nearby redwood.
Two eighteen year-old girls with suitcases were let out at the underpass, crossed the road, and took a spot near us to continue their journey. The tall girl, Michelle, was talkative and bouncy. The short girl, Celeste, was quiet and dour. Jay and I would wind up traveling with them for the next three days, and during that time, Celeste would speak no more than a hundred words and never lifted her mouth to the hint of a smile, at least that I heard and saw.
We got to talking with Michelle. They had flown to San Francisco earlier that summer, ran out of money, and now flat broke were hitchhiking back to Minneapolis. Michelle explained that one suitcase held their clothes and blankets while the other held their food. She opened the second one to show us, and there entombed were two dozen cans of Campbell's Soup, from cream of tomato to chicken noodle. As they had no camping supplies, I asked how they might consume their soup. Michelle and Celeste stared blanks at each another. They didn't even have a can opener or a spoon if they had. But nevertheless they lugged across America those twenty four cans in a bright red Samsonite.
After ten hours of waiting as darkness settled on Truckee, a pickup pulled over, and the four of us clambered into the open back. The driver was going to Reno, which at least was forty miles in the right direction. It was a magnificent night and all eyes were transfixed by that full and yellow moon rising above.
It seemed the right time for a nursery rhyme. I said, "Hey, diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle, and the cow jumped over the moon."
Michelle laughed. "And the cow jumped over the moon!"
"How big is the moon?" Jay asked.
We gazed upward for a while until the long silent Celeste allowed, "About as big as a golf ball."
"Oh, come on," Michelle replied. "Look at it, Celeste. It's as big as a basketball. And a cow can jump over a basketball."
"Cows can't jump," Celeste said.
"Cows can so," Michelle answered.
They argued about various aspects of bovine behavior for awhile before I interrupted. I decided to try my best. I explained that objects appear smaller the further away they are and did they realize that the moon is a quarter million miles away?
Michelle would have none of it. That made as much sense as a cow launching into outer space. "Why, just look at it," she pleaded. "The moon is right there over that mountain. You can almost touch it." Celeste had lost all interest. She seemed depressed. Or maybe she was hungry and was wondering how they had forgotten a can opener.
I don't remember where we slept that night in Reno. But I do remember as the truck idled at a stoplight how flattered I felt when a leggy woman on a sidewalk tried to summon me. In the coming days, as I was stranded in one place or another, I would dream of her. What if I had abandoned all plans and fallen in love in Reno?
The next morning broke sunny and bright, and the four of us took a spot on the entrance ramp that pointed us east. It became apparent that Michelle and Celeste -- well, Michelle anyway -- preferred to remain in Jay's and my company. By now they trusted us and knew it was far safer for them to hitchhike with males, than for two young women to beg rides from strangers. We decided to part company in pairs -- Michelle with Jay, and Celeste with me -- and planned to rendezvous at the Mormon Tabernacle Church in Salt Lake City, no matter the time.
Celeste and I hitched a ride first and off we raced into Nevada's parched interior. The driver dropped us in Winnemucca, and before long we got a ride to the far edge of Elko. And there we sat under a blazing and glaring mid-afternoon sun, she on her suitcase, me on my backpack. It must have been a hundred degrees with no shade close by, and Celeste whined a phrase here and there of useless complaint. Whenever she had something to say, which was rare, it always came as a complaint. "I'm so hot." "Why won't anyone stop?" To escape into solitude, I wandered a short way into the scrub, but thistle and other vicious plants stabbed and scraped my sandaled feet. I disrupted scores of scorpions. I did an about-face and headed back to pavement.
Our water bottles were already running low, so we tried to minimize our intake. But the asphalt compounded the oven-like heat, and wet with sweat and throats parched dry, we drank the last of it. Traffic was light and the drivers that passed averted their eyes, would not take mercy on our bone-dry souls.
We held there for an hour or two before resigning to backtrack into town for some shade and a lot of something cold to drink. Celeste would wear my backpack, and I would somehow manage her suitcase. But as we set out, an enormous vehicle approached, a luxury motor coach, slowed as it passed us, and came to a stop on the side of the road some thirty yards beyond. A spaceship on wheels with a brilliant metallic sheen, the size of school bus, waited there for us. Nowadays, of course, these gigantic RVs are a common sight. But on that day, the thing seemed surreal. Salvation at last!
As Celeste and I hobbled up to its side, the door swung open, allowing a puff of cold air to escape. And right inside, with his sweet and relaxed smile, stood, of all people, Jay. He held an unopened bottle in his hand and asked, "How about an ice-cold Coors?" I thought I would. Yes, I very much thought I would.
Jay, once again, proved the hero. His heroism took root when we became friends in Ankara, Turkey, in 1968. Our fathers worked there and we attended an American school on the outskirts of the city. I had arrived six months earlier, plucked from the cornfields of central Indiana and transmuted into cultural shock atop the central Anatolian plateau. I would acclimate to Turkey soon enough, but becoming accustomed to school and the American community proved to be hard going. I was desperate to fit in, desperate to discover a new normal.
There I found a current of anti-Turkey sentiment. Kids, mostly from military and State Department families, were used to changing schools, and the Turkish environment was considered a hardship compared to the likes of Germany, Spain, or Japan. While I increasingly enjoyed life in Ankara, I felt like an outsider when attending the American school.
Jay entered my world as I started my junior year and he his senior year. Here was a guy who confidently smoked Turkish cigarettes among his American peers, took delight in the language and conjugated its verbs, and brought with him from California the literature and music of the cultural revolution raging back home. We hit it off right away. He loaned me books by Eldridge Cleaver and James Baldwin. We listened to Hendrix and Dylan. We wandered into Turkish neighborhoods and sipped tea in tea houses with old staring men. We shared drugs on weekends and stayed up all night enthralled by our conversations. Jay had long Harpo Marx hair, wore beat up jeans with a macrame belt and wore beat up boots. Here was a guide from the brave new world back home. Here was a fellow adventurer in all things Turkish. There was no ugly in this American. I fell right in line. I wanted to be like Jay.
It was not a mirage. I stepped into the cool luxury of the motor coach and inhaled the beer. Michelle smiled from her leather chair and returned to her magazine. Jay introduced me to the owner, an older man who owned the company that manufactured these luxury vehicles back in California. He was on his way to Salt Lake City to rendezvous with his girlfriend and had picked up Jay and Michelle back in Reno. Celeste found a chair and fell asleep.
It was thus that we floated over eastern Nevada in the late afternoon. It was harsh as hell out there, but a cool heaven in this quiet confine. This is what rich was, the mahogany trim, the leather seats. When night fell, we were into Utah and soon our benefactor exited I-80 and dropped us nearby at an intersection in Salt Lake City.
It was a cool and starry night with the Mormon Tabernacle Church illuminating the sky from the city center. We hitchhiked as a foursome for an hour before giving up and finding food nearby. Our road ran along the grounds of an enormous corporate office building, surrounded by acres of lush lawns and sculpted landscaping. It looked like an exclusive golf course. A wooden fence, easy to climb over, separated the road from the property. Such soft grass seemed fine ground to bed down for the night. We scaled the fence, rolled out our sleeping bags and blankets, and now finally lying at rest, gazed straight up into the great beyond. There was that full moon again, but only for a minute before sleep eclipsed it.
It was four in the morning when the first blast hit, a direct blow to the forehead. I jolted from my sleep and came face to faucet with a frenzied sprinkler head. Right there at our beds, a series of these water cannons had popped up above ground that unleashed an automatic and ferocious deluge. We were caught in the crossfire.
We were pummeled and drenched. No wonder the grass was so damn green and so damn lush.
We rose to our feet and gathered our sleeping bags and blankets and backpacks and suitcases. And like foot soldiers between the trenches, staggered to the fence for safety. Standing and shivering there like hurricane survivors, we looked back at a dozen soaring and magnificent arcs saturating the sod with water. The Tabernacle glowed in the distance and our road in both directions was deserted. The moment was so absurd that Jay and I howled with joy. The moment was so forlorn that Celeste whimpered. Michelle, still stunned, just stared at the grand water show behind us.
We changed by the side of the road, from wet to less soggy clothes, and hung our laundry over the fence. And when a car or truck happened past, we stuck out our thumbs. No one seemed tempted. Fascinated by the sight of us perhaps, but no, not tempted. In an hour, the sky brightened and the air began to warm. We packed our things and within another hour, Celeste and I caught a ride that toted us eastward up into the mountains. The driver dropped us at jaw-dropping vistas at the Summit Pass exit.
Soon we were picked up by two friendly "cowboys" in their 20s who skidded to a stop at our entrance ramp. I doubted they were real-life cowboys but they were decked out in the familiar attire: western shirts, jeans, boots, and cowboy hats. We took the back seat in an old dented sedan among a dozen empty beer bottles and wadded up clothes. It was a tight squeeze. The cowboys were midway through a 12-pack of Coors positioned between them.
Off we throttled onto the interstate. "Where you kids headed?" asked the driver who called himself Bill. I explained Celeste and my separate destinations and that we planned to meet up with our traveling partners in Cheyenne that night.
"We'll get you as far as Coalville," said the driver. "I got a very important, uh, appointment there this morning." Bill and his companion, named Dwight, laughed hard and took long draws from their bottles. "How 'bout a beer?" Bill asked as he reached for a fresh one for himself.
It was hours before noon and these cowboys were already half drunk. I declined and with a frown and a sigh, Celeste closed her eyes to stay out of all interactions. It was sad that she withdrew. It was a spectacular morning. We cruised through green valleys and wound along timbered mountain elevations. We drove below the speed limit as cars and trucks passed fast in the left lane.
Bill and Dwight talked and laughed non-stop as they compared their tavern encounters from the previous night. The car swerved now and then while Bill fumbled with the radio.
He glanced back at me. "What kind of music you like? I suppose you probably go in for that hippie shit and broken eardrums." I said anything was fine.
He must have felt he insulted me. "Sorry, man," he said. "We ain't slept. We wound up in Summit Pass with a couple of, uh, damsels who wouldn't let us get no shut-eye." At this, Dwight opened his window and spit.
"You in college or something?" asked Bill. I said I was and learned that the two of them traveled around Utah together doing odd jobs, mostly in construction, and most recently helping with hay harvests at nearby farms.
"Yeah, we like outside work in the day, and beer and girls at night," Dwight said. He grinned and then Bill grinned.
And the two of them went back to their dialog, making fun of people mostly. Their humor took me over and I thoroughly enjoyed their chatter. Celeste, for her part, made a pillow of her jacket and turned her face to her window.
"Is the little lady sick or something?" asked Bill. And I explained that we hadn't slept much either, and regaled them with the misadventure concerning the corporate sprinkler system. They howled at every detail, especially at how a water cannon had smacked me square in the face.
It was thus that we rolled through the mountains. Beer and story telling and laughter. I noticed, though, that as Interstate 80 descended and headed north and straight to Coalville, we had slowed to about forty.
"There's too goddam many miles between piss stops out here," Bill said. "I recommend that your girlfriend keep her eyes shut." He unzipped his jeans, fumbled around with his underwear, grabbed two empties off the floor, and expertly positioned himself. He drained half his bladder into one and, while pouring that bottle out his window, simultaneously pissed into the other.
Dwight acted as if he'd seen this a hundred times before. "Why not just pour the beer right out the window and eliminate the middle man?" he asked. Bill acted as if he'd heard that line a hundred times as well. "Shut up," he said.
As we neared our drop-off town, I asked the question I had been wondering about. "So what's happening in Coalville?"
Bill replied, "I got me a court hearing with my old enemy, the Honorable Charles A. Wilkens. He gets to sentence me today and he will stare fire into my soul. I been up in front of him many is the time. This is my third drunk driving and I brought my toothbrush just in case. Wish me luck."
I did. I did wish him luck, although after they peeled and squealed away from us, Bill's luck would have served him better by not getting arrested for a fourth on the way to the courthouse.
By mid-afternoon and a few rides later, Celeste and I stood on the interstate near Lyman in southwestern Wyoming. Our goal was to meet Jay and Michelle on the capitol steps in Cheyenne, later that afternoon, that evening, that night, whenever we all arrived. Cheyenne was the whole State of Wyoming away, perched high on the Laramie Plateau.
There were so few cars entering I-80 from the road out of little Lyman, that we chose to abandon the ramp and hitchhike right on the interstate. Cars and trucks sped by so fast that drivers barely noticed us. But if we were to get a ride out there on the highway, there seemed a good chance that the driver would be traveling a great distance, and not just from Podunkville to Podunkville among the locals.
We stood there for an hour when I noticed an approaching westbound VW bus. I took little notice as it was heading in the opposite direction although the driver gave us a friendly wave as he went by and slowed down. He took the Lyman exit, took a left over the overpass, and another left onto our eastbound entrance, completing a u-turn. The van came to a stop, the side door slid open, and a Stones tune blared from within. Celeste and I clambered into a hazy den peopled by the driver and his three passengers, all quite friendly and all quite relaxed.
These folks had been to Woodstock which now was two years gone and it seemed they had been wandering as Woodstock refugees ever since. They were headed to San Francisco, or so they said, although now they were going in the wrong direction.
"So why did you turn around?" I asked the driver named Rick.
"To give you a ride, man," Rick replied. "To turn you on and get you down the road a ways."
Rick soon lit a joint and within a minute that barren and brown terrain transformed into a fertile and glorious place. Even Celeste took a hit, and for a brief moment an actual grin lifted her cheeks. I loved her for that. I loved the love in the eyes of my new fellow travelers. I loved that I felt love again. All was fine, all was so beautifully fine.
I wanted to know about Woodstock, and Rick held me transfixed as the legend came to life in first-hand, nitty gritty detail. His friends nodded off or stared at me with pleasant smiles.
"You ever hear of the Allman Brothers Band?" Rick asked. Oh, yes, most definitely yes! I had spent several days the previous spring visiting an old high school friend at Boston College where I had been introduced to their first album. Since then, their songs reverberated my brain waves, and the reel to reel in my dorm room shook the walls with their homegrown dixie rock and blues.
"Well, just listen to this," Rick said, and showed me the 8-track to their new album, The Allman Brothers Live at Fillmore East. He shoved it in, cranked it up, and for a glorious hour, that stretch of I-80 through southern Wyoming would never be the same.
I woke up this morning, I had them Statesboro Blues,
I woke up this morning, had them Statesboro Blues.
This bus carried drifters and I was a drifter among them. When people asked me where I was from, I hesitated. I grew up in Georgia not too far from the Allman Brothers. We moved to Indiana and then on to Turkey when I was sixteen. I came back to college in Michigan, another new state, and during summers I felt unanchored to bed or room. I was from Ankara, wasn't I?, where my "self" gained traction and where lasting friendships were born. My parents were still there but my friends had all come home and were scattered about the country.
For two summers I went to these friends and stayed before it became time to hit the road again. More than any other place, home became a room in a dormitory, a space like the interior of this floating VW bus, decked out in tie-dyed drapery and filled with yellow smoke and the iconic music of a rejecting generation. And my room was often filled with the drug-infused and bopping heads of fellow hangers-on whose hearts harmonized with the cultural chords of Woodstock.
I would buy my first car five years later, a deeply used maroon and cream VW bus replete with a pinned up tie-dyed sheet and blasts from an 8-track stereo. Just like Rick's. Where was I from? I was from that maroon and cream that threw a rod three months after I bought it. I was from drifting and searching for kinship with far-flung friends. I was from an hour of Allman Brothers bliss while cruising east towards Cheyenne. I was from places that never seemed to last. Or maybe I was from a feeling that just longed to stay.
Rick and crew dropped us about a hundred miles down the road, and on the spur of the moment they decided to head south to Colorado. I supposed they would make it to San Francisco by and by. They didn't seem to care one way or another.
Celeste and I made it to the steps of the capitol building in Cheyenne early that night where Jay and Michelle had been waiting. Jay had befriended a driver on the road who would put us up for the night. We walked to a house several blocks away where Jay's new friend, a college student named Nick, home for the summer, welcomed us within.
Nick fed us sandwiches and we unrolled our sleeping bags and blankets on his living room floor. It didn't strike me as odd that a student would open up his small home to four young strangers coming off the highway. Indeed, Nick took great interest in our hitchhiking escapades, and we (at least Jay and I) would find out about life in Cheyenne while from the stereo Santana sweetened the air around us.
There was an implicit trust and interconnectedness among youth during that time, a sense of an alternative community, cemented by anti-war, anti-establishment causes and vitalized by rock and roll anthems. From San Francisco to Philadelphia, there were sanctuaries, from the space within a wandering VW bus to a comrade's warm floor in eastern Wyoming.
In the morning, we were back on an I-80 entrance ramp with Iowa as our goal. Come what may, Celeste and I would meet Jay and Michelle on the steps of the capitol building in Des Moines some 650 miles eastward. They hitched a ride first, and after standing and sitting there for a few more hours, an enormous black Chrysler pulled over.
Celeste and I slid into the back seat. After such a long wait, I was especially grateful to the driver and his passenger sitting at his side. The driver was a large, beefy man with black, greased back hair and looked around forty. She was slim and very pretty with long blonde hair. They certainly were a couple, although she seemed much younger. His arm was around her as she leaned into him. Bench seats were the norm back then so a driver and his lover could nuzzle unimpeded by bucket seats.
I gushed on about how we were headed east, Celeste to Minneapolis, me to Indianapolis, that we were meeting our friends that night in Des Moines, that we had come from Sacramento three days before, and, wow, how kind of them to pick us up after being stranded there in Cheyenne. It can get discouraging with so many cars passing you by. But thanks to generous folks like yourselves...
"Okay," whispered the driver. And in no time our Chrysler Deluxe was rocketing down the expressway, passing every car and truck in sight. Inside, it was as quiet as outer space. Our hosts had no interest in us and Celeste never volunteered a word. She played the role of bored statue, either with eyes open or eyes closed. And so we soared, wordlessly and noiselessly, down the highway.
But I wanted to learn a little about them. The first thing I learned was that both their necks were heavily bruised with hickeys. From deep purple to mildly pink, from their jaw bones to shirt collars, on both sides and in front, their necks were covered with dozens of suck marks. We were traveling with a pair of vampires in training.
Thus distracted, it was hard for me to break the non-verbal ice. Plus, she was cemented to his side with her head lodged on his shoulder. I didn't want to disrupt their mutual enchantment. But by and by, I released a question.
"So... where you headed?"
"Chicago," he mumbled.
"And, where are you traveling from?"
"Vegas," he mumbled.
At which point, she freed herself from his arm, turned back, and, coming to life, extended her left hand to me. "We just got married! See? Isn't it beautiful?"
Celeste and I examined her wedding ring and agreed, yes, it certainly was a beautiful thing. She then told the story about how they had met few weeks before, had fallen madly in love, and decided on a whim to drive to Vegas to get married. She explained that her groom was a Chicago cop and could only get away for a few days, but it was all worth it because they stayed at the absolutely fabulous Tropicana Hotel. Had Celeste and I ever been?
Celeste and I had never been. And from the looks of their necks, it appeared the newlyweds hadn't spent much time outside their hotel room. "Well, you really should go some time," she said, and lifted her husband's arm to return to her original, draped position. Silence fell again and stayed.
In a few hours we had descended the rock-cropped plateau of western Nebraska onto the utterly flat plains of its farmland. The sense of being "out west" evaporated as silos pegged the landscape and endless expanses of corn, soybeans, and wheat engulfed us. Rolling across the plains inspires little by way of observation, other than to deliver the passenger into wayward daydreams, especially when entombed in the solitude and luxury of a careening Chrysler.
I daydreamed about my hitchhiking escapades. There in Nebraska at the age of nineteen, I already was a veteran of the long road. I remembered the first day I extended my thumb, in July of 1968, when high school friend Dave and I -- me at sixteen, he at fifteen -- hitchhiked across the boot of Italy, from Brindisi to Salerno, catching thirteen rides in all, including a horse-drawn hay wagon through the streets of Taranto. We had flown from Ankara to Athens to start a backpacking and hitchhiking trip that would take us up the spine of Europe, finally to Amsterdam. Our parents fully endorsed and paid for the adventure (I spent $150 over four weeks) and before we departed the airport in Ankara my father said, "How I envy you. I wish I was coming along."
I daydreamed about hitchhiking across Europe the following summer with friends Roger and Bob. While Dave and I never parted ways the previous year, the three of us often hitchhiked separately to maximize rides only to later rendezvous at a designated train station.
One ride that summer occupied my mind. In southern France, a friendly doctor in a red Peugeot picked me up near Lyon. His English was good and he wanted to know all about me and my journey. I learned about him and his family. This was a good vibe ride.
Talk petered out and we drove along for a long while when out of the blue the good doctor asked, "Tell me, Tom. Do you prefer ze woman in ze leather boots or ze woman in ze rubber boots?"
This was a first. Was it a riddle? "I beg your pardon?"
He smiled. "Simple question, Tom. Do you prefer ze woman in ze leather boots or ze woman in ze rubber boots?"
Over my life, I had not thought about women's shoes, or boots for that matter, for more than thirty seconds. It was a hard question to ponder. I preferred leather shoes to, say, rubber galoshes, so I told him that, well, I supposed leather was better.
"No! No! No!" the doctor exclaimed, wild eyed. "Ze woman in ze rubber boots is mooch, mooch better for you, mon ami! Rubber! Ooh, la, la, ze woman in rubber! Do not ever forget thees!"
To appease I heartily agreed. Rubber, of course. And when we arrived at the next town, I opened my door at a stoplight, blurted some hasty good-byes, thank you very much, and scampered away.
Day faded to night. The newlyweds had remained quiet and lovingly entwined across the whole of Nebraska. We held at 85 miles per hour the whole way, and I wondered at this rate if we had passed Jay and Michelle in spite of their head start. The cop and his young wife were driving straight through to Chicago and dropped us at the Iowa capitol building at midnight. She was full of smiles and wished us well. He had showed no feeling nor said much at all that day. And he had no words as we exited his Chrysler, but raised a hand to wave to us as they headed back to the interstate. Funny how that unexpected gesture of good-bye has stayed with me all these years.
There was that full moon again, hanging low and close over Des Moines. Of course, no one was about that time of night and I wandered around the capitol campus while Celeste slept under a secluded tree. In a couple of hours, Jay and Michelle dragged up from a side street, hungering for sleep. We had traversed a great expanse of the American prairie and now bedded down under Celeste's tree.
We awoke to an Iowa workday morning as the parking lot began to fill. It was the day to go our separate ways and the four of us hitched a ride to a spot near the confluence of eastbound I-80 and northbound I-35 which would take the girls to Minneapolis. I hugged Celeste as we parted, but she was unresponsive. We had spent almost four continuous days and nights together, but at this parting, as she had the entire journey, she sort of shrugged with the unspoken feeling, "I just want to go home." For some reason, the customarily chatty and bubbly Michelle was subdued that morning and offered only a perfunctory farewell. In a matter of minutes, they hitched a ride and were gone with their suitcases, one full of soup cans.
Jay and I made it to Davenport, Iowa, where we left I-80 for I-74 which would lead us south and east to my brother in Indianapolis. As we stood on an entrance ramp somewhere near the Illinois border, Jay cried out, "Oh, my God!"
What happened?
"Oh, my God!" he shouted. "That bitch! That bitch! She stole my clogs!"
It was true. He discovered they were gone while rummaging through his backpack there, emptying the contents on the asphalt shoulder. I remembered how Michelle adored his leather and wooden clogs. After she begged him mercilessly, he let her wear them for a day. Was it possible that she was wearing them this morning and simply forgot? No, Jay said, they were in his backpack last night. No wonder she was so subdued back in Des Moines, the thief. Whenever over the years we would reminisce about the trip, Jay would always begin by saying, "That chick stole my clogs!" He really loved those shoes.
By mid-afternoon, we were dropped off outside Bloomington, Illinois (not to be confused with Bloomington, Indiana, the college town). We thumbed there on the ramp for about an hour before deciding to head down to the expressway, a strategy we had had luck with before. Before long another hitchhiker was deposited at the Bloomington exit and he lumbered up to join us, a tall and friendly young man with a full and unmanaged beard.
His name was Scott and he carried an enormous backpack. Scott explained that he had left Alaska a week before and was heading home to Baltimore. He had been working for the U.S. Forestry Service fighting fires as a smokejumper. After training in Montana, he and his crew parachuted into remote areas of Alaskan wilderness to extinguish small wildfires before they grew into something catastrophic. Indeed, Scott had the look of someone more in the element of the Great Northwest than of the cornfields of central Illinois.
It was ill-advised to add a third male hitchhiker to the mix as the chances of getting a lift would plummet. But we were happy for Scott's company with his good cheer and an eagerness to get to know us. And as the semis thundered by, he said that after a week alone on the road, he was grateful to meet some like-minded comrades.
It was a hot and humid afternoon as the sun beat down on Interstate 74 like a heat lamp on the asphalt. Just yards away the passing cars and trucks provided momentary breezes of relief. Before long a police car approached on our eastbound side, slowly pulled off, and stopped some twenty yards in front of us. The Man made no gestures, did not exit the car, did not turn on his overhead lights, but just sat there idling, staring straight at us. The stare-down seemed to go on for a few long minutes before we decided to amble up to him.
His expression didn't change as we approached. He held to a scowl as his jaw slowly worked on chewing gum. He looked straight ahead through reflective sunglasses and slowly rolled his window down.
Jay leaned in to The Man with an ear-to-ear grin that beamed from under his mop of long, curly hair. Jay was a peace-loving kind of kid, and his friendly, relaxed demeanor could be disarming.
But The Man continued to stare straight ahead. In a matter-of-fact way, he stated, "You are hitchhiking on a federal highway."
Jay responded, "Would you like us to move?"
The Man turned to Jay, face to face, and erupted, "I SAID YOU ARE HITCHHIKING ON A FEDERAL HIGHWAY!"
Jay took a step back and raised his hands like a surrender.
The Man slowly got out of the vehicle and looked up and down the road while working his jaw and gum. He was young, tall, and lean, and hooked his thumbs on his belt. He thought for a moment, then nodding to Scott and me, said, "You boys there, step away."
Scott and I backed away five yards or so. When we stopped, he shouted his order again. "I SAID STEP AWAY!" We obeyed and headed further down the shoulder.
Jay would later recount that when The Man saw that we were out of earshot, he asked Jay, "Got any money? Got any money for me?"
Jay told him that all he had was twenty bucks. The Man then paced back and forth next to his car deciding what to do. Jay stood mute.
The Man stopped, pointed at Scott and me, and yelled, "YOU THERE, YOU WITH THE UGLY BEARD, GET OVER HERE!"
Scott trotted back up to the cop car. The Man ordered them spread-eagled against the car, frisked and then cuffed both Jay and Scott before steering them roughly into the back seat. He drove up next to me and demanded that I throw their backpacks into the vehicle. As I did, Jay and Scott sat stunned and silent.
The Man then drove a ways down the interstate, cut left across the median, made a u-turn by cutting left onto the westbound lanes, and at high speed pulled off at the exit ramp and headed into Bloomington.
In a span of ten minutes, all had been upended. One minute three travelers were swapping stories about Alaska and Utah and hitchhiking luck, the next I'm standing alone in the sun. In the flash of a moment, I felt transformed into an unwelcome foreigner. Approaching traffic lost all promise and became hostile.
Why had The Man arrested Jay and Scott but not me? I looked young for my age and could pass for a 16 year-old. I reckoned that The Man hadn't wanted to hassle with the rigamarole of arresting a supposed minor. And if I, like them, was breaking the law, why hadn't he at least ordered me off the interstate? Sitting there on my backpack, melting in the grass, I pondered this and I pondered my forlorn situation. I sure didn't feel fortunate for having been spared. I felt alone and abandoned.
But before long, my spine began to harden. I got mad. I would get even. I would rescue my fallen comrades. I would bring my case to the Supreme Judge of the City of Bloomington, and forcefully decry the tyranny of The Man and demand freedom for the innocent! The time of the revolution was at hand!
So, therefore, I walked up the entrance ramp and hitchhiked into town.
I walked into the police station in downtown Bloomington and through a plexiglass window inquired of the clerk about my friends. Were they in jail? How could I get them out? The Man himself overheard me because out of nowhere he appeared behind the glass and let me have it.
"You can't do anything," he sneered. "Your boys are getting booked. They're going to jail."
"Do they need a lawyer?" I asked.
"Well, I guess that's up to them, isn't it?" He smiled and walked off.
I wandered out the door and into downtown Bloomington. Passers by either stared at me or averted their eyes. I was a long-hair in a t-shirt, cut-off jeans, and sandals. Even in 1971, the sight of me must have seemed strange to residents of this small, conservative, agricultural city.
I found a phone booth out on the street and found the number of a lawyer in the Yellow Pages section of the phone book that dangled from a cable. I deposited a dime and when I got through to him and told the story, the lawyer had but one question: "Is the cop's name, the one who arrested your friends, is his name Officer Jett?"
It was! I'll never forget the J-E-T-T on the silver nameplate over his silver badge. Well, it was no wonder, offered the lawyer. Officer Jett had built quite a reputation in the city for dubious arrests and overall harassment. But if I had the money, he said, I should be able to get them out once the boys were processed.
I returned to the small lobby in the police station and told the unfriendly clerk that I wanted to bail out my friends if I could.
"You mean, you want to pay off their tickets?" she asked. "That will be $37.50 for each."
Tickets? Like parking tickets? No matter, that was a lot of money. Jay only had twenty, Scott was down to a few bucks, but I had about ninety left, meant to last me the summer. So in the late afternoon, paid for and free at last, three long-hairs in cut-offs group-hugged outside on the sidewalk.
We hitched the mile back to the interstate where Scott decided to head out on his own. He was eternally grateful, he said, that I was able to pay his fine, and promised to mail me the $37.50 after he got home to Baltimore. In minutes, a pickup picked him up and Jay and I watched from atop the entrance ramp as the Alaskan smoke jumper merged eastbound onto I-74. His check was waiting for me when I arrived back at my sister's in Detroit a few weeks later.
As the sun was dropping in the west, Jay and I finally got a ride that took us to an exit in that perpetual corn country near the Indiana line. It was dark by then and we devoured burgers at a restaurant by the overpass. Now fed but exhausted, there was nothing left to do but drop our backpacks and spread out our sleeping bags in the thick, chest-high grass that filled the triangular island between the interstate, exit ramp, and overpass.
The traffic had thinned but semi trucks regularly thundered by. Lying there in our grass-walled coffins, our only view was straight up into the stars. It was a warm night, so I lay on top of my sleeping bag and soon the insects came to accept our presence and resumed their percussive music. In no time, Jay joined in with snoring and I was left to contemplate the galaxy on my own.
Tomorrow, with good hitchhiking, my brother, Mark, would welcome us after we arrived in Indianapolis. The bare floor, in an empty room in the old and decrepit house he rented, would be my temporary encampment before my spirit rose to push on again. Mark would advise me to sleep in the middle of the room in order to avoid the occasional rats that crept along the baseboards.
In 1971, I simply rolled with the rides, and was not infected by self doubt. But two years later, I would be sitting in a ferry terminal in Harwich, England, waiting to board a boat bound for Holland. A college friend named Paul and I would be hitchhiking across Europe and, after haunting smoky pubs in London, find ourselves headed to the drug-friendly confines of Amsterdam.
A bearded and greasy-haired English backpacker would wander up to our bench for conversation. A bold but unfriendly fellow, he asked where we were we going. He said he was headed to Prague to meet up with some like-minded socialist friends. He was "into" socialism, he said. He was "into" working for social justice, and he was "into" jazz, and he was "into" being a vegetarian. And what about me, he wanted to know right then and there, what was I "into", what made me tick. Show me your values, he demanded. I've shown you mine.
I was caught off guard. No one had ever asked me such a thing. I hemmed and I hawed. "I don't know," I finally confessed. "I suppose I'm into, well, traveling."
"Traveling?" he mocked. He shook his head and took a step toward me. "Traveling is just scenery zipping by your window. It's never staying in one place. How can you stand your ground if you're here today and gone tomorrow? What do you hope to find in yourself by hitchhiking from place to place? You won't find it because it's not there. So, you want to be like a cloud that just wanders the sky?"
"Well, I suppose not," I allowed. "Er, maybe yes, I guess that's sort of true."
And with that, or insults to that effect, the disgusted young Brit walked off.
His words would burn and occupy a hollow space in my craw for years to come. A healthier response might have been to hurl my backpack at his jaw, but no matter, he left me deeply wounded. Paul, for his part, would reflect in the decades that followed that our European journey had been pivotal to his coming of age. Traveling through strange lands had opened his eyes to the broader world, its art, its people, its languages, and it had had that final effect on him. But Paul's transformation occurred because he had never lost his centered, foundational sense of home.
But I was just nineteen in 1971, and those scorching words in Harwich, England, were still two years off in the receiving. No, I was hunkered down in the grass somewhere near the Illinois/Indiana border with stars spying across the sky and that old moon making an encore sweep from its eastern stage. No, I was nineteen and hadn't yet come to the raw realizations of my undiscovered self. I knew Dylan's lyric but the words had not gained meaning. I was on my own, with no direction home, a complete unknown.
Jay and I would arrive in Indianapolis the next day and say good-bye after he spent a night at my brother's. I would drive him out to the interstate in Mark's car and we embraced at his thumbing spot near an entrance ramp before he traveled on to Philadelphia.
Before our trip, Jay had subsisted for months in a crowded and impoverished Christian commune where he shared his discovery of transcendent peace with young people of the same heart. He had found Jesus, he said, but in our days together that summer, he never played the preacher nor tried to bend my beliefs to his. Jay eventually would return to the commune, but his stay would be short-lived as he came to some basic terms. He concluded that he preferred the life style of the middle class as opposed to waiting in long lines to use a foul latrine.
Jay would return to the middle class, an advanced degree, and a whole lot more. But I will always see in him the gentle mentor who opened my eager eyes in Turkey. There in Indianapolis, he got a ride right away. Farewell, and until we meet again.
Back at the Indiana line and with Jay snoring on the grass nearby, I scouted the sky for shooting stars. My mind was full and I wouldn't yet fall off to sleep. I remembered hitchhiking from Ann Arbor to East Lansing the previous fall. It was a Sunday afternoon and two young and friendly brothers picked me up. They asked about me and I got to talking about living in Turkey for three years, and how great it had been to travel the country, learn the language, and steep myself into its culture.
And from out of the blue, as God is my witness, the driver said, "You must know the Bohnhorsts."
Wait. "What? Say that again."
"I said, you must know the Bohnhorsts," he repeated.
"Holy shit!" I cried. "I AM the Bohnhorsts! I am Tom Bohnhorst! How in the world would you know about me?"
It turned out the brothers and their family lived next door in Plymouth to my parents' closest friends. The neighbors were all good friends as well and the brothers had often heard stories about the Bohnhorsts' adventures in Turkey.
Small world. And hitchhiking seemed to make it smaller still. It wasn't the world's expanses of land or its mountains and seas that stand out. It wasn't the cities of Europe and its charming towns. It was the cast of charitable characters who like a fire brigade handed me off from car to truck to car again. And it was the characters who stood on the sidelines of it all. It was locking eyes with a Reno hooker whom I would never meet but wished I had. It was the French doctor who loved women in rubber boots. It was the student in Cheyenne who gave us his floor, and drunken and doomed cowboys, and the stoned, aimless refugees from Woodstock. It was poor Celeste who couldn't seem to smile. It was the Plymouth brothers who knew me before we met. It was the rude English socialist who had no business telling me the truth.
The moon was creeping over Interstate 74, now lessened by a sliver of wane. But the moon inside me was full to the brim. Tonight, the stars above seemed frozen in place, peepholes into souls adrift on the dark side of the Earth. As the surrounding insects drummed away, all felt right and serene even as random and rumbling semis blasted by. They bellowed, "Let's go! Move on! Move on! Move on!"
