Roaming Upward’s first chapter centers on a year of hitchhiking, during which I found my direction in life. I had a few earlier hitching experiences before then. Recently, while reflecting on the first major hitchhiking trip I did in 1969 at the end of my freshman year of college, I realized it was full of “seed” moments. A seed was planted. Thoughts were expanded or deepened. My path was altered in small ways that quietly accumulated significance with the passage of decades. So here is a recounting of those moments.
When I was in 5th or 6th grade, I checked out of the school library a two-volume set of large books with green covers titled Our National Parks that included lots of black-and-white pictures. The first chapter presented Carlsbad Caverns National Park. Within these caverns lay the Big Room, a vast space of darkness adorned with stalagmites and stalactites. The Big Room was so beyond my childhood experience, and so exotic that I promised myself to see it one day.
That promise came to mind as I started thinking of how I would get home to Washington State after my freshman year at college in Massachusetts. I decided I would hitchhike to the caverns (and to the Grand Canyon) before heading home. It would be my first long-range hitchhiking experience.
I carpooled with a student who was driving home to Dallas, Texas. I had practically no experience hitchhiking so rather than trying to hitch through Dallas and Fort Worth, I took a bus about 80 miles out on Highway 180 which went straight west to Carlsbad, N.M.. I got talking with another guy on the bus. He asked if I wanted to spend the night on an army base. But I’m not a soldier. He said that was all right; I could have dinner on the base, too. He was right; I went through the dinner line receiving generous proportions without showing any ID. That evening we talked, he and his three roommates and I.
Fort Wolters in 1969 was where the Army was training its helicopter crews for Vietnam. Just about everybody there was either going to Vietnam or had just come back. The four guys with me had just come back. I remember a form letter on their table given to returning soldiers telling them how important it was to tell civilians about the efforts and the progress that were being made because of their gallantry and heroism. But what I really remember is what one of them, a side gunner, said. Vietnam was great. You’re flying along and if you see a man walking along a road, you just blow him away (said with the hand motion of firing a machine gun). A few minutes later… Another thing that was great was you (plural) go into a bar and say “give us some pussy or we’ll close your place down.”
I grew up in a small, conservative farm town. The AP and Time magazine were my sources of news about the world. As draft age approached, I read lots of articles about staying the course, the “light at the end of the tunnel,” why we were winning the war.
That soldier’s casual comments exploded me out of my Time magazine world. I didn’t know what to do with what he casually said but I did know that the men writing those opinion pieces had no contact with these soldiers. You could not write those pieces if you had just heard what I had heard. I realized that we would never win a war conducted in this manner. How easy it had been to be lulled by the weekly body counts reported on the 6:00 evening news. Like a sports story, if the number of enemy dead was significantly higher than our dead (which it almost always was), then we must be winning. But what if the number of enemy dead included men walking along the road when they were blown away by a passing helicopter?
The next morning I started my hitchhiking – aiming west to Carlsbad along Highway 180. I made it about 100 miles to Aniston, Texas. Traffic was slow so I walked along the highway about 2-3 miles beyond Aniston. No rides so I slept in the bordering field. Few cars and no rides the next morning so I studied the Texas map I had picked up at a gas station. About 20 miles south ran Interstate 10. It passed south of Carlsbad by about 50 miles. But it probably covered the 200 westward miles far faster than this vacant highway. I walked back to Aniston and hitched south to I-10. I learned that in hitch-hiking, the busiest route is faster than the shortest route.
The next morning I was hitchiking north to Carlsbad. I had made a sign that proclaimed “It’s Hot Out” in anticipation of a hot day. But it wasn’t really hot out when I got picked up by two guys. Something about their concern when I got in the car made me realize that my sign that I had thought clever was manipulative dishonesty. I was ashamed of it and never used it again.
The two guys were friendly but I also perceived them as “lower-class.” The way they talked and the way they viewed the world and what they were doing in it attached that label to them. That label made me feel uncomfortable in their presence; they might have criminal tendencies. But I tried to be friendly despite that. They asked where I was going and I said Carlsbad Caverns and they had never heard of the place so I started describing what it was. They decided that it sounded interesting and they would see it with me. – which was great because that meant that they would drive me all the way up the 7 mile side road to the park. We got there and bought tickets for the next ranger-led tour (which was how you saw the caverns in 1969).
The tour consisted of two parts. The first part was the walk down through the entrance of the cave, down through complex passages until it approached the Big Room. The tour then took a break at the underground cafeteria where there were also restrooms and the elevators back to the surface. After our lunchroom rest, the tour would culminate with the Big Room where I would fulfill that grade-school promise to myself.
But one of the guys was freaked out about having 700 feet of rock pressing down overhead. He wanted to take the elevator back up and get back to the surface as quickly as possible. His friend would go back up with him. They said they would wait in the Visitor Center if I wanted to continue the tour. My backpack with all my stuff was up in their car.
What was I to do? Fulfilling my promise to see the Big Room would force these two strangers to wait around for me to finish the tour – though they might also just drive off with my pack. Or I could take the elevator up with them and leave the Big Room behind unseen. I was so torn. Plus there was that swirling down-deep sense of them as “lower-class” clouding my thoughts. In the end, I decided to fulfill my wish of seeing the Big Room – which I did though a significant part of my attention during that part of the tour was on where my pack would be at the end.
After the tour, I took the elevator up to the surface to meet my fate. The elevator door opened and there were the two guys sitting in chairs waiting. They got up and we walked back to their car and drove down the road to the town of Carlsbad. At some point along that walk/ride, one of them said something like “you must really trust people.” And I jumbled out words like “And you have to trust a hitchhiker in order to pick them up.” I liked that symmetry.
While walking up the main street of Carlsbad, a car pulled up next to me and a pretty woman leaned out the passenger-side window asking where I was going. Was an adolescent hitch-hiking fantasy actually happening? I leaned down and saw her boyfriend at the wheel. “I’m walking to the north end of town to camp for the night.” They offered to drive me up there. As they did, they asked where I was going. I enthused about the caverns and said I was heading to Albuquerque now on my way to the Grand Canyon. They said they would drive me to Albuquerque.
“What?” That didn’t make any sense. Albuquerque is 275 miles away (550 miles round-trip) and it’s getting near evening.
But they thought it would be a fun way to spend the evening. But first they needed to pick up a friend and buy some beers. Then off we went. The driver and his girlfriend in front; their friend and I in the back.
The most salient fact from that evening was that the driver was a double-amputee from Vietnam. Lost both of his legs. He told me several times that there was no way the highway patrol would ever give him a ticket. He had given his two legs in service to our country and there was no way they would give him a ticket. So we blasted up the highway at 90 mph. They had a very elaborate, 5-10 step group handshake that they would do every 10-15 minutes which I needed to learn so I could do it with them, too. They drank beer; I didn’t. I was scared the whole way that we’d end up in a car crash but I was also stunned/honored? to be invited into this very different way of being a young adult in America. Who would decide, on a lark, to drive 550 miles just to get some stranger closer to his goal? There is goodness at the heart of this. But… It was fascinatingly different from anything I had ever known. They dropped me off in Albuquerque in the middle of the night and turned back home because the woman needed to be at work early in the morning.
The next morning, I walked along I-40 until I got picked up by a Native American in an old pickup. Within 5 minutes of us drifting back and forth across the freeway, I realized he was drunk. I offered to drive for him. He stopped and we traded places. I drove him as far as the stop sign at the end of his off-ramp. I watched him drive off slowly along a small road that wound north through open land. I walked across the road to the on-ramp. To the west, I could see red cliffs. It hit me deeply. “I’m here! I’m in the Southwest where the rocks are red. I’m really standing here!” And later, “I can go anywhere in the world. It’s just a matter of walking far enough in the right direction.” The world opened beyond my assumptions of impossibilities.
Two days later, I dayhiked to the bottom of the Grand Canyon and back. As I hiked back up the South Kaibab Trail, I came to a sign pointing out and describing the Great Unconformity. A fairly straight groove cut across the canyon wall. The rock above the groove was a chocolate brown, gracefully-smooth and rounded sedimentary rock. The rock below the groove was gnarled hardness. Intense heat and pressure, deep in the roots of ancient mountains, had altered and toughened that rock. But the sedimentary rocks above the groove were sandstones laid down in a sea. That straight groove where the two different rocks contacted one another, that was the Great Unconformity. What made it Great was that the contact was level for many tens of miles. That meant that the roots of those ancient mountains were somehow worn down into a surface as smooth as that contact line. How long would it take to uplift mountain roots above sea level and then erode them down flat and then subside beneath the waves of the ocean? The sign proclaimed that this contact between the two rock types, this thin line, represented more time than the entire time since then. The thousands of feet of sedimentary rock laid down above this point and the time required to carve the Grand Canyon required less time than the formation of that line.
Click on this link for a picture of it: http://azgeology.azgs.arizona.edu/azgs/image-of-the-day/images/great-unconformity-grand-canyon
That was so cool and I could see it right there in front of me. How long would it take to wear down hard mountain rock to smoothness? And yet, over hundreds of millions of years, it did. My delight in that contact led me to two years of geology classes in college that helped develop the naturalist within me.
Heading north for home, I got picked up by two men in their thirties in a pickup. There are three things I remember about them. While stopped for gas, one of them was showing off his strength by holding a double-headed axe straight out from him and with his wrist muscles rotating the head of the axe back so its lower blade was pointing down toward his face and then, still with just his wrist muscles, bringing the sharp edge of the axe blade down to lightly touch the tip of his nose – and then up and back out. He did that two or three times. I would never do anything crazy like that. This trip opened me, thank goodness, to a Walt Whitman-esque array of Americans that the college track had isolated me from.
The second thing was their concern as to whether I was a hippie because they didn’t like hippies. (I had gotten a haircut before I started on this trip so I looked “straight.”) But every now and then, they would ask, “You’re sure?” One told of a time he was out walking his property and he saw some guys around a campfire making coffee. He looked through his binoculars and yep, they were hippies. So he took his rifle and shot a hole in their coffee pot.
The third thing I still remember is them telling me to never wrap my thumb around the steering wheel. They knew a friend who had gotten into a collision and the steering wheel spun so fast and hard, it sheared his thumb off. So don’t wrap your thumb around the inner circumference of the wheel. Keep it on the side of the wheel facing you.
They let me out in the small town of Kanab at night. I walked to the north end. of town to hitch a bit and discovered that Kanab was just like my home town. The high schoolers were driving their cars up and down the main street all evening. (In my town, this was called “dragging the gut.” I did a search for “dragging the gut.” The expression pops up in several towns throughout the midwest and west.) Several years later, I read Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books and in These Happy Golden Years, the young folk in the 1880’s hitched up their wagons in the evening and drove up and down the town’s one street, couples waving and laughing to one another as they passed.
My last significant memory began with getting stuck in either Salt Lake City or Ogden – a city too big to walk along Main Street to the edge of town. It was evening and all concrete with no place to lay my sleeping bag. There was no traffic-gathering place suited for hitchhiking. I felt lost at sea. I think I was standing by a gas station, uncertain what to do when a man stopped and offered me a ride north to Idaho.When we arrived at his exit, out of the goodness of his heart, he took me another fifty miles or so and dropped me off in the early morning at a good place for hitching. I was home around mid-day.
The reason I mention this last ride is that a half-year later, my first girlfriend, my high school sweetheart, after three years, dropped me. I was devastated. My first love – crushed into rubble. Making it worse was my setting: one of a very few students staying in the dorms over Thanksgiving Break with very long, northeastern US winter nights. I had to write a 20 page paper that was due after the break. I was very depressed and cynical about this world of people that could destroy my dreams so completely. The only thing that kept me grounded was remembering the selfless kindness of that man going out of his way to help me get home. He got me through my November darkness too.
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