Continental Drift, part one

Preparations

For the next seven weeks I am featuring a memoir of an epic and somewhat reckless hitchhiking trip I took from Iowa to New York City, via Canada, back in 1984. The route led me over and around the Canadian side of Lake Superior.

Part seven. Part six. Part five. Part four. Part three. Part two. Part one.

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My dad dropped me off on the shoulder of an entrance ramp to I-35 on a sunny summer day in 1984. Hitchhiking on the Interstate is illegal, but it’s legal to stick your thumb out for a ride if you do it on the entrance ramp. I slid my goofy oversized yellow backpack out of the back seat of the family VW Rabbit and stuck out my thumb. I wore tennis shoes, jeans, and a hospital scrub shirt (my favorite shirt, a token from my job at the psychiatric hospital that summer). My hair was cut newly short. I was impersonating a sober, clean-cut young man.  

I-35

Dad told me later it was one of the scarier moments of parenthood he’d ever experienced: leaving his son by the side of the road to hitchhike from Iowa to New York City. But he said very little to discourage me. He let me do it, in his stoic understated Oklahoma style. I suppose that’s a lesson in parenthood. I recently endured my youngest daughter moving across the country, literally watching a little dot on a screen of my phone crawl across the map using a location app, as she drove from Southeastern Colorado to the Northeast coast (during a snowstorm no less, but that is another story, everything is connected by stories). I had to show a similar forbearance.

My mom—demonstrating another parental approach entirely--spent weeks trying to convince me to fly to New York, instead of hitchhike. She was willing to pay for the plane. I was not dissuaded. I spent weeks outfitting my oversized backpack. Clothes, a sleeping bag, a tent, a tiny camp stove. An oversized Rand McNally North American road atlas. I decided I needed a weapon, in case I ran into trouble, and concluded that three feet of heavy chain stored in the side pocket of the pack was my best option. I cut a slit in the pocket so I could pull the chain out without taking off my pack. I practiced for days in the basement, next to the pool table, feeling like a ninja. Surprisingly, I didn’t break anything, and it was really fun whipping out the chain and assuming a fighter’s stance. The whole adventure seemed exciting to me, even as it was making my Mom quake with fear.

I’ll explode any Chekhovian suspense about that chain here at the beginning: I never had to use it. Never even pulled it out of my pack.

My weapon was dead weight to me.     

#

I’d hitchhiked from Iowa to New York City once before, in college, in 1980. I don’t remember a whole lot about that trip. I’d done acid late the night before. I had a casual friend, we’ll call him Tim, who I’d promised I’d hitchhike to New York City with him during Spring Break (this was before en masse Spring Break partying was a thing). I’d never done that kind of thing before. It seems a foolish and dangerous thing to try, but a lot of my actions as a young man fit into that “foolish and dangerous” category.  So about four in the morning, still tripping, we went from his apartment to mine, where I packed my overlarge backpack and, as I recall, with no sleep whatsoever, stepped out onto the entrance ramp of I-80 in the pre-dawn light.    

I-80

As I said, I don’t remember a whole lot. Only one scary circumstance comes to mind. I think this ride happened pretty early on, perhaps when we were still in Iowa. A car pulled over to pick us up, I jumped into the passenger seat, Tim jumped into the back with both our packs. We told him we were hitching to New York City. A half-drunk case of beer sat in the footwell of the passenger seat. Our half-drunk driver told us in a long monologue that sometimes he’d buy a case of beer and drive around until the case was gone.  He threw the cans out the window as he downed them, and offered us some of his supply. We declined.

Even on no sleep and still riding the shirttails of an acid trip, I knew this was a traffic accident waiting to happen. I exchanged a number of looks with Tim, communicating silently. I feared telling him I wanted out of the car. His eyes looked pretty crazy. I finally told him that, yes, while we were hitch-hiking to New York City, we were going to stop at the next town and eat breakfast. He let us out, and we ended up not dying in a fiery car wreck in Eastern Iowa. Whenever I read of someone driving the wrong way down an Interstate, I think of that guy.

#

Let me take a moment to acknowledge how wildly reckless and dangerous this all seems to me now, over forty years later, as I look back on it as a man in my sixties. All I can say in my defense is that I patterned myself on Jack London at the time, soaking up experiences whenever I could.

I was also low hanging fruit for Joseph Campbell’s idea of the hero’s journey, very popular in this era:

What I think is that a good life is one hero journey after another. Over and over again, you are called to the realm of adventure, you are called to new horizons. Each time, there is the same problem: do I dare? And then if you do dare, the dangers are there, and the help also, and the fulfillment or the fiasco. There’s always the possibility of a fiasco.

But there’s also the possibility of bliss.

Pathways to Bliss, Joseph Campbell

“Follow your bliss” was the prevalent wisdom. In retrospect, I sympathize with my parents.

#

When I tell my wife about my twin hitchhiking trips, she responds with, “It was a different time back then.” And it was. But it wasn’t that different. We’re not talking the fifties or sixties; this was the eighties. I remember most people at the time telling me it wasn’t safe.

They were telling me, “It’s a different time now.”

That said, during the four years I lived in Minneapolis, I hitchhiked from there to Des Moines (where I went to college) a dozen times. I’d had plenty of practice on a small scale, and was able to make the run from Minneapolis to Des Moines in four hours, on par with the time it would take were I driving my own car.  So I had significant hitchhiking experience, if only for short distances.    

#

After two days of travel, we arrived in New York City on St. Patrick’s Day. We met up with my friend Dan, one of the most generous people in the world and who we were staying with while there. We dropped off our stuff, then headed out to the streets of Manhattan. If you’ve never been to New York City on St. Patrick’s Day, be aware, it’s quite a spectacle, and in the early 80s, it was even weirder and wilder. New York City was full tilt into its Bernie Goetz decade, with hookers opening hooking on Times Square and Keith Haring graffiti in the subway and the twin World Trade Center buildings towering darkly over everything like that giant tree in Ethan Frome. People wandered the streets drunk, puking and pissing openly on the streets, spilling out of bars like refugees.

I assumed New York City was always like this.

We saw a few shows. We hung out at a few bars. We scored weed in Washington Square Park.

I knew I had to live there.

The hitchhike back home was long, and we split up at some point, because Tim wanted to hitch down south into Virginia to meet a girl, and I wanted to head straight back.

The capstone of the trip occurred at two in the morning on an I-35, near the State line between Illinois and Iowa. It was raining. I was cold and exhausted. I finally got a ride, and though it was only a few Interstate exits forward, it left me at an exit that had a Holiday Inn. I walked down the looping Interstate entrance, and into the motel.

I asked to use their phone. I called my parents. I’ll confess I think I was close to crying. My Dad got on the phone in the middle of the night and gently calmed me down. He had me hand the phone to the clerk, gave the clerk his credit card number, and told me to get some sleep. I did. I took a long hot shower too.

I hitched home the next day.

I miss my father’s gentleness. He’s been gone six years now.

Peace.

to be continued…