Riding on the Blacktop Rivers

THE SUN WAS shining through the Eucalyptus trees of San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, the ominous clouds that usually hang over California in the wet season of November had washed themselves out of the sky, and I was headed home. It seemed like it was going to be an easy haul to my home back in Niles. Michigan--just 1850 miles to Chicago and then another 60 or so and I could strip and dive into the brown river that swirled behind our house.

But it was not in Golden Gate Park under my pack. Its thin straps were already cutting into my shoulders and my sign that said "EAST" wasn't attracting too many rides. San Francisco had been a bad place to come to after leaving school in early October. I was getting out, leaving behind the violent hills that had screamed out of the earth in the quakes that threatened to push San Francisco into the Pacific, and I was going back home where the roads stretched between the corn fields and the small hills yawned.

But I wasn't leaving so quickly. Two rides still hadn't gotten me out of the park and I walked through most of Haight Ashbury before I got my first bona fide ride. It was a 62 Chevy pick up, that ran like it had tin cans for pistons but it was driven by a guy who knew just how to ease those fragile parts just one more time around. He was a friendly guy with a beard that ran off of his chin the same way the wires must have run off his distributor cap loose and tangled. He took me all the way to Berkeley, across the Bay Bridge, across Treasure Island and he dropped me on Berkeley's main drag by the side of Interstate 105.

The hitchhiking was busy there and I thought I would have to wait at least an hour before all the people in front of me got rides. A hot red porsche pulled up to the stoplight. On the right-hand window was a Harvard sticker--this was a sure ride. I couldn't miss. But the driver was dressed in a three-piece suit, and his sleek bubble sunglasses turned Business School into his face. When I knocked on his window, he kept right on looking at the light, as if it were holding him back from important dealings elsewhere. This was no ride, it was an insult. The line in front of me wasn't dwindling, but I had a prime position, a stoplight, and before the red porsche was on to the interstate, I had a back seat lounge in a home-fabricated roofed-in pick-up.

Two guys I only glimpsed as they yelled "jump in" were headed up toward Idaho to build a house--or so I heard from my travelling companions in the back--and it looked like a clear shot to Reno. The upper portion of the tail-gate was propped up and I thought maybe I'd get a view of California as it sped by backwards, but the State Troopers didn't agree. We were on the road for only ten minutes when they pulled up about two feet in back of the truck, cruising at a swift 60, and then they cut out into the other lane, passed us like a salmon might take a small waterfall and told our drivers to pull over. We all got our I.D.s checked and then we were told the tailgate had to be closed, so California went by in blackness. We made up for it with a couple of joints. Somehow the laws of thermodynamics didn't apply to this weed because our drivers got wind of it and they pulled over to ask for some up front.

The smell of pine cut into my sleep in the late afternoon and I could hear the truck whining against a steep incline. I pushed open the back gate and the Sierra Nevada, red in the setting sun, passed by like a slow-moving train. The forest was hypnotic, nothing moved out there in the dark green silence. Darkness came in from the east, and falling back to sleep, I wondered what it was like in the Far East to have the morning sun come up over the Pacific, to have the mountains cast their shadow over the west.

THE DIM PURPLISH patches of sky that dropped back behind the Sierra Nevada were lost in the fast-moving lights of Reno. The streets were deserted when we got in about 8 p.m. but by that time the action was furious inside the casinos. The truck pulled over at an intersection and the driver said they'd be staying at the University of Nevada for the night and we were welcome to come but they couldn't guarantee a room. I was more inclined to keep on and another guy I hadn't really talked to decided to go with me. His name was Bill and he seemed a little bit suspicious to me because he was awful young and all he had was a coat under his arm. But Bill assured me he had lots of experience hitching cross country and he showed it too by telling me right off that we couldn't hitch in Reno and anyway we'd pick up more traffic moving east if we walked to where the Reno bypass met up with Route 80.

We spent a couple of hours hitching but the cars seemed to be moving too fast to notice us in the dark. We got one ride that took us to a suburb of Reno--a few huts--and that's where I decided we should wait till the morning. First we went to an all-night gas station and asked if we could stay there, but the attendant kicked us out, saying there was "some kind of monastery or something" up the road a bit. The monastery turned out to be a seminary for Jesuit priests and when we rang the doorbell at 12:30 in the morning I was sure--visions of medieval churches offering sanctuary to knights errant--we'd found a place to stay. But the priest who answered the door said he would have to ask his boss--the priest in charge of the seminary. Bill didn't trust priests, but I told him that I grew up around priests and had been taught by priests and served them at Mass and I knew for sure we would have one maybe even two, comfortable rooms Bill was smarter than I thought. The priest just kept saying, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry..." He gave us a tip about a youth hostel outside of Reno and we walked about two miles to get there. But it was locked and it looked unapproachable in the middle of flat land, a big Victorian house.

We walked for about 20 minutes, sticking out our thumbs whenever some drunkard passed us, hoping to get a ride back to the University of Nevada. We were getting close to town when a Mustang glided up out of the dark on the other side of the road, went about 20 yards past us and then made a smooth eerie U-turn and slid up right along side us.

A guy who looked like he was in his late twenties and all dressed up in a silver studded jeans jacket leaned out the window and cooed sweetly. "Are you boys looking for a ride?" Yeah, we were looking for a ride alright, and we took the ride. It turned out those guys--there were two of them--were from some obscure part of Nevada looking for some Action and they wanted to know if we knew where it was. We told them we just wanted to get to the university, that we had good friends there. They took us right there, but the conversation on the way was a little strained, mostly punctuated by "Ooohs" and "mmmms" by the guy who spoke to us first. Bill said later he thought they were either faggots or police, and I said he was probably right on both counts.

At the university we caught slight of a group going into a dorm and we ran up and tried to follow them in nonchalantly. One girl asked us where we were going, though, so we told an abridged story and she said to sneak down into the television room and sleep on the couches. The damn t.v. wouldn't shut off so we were stuck with the late news, the Star Spangled Banner and then the snow for the rest of the night. I went down the street to a combination Deli/Sub-shop/Bar-and-Grille, but there wasn't anybody upstairs so I went downstairs to the bar and asked if I could get something to eat. The bartender said everything was closed, even though somebody just got a drink from him. So I went back upstairs and took a sixpack of Pepsi from behind the counter. I hid it in the bushes, went past about five honky marriage chapels and brought some food at a 24-hour supermarket.

WE WERE UP early the next morning and the road looked bad and slow. Finally a battered old tank slowed down--stalled to a standstill--and we were on our way, for at least a couple of hundred miles. Our driver was a squat, hairy toothless Canadian freak. He laughed like a leprechaun--in great volumes of uncontagious cackles--and he cursed his car at every knock. He wouldn't put it over 50 mph and the hard-iron hills of Nevada clanked by slowly. Huge white letters were carved into the hills--the only signs to tell one town from another as they filtered by.

Our next ride was a converted school bus, complete with pot-bellied stove and deluxe double - bed spread out in back. The ceiling was covered with colored patches of rugs. At one point the driver reach up and pulled one of the patches down to reveal a stash, then passed some joints around. I felt good in the bus; but I didn't smoke any. I was drowsy and it reminded me of home, and home seemed further away than when I started out. Even though the eucalyptus smelled so good, I would be home soon.

I woke up at the border of Utah, at the last gambling place before Mormon country. We stopped and I walked around and watched veterans play whole rolls of nickels at a time. Whenever they didn't hit I would play a few nickels on the same machine. I won about a dollar.

The Utah flats spread out against the lights of saltworks. Salt Lake City came all too quickly, and the bus left us off on the outskirts of town. Bill got a ride from a Volkswagon with only one free seat, and I was stuck for a long time up on a mountain. Snow fell for about an hour and I tried to light a fire under a bridge, but it didn't catch solid enough. A cowboy picked me up and left me at some cowboy exit: I was alone for too long. I scratched out an SOS sign, and after a few trucks ground by, a gold Cadillac slowed down but wouldn't let me near until I explained the sign. I guess I looked desperate, so they let me in a couple that was going straight to Chicago I didn't learn that the driver had been speeding for two days--ever since he'd left L.A.--until he had his third or fourth Coors from a cooler in the back seat. The alcohol must have kept him on the fine line between too much speed and not enough sleep. But after a couple of swerves onto the shoulder I said that I would drive.

The trip was flat and dull from there on in, except for a little run in with the Iowa State Trooper. He flagged us down when I was driving and the guy hid his speed under the back seat. The cop went to the front of the car and searched around for a full minute, then got up and told me to get out of the car. The tall man in the mountie's hat brought me to the front of the caddy to show me that one of the headlights was out. And he told us we could go as far as the next exit to get it fixed. The next exit had one gas station and that was owned by the trooper's brother.

IOWA FADED INTO the night and we were in Illinois moving toward Chicago for what seemed like a long time. They dropped me off in the suburbs at a subway station, and before too long I was on a bus line to Niles, coursing through the backroads of Southwestern Michigan. I was home that afternoon and the river still swirled brown there, down the hill. It was a good feeling to know it was there when I slept, now 90 hours out of San Francisco but somehow a long way from home.