Riding a Greyhound In Search of America

The Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York is a cavernous, dark, dirty beehive of vehicles, scurrying travellers, hustlers, religious people pushing books and leaflets containing the word of many gods, stores, waiting rooms--and, on the Monday night after spring term finals ended last year, me. I was heading out on the 11 p.m. Greyhound for Los Angeles, pack and sleeping bag on my back and cap on my head. I was looking for America.

I had stayed in New York only long enough to gather supplies and buy a bus ticket, and then I was on the rolling behemoth that would not stop until it crossed the continent, even if Greyhound did change drivers every five hours or so.

First, though, I had to pass through scenic New Jersey, scenic southern Pennsylvania, scenic Ohio--ah, the natural wonders of the interstate highway system, with three squalling brats across the aisle as background music. Still, this was the price of cheap transportation west. Anxious to reach the wide open spaces, I stayed on the bus as state after state rolled by, telling myself I would get off when I reached America, the old "When it's right, you know it" type thing. Indiana merged into Illinois, which metamorphosed into St. Louis, Missouri and Oklahoma.

Every so often they'd file us off the bus for meal breaks, coffee breaks and bladder breaks. We would take in a local place, like Joe's Real Bar-B-Q Cafe in Amarillo, where the patrons still wear cowboy hats and look askance at anyone who saunters in with a Maoist cap on his long haired head. I ate fast and left before the posse arrived.

Finally, I could take no more and decided to get off in Albuquerque, N.M. The bus rolled in just before midnight, two days out of Port Authority, and although the local buses had stopped running, I figured I could walk out of town and camp out. Wrong. It is about seven miles, uphill, from the bus depot to the western edge of town, a high flat plateau, or ten miles east to the base of the Sandias mountain range.

After struggling for a while in full pack, I got a cab--all right, it's a bourgeois thing to do, especially when you are trying to be a road person, but I was tried, and the cabbie told me it wouldn't cost more than a couple of dollars. Uh huh. He took me for seven bucks, but I stiffed him on the tip; that should teach him to take advantage of green, Eastern kids.

I started walking into the desert, looking for any slight rise of fall in the land, or any bush over seven inches high, or any other sort of sleeping place. I climbed over a barbed wire fence and headed out across some farmer's land, my flashlight the only light for miles and my breathing the only sound in the night. Except for the mooing which I heard after about a mile--soon followed by the sound of cows running across my path about 40 yards ahead.

I stopped, watched silently, then turned away from them and began to head off into the distance, when I heard a moo about three octaves lower. Now I don't really mind a cattle stampede, but I have an inherent dislike of large cows with horns and male hormones, which is to say, bulls. Suddenly, a comfortable sleeping place seemed unimportant, and all I wanted was to find that fence again and put it between me and the bovine bunch. I walked backwards, slowly, trying not to irritate the bulls.

Once out of range, I ran as fast as I could, considering the circumstances. I reached the fence 20 minutes later, climbed over it, and went to sleep right there, by the side of U.S. 40, the main road through the south-western part of the country. I woke up to trucks roaring by one one side and cows staring at me across the fence on the other.

No matter, it was a bright, clear day and down below was Albuquerque, and I was Away From It All in the desert and in just five minutes I had flagged down my first car. I had never hitchhiked before, but this was easy. The middle-aged occupant had once had a multimillion dollar turquoise business, but he'd lost it all through some bad breaks, including his back and left leg, and had traded in his 1976 Jag for a 1960 Rambler. He took me to a gas station in Gallup, where two Mexicans in a pickup truck let me ride in the back and either watch New Mexico fade away backwards, or, if I turned around, to watch the driver's t-shirt, which contained the local folk wisdom of "Four Wheelers Eat More Bush."

New Mexico soon became the Arizona border, Fort Defiance (Actual Fort Defiance Souveniers Here! Spend Money!), and then, turning south, the Painted Desert, the Petrified Forest, and Winslow, Arizona loomed up. Eagles or no Eagles, no girl in a flatbed Ford drove up to the corner where I was standing, so I continued on the Flagstaff, and by nightfall to within five miles of the Grand Canyon.

My first glimpse of the Canyon came in the very early morn, from the back of yet another pick up--an awe inspiring huge gap in the earth, a fuzzy, hazy red purple brown green fusion of colors and shapes and forms and rock layers. And just up the road was the South Rim Village, where hotels and shops and restaurants and cards and fat Iowa tourists in Winnebago motor homes greeted my eyes.

Leaving my pack in a hotel, I headed for the Bright Angel Trail, ignoring all warnings about being prepared for the hike down into the Canyon. The signs that said "WARNING--Take four quarts of water with you or DIE!" were meant for those fat Iowans in Winnebagoes, not for healthy young adventurers like me. I cockily jogged the eight miles down to the mighty Colorado, drank from its roaring waters, spit out the dusty mouthful, and after some exploring went to sleep in a side canyon to avoid the noon heat.

When I awoke at 1:30, I again decided to ignore warnings not to hike in the midday sun, and started up the South Kaibab Trail. Twenty yards up the trail was a big sign saying "WARNING--THIS TRAIL NOT RECOMMENDED FOR HIKING OUT. THERE IS NO SHADE, ONLY ONE EMERGENCY TELEPHONE, AND IT IS VERY STEEP. TAKE AT LEAST FOUR QUARTS OF WATER, ALLOW SIX TO EIGHT HOURS FOR HIKE! MULE RESCUES ARE COSTLY AND NOT ALWAYS AVAILABLE." Scratched under that was the legend "Jim Duggin did it on only two quarts, 4/13/77." I had no water at all, and I planned to make the whole ascent in three hours, so I set off at a rapid pace.

The first hour was fine and I rested ten minutes before setting off again. Then I went for half an hour before resting. I started again, sweating now, breathing harder, throat drying, back and legs burning from the sun, and as I came around a ledge I ran smack into what joggers call The Wall. Not The Wall at Fenway Park, but a massive physiological-psychological being who sits on your chest and squeezes your lungs and makes each step an act of supreme will worthy of a Nietzschean Superman.

I sat for ten minutes, tried to walk on, stopped, sat some more, walked another hundred yards or so, lay down on a rock, watched a middle aged fat man and his kids, all undoubtedly newly-arrived from Iowa in their shiny, sleep Winnebago, pass me by, bummed a beer from some longhairs heading down, slept and dreamt pleasant dreams about heat exhaustion and dying in canyons and the human equivalent of being slowly cooked in a Crock Pot. The last mile took as long as the first four had, and two ten-year old girls passed me on the way but I didn't care, I'd done it. God, I was tough. I decided to take a bus to L.A.

I spent most of my time in L.A. on the freeways, to and from the blond surfer-studded beaches and the cute little restaurants and pseudo-intellectual hangouts and quaint shops. Urbanologists have developed computer models that show L.A. will be completely paved over by 1982, except for a three by five foot square patch of grass that will be used to grow avocados. Swallowing my intellectual pretensions, I also made the required trip to Universal Studios, but was enraged to find that the Jaws exhibit was not operating that day. 3000 miles from New York and Bruce the Shark isn't home when I get there.

The best show in town came primary day, when a largely-unheralded question on the ballot burst into national attention and sent liberals scurrying for their fiscal integrity cliches. Proposition 13, the tax revolt, the great middle class reaction. And there on the tube was old Go-with-the-flow Jerry Brown himself doing the best broken field running and backtracking since Gale Sayers hung up the cleats. Politicians by the truckload began making the pilgrimage to the shrine of Sir Howard Jarvis, slayer of the mighty dragon of Big Government.

If Horace Greeley had lived in Los Angeles, he would have said "Head north, young man--quickly." For to the north of L.A. lies San Francisco, a city almost universally loved in this country, even by those who have never been there. Mellow--everyone I met on the coast as I headed north told me the main thing about Frisco was how mellow it is. Maybe it's the natural environment, or the Spanish legacy, or the peculiar effect of its Gold Rush origin, or simply all those people up there who've destroyed their brain cells with acid, but the city certainly seems mellow, with a capital laid back. Somehow the country forgot to tell Frisco that the Right-on Sixties had become the New Mood Seventies, so like the Japanese hiding in the jungles fighting world war II to this day, San Francisco bounces anachronistically on, retaining the feeling of community and the optimism that much of the rest of the country lost after Vietnam, Kent State and Nixon. But not even the warm, dark womb of the Bay Area could keep me from wanting to move on, to get out and see the world. I headed for Yosemite and points east.

Several days later I was on the road through western Nevada towards Oregon. Out past Reno I took up with another hitchhiker, a 40 year old permanent wayfarer who sold home-made turquoise jewelry to other roadies to survive. He was on the way to a rock concert he'd heard abut in Oregon, and since he had lost all his money the night before in Carson City, he was in a hurry to sell as many necklaces and roach clips as he could to the concertgoers. I hadn't heard of any concert, but he'll, he'd been hitching 20 years against my two weeks, and we made it as far as Mount Shasta, California before a rainstorm and the approaching cold night forced us to seek shelter. We were just glad to be there--all day long we'd been stoned out of our minds because the only people who pick up two male hitchers who looked like we did have hitched themselves and generally have massive quantities of dope in the car.

We took a hotel room and sat down to make some necklaces for the concert. My nerves, a bit frayed, were not helped any when the hotel's proprietess banged on our door and threatened to arrest us for overflowing the shower. Now I knew that doing one to five on an illegal bathing rap was unlikely, but this small town and its seemingly endless supply of cops would take the word of a respectable citizen against two dirty, hippy-looking hitch hikers, so we ignored her demands to open the door lest she see our jewelry spread out on the bed and call in the local National Guard unit. I didn't sleep well that night, expecting the wailing of sirens at any minute.

After five more hours on the road--we had split up to travel faster--I began to look forward to this gathering immensely, so when I got to Roseburg, Oregon (where you turn east into the Umpqa National Forest to get to White Horse Meadow, my destination) I began to look forward to food, a good sleep, some music and comfort. Roseburg was crawling with hitchhikers, all heading where I was, to this great Sixties type rock concert. Woodstock, here I come. A VW van slowed down, picked me up, and then took another hitcher, and another, and we headed off. By their conversation I was able to deduce something was amiss. It turns out this rock concert was the Rainbow Gathering Healing Festival, a collection of people who believe they are the fulfillment of a Hopi prophecy that said five generations after the white men destined to live in harmony with the great Spirit of the Earth. Karma, reincarnation, natural foods, meditation, tai chi, buddhism, astrology, yin and yang, ecology, TM, astral projection, cosmic consciousness, acid--anything spiritual or far out and freaky was right on with these people. I got to the gathering--7000 hippies in a cold, wet, muddy meadow in Boondocks, Oregon with dogs, goats and drunken people and a huge, disgusting pot of beans--this was not my ideal of a good time at the moment, after Mt. Shasta and Tioga Pass.

I got back on the road, went all the way to Portland that night, slept in the Greyhound station and next morning got on the eastbound bus and didn't get off until I had reached St. Louis two and a half days later, having seen the Rockies and Salt Lake City and the Great Plains as one great blur en route. Thanks to a friend in St. Louis, I had a nice warm bed and some home cooking again. I gave up all pretense to membership in the great club of hippies, freaks, road people and adventures. Six days, four friends and Cincinnati and Philadelphia later, I was home in Brooklyn.