Bay Area December 20 1974 Revised - One Man on the Bummel

One December day, having scraped together a fortune of about three hundred dollars to pay for a bus trip to the Bay Area I approached the new Greyhound station in Waterloo, Iowa. Approached, not entered as the line was so long and so slow that I turned away; waded the slush across old Highway 218, stuck out my thumb and three days later was in San Francisco, or would have been had I enough sense to accept an invitation from my last driver of the trip. I was actually in Pinol.

The way out was interesting. I do not recall much. I had been hitching to Iowa City often and having gotten a good ride to Cedar Rapids was picked up by on of my regular benefactors (I rather suspected that he was driving around looking for boy, had decided on the first attempt that I wasn’t what he wanted but enjoyed my conversation enough to take me to the interstate whenever he saw me again). Then a very long ride with a man who didn’t like me so well, that ended at a rest stop in Utah when he asked me to drive and I admitted that I didn’t have a license. He stopped to sleep and I went back to the road. I remember nothing about the rest of the trip until I was just south of Sacramento but I think it was one long ride and I was asleep for a lot of it. The traffic was heavy and not friendly, then I had a mystical experience. I heard the voice of my sister’s deceased mother-in-law tell me to wish on that next load of hay. What next load of hay? * But then there it came and I wished for a ride and bam, the next car stopped a pair of sweet kids, a boy and girl who asked me about my trip. When I expressed just how tired I was they gave me a couple hits of speed, which I had never used before (and haven’t since) before dropping me off at a gas station in Napa. A beautiful gay man picked me up. He was living in the city and liked to pick up artists of all media, he had just had a guitarist living with him for a week. I felt so out-classed by him, I did not take up the suggestion. He did tell me that I was lucky to get a ride at that spot as there was a large military base and prison and maybe a mental prison in the neighborhood and most persons would not pick up hitchers there. I believe he actually went out of his way to take me to my sisters’ home in Pinol.

After a week there, with my sister, I decided to return to Iowa, also via thumb, also with my three hundred dollars. Her husband dropped off in Berkeley with my back pack and a little carboard sign, along a stretch of street, Oxford, I believe, where hitch hikers, like a crowd of ragtag prostitutes, were hanging out waiting for customers, excuse me -- rides.

Before noon I was given a ride to Sacramento in a pickup truck, by Leo, a tiny firefighter.

And there I stood by the freeway till a pair of French Canadians picked me up. They were driving a four-door sedan and put me in the back, usually a good sign. The passenger apologized saying they weren’t going far then asked where I was heading. I said Iowa, then had to tell them where it was, which was very helpful to them as they suddenly remembered that they were actually going to Iowa and would quite happily take me all the way.

I had the feeling that they, perhaps, had misunderstood my directions and thought Iowa might be at the end of a disused logging road in the mountains where if one were ever found there wouldn’t be much left to identify -– so -- I asked for a handout. Any amount would do really. Such nice fellows could spare a couple bucks.

I don’t know how these two ever got through life without me as once more I had prompted memory, until that moment they had forgotten a most important engagement and regretted that they must drop me at the next off ramp. As they had been so good to me, even though there was no handout, I felt that the only fair thing to do was to get the hell out of their car as fast as possible.

The next driver, a Hungarian from Iowa, was quite pleasant and took us into the sunset mountains on his way to Tahoe. Night had fallen when we reached his turn off. There I was left in the dark and falling snow standing between twelve-foot-high snow banks by a sign reading ‘Donner Pass’. Well……

Perhaps at nine or ten a large truck stopped; it was a tow truck designed to rescue disabled semi tractors. The driver said he could lose his job if he were caught picking up hitchers but did anyway and as we were both. from Iowa.... He was returning to his base in Reno and warned me to watch out for the cops as it was illegal to hitch in Reno but not to be too worried. The cops didn’t need more paperwork; if one came by, he would only scold me before driving me out to the edge of town and dropping me off there. This was the cheapest and easiest way to get rid of hitchers.

Reno proved to be a long wait, standing by an on ramp and gathering a crowd: First John wandered up to stand alongside me then Jim came up and chatted for a while. Jim was a tall, heavy set young man who was traveling with Wally, his small lap dog. After an hour or so he decided that he and Wally would step across the road to refresh himself at a diner there. John thought he might go with them. I was perhaps hypoglycemic and hypothermic but stuck to my post. Jim tucked Wally inside his coat and they all left me. As soon as they were out of sight the cop showed up.

Well, the cop was very stern and hard and disapproving, but by that time I was very very tired, so tired that somewhere during his lecture to me I interrupted asking when he was going to drive me out of town. He was quite offended by my practicality. With glowing cheeks and ardent eyes he ordered me to walk, telling me that he would be back and if he caught me hitching he would be driving me to the jail. That boy was red hot – under the collar. He would have been more so had he known that I had a lid of pot in my coat pocket and fifteen more lids in my bag. I was not stoned but very hypoglycemic.

When I couldn’t see his tail lights, I stopped walking and stuck out my thumb. I never saw the cop or Jim or the dog again. An angel sent a man in a red convertible. Where are you going, he asked, a town in Iowa, I said, the truckers call it ‘Cut and Shoot.’ Why he asked. “People feel we do that a lot,” I replied. So, I did get a ride out of town, and a melted candy bar, his gift from his glove compartment, my first food in over twenty hours.

Red Convertible left me at the last exit to Las Vegas there under a lamp beside the road where there seemed nothing but its’ pool of light, the night and a mysterious industrial plant far across the highway on the empty plane silently out gassing huge clouds of steam. I was thinking perhaps they were burning Jews, yet another reason to regret having been circumcised, when a tiny Leo in a blue Saab stopped. He was a construction worker in the City and had driven by the place in Berkeley where I had started but hadn’t seen anyone going to the Midwest. My Leo, whose name I do not recall, was driving to keep Christmas with his family. He wanted someone to talk with to keep him awake and maybe relieve him at the wheel. Good, however that meant that I had to stay awake to keep him awake. So, on, passing Winnemucca where on the trip out I had begun a lifetime of coffee drinking, the Madeleine of my histories.

Flavor

in the first taste of coffee

opens,

can open nostalgia’s doors.

Can remove me

place me

beneath spring leaves

on washed sidewalks

Chicago mornings

lungs remembering lake breath

body wrapped all around cool with lake air.

Carry me to dawn in Winnemucca

surrounded by its vast isolation

within it’s strange winter

in dark cafe under stares of disappointed slots,

drinking my black breakfast.

Can take me to the highway

my thumb out

aching for the West and mystery.

We did fine until the next morning when we came down to the Great Salt Lake and he told me I had to drive. I might have had a learner’s permit which might have still been in date, but no one had allowed me to use their car for the test so that is all I would have had no license, or even an I.D. Wanting to do my part and be of help, I did not feel my little Leo needed to know that just then, besides as mother always said, ‘what they don’t know won’t make their heads swim.’ So off we went and doing quite well even though I was fried and the morning sun was screaming right into my eyes. The road there is arrow straight and goes forever. I remember concentrating on keeping in the lane and keeping my eyes open, then there was a loud ‘Bump Bump!’ Opening my eyes I saw that we were on a bridge that had been nowhere visible last I remembered but I was exactly in the middle of my lane so I resolved to not allow myself to fall to sleep again and carried on. Before my Leo awoke and took the wheel again, I found myself awaking to those bumps twice more but as each time the car was dead in the middle of its lane, I decided that I must drive better in my sleep than when awake.

The Leo took back the wheel in Salt Lake City and I was so glad. But once we started up the Rockies engine trouble also started. Well into the mountain we stopped at a village, just a spot in the road but it had a garage. The problem was found to be with the distributor and was fixed while a tribal man gave me the fish-eye. The town was so small our visit would have made the newspaper, if they had a newspaper.

Leo drove on into snow country and as dark came I fell asleep, waking some time later amid a light snow surrounded in the warm golden lights like glowing leaves in a magic forest but was the main street of Vale shining in the dark of night. I hope you have had or will have such a magical experience.

After crossing the Great Divide on the descent into Denver, the car lost all power. Lightless and soundless we passed everything on the road coasting at ninety miles an hour while trying to keep it that slow…plunging down the mountain and on into Denver, until Leo spotted a garage off the interstate and near a ramp. We were able to coast off the ramp right to its’ door. It was the distributor cap again.

The next morning in Kansas I was expected to drive again with the sun in my eyes but that day I stayed awake. The land looked haunted and barren in the bright sunlight of a dry winter. It felt so much more like Halloween than Christmas. The Leo was turning south at Kansas City so dropped me off where a pretty blonde gay boy, with a diamond as big as the Ritz on his finger, took me as far as the gate of the factory where he worked. He was so cheerful.

Everyone was driving pickups with gun racks. Not so common a site in Iowa then but our corn farmers had not started wearing cowboy hats and western boots either.

The rides started with a young combat vet, because it was Christmas.

Then a woman who went out of her way for the same reason.

Then the old couple out for a ride after church (it was now Sunday).

Almost lastly was the sweet artilleryman who was also on his way home driving from Oklahoma, for Christmas. Today he would be a Vietnam Era Vet, which is different from being a Vietnam Veteran – no one had been trying to kill him. He was cheerful and happy that as a draftee he was spending his tour of duty smoking pot in Panama. Good for him I wish they all had.

And finally, believe it or not, John from the Reno on-ramp, still on his way to Minneapolis. Seeing me again by the road asked his driver to take me along. I left them at the freeways’ junction with highway twenty where a woman returning home from college made room for me amide her luggage and dog. And then home once more, to find a friend who hadn’t noticed my absence from town was waiting to take me to a party in Cedar Falls where I first sung this song that you have read.

I ate food the next day.

So, passes the youth of those of no value.

December 12 to 22, 1974

David Weldon

•Once home, I asked my mother about the wish on hay. She was the youngest daughter and was born with a vail over her face so she was thought to be clairvoyant, and she seemed to be. She thought for a moment and then repeated a rhyme, “Wish on hay and look away.” She hadn’t thought about it for years but that is what the old folks said when she was a child. Oh, and as for the pound, it went back to where it came from next summer. No one was interested, but that is another story.

PS the coat was bought for me at J. C. Pennies in 1967... I still have it and if I lost ten pounds could button it and still be comfortable in it.

 

Done