The Vagabond Days

“And it’s a hitchhike a hundred miles. I’m a rag-a-muffin child.” – Paul Simon, Cloudy

There was a period of time in my life, roughly from 1967 through 1970, when hitchhiking was my primary method of covering any great distance. I didn’t own a car. I had very little money. And the kids of my generation were taking up the gauntlet of Jack Kerouac and going “on the road”. For me, at first, it was just short hops in and around the friendly suburbs of the San Francisco peninsula. Usually I was trying to get to Cupertino from Mountain View to link up with my then girlfriend Nina. Sometimes I would luck out and get offered a joint by the driver. Or sometimes I would do the offering. In any event, it was a time of extreme trust and faith both from the driver and the passenger.

By 1970 I was living in Santa Cruz, getting by on mescaline and unemployment and getting around on an old bicycle. When the bike was stolen, it was pretty much back to using the old thumbs again. On a hitching hop down to Big Sur that summer I met a woman from Orange County. After our weekend interlude by the mighty Pacific, I became a regular roadside vagabond covering the several hundred miles between Santa Cruz and La Habra at least half a dozen times that year. Sometimes I’d get lucky and get a through ride nearly the full distance, but often it was just short hops from one freeway overpass to another….from Santa Cruz to Watsonville, Ventura to Oxnard. And the urban milieu of the L.A. basin could be positively frightening.

Nevertheless, love drove me onward. Once in a while a trucker would pick me up. One time I was picked up by a business man type who wanted to show me pornographic comics. Another time I got picked up by a fellow who called himself “Honda John” and shared some good weed with me while he ranted about his no-good girlfriend. Several times I was left by the side of the road in the most hopeless of circumstances. Yet I would always eventually get a ride.

And now that I’m older, I think about all the things that could have gone wrong. All the rides that could have ended in disaster. I remember that when the Manson murders made the headlines, it became much harder to get picked up…much harder to try and telegraph a peaceful and benign countenance to the hundreds of cars zooming by along the Coast Highway. Yet so very often, I put my faith completely in the hands of my fellow man.

I was lucky. And probably not very bright. But that yen for the open road and the peculiar kind of freedom that comes from having nothing and not knowing where the ride might end still bubbles up within me once in a while. It was truly the best of times and the worst of times.

Boomer-Angst

“…and I don’t know who I am but, you know, life is for learnin’.” - Joni Mitchell, Woodstock

We baby boomers are an odd generation, born during the last great world conflict and conflicted ever since. I was born in 1947 when Robert Mitchum was filming Out of the Past and Humphrey Bogart was doing Dark Passage on the streets of San Francisco. I’m old enough to remember seeing Elvis Presley’s first TV appearance, catching the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, and watching the moon landing on a big screen in the Fillmore Auditorium while waiting for Country Joe and the Fish to start their first set. I grew up on the clean suburban streets of Mountain View before it was a part of the Silicon Valley. And walked the railroad tracks of the old Vasona Line before it morphed into the Foothill Expressway.

Look at me…this anomaly of the new millennia, listening to the Grateful Dead while nursing my arthritic joints. Working out at the gym between appointments with my chiropractor. Waxing nostalgic about the days of mushrooms and weed when the current drug of choice is Vicodin. I hobble into the future refusing to be beaten down, dancing to Fountains of Wayne and trying, in vain, to put the skids on Father Time. Behind me is the detritus of ex-lovers, broken marriages, old friends who didn’t make it, and a few lost opportunities. But also behind me are the years spent living in national parks, hiking and exploring the glorious American landscape, the raising of two beautiful children, and the opportunities captured.

When my grandfather was 65, he looked old. Suit clad and sedentary. I am nearly 65 but I still feel the beat, the energy, the vibe. My generation looks younger and keeps moving toward some indefinable goal, taking with it the broad perspective of the final half of the twentieth century. McCarthyism. Amos n’ Andy. Civil Rights. JFK. Duck and Cover Drills. Drive In Movies. Reagonomics. Space Shuttles. And a huge and diverse panoply of cultural iconic events. Seems like there is a lot more noise and confusion these days, and life keeps moving faster. But I am glad for when I was born, and that I can look back on a life well lived and never boring or taken for granted.

“No regrets, Coyote” – Joni again.