Back In The Day

I'm in recovery now, ten years and counting. I'm a senior now, I get all the discounts. And where once I was usually the scariest person on my side of the street, I hate to admit it, but I am just the littlest bit timid these days, and I'm vulnerable. I understand these things but it wasn't always like this.

Back in the day I hitchhiked all over the place. At the drop of a hat, so to speak. Just walk out the door, go to the nearest highway and stick out my thumb. I went to escape where I was at, and it took many years and much grumbling before I finally realized that you can’t do that. You are always where you’re at.

But changing where I was at seemed back then to do the trick, and maybe it did. At first. It had a lot to do with the innocence of youth, and hippie fatalism, “If God wants me to get to Portland, man, after I smoke the rest of this doobie, man, there will come a truck, man, or a schoolbus or a VW camper, man, and they will stop, man, because the universe, you know, man, wants it that way. It can’t NOT stop, man. That’s God…”

One time me and Bob Olson, Bo, took a trip.

Bo was a great man and an outstanding philosopher of the hashpipe. He was a big guy, long hair in an unkempt ponytail.He had a gravelly voice and a thoughtful air and a love for the old bluesmen and he read unusual books acquired at random and he thought in his own untutored way about what he read. Sadly he is no longer with us. That is beside the point for now but it is a sad fact. Oh well. 

We decided at 1:30 in the morning that we had to go to the free concert the Rolling Stones were putting on the very next day at the Altamount Speedway. We were smoking hash at the little house he  shared with Doug Stevens, also sadly no longer this side of the water, way down at the end of Roosevelt  Boulevard in Charleston, Oregon. Doug was another philosopher and you should have heard them argue, air blue with smoke, about things they had read.  I digress. Again. Doug didn't want to go, but I did, so we put on our jackets and walked out the door.

I swear to you this is true, and man we were in God’s pocket. We walked up to the Highway in front of Red’s Tavern in the misty hours well past closing time, which is a place you can stand for a very long time and never see a soul in the middle of the night, and within five minutes a dark sedan, not very new, rolled to a stop, loaded us up, and  dropped us off on Highway 101 in North Bend just before the big green bridge. The same thing happened. This next big sedan dropped us off in the middle of Reedsport. In those days it was a very bad idea to hitch within the Reedsport city limits. Cops.

We walked through a dark and sleepy town, and on the other side, starting up the long grade of Highway 38 heading up the Umpqua. And it happened again. A big sedan, not very new, rolled up as if bidden, the first car we had seen in the half hour we had been in Reedsport, and we were on our way once more. It was, I think, just starting to get light out when we walked up the onramp to I-5, not even full day. This time it was different. The first southbound vehicle we saw was an old Ford pickup truck, and it was wobbling down the shoulder in the breakdown lane at about 35 miles an hour. It stopped.

The fellow behind the wheel was loaded. High as a kite. He explaind that he was on his way to San Francisco to pick up a load of heroin, was junk sick, and had taken a handful of Seconal to cut the cold turkey. Bad idea. The windshield, I couldn’t help but notice, was entirely missing. There were glittering crystals of safety glass all over the front seat, on his Levi jacket, in his hair. He said he had hit a guardrail end-on, and it had ridden up over the hood and punched in the windshield, but “It missed me, man, and it woke me up, too, and the wind, man, its keeping me awake now, so that’s good, but could one of you guys drive for a while, man I gotta nod off, man, you dig, just for a minute…”

And we were at Altamount Speedway by three oclock that afternoon…
And then a couple years later I spent 26 1/2 miserable hours in the same spot beside Highway 101 in Smith River California in the rain. 

A greyhound bus ticket is a luxury I still appreciate..