Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
I didn't ask, but in another synchronous cohesion I said yes and cheap, only two fifty. He
took his lunch break to ride back to Gary's, and the deal was done. Gary and I split the extra
fifty bucks to seal our friendship. I never saw him again, but he still stands tall.
Hanging out at the beach a few days more was easy, ogling the sex kittens with the huge
racks, watching the muscle guys pump up and stare at their arms, roller skating, playing in the
waves. It got old, and a major topic was rampant theft to feed the heroin habit creeping into
the neighborhood. It did not feel fresh or free but more of a mutation. It felt like time to move
on, a recurring theme of those days. Time to restore the soul at the Mecca of our freedom.
On the road to San Francisco with my thumb curled north and my pocket thumping with
cash, I figured life might well stay sweet till old age. I'd be rich and famous by then and could
deal with challenges more easily. Why not?
I thought about friendships and counted those solid enough to count on for a day or two
of shelter, so if I wanted to stay on the road, hitchhiking cross country and back and around I'd
have a place every few hundred miles or every night, whichever came first. I still think about
Susan and would have called her a few times over the decades.
Traveling indefinitely only seemed like a viable concept the first few days out. It could get
old directly, but most things do, and the biggest challenge seemed to be in keeping things fresh
and lively—and happy, in spite of the topsy-turvy world crying out for equilibrium. Call me
old fashioned; I could stand on an on-ramp and watch a hundred cars whiz by with no chance
of getting a ride to San Francisco, because unity got so diluted in your urban centers, espe-
cially LA, where everybody was in such a hurry to begin with. And I didn't care.
Never mind. I could hit the groove in inner space on the Moody Blues, Quicksilver Mes-
senger Service, Country Joe, Joe Cocker, Joni Mitchell, Arlo Guthrie or any of them. Or shake
a tail feather to Motown or Memphis. I'd visited both and understood the soul groove and
the funky groove too. A well-rounded repertoire was invaluable to a roadman going coast to
coast, border to border. Insight came easy on an on-ramp in summertime, which felt like an-
other Summer of Love, after all. Watching the world speed by, casting fate to the wind, you
could hear reassurance on the breeze, see clouds gambol overhead and know that a ride would
come along, likely in a van driven by a sister or brother.
It would be another two years before America would capture the age we were born to. The
boomer wave was the first generation to say that war is bad, that we won't fight without a dir-
ect threat to family or country. We learned this from raising hell and waiting for a ride to the
next happening on
Ventura Highway, in the sun . . . shine
.
I could sing along with America or the Marvelettes, confident that life would shape up
with more and greater insights. In a few rides I got into San Francisco and delivered to a
house of many friends, where new friends could crash on a couch. That was cool. Everything
was everything, and San Francisco was about as stoned as a groove could get. The house was
