On the Road in 1980, Part 3

Madonna, Mexico City (1980) by Graciela Uterbide

I stayed two days in Guadalajara. On the train ride to the city, I met Rafael, warm and talkative, coming from Los Mochis up the coast to find work. We ended up looking for a place together, Rafael leading us into a neighborhood I might’ve steered clear of on my own, between the train station and Plaza de los Mariachis, where we found a cheap room with two beds at the Hotel Cinco de Mayo. My first night, waiting for an order of tacos from a street vendor, I was approached by a girl, maybe fourteen or fifteen, ripped sweatshirt and blue jeans, dark hungry eyes, tongue slowly licking her lips, indicating that her boombox needed batteries. She spoke in a rush; I didn’t understand half of what she said but knew what she meant. Facing a force capable of pulling me out of myself and into a state of thrilling danger, I replied, “No, gracias.” I was not averse to risk, but I could see how badly it might all end, both for me and her.

I did get my Mexico travel visa replaced in Guadalajara, but the American consulate could provide no help with my “lost” passport. The second night, Rafael went on a bender, staggering into our room two or three times, a bottle of mescal in hand, inviting me to join him. He never made it back that night. I awoke the next morning to the warbling of the hotel’s lovebirds. When I left, I was stuck with the whole bill. 

It felt good to get back to hitchhiking – swinging my rucksack up on my back, sticking out my thumb, waiting for something to happen. I let my rides dictate my meandering easterly route across the Mexican Altiplano, through Jalisco and into Guanajuato – Tepatitlán de Morelos, San Juan de los Lagos, Lagos de Moreno. My last ride of the day took me to the eastern edge of León. I hiked across fields of corn and green onions and into the foothills of a mountain range, camping among saguaro and nopales. settling in for one of those “Long Nights” of tranquilidad. 

As I was reviewing my dreams in the first streaks of dawn, a campesino passed by and began a monologue I understood little of. A half hour later, I chatted with three men and a gaggle of kids. Then one Rosalio Rocha stopped to invite me to his home for a breakfast of un café and sopa de frijoles con chorizo. I was welcomed into Rosalio’s adobe home, his wife cooking over an open fire on the dirt floor, two shy niños hiding behind her skirts. It was a beautiful moment – I was amazed and humbled by their heartfelt generosity.

A young mining engineer named Ángel gave me a ride from León to Guanajuato. He and his younger brother Ramon invited me to stay in a spare room in their apartment, and I did so for two days. I hung out quite a bit with Ramon, an amiable and mellow law student. Ángel was willing to share more than his apartment; after he brought home a woman from the disco and they had engaged in some rather boisterous sex, he knocked on my door, offering her to me. I respectfully declined, explaining I was tired from wandering the city all day. I had other reasons for refusing a gift that wasn’t his to give. But I truly had been wandering that colonial city, enchanted. My journal contains the following appreciation: [1]

There is a city I know. A subterranean street runs its length, passing beneath the public buildings that withstand like monuments. The road and its walls, its arches and ceiling, are constructed of large blocks of stone the people had discovered in the mountains above the city.

The city nestles in canyons under the shadow of these mountains, arms of houses stretching to the left and right of the main thoroughfare. Alleys so narrow that but one person can pass at a time descend the hillsides by means of steps, emptying the various pockets of the city.

The homes are washed in colors of aquamarine and lavender, tangerine and canary. Their shapes exemplify the strictness of the right angle, and considerable use is made of the flat roof space. During the day, this is a delightful place to be – lines of white clothing wave in the sunlight, wives whistle their unique language to each other across the rooftops. Families take their midday meals here, feasting on the panorama, acknowledging the passersby on the highway that hugs the hillsides like a shelf, encircling the city.

This peculiar form of speech I have encountered – how to translate its code of sibilants? An afternoon stroll is punctuated by the casual hissing of greetings. And the sounds of the morning market – an aviary awakened! This idiom adequately serves the city, though it preserves neither the vocabulary of philosophy nor any sense of a future tense.

In the evenings, the people gather to fill the gardens of the many plazas, listening to the final daysongs of the mockingbirds that nest in trees trimmed to form geometric designs. There is no public lighting – the entire populace dresses in white (even the beggars and shoeshine boys) and the city is graced with a perpetual moon that strikes the meeting places luminous.

Above the city is an old palace inhabited by a collection of mummies buried a century ago and maintained by minerals in the soil. From behind glass cases, they reflect gaping-mouth wonder, as if amazed by death, or by the lives they left behind. 

When night does fall, it is complete. I walk in utter darkness, the silence broken only by the occasional exclamations of lovers. The cobblestones of each street have become as familiar as the knuckles of my hands, yet I have found no true road leaving this city.

I did leave Guanajuato, though, hitching to San Miguel de Allende, camping outside the city along the sandy banks of a stream. I hiked into San Miguel to check out the Instituto Allende, a well-known visual arts college popular with American and Canadian students. Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, and other Beats spent time there in the 1950s, but the scene no longer seemed interesting. I walked out of the city to a dry plateau, camping behind the roofless ruins of a small chapel. Desert twigs for a cookfire, empty open spaces, coyotes yelping at the roar of a plane. Whether in a city around people or hanging out with myself, I learned something either way.

The next morning I hitched a ride to Querétaro, where I stopped for a lunch of café con leche and pan dulce, then leaped the 200 kilometers to Ciudad de México in two quick rides. A woman in the train station in Guadalajara had given me the address of a student hostel, so I decided to check it out. It was near the Bosque de Chapultepec, in the Zona Rosa,[2] only 70 pesos per day for a dormitory bed and a breakfast. But I needed a student card, which cost me an additional 150 pesos, including the ID photo. The cost was not considerable in terms of US dollars ($6.50), but my goal to travel for at least two more months was dependent on my frugality.

View of the Pyamid of the Moon from atop the Pyramid of the Sun, Teotihuacán

I spent four days in Mexico City. One was devoted to visiting the Mesoamerian archaeological site at Teotihuacán, a 50-kilometer bus ride northeast of the city. I climbed the Pyramid of the Sun and surveyed the broad valley stretching far to all sides, imagining what this must’ve looked like at its height some fifteen centuries ago, when according to population estimates, it was the sixth-largest city in the world. 

After spending an entire morning cutting through swaths of red tape at the US Embassy, I was finally able to get a new passport, thanks to my voter registration card, of all things. And once I had that new passport, I visited the Guatemalan Embassy and obtained a travel visa for that country. 

That glazed look on my face - weariness from battling American consulate bureaucracy.

The multilingual and multinational array of young travelers at the hostel offered its own entertainment. My last night there, a group of us went out on the town, traipsing from bar to club to private party, dancing and drinking cuba libres. We headed back to the hostel long after all public transportation had shut down. Laughing and goofing, our motley and besotted crew skipped down the middle of the normally busy Avenida Paseo de la Reforma, giving each other a boost so we could sneak in through an unlocked window at four a.m.

Footnotes:

[1] The piece was influenced by Italo Calvino’s Imaginary Cities, published in 1972 and translated into English in 1974.
[2] That trendy boho neighborhood was nearing the end of its heyday.

On the Road in 1980, Part 2

Mujer ángel, Desierto de Sonora (Angel Woman, Sonoran Desert), 1979, Graciela Uturbide

By mid-February I was crossing the border into Mexico. My circuitous route from Iowa City via San Francisco to the border took four weeks as I eased into the flow of travel and recalibrated the balance between getting somewhere (making miles) and being somewhere. After spending a wild week in Tucson with my old friend Tony Hoagland,[1] I hitched down to Nogales and easily crossed into Mexico. I checked out the buses and trains going south, taking a bus simply because it departed sooner, a six-hour, 400-kilometer ride due south to Guaymas, the first good-sized city on the Gulf of California.

When I left San Francisco over two weeks earlier, I hitched just 100 miles down the Pacific Coast Highway to Santa Cruz. I located my friend Theresa from Iowa City, who had just moved there and was living a couple miles outside of town up a dead-end canyon road. Like some nymph of the redwoods, Theresa and her sweetness kept me lingering in that mellow beach town for almost a week, but I also yearned for the regimen and introspection of the road. “Society, … I hope you're not lonely without me.”[2] On my way to Tucson, I wrote in my journal, “Beginning to look forward rather than back. Paying attention to my actions and transactions. Are the things I do and say equivalent to my feelings, my emotions, my convictions?”

I passed the time on the bus to Guaymas in conversation with my seatmate, using the opportunity to brush up on my conversational Spanish skills. He was a friendly guy, buying me tamales and guayabas from the vendors who crowded the bus in whatever dusty Sonaran village it stopped to take on or discharge passengers, passing their wares up through the windows. When I got to Guaymas, everyone I met was directing me to nearby San Carlos, mistakenly assuming I wanted to be where all the gringos were. Nevertheless, I took their advice, catching a local bus that took me there in a half-hour. Faced with the growing darkness and weary from traveling all day, I quickly found a quiet spot on the beach and set up camp. The next morning I discovered I was surrounded by beauty, situated on a lovely little bay backed by scrub desert and beyond that the craggy mountains and canyons of Cajón del Diablo.[3]

I also discovered my passport was missing. After frantically ransacking my backpack, I went back to Guaymas and checked at my two stops there – the taquería and the bus station – but it hadn’t turned up. The more plausible explanation for my passport’s disappearance implicated my amiable seatmate, who was likely making plans to put it to good use before it expired in five months. I gave myself a stern talking to about not being on my game and not keeping an eye on my essential possessions. On the other hand, I felt good about having perhaps facilitated his immigration plans.

While at the station, I met a young simpatico Norwegian guy, Per, who was preparing to catch a train south, but after I’d mentioned the beach I was camping on, he decided to join me. Meanwhile, I contemplated my options for replacing my passport: retracing my steps to the States, going directly to the American consulate in Mexico City, or traveling at my own pace and accepting the risk of getting stopped by the federales sin papeles.

We stayed just one more night on the beach in San Carlos. When the weather turned cloudy and windy and cool the next morning, we agreed to pack up and head south. We scoped out our options: trains or buses down the coast toward Mazatlán or ferries across the gulf to Baja California. While at the bus station, we met Kathy and Diane, down from San Francisco for a little getaway vacation. After chatting a bit, we bought a six-pack of Pacifico and found a quiet spot down by the harbor where we could drink and continue our conversation. By the time we finished another round of beers at their hotel room, they had persuaded themselves to go with us to Mazatlán. The purposes of our journeys were quite different, but neither Per nor I had any qualms about letting them join us for a while. They were fun to hang out with, and Kathy did speak fairly good Spanish. 

By midnight we were catching the train from nearby Empalme, and as the sun rose the next morning we were approaching Culiacán, the capital of Sinaloa, two-thirds of the way to  Mazatlán, a lively Pacific seaport of over 200,000 people. It hosts one of the best Carnaval celebrations in Mexico, a week-long street party that would be just kicking into gear the day of our arrival. On the train, we met Bill from Montana, a rangy, knowledgeable guy with an easy-going drawl, who joined our little entourage and recommended we all head for Isla de la Piedra.

After disembarking in Mazatlán, we quickly sussed out the scene and found our way to the docks, where we caught a ferry launch across the mouth of the harbor to Isla de la Piedra, actually a long peninsula that sheltered the harbor. The ferry took us to a small fishing village, from where we hiked about a kilometer to a beautiful beach sheltered by a grove of coconut palms stretching southeast for miles. The only buildings were a few open-air thatched-roof restaurants, one run by a Mexicana named Linda, who catered especially to the gringo hippies camped there. The current assemblage included Americans, Germans, Swiss, Italians, Brazilians, Swedes. 

I was delighted to join this international gathering. We made our campsite near others scattered along the back edge of the beach. Bill was particularly handy as we rigged up a shelter of coconut palm fronds and tarps to protect us from the midday sun and the steady northwest winds that picked up with the new moon. I romped in the sea, body-surfed, gathered freshly fallen coconuts for drinking, and played bocce with German Siegfried and Swiss Catherine, using empty coconut shells. At night we’d gather around a bonfire on the beach, smoke pot, drink rum and Kahlua, drum on improvised percussion instruments, and sing and howl at the moon. It seemed much farther from Mazatlán’s Centro than a half hour by foot and ferry. 

On Saturday night, a group of us went into the city to experience Carnaval. Mazatlán’s version is much tamer and more family-oriented than Rio’s Carnaval or New Orleans’ Mardi Gras.[4] But it was still a wild scene. The boardwalk at Paseo Olas Altas filled with laughing people. A parade with florid floats and pretty girls all dolled up. Fireworks erupted throughout the night. Bandas and gruperas played lively music on small stages. Mariachis roamed the streets. Folks carried plastic Coca-Cola bottles containing as much rum as coke. Beer stands on many streetcorners. Lots of drunkenness and a simmering undertone of violence. But Carnaval was mostly a joyous escape from the everyday grind. Young boys and girls flitted about, throwing confetti in each others’ faces as a kind of flirtation. As I awoke the next morning, I was still shaking colorful bits of paper out of my hair. 

On the last day of Carnaval, I decided to move on. That evening, at the height of the festivities, I caught a bus to the train station. Many others seemed to have the same plan – the bus was jam-packed, not another person could’ve squeezed on. The old vehicle was laboring. Its shocks, such as they were, had been pushed to their limit, the bus scraping bottom whenever it hit a pothole. Making a right turn, it tipped precariously. Everyone was laughing. Finally, the bus just died in the middle of the road, and we all staggered off into the night. 

I got directions to the station and continued on foot. When I got there, I leaned my backpack against a pillar to form a backrest and napped a few hours, ignoring the hubbub. At midnight, I caught a train south through Nayarit and then inland, slowly chugging through rugged mountains and teetering over stunning ravines, across Jalisco toward Guadalajara, where I hope to resolve my passport problems.

Footnotes:

[1] One night, Tony, his friend Lynn, and I dropped acid, hopped in his VW Bug, drove west into Saguaro National Park, and wandered among the strange desert cacti – saguaro, jumping cholla, prickly pear, fishhook barrel – until we were hopelessly lost and howling with the coyotes at low-flying planes.

[2] When I read Jon Krakauer’s book Into the Wild and watched Sean Penn’s movie adaptation and listened to Eddie Vedder’s soundtrack, I identified with Chris McCandless’s amazing and tragic journey, undertaken ten years after this (1990-1992).

[3] The Devil’s Drawer, a Special Biosphere Reserve.

[4] However, it’s true that at Mazatlán’s 2017 Carnaval, Sinaloa’s Secretariat of Health distributed 80,000 condoms to combat the spread of STDs.

On the Road in 1980, Part 1

Mission Dolores Park on the western edge of the Mission District, San Franciso

After an exhilarating year performing with Pink Gravy and the Eggthings, I ducked out of the local rock ’n’ roll limelight to hit the road again. My plan was to return to Mexico and go farther south this time into Central America. The semester before I left, I took classes in Intensive Spanish and Ethnology of Mesoamerica to prepare myself. This trip also put on hold a slow-developing relationship with Pat and her son Sierra, who would turn two in a month. Pat and I toggled back and forth between being good friends and lovers. I would sidle up to the idea of entering a committed relationship, but then my attention would be diverted. I was smitten with a cute, quirky, blonde-haired girl[1] in our Undergraduate Poetry Workshop class, Theresa Love (yeah, hard to make up a name more apt), who would leave me handwritten notes: “Meet me at four o’clock by the nut butters at the co-op.” Pat dismissively referred to her as “Jams & Jellies.” I didn’t leave Iowa City on a drizzly overcast January day[2] to extricate myself from this messy love triangle, but I was admittedly over my head and welcomed the chance to step back a bit.

Four days later, I was in one of my favorite cities, San Francisco, on a beautiful warm Saturday morning. I was drinking coffee in Jim’s Donut Shop on the corner of Mission and 29th, all the lively street traffic brushing past my shoulder on the other side of the plate glass window. I basked in the sun, marveling at the strange and unlikely happenstances of life. 

An hour earlier, I had been walking up Mission Street, smiling and digging the sunshine vibes, when I was attracted by a low whistle from a cab driver across a busy pocket park. I walked over and began talking with Karen, an attractive Black cabbie who, in a seductively husky voice, invited me to climb in and go for a ride. Without a thought – my mind as foggy as those of the Greek sailors enchanted by the sirens’ song – I did, and we did. An hour later, Karen was dropping me off at that same little park on Mission, a cab ride I’d never forget. She gave me her phone number – still legible in my travel journal in her neatly penciled handwriting – but I never did call her. Not sure why, perhaps I didn’t want to sully the serendipity of that moment with something intentional or anticipated.

In that booth at Jim’s Donut Shop, I took my first deep relaxing breaths since I’d left Iowa City. I’d been planning to head south on I-35, but when you get on the merry-go-round, you grab the ring, no matter where it takes you. I’d grabbed a two-day, 1,400-mile ride from Des Moines to Winnemucca, through the cold high Wyoming Rockies and the barren Utah and Nevada expanses. My companion for this long stretch, libertarian Dennis from Oregon, shared the sleeping accommodations of his van when we’d stop for the night. By Thursday night I had made it from Winnemucca to rainy Reno. I walked into a glitzy neon casino near the highway, sat down at the bar to have a beer, my backpack leaning against the barstool, and before long was befriended by Chuck, a middle-aged guy who offered me a warm, dry place to crash for the night. Ignoring my misgivings, I accepted his offer and, for the next seven or eight hours, held off Chuck’s relentless advances, patiently explaining that I didn’t swing that way, trying to catch a few winks in between. Afterward, I wondered whether I should’ve just let him have his way with me so I could get some decent sleep, but I don’t think I was comfortable enough with myself and my sexuality to do that.

Chuck did drive me out to the I-80 entrance ramp the next morning, my “virginity” intact, and I soon caught a ride through Donner Pass and into the verdant Promised Land of California. When I got to San Francisco, I looked up my old high school buddy Michael, who was living in the Mission District, working and student-teaching. I would end up spending nearly a week there, talking about life and literature with Michael, hanging out with him and his friend Abbe, wandering around the city, and writing in my journal. Looking through that journal, I was intrigued to read this preface of sorts on its second page:

I’m not interested in documenting the visible events of this journey as much as what’s going on inside, the interior voyage. To write when I have the time and urge, to explore my feelings and emotions, to trace that path. But also to celebrate the simplicity of life as it happens, not to lose myself down metaphysical rabbit holes. To combine musings and prose, the mundane and the spiritual. And to be honest and straightforward.

I was setting a high bar for myself, but I’d done enough traveling by this point in my life to know I needed a challenge to make this journey meaningful. Riding a streetcar to Golden Gate Park, I overheard a conversation between two young punks, decked out in leather, studs, and spikes. One said, as we passed through Haight-Ashbury, “This is where the whole flower-child thing started. My parents were here in the middle of it.” Thus, the punks as offspring of the hippie movement, both continuing it and trashing it. 

Another day, I kicked back on a slope in Mission Dolores Park, waiting for the sun to warm up the city and clear the fog to reveal a far view of the towering monuments of downtown commerce, occasionally the horn blasts of container ships steaming in and out of San Francisco Bay, nearby the clacking of trolley cars. The Beaux Arts bell tower and facade of Mission High School, the gaudy rows of Victorian houses. Children playing in the park, mothers and fathers keeping an eye, joggers getting exercise, dogs walking their owners, old men with burlap sacks poking through trash, teens drinking beer from paper bags, sleepers in repose on benches, others reading or thinking or observing. Palm trees, walls covered with graffiti, Free Puerto Rico, CIA Killed Angel, a statue of Don Miguel Hidalgo, leader of the Mexican War of Independence. The intimacy of living in close contact with all this. I opened my arms to the city and embraced what it had to offer. “I’m ready to give everything for anything I take.”

I wanted to become sharp, my senses ready, prepared to react, not wasting energy trying to place myself in the center of what was happening. At that moment the earth moved, buildings rocked and rolled, reminding me of the crazy geological pressure we were sitting atop, that political fissure, that fault. I could feel the urge – it was time to move on, see something new, meet people I’d never met, feel something I’d never felt, speak something other than English – time to continue the journey.

Footnotes:

[1] See Manic Pixie Dream Girl

[2] January 15, 1980

My Days in a Rock ’n’ Roll Band, Part 2

If we’d ever made an album, this could’ve been the cover art. Cf. the Jefferson Airplane’s Surrealistic Pillow album cover.

… or, How I Became a Monos’lab [1]

1979 was an interesting year to be listening to the latest music. That summer, Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park in Chicago signalled the beginning of the slow demise of that musical genre. Punk music had been banging its head against the wall of that sound. New music coming out that year certainly had punk leanings but had also moved on. In 1978-79 we were listening to the debut or second albums from the B-52s, Devo, Talking Heads, Prince, Gang of Four, Pere Ubu, Elvis Costello and the Attractions. This music had energy and vitality. It was raucous but also honored the beat. It felt smart and fresh, ready to both take on and make fun of the world.

That year, in Iowa City, our newly formed band, Pink Gravy, was vibrating with creative energy, and our small nascent fan base was eager to hear and see what we would come up with next. [2] On September 22, we played one of our most interesting gigs: an outdoor show as part of Iowa City’s dedication of its new ped mall, four downtown city blocks converted from car traffic to foot traffic. We set up our stage by the new fountain at the center of the mall, within a stone’s throw of a half-dozen bars. The show took place on Saturday night after the annual Iowa-Iowa State rivalry football game. Football fans, some still drunk from pre-game tailgating, were hitting the bars hard. Almost everyone was wearing their colors – their fierce alliance represented by either the bumblebee black-and-gold of the Iowa Hawkeyes or the cardinal-and-gold of the Iowa State Cyclones. It was an uneasy commingling of warring camps.

And our band of sarcastic misfits and agitators was in the middle of it. We might cover Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made for Walking” or Graham Nash’s “Our House” to appease the audience, but by the time we’d finished mutating those songs, they were barely recognizable. We attracted a range of baffled looks and blurry heckling, and tolerated an incident involving “drunken fools who happened to climb into the fountain and spray the crowd with water [and] damaged the public address system,” [3] but we managed to give as good as we got. Our dumbfounded audience was invited to consider the possibilities that we were due for a “Nuclear Accident,” that it was “Eggtime,” that “Everybody Is a Monos’lab.”

When we played the Beaux Arts Costume Ball at Maxwell’s on October 29, Thomascyne decided to alter our performance wear. Since the audience would be in costumes, she made long pink hooded robes to replace our usually outlandish stage outfits. We looked vaguely liturgical, like nine monos’labic monks. By early December we had earned a two-night weekend show at Gabe’s, which would always be our favorite place to play.

We merged these new sounds we were hearing with the older music we loved. We each shared our personal favorites with the rest of the band: The Velvet Underground, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band, Patti Smith, Bob Marley and the Wailers, Fela Kuti and Africa 70. I kept checking out the double album An Evening with Wild Man Fischer from the Iowa City Public Library. To annotate the quality of the vinyl discs, a librarian had dutifully but aptly and perhaps facetiously affixed a warning label: “Warped But Playable.”

Many wanted to categorize us as new wave, a catch-all term bandied about to explain whatever was coming after disco and punk. We adamantly rejected any attempt to pigeonhole us. Everybody in the band was writing songs – at least fifty in the first two years of the band – and we all explored our favorite musical styles. The blues were represented by “Boinger Man” and  “Middle Class Honkie Blues.” [4] Reggae and ska with “Nuclear Accident” and “Gangrene.” Punk with “Fab Con Men” and “I Wanna Be Your Toto, Dorothy.” Country and western with “Goodwill Store.” California surf music with “Iowa Wave.” Doo-wop with “I Like Ike.” Calypso with “Bio” (a remake of Harry Belafonte’s “Day-O” that explains the simple pleasures of selling one’s plasma). All these songs were homages to genres that had influenced us, but our flair for musical shape-shifting also dissuaded listeners from trying to define us.

There was so much that I loved about performing with Pink Gravy and participating in other Monos’labic sabotage. I loved having the opportunity to collaborate with a group of creative people. We leaned on and learned from each other when composing or refining songs, lots of co-writing of both lyrics and music. Inspired by the band’s protests at the Duane Arnold nuclear power plant, I had written the poem “Emotional Data,” which the band managed to turn into a song with a brutal driving beat and a call-and-response singing approach between me and Thomascyne and Brenda. Here are some of the lyrics:

D: I’m the guy with the x-ray eyes

T/B: That’s not the Cedar River

D: That’s a coolant system getting hot

T/B: That’s not a rain cloud

D: That’s a plume of hydrogen gas

T/B: I’m a fixed statistic

D: Nothing to evacuate

T/B: When the meltdown comes

D: Woah! Nothing to evacuate

T/B: With the stockpile comes down

D: I’m afraid of the light

The song featured a long instrumental breakdown in the middle that sounded like industrial noise. This became the signal for all available band members and every brave soul in the bar to do the song’s signature dance, The Meltdown, which entailed slowly descending to the floor and writhing amongst each other in the most congenial of ways – part mosh pit, part hippie love-in. 

Doing the Meltdown on the dance floor at Gabe’s.

I loved the dopamine high of performing in front of a raucous audience. I loved singing “Rock ’n’ Roll Nun.” [5] We all had stage names for our Pink Gravy personas: Louise and Thelma Swank, Phil Dirt, Dr. Ben Gay, Bob Quinze, Bert the Intellectual Cowboy, St. Orlando, David Ben Sunny. I might be introduced as Physical Ed or Johnny Brandex or Kid Karnage, all depending on the moment. That, along with our stage outfits, functioned as disguises so we could fabricate semi-porous boundaries between our performative lives and our more prosaic daytime lives.

This and the previous photo are by Steve Zavodny, The Daily Iowan.

I loved the way we were able to slip onto public platforms to make fun of the idiot world around us. In 1980, during the heat of the presidential campaign, David Tholfsen and I concocted a side project called the David Convention. Faced with a choice between a Georgia peanut farmer incumbent and a Hollywood movie star, we fought to add an option to vote for David – any David. I recall running around the campus Pentacrest during a noon hour in a pink polyester sport coat, hollering, cajoling students to vote for David. At a Pink Gravy gig at the Crow’s Nest on November 1, we held the David Convention. David and I famously performed an acapella medley of our favorite Wild Man Fischer songs. Quite a few other Davids were there.

Yeah, the Daily Iowan ad actually said “Miller Time,” our shameless promo for Miller High Life. But we never turned down free publicity. Photo by Dom Franco.

I did take breaks from the band to travel – the first five months of 1980 in Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize. The band continued to perform with great energy. In a rather charming documentary of the band, some of the best videos were shot while I was gone. When I returned from a summer-long 1981 journey through Europe, both the band and I had moved on. But our parting of ways was amicable. Pink Gravy dispersed in that centrifugal way typical of our time – to Lee County, Iowa; Bloomington, Indiana; New York City; Phoenix; Portland, Oregon; San Francisco. Some of us have formed new bands; our first drummer earned a doctorate in musical anthropology; one of us plays Irish traditional music. I’m still here, holding the gifts I gained from the experience – a clearer recognition of myself as a poet, the joy of creative collaboration, the liberating craziness of spontaneous performance – gifts that would quietly resonate in other chapters of my life.

Footnotes:

[1] From Part 1: The Monos’labs were parodies of clueless inarticulate suburbanites, Dick Nixon’s Silent Majority, who would then flock to vote for Reagan. Seemingly unable to fight the rising tide of conservatism, the Monos’labs chose to cynically and satirically infiltrate it.

[2] See “Why Are These People Acting Stupid?” by J. Christenson, The Daily Iowan, November 11, 1979, pp. 1A, 4A, 5A. http://dailyiowan.lib.uiowa.edu/DI/1979/di1979-11-08.pdf 

[3] From a Viewpoints letter published in The Daily Iowan, Bill Case, October 4, 1979.

[4] Although I’m unable to link any of the sound recordings we have of our music, our collection of live recordings is in the process of being digitized for the Pink Gravy and Monos’labs archive being curated by the University of Iowa Special Collections folks.

[5] Who wouldn’t enjoy singing, “Here comes the fire chief / Oh, here comes the fire chief / With his red helmet and damaged brain cells / He’s just seen a rock ’n’ roll nun / But a couple a days in the electric chair oughtta set him straight”?

On Quests, Part 2

From The Green Knight (2021), Dev Patel as Gawain and Alicia Vikander as the Lady of the Castle.

“Writing has always been a way to reconcile my lived experiences with the narratives available to describe it (or lack thereof).” –Melissa Febos, Girlhood

That week with Bobbie, we talked about everything. Mornings after Jeff left for work and evenings after dinner, Bobbie and I would take her dog, Gertie Bell, on long walks steeped in conversation. Wednesday, we drove down to Fire Island, part of the barrier chain guarding Long Island’s south shore. We walked along the beach and then picnicked at one of the sanctioned swimming areas. All told, we walked, and talked, over nine miles that day. Thursday morning, we bustled around the kitchen, making lunch for the social studies teachers’ book club Bobbie belongs to; I contributed a Spanish tortilla and helped her make panzanella and another salad. Bobbie had let me know beforehand what book they were reading so I could participate in the discussion.

Friday morning, we swam at the beach near her house and then ran errands in preparation for Family Day, an event hosted by the Huntington Beach Community Association, in which Jeff plays an active role. Bobbie and Jeff’s oldest son, Ben, and his wife and their two children arrived that evening. Saturday was Family Day – neighbors gathering at the beach for fellowship, friendly athletic contests, and lunch. Jeff recruited me to help grill burgers and dogs, and asked me to pair up with Bobbie for the final event, the egg toss competition, while he sought out another partner.

Our long talks included topics we’d covered in our letters, because talking about them in person is different – our hopes and fears for our children and grandchildren, chapters from the stories of our marriages. Bobbie expressed some of the frustrations anyone who’s been married for three or four decades feels when the dynamics of the relationship get predictable because each person takes the other for granted. I vouched for Jeff – he is reliable and generous, I proposed, a good man, a good father and grandfather, a good husband. Bobbie agreed all that was true.

After taking my leave early Sunday morning,[1] as I drove down the Jersey Turnpike and the Eastern Shore toward Virginia Beach, I thought about those five days with Bobbie – what a gift it was to renew our friendship. I was amazed that everything about her that I loved in 1972 is still there in 2021. But I also had this odd feeling of pride in how I’d handled myself (or how we’d handled ourselves). After our first walk around the neighborhood, we’d held each other in a long sweet embrace. And as we would walk and talk, we often brushed shoulders and arms as I’d leaned in to listen better. But that was the extent of our physical intimacy. We instead expressed those feelings by simply being attentive to each other’s needs and moods. I have no doubt Jeff picked up on our mutual affection but, as a kindness, allowed space for it without comment.

In The Green Knight, Gawain, exhausted by his journey and stripped of his horse and all his possessions except the battleaxe the Green Knight had given him, arrives at a castle and collapses in its doorway. We next see him sleeping in a comfortable bed, tended to by the lord of the castle. The lord tells him he will go out every day to hunt and bring home meat to give Gawain strength so he can complete his quest. While he’s out hunting, the lady of the castle attempts to seduce Gawain, testing his chivalry and moral virtue. Her advances repeatedly rebuffed, she instead gives him her green sash, a charm to protect him from harm. I’m not suggesting a perfect analogy between the Arthurian legend and my story – Bobbie certainly never tried to seduce me – but the similarities are uncanny.

When I talked with Bobbie again on my way back to Iowa, she mentioned that Jeff had resumed going on those long walks with her and Gertie. Perhaps seeing Bobbie the way I saw her had given him a renewed appreciation of her. Perhaps my attention to Bobbie had made her glow in a way that enhanced her beauty. Perhaps my visit had helped them find a little more happiness in their life. Oh, I was pleased with my supposed achievement, probably too pleased, but at least I had a legend to explain it all.

That last homeward hour on I-80, which I could nearly drive blindfolded, I catalogued memories of the journey. The hospitality and generosity of Jon and Kathy. The time spent with them and other friends I’d grown up with, folks I’d looked up to when I was a lost high school freshman trying to figure out who I wanted to become. Camping with Emma, Oscar, and Linus in the Virginia sand dunes, among Live Oaks and Scrub Pines. Hiking with them through freshwater swamps filled with turtles, Bald Cypress knees jutting up from tannin-brown waters, the air thick with Spanish Moss, impressive dragonflies, and the plunking, ricocheting calls of bullfrogs. And those perambulatory tête-à-têtes with Bobbie. The culinary duet we performed the morning before the book club meeting. The way I was welcomed into her and Jeff’s family, as if a place had been saved for me all along.

I now sense that, more than ever, I’m on a cusp, my momentum propelling me forward, keen to embrace a feeling not felt since my wife died almost three years ago, something I wasn’t sure I’d ever feel again – that feeling at the beginning of love, that feeling of “When will I see you again?” Could it be that my love for Bobbie makes me more receptive to love from other sources? Is this some kind of reward for “my gallantry”? I know life doesn’t work that way, and honestly, being ready for love – in a world riven with woe – that alone is enough.

8 September 2021

Footnote

[1] Bearing Bobbie’s parting gifts of a half-dozen books, garden produce, and a fresh-baked loaf of blueberry bread.

On Quests, Part 1

Translated by J.R.R. Tolkien, among others, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was written by an unknown 14th-century poet of the West Midlands of England. .

As I recently watched The Green Knight, based on the Arthurian legend Sir Gawain and The Green Knight, one scene resonated for me as I sensed the extent to which it mirrored my recent experiences with my friend Bobbie. The movie is a faithful retelling of the fourteenth-century chivalric romance, with chapter titles in Old English blackletter and a soundtrack that is positively eerie, sometimes sounding like a chorus of Tuvan throat singers. King Arthur is old and doddering; Queen Guinevere is decidedly unlovely; Sir Gawain is a youthful goof-off. 

The story centers around Gawain’s quest to fulfill a Christmas Day promise to seek out the Green Knight one year hence, whereupon Gawain would receive the same blow he chose to deliver to the Green Knight. (Gawain had cut off his head, likely not expecting the Green Knight to pick it up as he laughed and rode away.) Gawain’s journey is infused with magic – a woman who asks him to retrieve her head from the bottom of a lake, a talking fox that befriends him, the Green Knight himself, more vegetation than human.

Last October, I was working on a memoir piece about falling in love with Bobbie the summer after high school.[1] Those recollections of first love inspired me to reach out, if only to thank her for all she gave me. I sent a letter, a shot in the dark, to the Long Island address I had for her when our correspondence was sidetracked over forty years ago by growing families commanding our full time and attention. My letter did reach her, and a week later I received one in return, eight pages on yellow legal pad paper. All that catching up!

Although we exchanged emails and cell phone numbers, we decided to continue to correspond via handwritten letters. Over this past year, one of us has received a letter from the other every ten days or so, the U.S. Post Office’s lack of delivery speed giving us time to think of something new to write about, although that was never really a problem. We had a lot to share about our lives and families, about the dismal state of the “American experiment,” about our experiences as high school teachers. We had both left secure jobs in our late forties, returned to school to earn education degrees, and then helped students learn about World History (Bobbie) and Language Arts (me). We would have been great colleagues, our teaching philosophies matched so well.

In May, while I was visiting old hometown friends in Akron, Bobbie sent me a text: “Cheryl told me you are there today and tomorrow. Hope your visit is wonderful. If you get sleepy as you drive back to Iowa, give me a call. I’d be happy to help some of the miles pass.” I had other stops before returning, but ten days later, I texted Bobbie from the first rest stop in Illinois to see if she was available to talk. Back on the road, ten minutes later, I got a call from her: “Where are you?” “Just east of Champaign.” “Well, turn around! I’m in the middle of Pennsylvania on my way to Ohio.”

I was momentarily tempted to do so but decided to continue homeward. Instead, we talked – for the first time in all those years, for over two hours as we both drove west. The miles flew by. We agreed that since we’d missed this chance to meet up, we must do so soon, and I told her I’d be coming back east in August to camp with my daughter and grandsons in Virginia. When we finally said goodbye, as Bobbie was pulling into a rest stop and I was crossing the Mississippi River, she said, “I love you.” Without a moment’s hesitation I responded, “I love you too, Bobbie.”

We made plans: I’d visit her on Long Island at the beginning of August before heading down the coast to meet Emma, Oscar, and Linus at a state park near Virginia Beach.[2] I stopped in Akron for a few days, then drove to the middle of Pennsylvania Dutch country, in the foothills of the Alleghenies, where I camped for the night at the all-but-deserted Holiday Pines Campground – for free since the office was closed. The next morning, as I fueled up on the Twilight Diner special, I watched two horse-drawn buggies make their way along the Interstate 80 overpass. I reached New York City at noon, avoiding rush hour traffic, crossing the George Washington Bridge into Manhattan and the Bronx, then across Throgs Neck Bridge to Long Island, pulling up in front of Bobbie’s house an hour later.

It had been 45 years since we’d last seen each other, but we reconnected as if it were yesterday. Of course, all the letters had smoothed out much of the potential awkwardness of the meeting, but we both still felt a twinge of apprehension. After all, we had professed, not in so many words, our love in those letters, letters that I wasn’t sure her husband, Jeff,[3] was fully aware of. When he arrived home that evening from work, he welcomed me without reservation, taking me on a tour of the dovecote that housed his flight of homing pigeons and the chicken coop he’d built for their laying hens. I was given their boys’ old bedroom, a beautiful space with three ribbon windows looking down on Northport Bay and, beyond a narrow neck of land, the Long Island Sound and the far Connecticut shore. Two skylights in the roof let in sunshine filtered through the tall oaks towering over the house. I called it the Treehouse, and there I slept for five nights as Bobbie and Jeff graciously wove me into the fabric of their life.

Footnotes:

[1] For the full story, I invite you to turn to Falling in Love for the First Time (Parts 1-3) in this blog series.

[2] First Landing State Park, at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, where English colonists first arrived in 1607.

[3] Jeff was the boyfriend after me. When I visited Bobbie in Denver near the end of her first year of college (still thinking I was her boyfriend), he helped replace my car’s fuel filter so I could drive back home.

On Wanting to Shampoo You

I’ve been relistening to and reloving Joni Mitchell’s Blue, fifty years in this world. Ah, the sweet pirouettes of her voice. Her lyrics are still fresh; they still speak to me about the yearnings of youth. Even when the words seem to miss, they hit: “I wanna talk to you / I wanna shampoo you / I wanna renew you again and again.” These lines from the album’s opening song, “All I Want,” seem laughable, at best whimsical, except that (as often happens when stuff gets in your head) they took shape for me three times in the past week ‒ in literature, in real life, in memory.

On a westbound train skimming along the northern border of the United States to Seattle, I was reading James Baldwin’s 1962 novel Another Country. In it, he tried to make sense of the many permutations of heterosexual, homosexual, and interracial love and relationships, such as this: “Yves ... preferred long scalding baths, with newspapers, cigarettes, and whiskey on a chair next to the bathtub, and with Eric nearby to talk to, to shampoo his hair, and to scrub his back.”

The title of Joni’s song is rich with ambiguity. Is this the apologetic, self-effacing “all I want …” or the unreserved, exacting, full-throated “ALL I WANT!” or both at once? The young British singer-songwriter Arlo Parks said, “What I love so much about this song is that it is full of contradiction and conflict. There’s a real sense of exploring what it means to be present and alive in the moment…. It feels like she was trying to hold onto something or keep up with something.” At the end of the first stanza, when Joni entices her listener, “Well, come on!” I am ready to do whatever that means.

While visiting my oldest son, Sierra, and his partner in Seattle, we took the ferry to Bainbridge Island one day for the pleasure of crossing Puget Sound. He had pointed out that because of the high cost of housing in Seattle and its avid backpacking and camping ethos, many homeless people live under highway overpasses but in top-quality tents.

At a sink

in the men’s bathroom

in the ferry terminal

on the Seattle waterfront

one guy shampoos

another guy’s hair

As I wash my hands

at an adjacent sink

the shampooer turns to me

and says, “How’s life

in the real world?”

Finally, Joni’s lyrics brought to mind the times I helped bathe my wife, Pat, over the last year of her life. Drawing the bath water, helping to remove her shoes and clothes, supporting her as she stepped into the tub. Then pouring a pitcher of water over her head ‒ the water cascading down and glinting in the morning light ‒ and shampooing her hair, momentarily lost in the minty smell and thick luxurious foam. Then one more submersion, carefully rinsing her hair, using my left hand to protect her eyes from the stinging suds. And after that, lathering a washcloth to massage her back, neck, arms, breasts, belly, genitals, legs, feet. A stark reminder of how her body was withering over time, skin more and more loose, muscles more and more lax from disuse.

Pat rarely felt anything other than physical discomfort, if not pain, in her final year, the fentanyl patches and oxycodone her only relief. I tried to make those baths for her a small moment of repose, but I was sometimes less than patient with her, and her crankiness (as much as she’d earned the right to it). At my best, I gave a good performance of selfless giving. At her best, she silently applauded the effort.

In each of these moments, I was reminded how physically intimate the act of shampooing another can be, what a superb example of caregiving it is. As she described her desire to be alive and free with someone, Joni might’ve simply sung, “I wanna make love to you.” Her line is far better.

19 July 2021

My Days in a Rock ‘n’ Roll Band…

or, How I Became a Monos’lab, Part 1

When I returned to Iowa City in late August 1979 from my Cape Breton trip, I was looking for a change. I responded to a roommate-wanted ad on the New Pioneer bulletin board. This small step led me into a world of new friends and collaborators, of artists and musicians and writers, people who looked clear-eyed at the world handed down to them and engaged with that world in the guise of characters, as if it all were a play, and it was.

I met Thomascyne Buckley, a gregarious, auburn-haired art student, at her first-floor apartment in a house on Fairchild Street, and soon moved in with her and her dog Max. They’d been living there a year, and she’d put her stamp on the place. The creative chaos was both exciting and unsettling, but I soon found my footing. Hanging from trees in the backyard were boingers, musical sculptures Thomascyne had made by shaping thick aluminum wire into objects vaguely resembling tight tornado funnels. I would lie in a hammock, reading and absentmindedly strumming the boingers with anything like a drumstick to produce a shimmering and beautifully eerie sound, a coda perhaps to a particularly good poem or paragraph.

As the semester started, what we were each studying and creating led to interesting discussions across disciplines – art, literature, music. Having caught parts of a Dada Conference held at the university back in the spring, we both were drawn to the absurdist sensibilities of Marcel DuChamp, Kurt Schwitters, John Cage, and others. And we were also keeping a close eye on current issues.

In her sculpture class, Thomascyne was constructing “eggthings,” costumes made of wire frames covered in heavyweight gessoed paper, with armholes, legholes, and an eyehole, and a seam between the top and bottom that would allow a person to put it on and wear it. I was intrigued as I watched her work out the practical design issues of making wearable art. Meanwhile, she was constructing a narrative to explain these six eggthings: Dr. Bob was in the lab, messing around with some radioactive materials, when a half-dozen adjacent eggs were accidentally contaminated, mutating into these six-foot-tall eggthings.[1]

At that time, most politicians thought nuclear energy was the solution to our need for a cheap and unlimited alternative to fossil fuels. But others feared nuclear power plants were being approved and built too quickly without regard for their dangers. Those fears were realized in late March of that year when a partial meltdown and radiation leak occurred at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. Thomascyne’s sculptures were whimsically highlighting those dangers, critiquing them by normalizing them.

Meanwhile, one of Thomascyne’s sculpture classmates, Brenda Knox, was creating fabric head masks of characters such as Madge and Howard Nelson, Bowlo, Zippy the Pinhead.[2] These characters became model Monos’labs – clueless inarticulate suburbanites on vacation, parodies of Dick Nixon’s Silent Majority, the kind of folks who would flock to vote for Reagan the following year. Brenda and Thomascyne scoured second-hand stores, looking for outlandish outfits for the Monos’labs, the more polyester the better. Seemingly unable to fight the tide of conservatism sweeping the nation, they chose to cynically and satirically infiltrate it.

Other young artists would frequent the Fairchild Street house. Walter Sunday stopped by, lugging a large paper bag filled with combs he had scavenged from the streets. I was taken by his single-minded passion and began to do the same. These are the opening stanzas of my long poem documenting the experience:

Once upon a time, Walter, obsessed with the debris of combs,

casually left a pile of them on our kitchen table.

Black and anonymous, as common as money, they

remained there, an arrangement that lasted through the winter.

Their purpose squandered, never again would they

orchestrate the wave of hair through their fine teeth.

Then the sun returned and the snow melted, disclosing

this residue of combs scattered throughout the city.

Combs on the sidewalk, steaming with ownership,

still holding the private tangled strands of lives.

Combs made of hard rubber, DuPont nylon, all the plastic

brands—Pro, Goody, the ubiquitous black Ace, the Unbreakable …

At the suggestion of Thomascyne and Brenda’s sculpture professor,[3] all this came together as a performance of their work. Thomascyne had recruited a crew of adventurer-participants; all the eggthings were selected for their tall, lanky physiques. She had located a free piano and a pickup truck. That afternoon, we hauled the piano across town while playing it maniacally. And so it began one night in late October, near the UI Art Building, under some trees beside the river, dimly illuminated by the lampposts on the bridge.  

This was the debut of the Monos’labic Orchestra. Thomascyne’s tangled tree of boingers made a musical appearance, trash cans provided a percussive element. Six eggthings – all well over six feet tall – danced and whirled and chanted: Moon, stars, planets, boing! … Omm-lette! …  Je suis fou! Je suis dans la lune! A sizable crowd of students showed up, curious about what and why. It was all wonderfully messy and funny, but also at times magical and mysterious. 

The eggthings were naïve and idealistic, in need of protection from a judgmental world, so we adopted them. Everyone involved in the performance realized this wasn’t over, that some kind of second act was coming. That next act took place on a slushy February day when the six eggthings returned to public life to protest the wholesale slaughter of their brothers and sisters at Hamburg Inn #2, Iowa City’s popular breakfast diner. The entire demonstration was documented – the eggthings picketing in front of Hamburg Inn,[4] a “token woman reporter” interviewing them and inviting them to make an incoherent statement of their concerns, and then a VW van suddenly appearing and a pack of RV people clambering out, chasing off the helpless eggthings, and catching up with the most hapless of them, Sonny Side-Up, across the street. A martyr to the cause, Sonny lost his life that day, his scrambled remains strewn in the alley off Linn Street

A few weeks later, Pink Gravy and the Monos’labic Orchestra performed at the Wheel Room, the bar in the basement of the UI student center. It was both a memorial concert for Sonny Side-Up and a Mardi Gras Festival celebration. Making its first appearance was Pink Gravy, the electric rock band manifestation (or mutation) of the Monos’labs. In the planning leading up this event, scraps of ideas on paper were floating around the Fairchild house kitchen table. On one of them, someone had scrawled “punk group.” Thomascyne walked in and misread it aloud: “Pink Gravy?” The name would stick.

Once again, Thomascyne served as the mastermind and agent provocateur and mother of this venture. Both Brenda and Thomascyne had great voices. Brenda played sax and flute. Thomascyne quickly picked up the electric guitar and sax. Paul added his solid lead guitar and vocals, and Chad became the quintessential quiet, steady bass guitarist. Bob was on drums, Eric on keyboards, and David Tholfsen and I on percussive energy and vocals. Alan, Scott, Kevin, and many others joined in at various times during the life of the band. I was invited to get involved because I was a poet who enjoyed disguising myself in costumes and acting goofy. I sang backup and occasionally lead vocals. I played the tubes[5] and other percussive instruments – squeak toys, boingers, bike horn, smoke alarm, as well as more traditional instruments.

In March, we played the Wheel Room again, and in April, we were at The Moody Blue to rally support for an upcoming demonstration at the Duane Arnold nuclear power plant near Cedar Rapids, where a number of Monos’labs were arrested for trespassing. In May, we rented the Old Brick building for a Graduation Blast featuring Pink Gravy and the Monos’labic Orchestra. Brenda, who worked at Gabe’s, helped us get our foot in that door, and by July, we were playing gigs at what would become our favorite place to play. We publicized our shows by stapling bright, busy collage posters all over town (which fans would then remove because they liked the art). Much of the raw material for the posters came from magazines of the fifties, a bonus of our second-hand store scavenging. We mastered the art of xerox, sometimes making copies of copies so that the image degraded, generation by generation.

How does one explain this? We were a bunch of bored and restless kids who decided to do whatever we could to shake up the status quo, to épater les bourgeois.[6] The recipe: stir up a couple of visual artists, some writers, a few musicians, and shake vigorously, garnish with Monos’labs and eggthings. The end result was a conceptual garage band (or warehouse band since we practiced at Blooming Prairie Warehouse) that was visually interesting and musically all over the place. People came to see the spectacle, listen to our songs, and dance with us. For me, hanging with this group of people was creatively inspiring and crazy fun. As Pink Gravy would remind us in its ska number “Everybody Is a Monos’lab” – “S’labbin’s happenin’/ It certainly isn’t fattenin’/ You just gotta see it through/ Get some data from the view.”

Footnotes:

[1] According to the song “Eggtime,” by the band Pink Gravy.

[2] Madge with cat-eye sunglasses and severely coiffed hair, Howard looking vaguely academic, Bowlo a pudgy-faced Italian guy, Zippy with an actual rabbit ear TV antenna.

[3] Louise Kramer, a visiting instructor from New York City. The creation of Thomascyne’s boinger pieces had been encouraged by David Dunlap in his drawing class.

[4] One of the picket signs was a real estate yard sign that had been appropriated and mutated: “Dick IcKee real or.”

[5] Rubber shower hose, galvanized iron and PVC plumbing pipes, plastic tubing,

[6] That is, stick it to the man.

How I Came to Iowa City…

Anti-war protest on the University of Iowa Pentacrest, spilling out onto Clinton Street, May 1970

… And Found a Home

My family moved from Stow, Ohio, to Urbandale, Iowa, in 1974, while I was living in Western Kentucky. As I understood the story, my father, a liquor salesman for Seagram’s, took the fall for some company malfeasance involving the Ohio State Liquor Control Board. After he did this, the company got him out of Dodge and into Iowa, and to thank him for his loyalty, handed him a promotion – State Sales Manager. For me, the most salient point of this was I could claim Iowa residency and then pay in-state tuition at the University of Iowa.

While working on my high school senior project – an independent study of modern poetry – I had developed an interest in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. It kept popping up in bios in the back of the anthologies I was avidly perusing, books such as The New American Poetry (1945-1960) and An Anthology of New York Poets. Even though I’d never been to Iowa and had not applied to any colleges, in my yearbook questionnaire I listed the University of Iowa as my post–high school destination. I guess that was aspirational. But when my family moved to Iowa, I realized I could make that come true.

I moved in with my family in December 1974, camping out in the basement utility room, applied to Iowa, and proceeded to land three part-time jobs – working the grill at George’s Chili King on Hickman Road, clerking at an Iowa State Liquor Store on Douglas Avenue, and tending bar at Christopher’s, a family-owned Italian restaurant in the Beaverdale neighborhood. I worked until June, until I had enough money for my first year’s tuition, and then quit all three jobs and took off to Ann Arbor to find out what my good friend Jim “Prch” Prchlik was up to. He was sharing a rambling farmhouse on the edge of the city and making bank by working weekend shifts at the nearby Ford Truck plant. During the week we’d work in the garden and then roll into town to hang out with the street people living on and around The Diag and State Street.

Notable among this shifting lineup of characters were Tom and Whiskey Stone, members of a group of wandering souls who a few years earlier in an encampment outside Austin, Texas, had sworn an oath binding them as the Stone Family.[1] These folks helped me master the arts of panhandling and dumpster diving, not essential life skills for me but part of some socioeconomic experiment: Was it possible to live off the wastefulness and affluence of bourgeois America?

After a few weeks in Ann Arbor, I headed to Iowa City to scope out a place to live that fall. I have a distinct memory of coming into town on a sunny afternoon, walking down Iowa Avenue and noticing the C.O.D. Steam Laundry, a combination deli, bar, and music venue. When I heard The Grateful Dead’s “Truckin’” playing on the sound system, I knew I’d found a home. The inimitable and venerable Gerry Stevenson – in his usual garb of khaki shorts and long-sleeved Oxford shirt, glasses tipped on the end of his nose – served me a beer and a sandwich loaded with alfalfa sprouts.

I spent a couple days scouring the want ads, tracking down leads, knocking on doors, and returning to City Park each night to camp out. I’d found Stone Soup Restaurant and would wash dishes for a free lunch. One of the other dishwashers, Tom Leverett, invited me to a birthday party for Kevin Kelso, who worked at New Pioneer Co-op. Early that evening, I was panhandling spare change for, as I readily explained, a bottle of wine to take to a party. I was standing on the corner of Linn Street and Iowa Avenue, in front of Best Steak House, a restaurant run by two Greek brothers,[2] when my liquor store co-worker friend and his girlfriend Laura knocked on the restaurant window and gestured to come inside and join them. I ended up at a party at Laura’s house that night instead.

I did find a place that fit my budget of under $100 a month rent: a room above a Montessori pre-school on Reno Street with access to the kitchen used by the staff. I liked that it was a good twenty-minute walk from campus, and much closer to Hickory Hill, a large rambling urban park. I came to enjoy that walk home via the back alleys of the Goosetown neighborhood originally settled by Czech immigrants, admiring the tidy backyard gardens and grape arbors.

Across the hall lived the poet John Sjoberg and his cat Liz. John’s door was always open to me, and he became a valuable mentor. In the center of his room sat a typewriter with a roll of teletype paper cascading from it. I could always stop in and read where he had gone in his mind the night before. He was a poet of imagination and love. For example, here’s the opening stanza of his poem “Porch Window”:[3]

my head is green

the songs here, the bird songs

here & here & here

are my heart.

John introduced me to a group of poets, most of whom had graduated from the Writers’ Workshop and settled in the Iowa City area: Allen and Cinda Kornblum, Morty Sklar, Chuck Miller, Dave Morice, Jim Mulac. There was usually a reading on Friday or Saturday night at Alandoni’s Used Book Store at 610 South Dubuque Street,[4] and a party afterward. They called themselves Actualists, a name I always considered facetiously applied but one that recognized a supportive community of writers. The ambiguity of the name allowed room for anyone to fit in, including me, at least five to ten years younger than these other writers.

This decision, along with the decision, within a month after starting school, to take a job working part-time nights at the Stone Soup Restaurant’s bakery, established my roots in two Iowa City communities only loosely connected to the university, roots that made this start to feel like home, a place where I could “sit down and patch my bones.”

Having arranged to move into my place on Reno Street on the first of September, I took off for Madison, crashing a few days in an empty room in a large frat house reinvented as communal housing, and then looped back to Ann Arbor. A week later, Prch suggested I check out the Rainbow Gathering, an annual counterculture festival illegally held on some remote public lands the week of the Fourth of July. According to word on the street, it was happening near Hot Springs, Arkansas, that year. So I “got out of the door and lit out and looked all around.” In northern Arkansas I caught a ride from a NASCAR wannabe going 125 miles an hour down I-55, lakes becoming blurry blue visions, streaks of billboard boastings, flickering fenceposts and rows of cotton. Sporting a burning grin and waving his cigarette at me, he yelled above the noise, “Hot damn! Tomorrow’s our country’s birthday! Let’s torque it up in her honor!” I smiled weakly and held on.

When I got into Hot Springs, I could find no hint of the Gathering. I walked around, looking for anyone letting their freak flag fly who might be able to slip me the secret directions. Nothing. It turned out the Rainbow Gathering was in the Ozark National Forest[5] near Mountain Home, Arkansas, almost 200 miles due north, but I wouldn’t learn that until much later. I got dinner in town and spent the night on the outskirts of Hot Springs, near the road I came in on. Next morning, the Fourth of July, I got a ride from a couple of Arkansas Baptist College football players on their way to a party in Little Rock. They invited me to join their celebration.

When we got to the party, held in an apartment building owned by a team booster, I was goodnaturedly introduced to him and the other football players and their girlfriends as “Yankee.” There was a watermelon loaded with vodka and a tub of Budweisers on ice. Early afternoon, with only a breakfast in my belly, the drinking commenced. I somehow felt the need to defend the Union by keeping pace with these Little Rock secessionists. I lasted a couple of hours, eventually accepting defeat by diving into the apartment building’s pool with my clothes on. My friendly rivals fished me out and helped me to an empty apartment where I could sleep it off. They woke me in the morning, treated me to a hearty breakfast at a local diner, and sent me on my way.

Back on the road, I watched a long slow freight train pulling out of Little Rock. I decided to hop it, but by the time I got to the tracks, its speed had picked up. Running with a backpack on a rocky uneven railroad bed and trying to catch an open boxcar proved a failure. I picked myself up, washed off my scrapes, and proceeded to hitch to Bowling Green, Kentucky, where my friend Pat Berkowetz tended my wounds, physical and otherwise. I then stopped in Akron to see some high school chums before landing back in Ann Arbor. But I was soon back on the road, hitching to Minneapolis with Kelly, and continuing on my own, west to Seattle, down to Oregon and San Francisco, back up to Ashland, Oregon, east to Denver, and finally Iowa City by the end of August.[6]

1975 was a restless year. Like many young Americans, I was searching for something I could trust to be true.[7] When I moved into the room above the Montessori school and started classes that fall, it felt right, like the satisfying sound of a puzzle piece clicking into place. I began to see the possibilities of finding my niche in this Midwestern college town – among a group of poets collaborating, engaging with the world, and celebrating whatever felt real, and among a community of folks creating a cooperative network to offer food that was natural, organic, unspoiled by the corporate world. For all the miles of wandering still ahead of me, perhaps I’d found a fit, a home, a place and people I could return to when I needed a rest.

Footnotes:

[1] For a photo of the three of us, see my blog post Friends of the Devil, Part 2. The daughter of an oil millionaire from Odessa Texas, Whiskey was a high school cheerleader impregnated by the star football player. After her dad denounced her and got a court order granting him sole custody of the child, Whiskey hit the road.

[2] Who would respond to every order by asking, “You want fries with that?”

[3] From John’s book Hazel and Other Poems, published by Allan and Cinda Kornblum’s Toothpaste Press in 1976. His inscription in my copy: “To Dave & the House. May Kentucky always grow in your heart an’ help your head.”

[4] One of the 150-year-old cottages demolished in 2015 over the objections of historic preservationists.

[5] Video trigger warning: hippie nudity.

[6] I described some of the events of this part of the trip in my blog post The Art of Hitchhiking.

[7] The Pentagon Papers (1971) and the Watergate Scandal (1972-74) were just two manifestations of that sense of being betrayed.

People We Used To Be, Part 2

Hitchhiking sign for Yarmouth, from my comp notebook. In the underlayer of text, the conjugation of avoir and etre, most of it in Johanne’s hand. I must’ve been driving.

“Perhaps a person can write about things only when she is no longer the person who experienced them, and that transition is not yet complete. In this sense, a conversion narrative is built into every autobiography; the writer purports to be the one who remembers, who saw, who did, who felt, but the writer is no longer that person. In writing things down, she is reborn.” -Rachel Kushner, “The Hard Crowd: Coming of Age on the Streets of San Francisco”

Bidding farewell to my new friends Johanne and Marc and their cabin in the woods near Mont-Joli, I headed southeast on Highway 132 toward New Brunswick. As I passed through the little eastern Québec towns – Sainte-Flavie, Sainte-Angèle-de-Mérici, Saint-Antoine-de-Padoue[1], Sainte-Jeanne-d’Arc, Saint-Noël, Saint-Alexandre-des-Lacs, Sainte-Florence, Saint-François-d’Assise – I thought about the communion of saints, the mystical bond uniting us through hope and love. Was this what I would learn on this journey into the unknown? 

When I crossed into New Brunswick, I entered the Maritimes, Canada’s Atlantic coast provinces, originally the home of the Mi’kmaq, Maliseet, and Passamaquoddy people, taken over in the early 17th century by British and French settlers. The French settlements were known collectively as Acadie. And my route along the New Brunswick coast – Highway 11 – had been named the Acadian Trail. The rides were short but came as quickly as I desired them to, and the entire southeasterly route from the Québec border through New Brunswick was less than 400 kilometers. As I traveled I could make out Prince Edward Island, ten miles across the Northumberland Strait. 

When I crossed into Nova Scotia, I picked up the Trans-Canada Highway again, heading due east and then crossing the narrow Strait of Canso separating Cape Breton Island from the rest of Nova Scotia. I picked up Highway 19, which took me along the northwestern side of the island. As the traffic thinned out and the little towns grew fewer and farther between, I slowed down, enthralled by the romance of the sea and landscape. Sheep grazed the high meadows of yellow clover and lavender, thickets of wild roses, huckleberries, raspberries, leading down to the fishing villages and plummeting into the Northumberland Strait.

A ride dropped me off midday in Margaree Harbour, a picturesque village at the mouth of the Margaree River. I walked around until I found the most popular café. Afterward, hiking across the bridge over the river and out of town, I burst into a spirited song of the road:

Hike a stiff easterly breeze

with a bellyful of fish chowder –

the trawler’s come home with the catch.

Fling yodels off the precipices,

echoing down through the dales.

String the Acadian fiddle, lads!

Blow ye winds on the bagpipes!

Near Chéticamp I entered Cape Breton Highlands National Park, 366 square miles of high plateau and rocky coastlines. No roads led into its heavily wooded interior, and the park contained a wealth of wildlife, including lynx, bobcat, moose, black bear, and coyote [2]. Following the Cabot Trail, the road circumnavigating the park, I pushed on to the Highlands, the cloud-hidden spruce, jackpine, and birch reaches through which the Chéticamp River cut a gorge.

Near MacKenzie Point, knowing that the route was about to turn east and inland along the northern boundary of the park, I stopped for the day. Because I hadn’t stocked up on enough provisions to allow for multi-day camping, and the handful of official park campgrounds offered only the most basic tent-camping amenities, I realized this might be the extent of my stay. I followed a short trail to an overlook, and then wandered off that trail for some tent-free camping. From my sojournal:

camp on high cliff overlooking 

the Gulf of Saint Lawrence.

beyond that Newfoundland, 

the Grand Banks, 

the North Atlantic. 

scrub pine for wind protection, 

moss to cushion the bedrock. 

quarter moon gives way to

milky stream of stars

to glistening blue sunrise. 

Cabot Trail along the northwestern coast of Cape Breton Island

The next morning, I scrounged up a couple of apples and a hunk of cheese from my rucksack and sliced it all up for a little breakfast plate. I’d been on the road for almost twenty days and hitchhiked over 2,000 miles to arrive at this beautiful morning in this spectacular place. And that was it. That was all I needed or wanted from this trip. From that point on, I was moving in the direction home – across to the eastern side of the island and then south along the coast. I was packing Gary Snyder’s Turtle Island in a pocket of my rucksack, reading and rereading his poems and essays. In “Four Changes,” I’d underlined: “Balance, harmony, humility, growth which is a mutual growth with Redwood and Quail; to be a good member of the great community of living creatures. True affluence in not needing anything.” After camping for the night on a beach, I wrote in my notebook:

driftwood and smooth beach stones

are ideal for campfire cooking.

boil brook water

add five hands

of rolled oats

stir until thick

mix in honey, raisins, sunflower seeds

rich helping of peanut butter.

this

will last until midafternoon.

After stepping off Cape Breton Island, I continued along the southeastern coast of Nova Scotia, small fishing ports anchored to the rugged coastline, interrupted by Halifax, the only substantial city in the province. The white horses of the surf raced along, the ocean tossing tangles of rigging and mislaid lobster traps on its shores. Big-boned gulls met up at the cannery docks after following the fishing trawlers home. Little fingers of the ocean curled up into the land, beckoning – Halifax Harbour, St. Margaret’s Bay. The land jutted out its chin where the storms broke and the wind never ceased – Fox Point, Western Head. Across the waves, a white-rocked beacon cast its lonely eye across the ocean, a mother searching for her son, lost, swept away.

I was traveling easily, unhurried, no schedule, no deadline, this time with myself. When I wanted a break from the road, the ocean was never far. Because of the Gulf Stream, the southeast coast of Nova Scotia offered bracing but pleasant waters for swimming:

still cove of rock

shelter from the sea’s turmoil.

cliffside coursing with pink granite

flecked with agate and quartz.

water transparent

twenty feet deep off this edge.

sea tern enters

circles

dives for its meal.

When I reached Yarmouth, at the southern end of Nova Scotia, I took my leave of the Maritimes. I booked passage on the ferry out of Yarmouth Sound, past the Cape Forchu lighthouse, across the Bay of Fundy as the evening fog rolled in – 180 kilometers to Bar Harbor, Maine. I roamed the ship, observing my fellow passengers, stopping at the bar for a Moosehead Ale and a shot of rye whisky. On the stern deck, I met two free-spirited women travelers from Minneapolis and kept their company for the rest of the voyage, sharing their cigarettes, drinking ales and conversing between blasts of the foghorn, falling in love with ballet-bodied, green-eyed Mary – but we kept it friendly. Listening for whale songs through the night, we disembarked at sunrise.

I had one stop to make on my way back home. After graduating from Iowa, my friend Tony Hoagland had moved to Ithaca to test the post-graduate waters of the writing program at Cornell. I took US Highway 2 through the backwoods of Maine and into New Hampshire. Early that afternoon, as I was passing through the White Mountains, ten miles north of Mount Washington, I came upon a cascading mountain stream beside the road. I asked the driver to pull over to let me out, and climbed the hillside, following the stream, until I came to a place where the water pooled beside large basking boulders out of sight of the road. I stripped down and floated in the cool, clear mountain water, high on the wonder of it all, thinking about Tony:

I reached up to draw

the pennyroyal from my ears.

Rushing back came the sound of water.

The river reclined on rock contours,

pocketfuls of coins laughing down its slope,

the sacred chords of silvery promises.

As I lingered, the sun dried thoughts of you on my skin.

One last border to fall before the flints of our souls will strike again.

I continued on Highway 2 into Vermont, then south on I-91 and west into New York State, reaching the Hudson River and Troy by nightfall. By then I was deep into this notion of an epic or mythic odyssey, and scribbled in my journal the next morning:

I’ve descended from the northern lights, where the stars streak with their weight to earth. There I watched the brazen criminal sun break through the granite chill. But last night I walked through the seven-storied ruins of Troy, and today I drift as sluggishly as dust across this valley. How will this compare with you – your movements swift and delicate, like the red fox?

I reached Ithaca that afternoon and spent a good couple days hanging out with Tony, talking about poets and poetry, getting high and swimming in Lake Cayuga. (Tony was always a great swimmer, and a member of that communion of saints.) Although as restless and footloose as I was, he was able to envision a life as a poet and teacher and work toward it. His focus was inspiring.

By the end of August I was back in Iowa City. Changes were in the works. My housemate Pat had given birth to a son, Sierra Soleil, in February. Like everyone in the house, I was helping raise him, but Pat and Sierra were moving to Santa Cruz to stay close to his father. I’d decided to not spend another winter living in the unheated attic of the Governor Street co-op house, and was about to move into the first-floor apartment of a house on Fairchild Street with Thomascyne, a feisty red-haired art student who would open doors and point me in new directions.

Footnotes

[1] When I was thirteen, I selected Anthony of Padua as my confirmation saint. I liked that he was the patron saint of lost causes, and that adding Anthony to my name made my initials D.E.A.D.

[2] In 2009, Taylor Mitchell, a young Canadian country singer, was attacked by coyotes on a trail near Chéticamp, and died from her wounds.

People We Used to Be, Part 1

A page from my composition notebook turned into a hitchhiking sign.

“I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.”  –Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem 

When I returned to Iowa City in April 1977 after six months of traveling, I slowly eased back in. I was tending my co-op house’s back garden and occasionally helping out at the bakery – which had split off from Stone Soup and opened its own place a floor up in Center East as Morning Glory Bakery. But mostly I was chilling, digging the mellow summer vibe of Iowa City. Most of the students would vacate the premises, and cool, interesting folks just came out of the woodwork, or the woods. The day usually ended or started with drinks at The Deadwood or Gabe & Walker’s. A surprising number of good young jazz musicians were playing around town in various combos, before eventually splitting to the West Coast.

New Pioneer Co-op was preparing to move from its cozy second floor location on the corner of South Gilbert and Prentiss streets to a larger storefront beside Ralston Creek on South Van Buren. I was hired to help with the expansion, joining a staff that included my friends John, Sheila, Pam, Sue, and Bob. I learned a lot from those folks. We worked as a collective, sharing store decisions and duties, but as the junior member of the group, my usual role was supervising the volunteers, stocking the bins, running the cash register. I enjoyed the work, and the quality interactions with the co-op community. 

I finally returned for my second year at the university in the fall of 1978. I had decided to work toward a General Studies degree, a liberal arts path that was actually an array of intersecting paths. My coursework was spread across a range of disciplines, an approach that felt natural. English Lit and Creative Writing, Film Study and Production, Languages (Spanish, French, Italian), Anthropology, Geography, Art History, Botany, Jazz Dance – I was omnivorous, helping myself to the buffet of knowledge.

By spring break, I was antsy. Iowa in March was barely thawing to a grey slush; one would need to head south to experience spring. I ignored that pull, deciding to visit my baking buddy Nancy, who had moved to a commune in Magog, Québec. As was often the case, I failed to clearly communicate the specifics of my visit. When I arrived on a frigid snowy night and called Nancy, she apologized that the community was in a spiritual retreat of sorts and couldn’t accept visitors right then. She did give me an address in Montréal. With few sleeping options that night, I went to La Régie de Police in Magog and asked to spend the night in a jail cell. They were cool with that request, but did lock the cell door. 

The address from Nancy led me to a three-story brownstone in Old Montreal, a “spirituality centre” run by a Buddhist Jesuit (or a Jesuit Buddhist). I meditated with him, sitting zazen, quietly walking up and down stairs in my stocking feet, settling into my silence. I slipped out to see the city once or twice, but it was bitterly cold and I had little money. That's how I spent my spring break.

In July, after taking a Poetry Workshop class with the gracious Marvin Bell, I returned to Canada. Similar to Mexico, it was an inexpensive destination that offered a chance to cross boundaries and see new places. For some reason, Cape Breton in Nova Scotia had become a goal. Perhaps I was thinking of Herman Melville’s comment: “Nothing will content [humankind] but the extremest limit of the land.”

I headed northwest on US 151 toward Wisconsin, stopping along the way at New Melleray Abbey, near Peosta, Iowa. Passing through the oak doors of the Trappist monastery, I explained to a young monk, “I had a need for shelter.” Without a word, he pulled from the folds of his robe a small black copy of the New Testament and Psalms and placed it in my speechless hands. I stayed in a private cell (kept unlocked), joining the two dozen monks in the chapel as they chanted the prayers of lauds at dawn and vespers at sunset. They shared their vegetarian meals with me, made with produce from their gardens - excellent bread and sparse conversation. After two days of peace, I thanked them for their goodwill and continued on my way.

I stopped in Madison to see what was happening, because something always was. I hooked up with a couple other vagabonds, and a spontaneous party ensued alfresco. When we had exhausted every prospect, we started to think about a place to crash – we laid out our sleeping bags in a wooded thicket beside Lake Mendota, not far from the student union. Campus cops rousted us a few hours later, telling us we couldn’t sleep there and checking our IDs. For some reason, they could not confirm my identity in their database, which pleased me to no end.

I continued northeast through Wisconsin and into the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. It was quiet, uneventful traveling, a time for contemplation. While waiting for a ride, I wrote in my notebook:

Beside the road i’m following:

ferns, buttercups, queen anne’s lace,

ace of clubs with one corner torn off,

indian paintbrushes, black-eyed susans,

curls of birch bark, grocery lists,

scraps of maps, a lake, water 

lilies, merganser diving.

Coming down through the Lower Peninsula, I stopped in Ann Arbor to get an energy charge  from my old traveling companion Prch, and then on to Detroit to cross the Ambassador Bridge into Windsor, Ontario. I got a ride from a young Black guy going to visit his father in a Windsor hospital. But the border official, noticing my rucksack, asked me about my plans. I told him I was thinking of going to Nova Scotia and would probably be in Canada a couple weeks. I was directed to the Office of Immigration, where I filled out a form and was then told I’d need to have $25 per day and a bus or train ticket to my destination. That amount of money would usually last me a week. After being sent back across the bridge, I walked downtown to the Detroit-Windsor tunnel, where I caught a shuttle bus to Canada, telling a completely different story that time.

I followed King’s Highway 401 through Ontario and into Quebec, along the north shore of Lakes Erie and Ontario, and then the Saint Lawrence Seaway to Montréal. I did some urban camping in Mount Royal Park, big enough that one could keep a low profile and not be hassled. From that same “sojournal”:

The corner of Rue Saint-Urbain

and Avenue Duluth Ouest

Café Santropol

in Montréal

a bay window

large pot of mint tea

old blues and jazz in the air

I make a sandwich

cheese tomato bread

and partake

Leaving Montréal, I picked up the Trans-Canada Highway going northeast along the seaway. I got a ride from Johanne, a young Québécois woman. She soon picked up two more hitchhikers, who proved to be borderline assholes, to the extent that I was becoming concerned for Johanne’s well-being, but they soon reached their destination. She was on her way to visit her friend Marc, who lived near Mont-Joli, a fortuitous 500-kilometer ride. To pass the time, I asked her to teach me some French. As we talked, I became charmed by her smile and laid-back style. Yes, I wanted to travel with her and wanted to travel blind. Later on my trip, with her in mind, I wrote:

Your eyes are bluebirds

Flying from the forest of your lashes.

Your hair is chestnut straw

Where white daisies make their home.

Your skin’s a creamy yoghurt with honey freckles.

The Saint-Laurent wraps you in its blue blouse.

Your breasts are river-worn stones,

A truth humbling Rubens and the masters.

We talk as we follow the river, 

Your hands rippling and fluttering in rhyme.

I learn from you: je suis, tu es, nous sommes,

New ways of saying the world. 

It was dark when we got to Mont-Joli. Johanne invited me to spend the night at her friend’s house. Marc was a burly bearded Québécois brother living in the backwoods and subsisting on a large garden and a small herd of goats. He lived in a one-room cabin, but gregarious and generous, he heartily welcomed me. It was a cozy scene. Marc and Johanne shared the bed and I rolled out my sleeping bag on the floor nearby. Early next morning, they quietly made love, thinking I was still asleep. When Marc got up to milk and feed his goats, Johanne beckoned to me to join her in bed. During my travels, I met people like her who were, by their nature, able to carry others’ weight, lightening their loads. 

Later that morning the three of us hiked to a nearby lake for a swim. As Johanne ran ahead, Marc turned to me, grinned, and said, “She is an extraordinary woman.” I smiled and nodded in agreement.

Going Down to Mexico, Part 6

The route from Ciudad de México to Morelia represents the first 15% of the 2,100 kilometers I traveled in this last installment to return to the U.S. This is the trusty road map I used in 1976-77 and 1980, in the days before Google Maps.

“Really to see the sun rise or go down every day, so to relate ourselves to a universal fact, would preserve us sane forever.” –Thoreau

I left Ciudad de México and its twelve million inhabitants on February 22. Because of my backpack, I couldn’t take the Metro, but a confusing bus ride and some hiking eventually got me to Highway 15, the main road heading west. I quickly hitched a ride from three estudiantes taking a day off from book-learning and going to Toluca. They took me to the Calixtlahuaca ruins just north of the city, and we explored the stone pyramids for an hour before they dropped me off on the western edge of the city. Just as I was about to give up on hitching, two guys going to Guanajuato stopped, and we traveled through the late afternoon pine forest mountains. As we crossed into Michoacán and the sun was setting, I said, “¡Alto aqui!” and climbed a hillside into woods until I found a level spot and rigged up a shelter from the hail that came not long after. 

I started hiking the next morning in the clear mountain air, but soon got a lift from a busdriver, and off we went to Zitácuaro, the bus filling along the way with indigenous Mazahuas, the women identifiable by their beautifully embroidered blouses and layered skirts. I bought bananas at the market and my favorite treat, calabaza dulce, from a street vendor and walked to the edge of town. A friendly couple soon stopped and took me fifty kilometers to Ciudad Hidalgo. Noticing a marker on my map for an agua termal, Los Azufres, I hiked five kilometers to the turnoff and then grabbed a bouncing twenty-kilometer ride in the back of a pickup up a logging road to a blue lake fed by a hot mineral spring. I set up camp on the far side of the lake and dove into the bone-chilling water. The first campfire I’d made in a while warded off the mountain night chill.

In the morning, I found the hot spring by following the rotten-egg smell of sulfur (azufre) to its source. A simple setup corralled the spring in a four-foot-deep pool, the overflow spilling into the lake, so one could comfortably steep in 90-degree water. I shared this delicious pleasure with one family, soaking for over two hours, luxuriating and exfoliating. 

Next day, a couple of quick rides took me to Morelia, where I stopped for lunch and stocked up on fruit, veggies, and eggs, and then camped on its outskirts at the edge of a cornfield. In the morning, the first passing car stopped to pick me up, two young guys just returned from a year in Chicago. I decided to stop in Zamora for lunch, checking out the city and treating myself to their famous chongos zamoranos. Then three men en route to Guadalajara gave me a lift in the back of their pickup. As we passed along the southern shore of Lago Chapala in the late afternoon, I tapped on the top of the cab to stop, clambered out, and found a spot beside a stream at the edge of a strawberry field – laundry day at the lakeshore, sweet juicy fresas for breakfast (and lunch and dinner). 

After a three-day break, I was back on the road, a couple of rides taking me to Guadalajara. I eventually wandered into a plaza where lots of handsome young kids were setting up a stage, so I stayed late to enjoy a ballet performance. I found a church and sought out the priest to ask for a place to sleep. He filled my need by taking me to the Civil Hospital Alcalde, where I slept in a spare bed in the men’s ward. In the morning a nurse placed a glass of milk on the bedside table like a votive candle.

I was now moving steadily, not in a rush but making miles most every day. I hitched a ride from a young couple and their two sons traveling from Mexico City to Puerto Vallarta. So, across Jalisco and into the dry rugged mountains of Nayarit until our paths diverged near Avakatlan. The next morning, a well-dressed elderly man stopped to give me a lift. He spoke good English, and I sensed this was an opportunity to share the message. He listened intently and then offered that he too was a seeker and had found his answer in Kirpal Singh, master of a spiritual practice known as Yoga of the Sound Current. We stopped in Tepic, the capital of Nayarit, and he treated me to brunch at the Hotel Junipero Serra, where I enjoyed enchiladas verdes on a veranda overlooking the city, my fanciest meal in Mexico. He was on his way to Culiacán but diverted from his route to visit the fishing port and surfing town of San Blas, and I tagged along. I thought about staying a few days but had a difficult night camping in a palm grove near the beach, where I was attacked by mosquitoes and sand fleas.

In the morning I moved on, a short hike and then a ride back to Highway 15, now heading northwest. Crossing the Río San Pedro, I decided to stop for a swim to wash off the heat, dust, and sand flea memories. I crossed the bridge and hiked upriver a kilometer, stripped down to my shorts and, in my excitement to cool off, dove from a six-foot bank into four feet of water. Luckily, the bottom was muddy, but it was a hell of a jolt that dazed me and left me stiff and sore for days – from my head and jaw down my spine. My mother always displayed on the wall by our dining room table a small framed picture of an attentive guardian angel hovering near a boy and girl at the edge of a cliff. Was that the spirit that saved me? I rested up and recovered for a day, visiting the nearby pueblo and catching a glimpse of some of the reclusive Huichol people who live in the nearby mountains.

The next day I caught a ride from a semi driver, a thoughtful hombre into writing and philosophy and Kahlil Gibran. We made a connection and I shared the message with him. He dropped me off on the outskirts of the tourist city of Mazatlán, where I wandered through quiet Sunday afternoon streets and down to a stone jetty away from the busy beach hustle to watch the waves break and the sun set on the ocean.

The land was becoming increasingly arid as I continued north. A ride into Culiacán, the capital of Sinaloa and the pre-cartel Mexican drug business, a city with more flashy cars per capita than any other in Mexico. I stopped in a plaza for a lunch of fruit and chatted with a law student. A long walk to the outskirts of the city, a long wait, and finally a short hitch to a naranjal, where I camped that night under the fragrance of orange blossoms. After oranges for breakfast, I stuffed my backpack with a dozen more.

My second hitch of the day, from a friendly taxi driver and shrimper, took me to Los Mochis. He invited me to his home for comida (the main afternoon meal, as is Mexican custom) with his whole family – his wife making bread, son and pretty daughter-in-law, 84-year-old father-in-law, brother. Mucho platicando – lively discussion of life in Mexico versus Estados Unidos. Afterward, he dropped me off downtown. Two days of steady hitching took me another 650 kilometers north into Sonora. My last night in Mexico, I camped at a water reservoir on the outskirts of Hermosillo, celebrating by baking a banana-chocolate cake in a pan over my campfire coals. From my journal:

the dry places

the Sonoran Desert

the wind comes

slipping over the hills like a hawk

hot iguana sun and saguaro statues

in the stillness of the coyote darkness

a sky of glittering diamonds

spirits lose their power

At the end of over 4½ months in Mexico, I took a bus to the frontera, retracing the route of my brief excursion into Mexico two years earlier, the same blind boy playing harmonica for change outside a dusty bus stop diner. His playing had not improved. I crossed the border from Nogales, Sonora, to Nogales, Arizona, like going through some cultural time-warp, except we all were alike in so many more ways than we were different that the differences were insignificant.

I caught a lift from a Mexican American going to Tucson after visiting his dentist across the border. He also picked up Dean, a scruffy young hitchhiker from Indiana, and we headed north on I-19, him drinking tequila as the novacaine was wearing off. I volunteered to drive because he was weaving badly, but he turned me down. As we came up on two Arizona state patrol cars pulled off the shoulder to make a stop, I warned our driver to “maintain.” He did, by slowing down to twenty miles an hour, and still almost took off the driver side door of one of the patrol cars. We were nabbed a few miles down the road, or he was nabbed, drunk, with no car registration and a trunkload of suspicious mag wheels. Dean and I got our IDs checked and our rucksacks sniffed by drug dogs and told to walk to the next exit ramp.

When I got to Tucson, I called Iowa City, nervous with anticipation, and talked with Pat. It was a happy long-distance homecoming, tempered by the news that she had miscarried back in the winter. I was surprised how good it felt to talk with a friend, someone from my household, someone whom I’d worked beside many nights in the bakery. This, I realized, was my home (or home base), my family, all that made the journey meaningful. Pat was heading to California to visit family and friends, so we made plans to meet in Santa Clara in a week.

I took my time hitching up the coast. On the vernal equinox, I camped with a Dutch macrobiotic cook named Biek and another hitcher in a Big Sur meadow, waking at sunrise in a field of California poppies. Pat and I met up later that day, a sweet comfortable reunion. We hung out in Santa Cruz for a week and then hitched back to Iowa City. During those ten days together, our friendship deepened to something that would develop into the foundation for our marriage, four years later. 

Back in Iowa City, I barely knew how to talk about this six-month journey. What happened to Michael, and all the others whose paths I crossed? I didn’t have a good answer to the question Dylan posed in the song he wrote when he was twenty-one years old: “Where have you been, my blue-eyed son?” Perhaps I’m only now beginning to “learn my song well.” My last journal entry ended:

April 1st we return to Iowa City / the end of a lot of miles / i’m here now and something’s going to happen but i know not what / wait to hear from Prch in Ann Arbor back from his travels / think about Naropa, the Rainbow Gathering, Cheryl in Vermont, other places or things to do here in Iowa City – the house, the garden, friends on nearby farms, poetry, Stone Soup, some job or another, connections getting rewired / i’m waiting

Glossary

chongos zamoranos - a sweetened milk curd dessert flavored with cinnamon

naranjal - orange grove

Going Down to Mexico, Part 5

The interior of the Basílica de Nuestra Señora de la Soledad (Our Lady of Solitude) in Oaxaca

As I reflect on this trip, I wrestle to explain the spiritual journey I was on. How did I come to share in Miguel’s mission to witness God’s love? How did I reach a point where I’d write at the end of a journal entry, “May the Lord be with me”? Like many kids my age (22), I was looking for answers. I was looking for a way to be at peace with myself and live in the world. The poet in me also relished, or was comfortable with, the mysterious and the mystical. Deep in my heart I knew this wasn’t the only path I would follow in my life, but it was the one presented to me at that moment, and I wasn’t going to be so stubborn as to refuse it.

Sunday, January 30, was our last day in Puerto Escondido, capped by the excitement of a school of sardines veering into the bay, glittering silvery as they leapt in the air, followed by larger fish and a flock of terns feeding on them. All the niños rushed down to the shore as sardines and other fish were beached or trapped in shallow pools. We followed them and grabbed dinner – a good-sized sea bass flopping on shore. The next morning we got a ride to San Gabriel Mixtepec, about fifty kilometers north, in the back of a flatbed truck carrying spools of barbed wire. As the truck wound its way up a dirt road into the mountains, it took on other passengers – one with a pig, another with a portable corn miller, a family with two children – until the bed was full. Miguel and I slept that night by a stream under coffee trees.

The next day we got a late start, missing what little traffic there was, and hiked through pine forests, quiet cafetales, and crisp mountain air to the next town. We got a better start the following morning, and a ride from the first passing vehicle, a truck delivering tanks of cooking gas to towns along the way, up into the misty morning clouds, cresting the Sierra Madre del Sur, and down into the Central Valley to Sola de Vega, where the pavement began, and on to San Pablo Huixtepec, where we camped by an irrigation dam under a full moon. At the other end of the broad agricultural plain was the city of Oaxaca, thirty kilometers away.

One ride brought us to the edge of the city, and we hiked the last few kilometers, from the farms on the outskirts to el centro. We tested a seminary for a place to stay that night and were offered sixty pesos and directions to a hotel – our first bed and hot shower in months. Asking around for a camping spot the next day, we discovered a long set of stairs, twenty minutes from the Zócalo, that took us up a hill to an amphitheatre and beyond that a forest. We set up camp on Cerro del Fortín, from which we could look out over the city. In the morning we met the men who guarded the forest, protecting it from households seeking stove wood. They were friendly and let us store our rucksacks in their hut during the day.

Oaxaca offered lots to see and do. The Zapotec ruins at Monte Albán were a short bus ride away. The Museo de las Culturas de Oaxaca gave a good overview of the pre-Columbian Zapotec and Mixtec civilizations. We saw a French movie with Spanish subtitles at the French language school one day, went to a free classical guitar concert another, wandered the city, unwinding at times in one of the many beautiful churches, such as the aptly named Basílica de Nuestra Señora de la Soledad. We hung out at the Zócalo, scrutinizing the tourists and admiring the Zapotec women in their beautifully embroidered huipiles. 

A huipil (traditional indigenous tunic) that Pat brought back from a trip to Oaxaca with her friend Sue Martinez in 1974

Every day we stopped at the mercado for a treat of fresh produce or large mugs of café con leche. In one of the small tiendas on the street side of the market, we met Señora Eugenia, who owned a mole shop. (The small containers of peanut butter she stocked first drew us in.) We were attracted to her charm and intelligence, and chatted with her when she wasn’t busy with customers. She sold us a jar of her mole negro and showed us how to use it to elevate a dish of arroz con pollo. Later we visited her home to help repair a chili roasting machine. In her factory, located across the inner courtyard from her residence, all the ingredients – cacao beans, peanuts, chili peppers, onions, garlic, and spices – were roasted, ground, and combined to make this Oaxacan speciality. The aromas and powdery dust merged and drifted in the sunshine slanting through the skylights.

We saw the forest guards only on weekends but got to know them well. We watched one skillfully weave a basket from strips of bamboo, and he let us try our hand at it. We shared our message with a number of them, talking about our experiences: “I once was lost but now I’m found.” Over time, this had become a natural thing to do, and in a country as religious as Mexico, people were receptive and respectful. It was never about proselytizing. I gravitated to the clarity and brevity of the Beatitudes: “Blessed are pure in heart, for they shall see God.”

Miguel and I returned to the issue of taking our separate paths, considering the pros and cons as we walked the city. Acknowledging our spiritual concordance, Miguel tentatively agreed to the proposal. More discussion was needed, but the tenor of the conversation was less heated than that of two months ago. I wanted to make sure the break was clean, positive, and above reproach.

We met two men who offered us information about magic mushrooms, which we’d been interested in since a conversation in Morelia. At their house they showed us photos of derrumbes: psilocybin mushrooms – ten centimeters tall, white stems, phallic black heads, growing in bunches in June and July near Huautla de Jiménez, a Mazatec pueblo about 200 kilometers north of Oaxaca. A strange and powerful mixture of mystical and drunken spirits resided in that house, but they listened intently to our message.

Near the end of our second week in Oaxaca, Miguel came down with a severe stomach flu. On the second day of his fever, he became incapacitated, and I busied myself caring for him. The fever tested Miguel, and in the middle of it he raised the issue of our imminent separation. He chastised me for being self-centered, a charge I couldn’t refute. During the coldest night we’d experienced in a long time, Miguel’s fever broke. The next morning I fixed a hearty breakfast of huevos rancheros (minus some of the chili peppers). As the sun warmed us, we became overpowered by the moment – the return of health and strength, the relief after an emotional trial – and we both realized it was time to part, that this would be a step forward. 

That evening, Miguel and I shared a long farewell hug, two tall lanky blonde guys from Austria (well, my grandfather was), one difference being a decade of experience. I packed up my gear and walked to the station to catch the night train to Mexico City. As I waited for the train, I was tested by doubts. I felt the absence of Miguel; we’d been traveling partners for 4½ months after all. But my thoughts also turned to a promise I made to Pat the day I left Iowa City: to return by April 1.

The second class section was crowded, and I wasn’t able to sit down until our soldier guards detrained at midnight. I stretched out, covering myself with my old woolen serape as we moved through the mountain night, the names of Indian pueblos whispered into my dreams. As morning came we entered the Valle de México – irrigated farms became dirty factory sprawls became working class slums became the comparative wealth of el centro. Disembarking at Estación Buenavista, I wandered the area, getting my bearings, stopping for lunch in Parque Alameda, asking around about places to stay. I was directed to Colonia San Rafael, just west of the city’s historic center. Many of its early 20th century mansions had been converted into pensiónes. (See Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, set in the early ’70s in a nearby neighborhood, to get the vibe.) A sign in a store led me to Serapio Rendon 39 and a tiny room for 25 pesos a day ($1.25) with kitchen privileges for a few pesos more – homey, with lots of families and children.

On Saturday I visited the Palacio de Bellas Artes and marveled at its Art Deco interior and the impressive murals by Diego Rivera, David Siquieros, Rufino Tamayo, and José Orozco. I took a bus to the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, the heart of the student protest movement, where I met a group of architecture students on break from class and talked with them about politics and the student massacre of eight years before. The next day I took the Metro to Parque Chapultepec and spent four hours wandering the magnificent Museo Nacional de Antropología and then strolled through the park:

Everyone goes to Chapultepec Park on Sunday

The Metro line is crammed with

A flood of refugees from the working week

Families lay out picnics on the grass

Babies cry and melt ice cream on their new outfits

Children romp through the gardens

And play futbol around the monuments

Young lovers couple on the sexual merry-go-round

The lonely are not alone

Some visit the zoo it’s so nice

Others evade the cages of despair

They rent boats and row in circles on the pond

For one hour feeding the ducks

Monday, I visited the newly completed Basílica de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe and witnessed the devotion of pilgrims coming from all parts of the country, crawling on their knees the last hundred yards over paving stones to her shrine to petition for help or health. Sitting in Parque Alameda and enjoying my lunch, I was invited to meet that evening with a class of students studying English. Perhaps I’d offer them the message. The city was interesting but too fast and cold and dirty. I was relaxing into traveling solo again, open to the world around me, maintaining a clear-eyed view of my actions.

Glossary

cafetales - Small-scale coffee farms found in Mexico primarily in the highlands of Oaxaca and Chiapas.

Zócalo - Central plaza or square. The Zócalo in Mexico City was built over the ceremonial center of the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan.

mole negro - A marinade sauce that can be traced back to the indigenous peoples of Central Mexico. It can transform a simple arroz con pollo (chicken and rice) dish. Because of its  complex array of flavors and laborious preparation process, it’s often associated with celebrations and festivals.

Going Down to Mexico, Part 4

Playa Zicatela, just south of Puerto Escondido, Oaxaca

“Everything in Mexico tasted. Vivid garlic, cilantro, lime. The smells were vivid. Not the flowers, they didn’t smell at all. But the sea, the pleasant smell of decaying jungle.”  –Lucia Berlin 

We spent a week at our camp home on Playa Azul on the Michoacán coast. Three college students from Mexico City joined us for a few days. A steady trickle of visitors stopped by, bringing reefer to share, nimbly climbing the coconut palms, a knife in their teeth, to harvest cocos – a refreshing beverage in a green-husked goblet. The steep drop-off at the shore made this beach less popular with families and surfers, but the waves were fun and fierce for a novice body surfer. More than once I caught an incoming wave the same moment I was getting caught in the powerful backwash – it felt like 90 seconds in a washing machine. 

On Christmas Eve we went to town after dinner and took in the final night of Las Posadas, Mary and Joseph in search of shelter, the piñatas of Navidad descending until Midnight Mass in the tiny packed church, where gaiety mixed with solemnity. This marked a growing accord between Michael and me, a new bond of partnership. We talked of the spirits – fear and anxiety, resentment and regret, self and egotism, attachment and addiction, depression and despair – that haunted us and held us back. One evening two young men walked into our camp, sat by our fire, offered us drugs we had to refuse, and then silently moved on. After they left, we looked at each other, unsettled by the aura of malevolence, and silently mouthed in unison: Demons. I wrote in my journal:

and if angels sing in my head

if spirits stand over me

but pass on by

how can these be told?

On December 27 we moved down the coast, stopping in Lázaro Cárdenas for supplies and then catching a ride from two San Diego surfers headed to their friends’ house for a meal. We were invited to join them, so across the Río Balsas into the state of Guerrero, and twenty kilometers more to the beach town of Petacalco, where we met Russell, Carmelo, Sharon, Jay, Fred, all transplanted from Cape Hatteras, seeking a higher consciousness and the clean waves at El Faro in Lázaro. They rented the house and land from their friend Santiago, growing papayas, bananas, tomatoes, and beans. We set up camp in a coconut grove behind their house, becoming involved in the community and its efforts to achieve enlightenment by letting go of fears and egos. After dinner we’d all get high and engage in intense discussions on how to “be here now.” We contributed what we could, but they were on their own path.

One day we took an excursion, paddling surfboards across the mouth of the Río Balsas to an island where Santiago’s father, Samuel, farmed a paradise guarded by royal palms rising seventy feet in the air. He tended fields of maíz, jícamas, papayas. He harvested calabazas and camotes and treated us to plates of them, enmielados (boiled in honey). On New Year’s Eve we tried marijuana tortillas, then dinner at the house of Diego and Felipe, two local fisherman friends, and then back to the house, where the scene was lost in reefer, tequila, and rock ’n’ roll. On Sunday we made dinner in gratitude for our friends’ hospitality – tempura vegetables, gorditos filled with fried veggies, sweet creamy atole for dessert.

When we left on Monday, we took on new names to symbolize our new commitment. Reflecting on our experiences at Petacalco, we resolved to abstain from reefer, feeling it might be blurring our focus. I was now Marcos, and Michael became Miguel – one of the freedoms of traveling, because no one is qualified to contest the “truth” of your life. A fifty-kilometer ride took us to the pueblo of Lagunillas, where we stocked up and set off on a seven-kilometer hike down a dirt road to Playa Troncones, recommended by our Petacalco friends. The next day, searching for shellfish in the rocky shallows among sea urchins and mussels, a rainbow of fish darting in and out among the rocks, I was tumbled by the surf, receiving cuts and sea urchin spines I’d later have to extract. That afternoon a fisherman gave us a small shark he’d hauled in, which we then shared with the farmer whose land we camped on. After Miguel figured out how to skin the shark with the tools at hand, we grilled steaks.

We stayed at Playa Troncones for four days, the mountains a blue shadow at our back, the sea shimmering before us, sunsets glowing through the palm trees. We obtained drinking water and eggs from the farmer we’d shared the shark with, all the cocos we wanted when he harvested the grove, a feast of oysters one day from a man who dove for them. The Father provided for us.

After hiking back to the highway, we caught a ride in the back of a pickup to Zihuatanejo, a resort town rimming a beautiful bay. A string of hotels along the beach, a marina where yachts of all types docked, beaches populated with rich Chilangos and English-speaking gringos of all stripes – Murricans, Canucks, Brits, Aussies. After slurping down a bowl of pozole at a street stand, we hiked away from town to the other side of the bay, where we camped by a house owned by an absentee American and cared for by the Mexican family living next door. We quickly became friends with the caretaker, who invited us to attend a meeting for worship with his family, my first experience with a Jehovah’s Witness service. On Monday we exchanged dollars for pesos and treated ourselves to a lunch of hot tortillas fresh from a tortillería, bananas, and crema de cacahuates (yup, peanut butter).

We continued southeast along the coast toward Acapulco. Within a hundred kilometers, we hopped off the road and hiked five kilometers to a spot beside a swift-running stream near the pueblo of Santa María. We camped on a sandbank by the stream and slowed down for a couple days, fasting, reading the Bible, lazing in the sun, slipping into the stream to cool off, comfortable in the stillness. I wrote in my journal: 

Friday morning, we were back to the blacktop and sticking out our thumbs for Acapulco. We got one ride, then nothing for hours and miles until three vacationing students from Mexico City stopped to deliver us to six p.m. downtown Acapulco. We soon met Antonio and Francisco, kids living honestly on the beach. They led us to Playa Caleta, the only Acapulco beach one could sleep on. Near the mouth of the bay, far from the glitz of el centro, we’d sit in the relative quiet and comfort of hotel chairs and enjoy a late meal. At dawn, we’d rise as the workers rushed through straightening chairs and raking the beach. We checked out the city, the glaring contrasts of wealth and poverty, the tapestry and travesty of the tourist trade, and the humanity that exists in spite of that.

Los Ángeles de Acapulco

every Saturday

the children of Acapulco get a bath

and as evening comes

the plazas and calles

become filled with the perfume

of jabón and champú

from the anointed heads

of children at play

We had success at the Mexican Immigration office, extending our tourist visas for three more months. We enjoyed Acapulco beach life for the next few days, relaxing under the sombrillas when the chair-ticket guy was not around. Our little beach urchin friend Manuel would bring us leftovers from his daily hustle of the tourists – hot cakes and pastries in the morning, steak or fish and bolillos in the evening. We chatted with some of those tourists – a retired German diplomat, a restaurant owner from Blackpool, a retired British civil servant – but our patience was tested by overheard conversations that revealed how oblivious they were of the world around them. On Friday we took Manuel to a dentist to have his teeth looked at and bought food for the next leg of our trip. 

The next morning we took a bus through the part of Acapulco we’d avoided – Pizza Hut, Shakey’s, Denny’s, Big Boy, Colonel Sanders – and then got a ride in the back of a camioneta climbing the cliffs overlooking the bay and then south. The road was quiet, but we caught a ride from a crazy young busdriver who burned through his route and then talked with us at its end, sharing his pan dulce. A traveling salesman took us to Pinotepa Nacional in Oaxaca, along the way turning off onto a dirt road to a beach restaurant and a delicious fish dinner. And finally to Puerto Escondido, a fishing port turned surfing and hippie hangout. We scoped out the town, full of hip young gringos, trailer park offering campsites for 17 pesos (85 cents) a night. We hiked down to Playa Zicatela and made a quiet camp in the scrub woods away from the beach. The surfers would come out our way to wrestle and ride the waves, the beach strewn with self-absorbed kids getting high or tan or both. We befriended a Belizean and Canadian couple who had met in Escondido. He was nursing a knife wound suffered at the hands of her enraged former boyfriend, but we admired how completely in love they were.

We decided to bid adiós to the coast and head north toward Oaxaca City, bypassing the Yucatán and Guatemala for now. Over three months in Mexico and four months on the road, we moved slowly but deliberately. Miguel and I still had our differences, but they were the healthy, normal consequences of traveling together. I was asking questions whose answers strengthened my convictions, eased my doubts, and filled me with peace and equanimity. My apprenticeship was coming to a close.

Glossary

Las Posadas - Literally, the inns. A nine-day reenactment of Mary and Joseph’s search for lodging, which ends on Christmas Eve. A popular processional ceremony in Mexico and other Latin American countries.

jícamas, calabazas, camotes - Jícamas and camotes are root crops. The jícama has a sweet, nutty flavor, crisp like a water chestnut. Camotes are in the sweet potato family. Calabazas are in the pumpkin family.

Chilangos - Residents of Mexico City or Mexico, DF (Distrito Federal). When used by those from other parts of Mexico, it can have a derogatory meaning. Citizens of Mexico City often use it as a point of pride.

pozole - A traditional Mexican stew of hominy and pork or chicken, often garnished with shredded lettuce, onions, garlic, chili peppers, avocados, and fresh lime juice.

Going Down to Mexico, Part 3

(Las Cascadas in Parque Tzararacua, Michoacán)

In San Luis Potosí, we bought train tickets to Morelia. Engine problems delayed our departure by three hours, so we missed our transfer. When we did arrive in Escobedo, a little pueblo in the state of Guanajuato, we disembarked to a brass band playing a fanfare. A couple dozen muchachos immediately swarmed us, as if the musical welcome were meant for us, while we inquired when the next train would depart … Not until the next morning. The kids followed us as we walked around town and finally to the Catholic church, María Auxiliadora (Mary the Helper), where we stopped to center ourselves and then talk with them until a Franciscan padre shooed them off. Because the night threatened rain, we asked for shelter, and he set us up in a house adjacent to the church, where we cooked dinner and bedded down on straw mats. The next morning, as we waited for the train, warming ourselves in the sun, we sat on a rusty steel girder stamped Krupp 1928.

That train took us 100 kilometers closer to Morelia. It also had engine troubles, so we missed the last train to Morelia. Acámbaro was a pretty little city tucked in among surrounding mountains. Sitting under the topiary orange trees of the main plaza, we were befriended by a group of muchachos who directed us to the restaurant with the best food and prices. Along the way, we lost one of our new friends when two plainclothes police rushed up, brutally grabbed him, and hustled him off because of some brawl he’d gotten into earlier. Young Mexicans would often gravitate toward us; I’m sure their motivations were various – but they were also simply curious. Sometimes, if they didn’t know or remember our names, they’d address us as maestros.

After our meal, we hiked out of the city and up into the hills, laying down our sleeping bags in a pile of corn stalks, burrowing in to shelter ourselves from the shower that occurred most nights. In the morning as campesinos passed on their way to the fields, I climbed the hillside and watched the sun illuminate the city’s white stucco buildings as it rose above the ridge behind me.

That day, we finally arrived in Morelia, the charming capital of Michoacán, known for its early colonial architecture, especially in el centro. On a recommendation, we made our way to the Seminario Santa María Guadalupe in the eastern hills of the city, and met a priest who gave us a tour and provided dinner and a place to stay at a nearby retreat house. After learning that was a one-night offer, we camped the next night in a half-finished restaurant. 

When one of Michael’s pack straps broke, we found a zapatería and had all of our straps stitched up. Our rucksacks were usually loaded down with supplies: fruit and veggies, cooking oil and honey, rice and oats. Those rucksacks made us conspicuous but also helped us fit in. Men carrying home firewood on their backs, women carrying baskets of tortillas or produce on their heads – we each wore our burdens. Sitting in a plaza as evening approached, we met some jóvenes who took us to a houseful of partying students and musicians. We were invited to crash there as long as we wanted. Sometimes our needs were met in mysterious ways.

We spent almost a week in Morelia, going to a soccer match one day with our new friends. Another day I ran a gauntlet of Mexican functionaries in order to recover $200 of traveler’s cheques that had gone missing – federales, a public minister, local police, office of tourism, and finally a lower-ranking public minister who filled out my report – all so I could take it to the Banco de Comercio and then spend an hour on a repeatedly disconnecting phone call to Mexico City to get my refund.

At the mercado, we stocked up on groceries and plastic sheeting to expand our tent and then caught a bus to a park recommended by our friends, Parque Kilómetro 23, so named because it’s 23 kilometers east of Morelia. (If we had traveled 100 kilometers further, we could’ve entered the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, except that scientists had just discovered this site the previous year.) After walking the confines of the park, we climbed a fence into a neighboring forest with more privacy. It was a good break from cities and travel – cows grazed the steep terrain of pines, firs, cacti, unfamiliar tropical trees, exuberant wildflowers, fantastic mosses. A man passed by to check the pines he was tapping for resin. We set up our camp on a thick bed of pine needles, and arose in the morning to a feast of fried macho plátanos drizzled with crema y miel. We discovered a stream in the next valley where we washed our clothes. 

The nights were mountain chilly but the sun quickly warmed us. We sunned like frogs on large rocks beside the stream, reading the Bible and getting ourselves clear. We talked while stirring the embers of our evening campfire and got in touch with what was going on inside. I still had a lot of old shit to resolve and a lot of blanks to fill in on the questionnaire entitled “Who Am I?” Michael had been a valuable guide on this journey, but I still chafed at his insistence that I wholly commit to sharing the Father’s message. I wondered if we’d reached a fork in our paths.

That Saturday, we fasted on water, lemon juice, and honey, and discussed parting ways. I conceded that it should be a decision we mutually agreed upon. I slept half of that night and filled the rest with ruminations on love unhindered by expectations. Pat was on my mind – my Iowa City housemate and off-and-on lover, she was pregnant when I left. Although not the father, I planned to be there for her and her child. 

The next day we caught a bus back to Morelia and stocked up at the mercado. December 12 is a national holiday in Mexico, el Día de la Virgen de Guadalupe, commemorating her visitation to the Chichimeca campesino Juan Diego in 1531. We wandered off to a nearby plaza, where we met José, who tried to sell us some mota. We went with him to the Bosque de Chapultepec, where we fell in with a group of stoners, got high, and then went to an outdoor concert. We crashed at José’s house that night, on the way stopping at a shrine for Nuestra Señora; we bowed our heads to pass under the folds of blue and white drapery adorning the path to her statue.

Monday afternoon we caught a bus out of Morelia to Quiroga, 45 kilometers west at the eastern end of Lago de Pátzcuaro. We camped on a hilltop overlooking the town and lake, in a garden of herbs and flowers. The chilly night kept the mosquitoes quiet, but by morning we were soaking up the sun’s vitamin D, sans clothing, until getting caught off-guard by a man and his son gathering herbs. By Wednesday we were moving on, hitching a ride in the back of a panel truck to Pátzcuaro, a popular tourist stop on the southeastern edge of that lake, known for its Spanish colonial and Purépecha indigenous cultures.

As we walked along the lake, looking for a campsite, we met some muchachos fishing and bought two lake trout from them for supper. We came upon a string of abandoned houses and moved into the last one. The next morning we caught a ride from a friendly truck driver transporting produce from Morelia to Apatzingán. He entertained us with stories about the area and his life as we swerved through the mountains. Sixty kilometers later, at his suggestion, he dropped us off at Parque Tzararacua, where the Río Cupatitzio descends in a series of cascadas. We hiked along the river to the bottom of a lush gorge, continuing to follow a trail into another valley, where a small cascada splashed into a deep blue pool. We set up camp, bathed, and made dinner. It felt like what I imagined paradise to be. Breathtaking flora frequently visited by hummingbirds. The sound of falling water merged with the melodies of songbirds. The days were warm and sunny; the nights were mild. Michael found another cascada upriver from our camp, a forty-foot drop that gave me a rush when I stood beneath its whoosh. 

After four days there, we headed south toward the Pacific Coast. A man hauling goods from Uruapan to outlying towns stopped to give us a ride. I sat in the back of the truck with six boys grilling me with questions about los Estados Unidos. A series of short rides took us through tropical mountain forests, then cresting the Sierra Madre del Sur into a much drier climate, almost desert, and a long winding ride to a vista of the endlessly blue Pacific. When we arrived in Playa Azul, we hiked down the beach away from the sandy tiendas and restaurants to a grove of coconut palms sheltered from the sea breeze by bushes. We watched the sun set on the ocean in a blink and fell asleep as waves washed up on the beach.

The next day we went to Lazaro Cardenas, fifteen kilometers down the coast, to shop for supplies. We started off the day with a fresh papaya and a joint one of our new friends brought to share … and finished the day with a campfire dinner of spaghetti with marinara sauce and Swiss chard. At dawn the next day, Michael talked with the passing pescadores who fished the surf with nets, getting a promise of fresh fish for tomorrow, Christmas Eve.

Glossary

maestros - It's possible they were messing with us, but I’d like to think not. I felt honored to be called a teacher. It would take me 25 more years to officially become one.

jóvenes - Jóvenes are teenage kids, maybe early twenties. Muchachos are younger (tweens). Or at least, that’s how I used the words.

macho plátanos ... crema y miel - Slice up the plantain and fry in oil, both sides. The cream and honey add sweetness and make it a tasty breakfast dish.

cascadas - The river has a direction to go

down

over the edge into air and mist

cascading down in a white foamy roar

and again calm

onward

Going Down to Mexico, Part 2

(One of the prettiest parts of Tampico, Plaza de la Libertad, near the train station. Note the wrought-iron balconies on some of the buildings.)

Michael and I arrived in Tampico on Friday evening, October 29, and didn’t leave there until Saturday, November 27. Tampico is a fairly typical Mexican city – a mid-sized Gulf seaport, a little neglected since its oil boom days of the early twentieth century, far from the Gringo Trail – and that appealed to us. It seemed a good place to work on learning the language and culture of Mexico. We were given a place to roll out our sleeping bags in the church hall of the Iglesia Presbiteriana Jesucristo El Buen Pastor (Jesus Christ the Good Shepherd).

By this point in our journey, we had established a modus operandi when arriving in a new town. Michael saw himself as an apostle spreading the Good Word, following the instructions of Matthew 10: “Go to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. And as ye go, preach, saying, The kingdom of heaven is at hand…. Provide neither gold, nor silver, nor brass in your purses…. And into whatsoever town ye shall enter, enquire who in it is worthy; and there abide till ye go thence.” We would seek out a person, preferably a religious one, knowing they might be more receptive to our request. The conversation would go like this:

–Hello, can I help you?

–Yes, we have a need.

–What is it, my sons?

–We have a need for a place to sleep.

That was it. If they met our need, we’d gratefully accept the offer. If not, we’d “shake the dust off our feet.” I was the mostly silent sidekick in these transactions, occasionally called upon to translate because my Spanish was better. Michael was pushing me to become more than that, but I tried to explain that I couldn’t fake a calling. However, I wasn’t hearing anything in his message that troubled me. It was ecumenical and inclusive; if he was trying to convert anyone, it was to a life of love and spiritual wholeness. He and I were doing yoga, reading and discussing the Bible one day and books such as Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha the next.

We let the church congregation know we desired to stay in Tampico for a while. Michael wanted to work on his Spanish so he could share his message. We made our home in the church hall that week, buying pastries from a nearby panadería for breakfast, going to the mercado to choose from the wonderful array of fruit for our lunch – piñas, plátanos, naranjas, papayas, mangos, guayabas – each negotiation providing practice in Español. We’d find a bench in a plaza and eat our lunch while enjoying the lively parade of people and the wind rustling the stately palms overhead.

Manuel, a law student and the older son of the church pastor, took a friendly interest, offering us impromptu lecciones en Español. When he had free time, he’d introduce the city to us. We rowed a flat-bottomed boat across Laguna del Chairel and hung out with some of his friends, including Daniel, the son of the family who would eventually host us. Another day, we went down to the docks, boarded a Russian merchant ship, and were given a tour by an English-speaking officer, afterward drinking Brazilian beers with the sailors. On Todos los Santos (All Saints’ Day, or Halloween), we went to Playa Miramar and met a family who welcomed us to their three-room home, where we drank Carta Blancas and conversed about life in Mexico. The next day, el Día de los Muertos (All Souls’ Day), we visited a cemetery packed with people who had brought baskets full of flowers and food so they could tend and then picnic on the graves of their ancestors. It’s a major fiesta in Mexico.

Manuel also helped arrange a meeting with the Rodriguez family, who invited us to stay with them. Our second week in Tampico, we moved into a spare room in their home, becoming the center of attention, falling into the gentle teasing, the endless chistes, of a loving family – Mamá and her young adult children, Daniel, Estella, Chelly, and Estella’s niño, Sofía. The absence of Papá (Señor Juan) and Estella’s husband, Diego – working on Juan’s shrimper off the coast of Campeche – opened up room for us at the dinner table. Manuel stopped by on Saturday to take us across the Río Pánuco to a village in the state of Veracruz, where pigs roamed free in the grass-covered roads. We visited the home of his friend Olga, enjoying a simple feast of pescado, frijoles, arroz, tortillas. One night we happened upon a wedding reception and were invited to join the festivities and dance with the girls. We would accompany Estella and Chelly to the mercado to help with the shopping, learning where to find the best deals. Mamá taught me Sofía’s favorite lullaby, “Mi Muchachita de Corazón,” guaranteed to put her to sleep. And she showed us how to make empanadas: patting the balls of masa into thick tortillas, folding meat or cheese or vegetables into them, and frying them. Simple and delicious.  

Sometimes life in Tampico got pretty intense, sleeping in a room adjoining a busy road, struggling to communicate in a second language, witnessing a tragic drowning in the river. The smells of the oil refineries wafting from Ciudad Madero, the bright red viscera and flesh of the carnicerías in the mercado, the noise and diesel exhaust of autobuses. The incessant discord of the street – taxis cursing, traffic police whistles screeching, bus drivers crossing themselves at each intersection as their brakes hissed, same as the men did from the plaza benches, “Ssssst, senorita!” A block from where we lived, a niña was struck and killed by a car. The next day, while we were on the roof fixing the TV antenna, we saw people gathering at the family’s house for the funeral.

When Señor Juan returned from Campeche, brimming with stories of shrimping in the Gulf, we knew it was soon time to move on. Michael and I took on a plumbing project to fix leaks in the two bathrooms; the experience of hunting around town for parts expanded our vocabulary and language skills. Our last Sunday with La Familia Rodriguez, we prepared a North American feast of spaghetti with a hearty marinara sauce and french fries, onion rings, a tossed salad, and a fruit salad for dessert. We had all grown close in the almost three weeks we lived there. 

Saturday at dawn we took leave of our Tampico friends. The train moved west through the Río Pánuco valley. It was still overcast when we reached the foothills of the Sierra Madre Oriental, but as we ascended, the clouds that seemed to hover over Tampico the last few weeks vanished and a bright sun lit up the beautifully rugged mountains, green with tropical foliage. The train followed the switchback tracks, past swift-moving rivers and waterfalls, sheer rock on one side of the tracks and a steep drop on the other. By the time we reached the Mexican Altiplano, the flora had converted to dry shrubland. As we approached the pueblo of Cerritos, the destination we arbitrarily chose that morning, we took note of a church in ruins on a hilltop and decided to camp there. It was a beautiful warm night, but I slept fitfully, and by morning had a high fever and a severe case of diarrhea. 

Besides getting to know the language and customs of Mexico, we were getting to know its microbial array. As cautious as one might want to be, the Verganza de Moctezuma was unavoidable. Michael had already had a serious case in Tampico, and I, a much lighter one. He proved a great help in nursing me back to health. I slept that day under as many blankets as possible, trying to sweat the fever out of me. Nearby residents visited our camp and returned with chamomile and peppermint, and Michael made teas to calm my stomach. Mexicans are well aware of stomach ailments. The herbalist stalls in the markets were fascinating; nearly everything addressed gut health. 

That night the weather turned cold, windy, and rainy. We moved our camp closer to one of the partially standing walls of the church and set up our tent. By morning the fever broke and my appetite began to return. The clouds scraped the hills surrounding Cerritos, y hace mucho frío, but I felt the gratitude and relief that follows an illness. Michael and I talked about the different places we were in – his commitment to sharing the message, my doubt or indifference. He wanted to be my teacher; I was interested in learning from him, but I didn’t want to be his student. Nothing was resolved, but expressing our feelings eased some of the tensions simmering beneath the surface. That day, we talked of seeking warmer climes, picking Morelia, the capital of Michoacán, about 350 kilometers due south, as our next destination.

Glossary

piñas, plátanos, naranjas, guayabas - The pineapples were especially delicious - smaller, sweeter, more acidic than those found in U.S. supermarkets. Bananas, oranges, guavas were all tasty because locally grown. I wrote a poem that began: “Teresa / the little flower of Tampico / tends a fruit stand in the market.”

pescado - Fish in the sea are pesca; fish on the plate are pescado.

Verganza - How to avoid Montezuma’s Revenge for Cortes’s cruelty? Stay away from tap water. Never stray far from the high-end Cancun hotels. It is the inevitable price paid to truly experience Mexico.

y hace mucho frío - One of our ongoing incentives was to reach warm weather. Even that far south, the Central Mexican Plateau could get cold at night.

Going Down to Mexico, Part 1

(In 1976, I camped on the U.S. side of the border before entering Mexico. In 2021, many seeking to enter the U.S. camp on the Mexico side of the border [in places like this] as they wait, and wait, for court hearing on their refugee or asylum requests.)

By October 1976, I was ready to head down to Mexico again. This time I’d actually make it, and wouldn’t return to Iowa City for six months. Michael, one of the many wanderers who hung out at Stone Soup, had befriended me. A tall lanky thirty-something Austrian who’d moved to Australia with his mother in his childhood and to San Francisco in the sixties, he’d heard about my plans and cajoled me into taking him along. Maybe I was liking the idea of some company. 

The Beats and other writers, artists, and musicians had made the idea of going to Mexico appealing. It offered a destination both easily accessible to and culturally far from Anglos. No need to board a plane to discover a different language, different traditions, and a dollar-to-peso exchange rate favorable to the tight budgets of bohemians and hippies. Adding to the romance of the place was the fact that some of the best weed at that time came from Mexico. If the provenance of the lid you were buying from some shady dude was the highlands of the Sierra Madre del Sur – Oaxacan or Michoacán or, best, Acapulco Gold – you could be assured of its efficacy.

As our trip began, I quickly realized that Michael had a larger agenda. While living in San Francisco, before he’d hit the road, Michael had joined one of the many loose gatherings of spiritual seekers popular at that time. In the parlance of the sixties, he was a Jesus freak. In my research into the evangelical “prophet” Lonnie Frisbee, active in the Bay Area in the early seventies, I can see some aspects of Michael – his homosexuality, his interest in UFOs – that suggest he might’ve been a follower. But Michael was always tight-lipped about the origins of his mission. He described himself as an apostle wandering the world and spreading the Father’s Message, a curious casserole of Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, sci-fi, and hippie principles. Clearly I hadn’t vetted him sufficiently, although I think Michael was keeping some of his light under a basket while in Iowa City, worried I wouldn’t let him come along if I knew his full intentions. However, I decided that I might learn something from this experience, that this journey might evolve into a spiritual one. And I rationalized I could go my own way if it all got too weird.

Michael and I met up in Des Moines at my parents’ house and set out on October 7. As the sun slanted low in the sky on a ride to Joplin, Missouri, we asked to be let off near Sarcoxie, a little town in the southwestern corner of the state. We crossed a creek as we were walking into town, and decided to leave the road and follow it. We made camp along the creek, near a stand of oak and sycamore. We spent a couple days there, relearning how to live in the moment. Waking at sunrise and seeing our breath, cooking oatmeal with raisins and bananas for breakfast. The days warming up so we could strip down and bathe in the creek, the water’s chill setting our hearts on fire. Green soybeans from a nearby field and wild watercress supplemented our dinners, Michael demonstrating his resourcefulness as a campfire cook. Sitting around the fire until the full harvest moon rose and cast shadows, Michael and I talked about our lives, getting to know each other. He gently pointed out the spirits of Fear and Self that held me back. In the morning I looked down into the creek at my clear reflection.

We stopped in Edmond, Oklahoma, so Michael could talk with Hayden Hewes, who, two years prior, had interviewed Bo and Peep, a middle-aged couple claiming to be not only aliens but also the two witnesses from the Book of Revelation who would show us how death could be overcome. (Some twenty years later, they’d gain notoriety.) I was skeptical but intrigued, or at least amused. Michael did track down Hewes –  a young, bearded, wary UFO investigator – but failed to get the answers he was seeking. 

We spent a few days in Austin, always a friendly city for travelers and street people. Hot showers and laundry day at a University of Texas men’s dorm. Hepatitis A and typhoid shots at a free medical clinic. One long afternoon trying to cut through Naturalization and Immigration red tape – Michael had concerns about getting a Mexican travel visa because of his Austrian passport. Urban camping’s always a challenge – one night in Pease Park, another night in Assumption Cemetery, another night in an abandoned house on San Jacinto, five blocks from the state capitol, from which we were rousted by the police the next morning.

By October 22, we were in Pleasanton, thirty miles south of San Antonio, where we caught a ride all the way to the border with Julio, an ex-Marine Mexican immigrant who primed us with information about Mexican food, wildlife, and places from his childhood. He gave us a tour of Elsa, the little town where he lived, and invited us to have dinner with his family, a typical Tejano feast of frijoles, arroz, guacamole, tortillas. On the walls looking down at us were framed portraits of the Virgin Guadalupe and John F. Kennedy, standard Mexican Catholic iconography. Then he drove us the last twenty miles to the quiet border crossing at the Progreso International Bridge. This would be a precursor to the goodwill and generosity we’d repeatedly experience in Mexico.

(Looking upriver at Progreso International Bridge, Mexico on the left, U.S. on the right. Our camp was about 300 yards upriver from the bridge. The road along the river wasn’t there then.)

As we camped that night on the U.S. side of the Rio Grande, the lively, joyous sounds of Nuevo Progreso floated across the river, the jaunty accordions of norteño, the frenetic trumpets of mariachi, the ay-yi-yis and howls of laughter. We spent three nights camping there along the border, intermittent downpours keeping us from drying out our gear enough to move on. The U.S. Border Patrol paid us a visit, pulling up in a jeep and asking some questions, and then left us alone. We swam and washed clothes in the Rio Grande, waving to our neighbors across the border doing the same. One curious young Mexican swam across just to talk with us. We had a surprise visit one night from a Mexican who dried off at our campfire before proceeding onward to El Norte. We read Herman Hesse’s Journey to the East to each other, wondering if we too were on a pilgrimage in search of the Truth.

Because Michael’s Austrian passport flustered and confused the Mexican Aduana officials, that pilgrimage didn’t take us across the border to Nuevo Progreso. Instead, we hitched thirty miles to McAllen, finally got our paperwork in order at the Mexican consulate, slept that night on the porch of the Sacred Heart Catholic Church rectory, and the next morning, walked to the bridge leading into the Mexican border town of Reynosa. On the bridge we passed a distraught Spanish hippie – long red hair, no shoes, just a string bolsita containing his meager possessions – who appeared to be lost, stranded, welcome in neither country. For us, a ten-dollar bribe expedited the stamps in our passports. We didn’t want to spend the money, but it seemed only fair that we gringos should bolster the Mexican officials’ paltry salaries. 

We walked around Reynosa, stopping at a zapatería so Michael could get his sandals repaired, and then caught a bus to Monterrey, enshrouded in a cold steady drizzle. Upon arriving that evening, we received shelter in the form of a semi-enclosed side entrance to the Iglesia Cristo Rey. The padres there were good to us – we stayed three nights, cooking dinners over our campstove, always to a curious audience, arising at seven for morning Mass, leaving our backpacks locked up for the day as we explored that boisterous industrial city. The surrounding mountains are said to be beautiful, but they were constantly obscured by rain clouds and smog. We soaked up Mexican city life as our feet soaked in street puddles.

That Friday, October 29, we bid adiós to the good padres of Cristo Rey and caught a train to Tampico, 500 kilometers south-southeast, much warmer and drier. The ten-hour ride cost 40 pesos (two dollars). As we inched our way toward the Gulf Coast, with many stops in sleepy little towns, we observed the countryside – the thatched roof huts, the orange groves, the fields of maíz and agave. Two Federales sat down across from us and became our amigos, downing a dozen Carta Blancas each, sharing their tacos and tamales with us. We arrived in Tampico that evening. Two tall gringos, our backpacks augmenting our conspicuous height, we would always stick out. We were güeros and, in the opinion of some young girls, guapos. As we walked out of the train station and into the heart of the city, heads on swivel, trying to figure out which way to go, I stepped right into a four-foot-deep open sewer hole, scraping my shin but otherwise unharmed. Everyone laughed, and embarrassed as I was for not paying attention to my surroundings, I did too.

Glossary

Tejano - The first European American to set foot in Texas was the Spanish explorer Cabeza de Vaca (1528). Until the Texas Revolution in 1836, Texas was a part of Mexico, much longer than it’s been a part of the U.S.

Aduana - The visa stamp in the passport received at Mexican Customs usually came at a small price, the bite of the mordida a kind of unofficial toll.

güeros - Michael had blonde hair. Mine was naturally curly and bleaching blonde from all the time spent outdoors. Michael eventually persuaded me to allow him to cut it.

guapos - There’s little photographic evidence, but take my word for it – I was a cutie.

The Art of Hitchhiking

(Pond of water lilies, from the University of Michigan Herbarium website)

This blog post offers a short metaphysical treatise on hitchhiking. In the sense that these youthful experiences were a part of my education, I continue thinking about where I was then and where I am now on this journey.

A hitchhiker should be adaptable, flexible, open to the possibilities, ready to consider any detour as an escapade or learning experience (admittedly, an attitude easier for white men to pull off). Let me offer one example from my three-month-long summer of 1975 trip.

I was in Salem, Oregon, heading for Goshen, 70 miles south, where Pammie lived, a friend of my friends Kate and Prch. Doris and her dog Kiani stopped to give me a ride. We got high and drove to Albany, 25 miles south on I-5. She was picking up her friend Claudette and then going to Claudette’s log cabin. “Do you want to come along?” Of course, I said yes – my prime directive at that time was to partake in every adventure I could, and these young women seemed to offer one. (At the time, I didn’t realize her cabin was in Gates, 45 miles east, deep in the Oregon woods, but that wouldn’t have mattered.) On the way, Shitrat, her ’63 Volvo, blew a water pump in Lyons, and we – Doris, Kiani, Claudette, and I – drinking beers and laughing about our predicament, hitched to Mill City, where they had friends, one who paid Doris $30 he owed her, another who gave us a lift to Claudette’s cabin, where we ate bagels and drank tequila and got high.

When Claudette ran off to check about a job, Doris and I hung out. Out of respect for the fact that she’d given me a ride and invited me into her world, I left the decision to make the first move, if there was to be one, to her. But before long, Claudette returned and we all hitched back to Salem – three folks and two dogs now – staying warm in the back of a pickup under Army blankets and Oregon stars. Back in Salem we went to a bar where some friends in a band were playing. Doris spent the night with Joe, the lead guitarist, whom she’d been digging and hoping to hook up with. Claudette and I stayed at Doris’s house, Claudette sleeping in the bed and me in my sleeping bag on the floor with the dogs. The next morning I was back at that same entrance ramp in Salem, still hitching south, in wonder at the lovely twists and turns our lives take, somehow wiser by the experience.

* * *

These stories might lead you to believe that hitchhiking was an endless series of exciting and diverse adventures. That’s not entirely true. It often entailed long, boring stretches of time, standing beside an extremely busy or empty highway and waiting for a ride. In those moments good hitchhikers learned the value of patience. They didn’t let themselves be taken over by frustration or envy or anxiety or anger. Like the Chinese poet Han-shan, glad to be “free of the busy world,” they simply waited, or they developed some strategy, such as hiking with their thumb out, to pass the time. They knew that when a car did stop to give them a ride, they would feel all the more grateful for that wondrous generosity.

When stalled, I often stopped paying attention to the road and just looked around, taking in my surroundings. I often sang: “I Ride an Old Paint,” Lowell George’s “Willin’” (Linda’s version), Kris Kristofferson’s “Me and Bobby McGee” (Janis’s version). Sometimes I made up and sang little snippets of choruses; sometimes I composed poems in my head. This is from my notebook of that summer of ’75 trip… 

on I-5 near Roseburg, Oregon

going nowhere, going back east

walk barefoot along blind road

to the South Umpqua River

off highway & down to its banks

along the way having my fill 

of blackberries, & invisible

anyway strip down to nothing

splashing, playing hide & seek

with fat wiggly tadpoles

lay on abandoned mattress

drying, relaxing under sunshine

daydreams, read the Diamond Sutra

again searching for … better luck 

on the road, focused on no-ride

one will appear in no time

* * *

As I’ve noted elsewhere, hitchhikers sometimes had to deal with unwanted sexual advances. This was why, even at the height of its popularity, solo hitching by women was a risky undertaking. One can find many articles that discuss the complicated calculus of this and offer tips for doing so safely. I will never truly know half of what women had to deal with – still have to deal with – from men, but my own experiences helped me understand that better.

When I was going to school at Ohio University in the fall of ’74, I hitched up to Ohio State one weekend to see Cheryl, Sue, and Owen. As I was getting into Columbus, I was picked up by men seeking physical intimacy – three times in a row! I firmly declined, but in a way that was part apology, both of us embarrassed by the misunderstanding. Many years later, I realized the way I was wearing my bandanna was likely signalling my availability to gay men. A bright red paisley bandanna was part of my gear and garb then. Worn as a neckerchief, it could protect me from sunburn; folded into a right triangle, it could become a headband to corral my long curly hair. Only recently did I happen upon an article that explained another of its purposes.

I supported women hitchers whenever I could. In the summer of ’75 my friend Kelly was looking for a partner to hitch from Ann Arbor to Minneapolis, via Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. I was getting ready to head to the West Coast, so this seemed like a good way to start that trip. I knew hitching with someone else would slow me down a bit, but I was glad to have the company. We stayed one night at the University of Michigan Biological Station near Cheboygan, where our friends Joy and Alan were doing fieldwork. The next evening we stopped near Iron River, skinny-dipped in a pond full of sweet-scented water lilies, and were given a bed by a friendly couple, in which we slept chastely, like sister and brother, in the spirit of her original request.

Later that summer, my high school buddy Michael, his girlfriend Abby, and I hitched from San Francisco to Ashland to catch some of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Three people hitchhiking was a big ask, and at one point we were so stalled that Michael and I moved off the roadside so Abby appeared to be  alone. No surprise that a car stopped in short order. Maybe the driver was concerned for the safety of this “fragile” woman; maybe he was a sexual predator; maybe he was simply a good guy. In any case, when we stepped from behind bushes to climb in the car with Abby, I felt no guilt about our trickery.

* * *

A hitchhiker should be a masterful glaneur, ready to use what has been cast off by those able to do so. Packaged food past its expiration date, produce with spots, leftovers from the noon pizza buffet. I became a skilled and unapologetic scavenger and dumpster-diver, taking a perverse pleasure in living off the wastefulness of American culture. I have vivid memories of all the produce harvested while traveling: pomegranates from shrubs on the medians in Austin, pecans from an abandoned orchard south of San Antonio, large juicy strawberries from a field beside Lago de Chapala near Guadalajara, sweet crisp Burlat cherries from an orchard in the Rhone Valley south of Lyon, golden pink apricots from the backyard of an abandoned house in Sanary-sur-Mer on the Côte d’Azur. My efforts at gleaning were not limited to food…

The grey serape

that I found in the late fall of 1974

on an Interstate 10 entrance ramp west of Tucson

Left behind by some vagabond

a thick weave of heavyweight wool

a jagged black lightning pattern running its length

Rolled up and strapped to my backpack

it served me well through the rest of that decade

accompanying me as I wandered endless miles of open road 

From the Olympic Peninsula to Cape Breton

from wintry Montreal to San Cristobal de las Casas

from the Isle of Skye to the Tuscan hills outside Florence

Handy and versatile for hitchhiking

to keep off the cold or the rain or the snow

or to supplement my sleeping bag on crisp nights under the stars

No, I don’t know what became of it, or those nights, or those stars

My Kentucky Ancestors, Part 3

(Swiss colonists at Bernstadt, Laurel County, Kentucky, ca. 1881)

My grandmother Margaret (Muster) Duer was born in 1888 in the eastern Kentucky town of East Bernstadt. This was a Swiss colony established in 1881 by people suffering from a farm crisis in their native country, either adventurous or desperate enough to buy land sight unseen in the United States. Arriving here in hopes of planting vineyards, they adapted, learning for example to make corn mash moonshine in backwoods stills. My great-grandfather Jacob Muster came from Bern, and my great-grandmother Amelia Blunschi from the Swiss canton of Sankt Gallen. They met and married in Kentucky and brought my gramma into a life caught up in a scrap with the red clay of Appalachia. 

The second of seven children, Gramma watched the tiny pine boxes containing a one-year-old brother and a stillborn sister be lowered into that unyielding clay. While Gramma was still in her teens, her father, a skilled interior decorator never able to practice his trade here, died from the bite of a black widow spider. The boys all went to work at the Diamond Coal Mine, a deep-shaft operation managed by their uncle John Blunschi. When her oldest brother, Fred, died a few years later from a burst appendix, Gramma ventured to Cincinnati in hopes of finding work that would help support the family. In its Germantown neighborhood, she gained steady employment in her father’s trade, replacing and installing wallpaper.

(The Muster children, c. 1902, from left to right: Willie, Frieda, Fred, Gramma, Ernest)

After the Great War she met and married Johann Baptiste Dür, a recent immigrant from Austria. My gramma and her brothers had bought thirty acres with a house from Uncle John Blunschi to add to the family homestead. Margaret and Johann tried to make a life there, but paydays were few and far between and the farming life did not suit him. A boatbuilder from a fishing village nestled on the eastern shore of the Bodensee and at the foot of the Central Alps, he decided to move the two of them to a city in Ohio named for its dominance of the surrounding land, Akron, where he started a construction company with his younger brother Adolph, a bricklayer. Enjoying the boom brought on by the burgeoning tire industry there, they built solid brick houses, keels firmly moored in this new landscape. But in 1925, Johann died suddenly at the age of 38, leaving Gramma a widow with two young sons, a house on Voris Street, and a few rental properties in the city.

(My uncle Dick’s architectural rendering of the East Bernstadt homestead where he and my dad grew up)

She moved her family back home to Kentucky and, with the help of her brother Willie, raised her boys on the farm. Most of their needs were met by six to eight milk cows, a few meat hogs, a flock of chickens, a kitchen garden, and an acre or two of cash crop tobacco. Willie and Gramma supplied milk for neighbor families, and during the spring calving time, she made many pots of smearcase (cottage cheese) and countless blocks of Swiss cheese with the surplus milk. A large room with a flagstone floor taking up nearly one-third of the house’s ground level was a dedicated “milk and cheese factory.” They ran the country store that was part of the old home place, and for a time she worked in the post office, a job she obtained through her brother Ernest, the East Bernstadt postmaster. In this way, she supported her family during those years. Through it all she made sure her sons received an education, escorting them and all their cousins the fifteen miles down to Corbin every week amidst the Great Depression to attend the Saint Camillus Academy boarding school. By the time her sons had finished high school, the Second World War was underway. The three of them moved back to Akron, where her sons found work in the tire factories until they were drafted. Gramma worked during the war as a cashier in the Goodyear Aerospace factory and settled permanently in Akron.

Her older son became an architect and settled in Cleveland. Her younger son returned to Akron, working in the Firestone tire factory for a time, eventually becoming a liquor salesman, eventually marrying my mother and becoming my father. When I was born in 1954, the paranoid muttering of McCarthyism was being drowned out by the new raucous energy of rock ’n’ roll. We lived in an apartment on the corner of Voris and Washington streets, next door to the brick duplex whose south half served as my gramma’s home while she rented out the other half. A few years later, my parents bought a house in the suburbs, but every Friday, we would drive over the Cuyahoga River Gorge into the city to bring her out for the weekend. As our family grew to eventually include ten children, she became an indispensable part of it.

She was a slight woman, five foot tall on a good day, weighing no more than a hundred pounds, but she exuded a scrappy determination. She could be a stubborn woman, doggedly attached to her opinions, but I felt that after the life she had lived, this was a position she was wholly entitled to. I always admired her independent spirit. She lived in that three-story house on Voris Street until she was in her eighties. Even then, urban renewal (in the guise of a new main post office) was the only thing that could move her. In her new home, a high-rise senior center apartment building in North Akron, she became the unofficial caretaker for dozens of neighbors.

There are specific things I remember about her: the Old World terms – schatzi (dear), schnickelfritz (rascal), humpf-stumpf (knucklehead) – with which she blessed or chastened each of us, the patience and skill with which she’d darn the endless holes in our socks, her special honey-lemon-whiskey potion for our sore throats, the aromatic roots we’d help her to dig up to make sassafras tea, the pokeweed and dandelion greens we’d gather so she could cook them up for supper, the way she could concoct a delicious apple pie out of just two or three of any type of apple, and the long curlicued peels left over from her artistry. She taught me the lessons of self-reliance and persistence, lessons I might not have learned otherwise. When we had chicken for supper, she would ignore my father’s rebukes and choose the neck for her plate. She knew there was enough meat on those bones to sustain her. While the wildly patched jeans of the sixties were for most a symbol of our revolt against middle-class values, the ones I artfully designed and carefully mended also represented an homage to Gramma. I was delighted to learn that her maiden name, Muster, is a German word meaning “model” or “pattern,” because I often think of her life as a pattern for my own.

(The simple nine-patch quilt that Gramma made and gave to me forty years ago. We kept it on our bed for years until it become threadbare.)

In her nineties, she was named Senior Volunteer of the Year by the mayor of Akron for her 26 years of work at the Summit County Old Folks Home, helping residents by tidying up their rooms or showing them how to polka or transporting them if wheelchair-bound. The ceremony seemed to only embarrass and annoy her. She just wanted to get on with her life. Even though her eyesight was failing, she would still get out her treadle-operated sewing machine, set up her quilting frame, which filled the living room of her tiny apartment, and piece together the colorful patchwork quilts that she then gave away. (She would listen to the Cleveland team’s baseball games on the radio while she stitched, and we often discussed the team’s woes.) She walked to mass at six in the morning, and it was this habit that put her in the hospital for the first time in her life, the victim of a hit-and-run accident. Besides broken bones, other medical problems were discovered – gallstones, carcinomas – the sources of aches and pains she’d probably accepted for years as part of her life. 

The doctors operated, but at the age of ninety-six, she lacked the reserves of vitality needed to recover, and early that winter, death overtook her. She died four days after our third child, Jesse, was born by cesarean-section. The responsibilities of my own family kept me from traveling the thousand miles to her funeral. She was buried three days later, and that night I dreamt I helped carry her pine coffin home to the little church cemetery overlooking the eastern Kentucky countryside.

My Kentucky Ancestors, Part 2

(Mercedes Bend farm in 1976. I roamed those hills in late fall, after the first frost, nibbling on wild rose hips.)

When I moved to Iowa City in September 1975 to continue my education at the University of Iowa, I quickly discovered the co-op scene. I was impressed by the folks I met there – vibrant, interesting, talented, inspired by their interest in natural and organic foods, vegetarianism, cooperative enterprise, and communal living. New Pioneer Food Co-op was then located on the corner of Gilbert and Prentiss streets. Blooming Prairie Cooperative Warehouse was two floors above it. Stone Soup Restaurant was operating out of the Center East basement on the corner of Clinton and Jefferson streets. I started working at Stone Soup as a night baker, making whole wheat bread, granola, and beanburgers for both the restaurant and the food co-op. After my shift I’d catch a nap in the empty Yoga Center on the first floor before my morning philosophy class.

Many of the people I met at this time have remained my closest friends. When Pat moved from Santa Cruz to Iowa City that fall, she started working as a baker too. Six years later we were married and starting a family. Many of these friends had a desire to “get back to the land.” They found that the most reasonably priced acreage was often the most unruly – hilly, rocky, wooded, suitable only for subsistence farming. This could describe the Arguing Goats Farm in rural Cedar County, or Mercedes Bend off Highway 1 north of Solon, or the Mozz (short for Mausoleum), an old forsaken farm near Cedar Bluff that John, Sheila, Pam, Jim, and others had revitalized. Such places were generally fine with these hippies, whose goals were modest – raise some chickens for the eggs, a few goats for milk and yogurt, a hive for honey, a garden or orchard for produce to put away for the winter, maybe a few acres of a cash crop of sorghum to make into syrup.

This scenario was playing out everywhere at that time, and in the Central United States it was especially prevalent in the Ozark and Appalachian mountains. Sometimes the hippies and the folks who’d lived there for generations (and who often self-identified as hillbillies) kept their distrustful distance. But sometimes they found a common ground of mutual admiration. Arnie Brawner, a 53-year-old organic farmer from nearby Mount Vernon, became a valuable mentor for my friends living at the Mozz, just one example of that cross-fertilization.

In the spring of 1976, I got an opportunity to visit one of those “unruly places” when I learned there was a spot open in a car of co-op folks heading to East Wind Community in the Missouri Ozarks. East Wind made most of the nut butters sold in bulk at New Pioneer. As a working member, I would often stock their products, opening up 35-pound tubs and stirring in the oils that had separated while the nut butter was in storage. East Wind had invited people to see the operation, offering ingteresting workshops on how to live communally and how to subvert the corporate capitalist paradigm. But I remember best hiking through deep woods and crossing clear mountain creeks with Annette and Sich, who were preparing to homestead a farm in Edmonson County, Kentucky, twenty miles east of where I’d lived two years before that. I felt a spark with Annette and, as we were leaving, made sure to get directions to the farm from her and promised to visit when I had a chance.

That August, I followed up on that promise, but all in good time. I’d just spent two weeks hitchhiking out to Boulder and staying with my friend Tony Hoagland, who was taking classes at the Naropa Institute’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. I’d returned to Iowa City one day before my old high school buddy Michael was passing through on his way to Ohio for the wedding of our friends Jon and Kathy. We met up at the communal household I’d moved into that summer near the corner of Governor and Burlington streets. 

Michael and I arose early to a hearty breakfast of oatmeal with raisins, made a destination sign, rolled some joints, said good-bye to my housemates, crossed the street, stuck out our thumbs, and quickly got a ride out to the interstate. We parked ourselves at the bottom of the ramp, taking turns hitchhiking. The sunny morning was starting to heat up, and no ride for a while until Kevin stopped on his way back to Yale in his climate-controlled Catalina. So we got a ride all the way to Akron, along the way reading, writing, napping, rapping with Kevin, who was young and not all that interesting. As we approached our exit at nine that evening, we got caught in a heavy rainstorm, so Kevin generously took us the extra ten miles into Kent. 

Back in our old haunts, we headed to The Cove, bought a pitcher of beer, and made some calls. It just so happened Jon’s bachelor party was in progress. We called the Brown Derby and found out the group was on its way to the Venice Cafe, just a block from us. We finished our pitcher, smoked a joint out in the alley, and headed to the Venice. It was a rowdy reunion of high school friends, with too many beers being bought for me and my empty stomach. Then Owen invited me outside to share a bowl of hash, and I was stone-cold stoned, rapping wildly and pulling poems out of my pockets. Suddenly we were at the Outpost Lounge, where we slipped a dancer some bucks to perform a slinky, seductive dance for Jon’s benefit. Closing down that dive, we hightailed it to the Chat Noir in downtown Akron. Stepping away from the craziness for a moment, I wondered about this strange tradition, a presumed last chance to taste freedom and wild adventures before settling down, as if marriage itself wasn’t an adventure, as if having and raising children wasn’t the adventure of all time.

I spent the next couple of days with Jon’s family, making multiple batches of bread for them, my customary way of saying thanks, and doing my best to help Jon with wedding plans. I visited Gramma Duer, who was living in a senior center in North Akron, and peppered her with questions about her early life in Kentucky, taking careful notes. The last couple of days before the wedding, I got out of the way and stayed with Benny Semchuck’s family. The wedding was held on a Saturday evening. That day, our old gang got together to go swimming and get high at the quarry swimming hole with its daredevil cliff dives, then to Grins’s house, where we drank beer and shots, listened to Uncle John’s Band “coming to take his children home,” and were handsomely fed to the tune of sweet corn and burgers. We attired ourselves in a bright collage of colors for the ceremony, and as soon as the I-do’s were done, rushed off to Ziggy’s Hall for all the food, booze, old-time friends, pretty women, and dancing we could handle. By three in the morning, we were at Owen’s Cuyahoga Valley pad, drinking coffee laced with gin, finally calling it a day.

Monday morning, I was on my way back to Kentucky, south from Akron into the Appalachian foothills. A ride from an angry, streetwise, big-talking, woman-chasing kid on parole took me into Charleston, West Virginia, home of Agent Orange and antifreeze, mountains of coal, pools of chemical waste, river of salt brine tears, all ratchety hardcore but still brutally beautiful. On a ride to Huntington, I smoked a joint with the driver and helped him deliver flowers to florist shops along the way: “Whaddya think of us hillbillies?” Then a ride from a couple of pimply teenagers skittishly smoking another joint. And then a ride with a couple of guys delivering eggs – two more joints and into eastern Kentucky. Eventually, Gary interpreted the hieroglyphics of my sign and took me all the way to Bowling Green. By 9:30 that evening, I was calling up Pat Berkowetz, a friend from my year living in Butler County; she was working a late shift but let me keep her bed warm for the night.

(Walt and Betty’s eight kids. When I was their neighbor in rural Butler County, I spent as much time playing with them as I did visiting with Walt and Betty.)

The next day I hitched up to Morgantown and arrived just as my former neighbors Walt and Betty Essex were getting ready to move ten miles to Woodbury and a beautiful old three-story house atop a hill overlooking the Green River. They’d be living there rent-free, thanks to the Army Corps of Engineers, in exchange for serving as caretakers for the house that would eventually become the Woodbury Lock and Green River Museum, honoring the days when steamboats plied the river. It was wonderfully roomy, just what they needed for their big family, with a great front porch where I slept. I stayed two days, helping them move in, glad to be of use, going for afternoon swims in the river – and then headed to neighboring Edmonson County to find Tupelo Ridge Farm, and Annette. I got a ride that took me up a dirt road all the way to the farm, meeting Sich and Jean, who as they were getting ready to leave for Bowling Green, told me Annette no longer lived there. I shook off that disappointment and helped them run errands, getting to know this friendly couple who lived on land I’d come to think of as a second home. I admired how they’d wedded the order of a farm and the disorder of the wild. 

The next morning I realized I needed to haul ass back to Akron for my friends Cheryl and Jim’s wedding. I helped Sich milk their cows, picked a couple bushels of tomatoes, ate breakfast, and reluctantly said goodbye to these young farmers and their land. I started walking down the dry dusty road toward the Western Kentucky Parkway, a car coming along every fifteen minutes or so, but the country was so beautiful I didn’t care. I finally caught a ride to Louisville and eventually made it back to Benny’s house by nine the next morning, discovering that the wedding was at eleven. Whew! Just enough time to take a much-needed shower, get dressed, and head over to Coz’s house for prenuptial drinks. The Kentucky poet-farmer Wendell Berry has written, “One who returns home – to one’s marriage and household and place in the world – desiring anew what was previously chosen, is neither the world’s stranger nor its prisoner, but is at once in place and free.” In those days, I was starting to figure out exactly what he meant by that.