Falling in Love for the First Time, Part 2

(Driving into McConnellsburg PA on the Lincoln Way)

By the beginning of September 1972, my girlfriend Bobbie had started school at the University of Denver, and Jon, Mike, and I had traveled on the Penn Turnpike to McConnellsburg, a little south-central Pennsylvania borough nestled in a valley in the shadows of the Tuscarora Mountain ridge of the Appalachians. The plan was to do volunteer work with a small Catholic order, Glenmary Home Missioners, on a project called HOPE, Homes On People’s Energy. Specifically, we were helping Brother Ralph build houses for and with the Black families that lived in a community a mile outside of town known as The Ridge. As much as I admired Brother Ralph and enjoyed the construction work and getting to know the families on The Ridge, I leaned heavily on the support of Jon and Mike to get me through the rough patches of homesickness and sore muscles.

We shared a second-floor apartment that seemed to overhang the busy and historical Lincoln Way (US Route 30). Living directly across the street from the church rectory, we always felt Father Wolf was keeping a close eye on our activities. Jon had impressive culinary skills for an eighteen-year-old lad. When a church member gave us some squirrels that he had shot and dressed, Jon figured out a way to cook them, and we all figured out a way to eat them. Lord knows Mike and I would’ve been hard-pressed to make a decent meal with even the most basic ingredients.

We all pined for our girlfriends. I seem to recall that we each had a song that somehow evoked our absent loves – such as Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” and Carole King’s “So Far Away” – but that may be a false memory. I do know that whenever I got a letter from a Bobbie, you could count on me playing Side A of John Denver’s album Rocky Mountain High, which included the title song and “For Baby (For Bobbie).” (Bobbie’s given name is Georgiena, but when she was a newborn, her older brother called her Bobbie – as close as he could get to Baby – and the nickname stuck.) I do not listen to John Denver’s high whiny schmaltz anymore, but this story isn’t about him.

We all returned to Akron for Christmas break. That Christmas after high school was imbued with a complex array of feelings. Our classmates had finished their first semester of college, returning with stories of unfettered independence on campus, aware that those experiences were taking us all in different directions. It seemed there was a party at someone’s house every night. I tried to spend every minute with Bobbie that I could. Her father had arranged for her to be among the young women presented to Akron society at the 70th Charity Ball for the Children’s Hospital – a debutante ball. Bobbie asked me to escort her, and I readily consented, even though I had no idea what that entailed. We both made private jokes about our unlikely participation. But I was just glad to be there with her, mostly watching from the sidelines in my borrowed sport coat and keeping her company when it all got pretentious or boring or silly.

Jon, Mike, and I were soon on our way back to McConnellsburg. In the fall we’d sometimes help Bob Wolford and Harvey Kneese’s roofing crew. They were funneling all the profits into their project to build a modular house factory, and the arrangement was that, for our free labor, Bob and Harvey would offer cut-rate deals to people on The Ridge who wanted to buy one of their houses. Working with the two local guys on the roofing crew, Michael and David Strait, we became acquainted with the regional dialect. Michael or David might say, “Could y’ins bring up another packet of shingles?” It always made us smile. We replaced a lot of lovely old gray slate roofs with asphalt shingles. By winter, the six of us were constructing a sheet metal factory building in a sheep pasture on a wind-bitten hillside. When the site was being leveled and dirt needed to be moved, I learned how to use a stick shift ... while learning how to drive a dump truck. I pretty much killed that transmission. By spring we had put the finishing touches on a sturdy two-story house on The Ridge and were able to celebrate with Bebe and her family as they moved in. And by the end of May, we were packing up and returning to Akron, no longer lonely or homesick, looking forward to the next stage of our lives.

I was back home, but Bobbie was still in Denver finishing her school year. I was thinking about her a lot, missing her laughter and that sweet look in her eyes, the memorable terrain of her body, and the long intimate conversations within which we would entwine ourselves late into the night. I went to a poetry reading at a bar on Water Street in neighboring Kent, and by the end of the reading, in the darkness of that bar, moved by fuzzy romanticism and my vivid memories of her, I decided to drive to Denver to see her – that night. Before bothering to weigh the wisdom of that plan, I went home, told my mom I was leaving, and packed up the sky blue 1952 Chevy Impala I’d bought from Brother Ralph for a dollar, my mom supplying me with a thermos of coffee, a bag of sliced carrots, and words of caution.

I headed out into the Midwestern highway night – Akron to Columbus to Indianapolis to St. Louis – calmed by the rhythms of the road, listening to “Ramblin’ Man” and “Free Ride” on the radio, keeping myself awake by talking to the truckers in their Morse Code–like headlight language. In central Missouri the next morning, I was recharged by the kinetic energy of the passing miles, and outside of Kansas City I picked up a hitchhiking couple. A hundred miles later, my Impala began to falter, hampered by some undiagnosable car trouble, unable to go faster than 40 miles per hour, an easy target for the lions of the Kansas savanna. And so, tantalized by anticipation, we crept across the monotonous map of Kansas and into eastern Colorado until I was blown away by my first view of the Rocky Mountains in the distance, a sublime vision of purple at sundown, and we made Denver by midnight.

As became my habit during those years, I hadn’t given Bobbie a heads-up I was coming. Remember, this was in the days before cell phones, but I valued the liberation from an expected time of arrival, an itinerary, and relished the idea of surprise, of showing up out of the blue on someone’s doorstep. Ever generous, Bobbie slipped me into her dorm room, and for the next few days (when she wasn’t attending classes) we talked of life and learning, and she introduced me to Denver and the mountains. Her friend Jeff helped me find the car problem – a bad fuel filter that we easily replaced – so that I could drive back across the middle of America. When Bobbie came home a week or so later, she told me she had met someone (namely, Jeff the handy mechanic) and fallen in love with him. The news knocked me off-balance; she had done that good a job of hiding this when I was there. I like to think I took it well; I certainly don’t remember feeling even a whiff of betrayal or deception. I was glad she told me in person, glad she didn’t tell me when I was in Denver, grateful for the almost year we had been in each other’s lives. And I got my legs back under me before long.