Falling in Love for the First Time, Part 3
(US 40 between Steamboat Springs & Denver, Whiteley Peak in the background)
That summer after Bobbie and I broke up, we both got busy with the rest of our lives. Our paths didn’t cross often, but when they did, it was sweet and comfortable. Because we’d developed this habit of writing letters to each other, these epistolary connections, Bobbie and I stayed in touch for the next ten years until we each became too busy with our growing families, me in Iowa City and her on Long Island. But recently, we started writing letters to each other again, picking up our “deep friendship” where it had left off 35 years ago – some kind of grace.
Bobbie and I did meet up in Denver again the year after our breakup. In early October 1974, I left my hodcarrier job in Kentucky and drove to Des Moines, where my family had moved. After I’d touched base with the fam and parked my VW Bug, I started hitchhiking. For anyone who came of age during the sixties and seventies, this wasn’t an uncommon experience, as it would be today. I started hitchhiking in high school out of necessity, walking down to Graham Road when I missed the bus and hitching the seven miles to school. I appreciated the practicality of it – filling an empty seat in a car going where I’m going, having a conversation with someone to pass the miles – as well as the mutual trust the act required. For someone “on the road,” a car can be more burden than convenience. With my backpack and sleeping bag and pup tent, and without a car, I was mobile and agile. Without expenses for gas and motels, what money I had could take me further, in terms of both distance and time.
The goal of this journey was to see the West Coast I’d read about in Jack Kerouac’s novels. Because it was early November, I picked the most southerly route, south to Austin and then west on I-10 to Tucson, stopping in those college towns to see what was going on. On a whim, I crossed into Mexico, catching a ride down through the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, a wilderness reserve, and walking across the border now vandalized by a 30-foot-tall steel-barred fence. Late at night, I crossed over, untouched, unquestioned, into the Sonoran border town of Sonoyta. I spent the night in a little cafe, waiting for a bus to take me the 60 miles southwest to Puerto Peñasco, a Gulf of California fishing town. No passport, no visa, virtually no Spanish, I camped in the dry hills north of town and swam in the sea. I just wanted to see what it felt like to be out of country, to be an outsider (if a white man can ever be such a thing).
A few days later I crossed back into the U.S. the same way – nothing to declare, other than the experience, and nobody to declare it to. I headed west to Laguna Beach, to the home of the oldest sister of my next-door neighbor pal, Pat Flowers. I spent a weekend in her and her husband’s apartment, finding an unlocked window after I realized they weren’t coming home. I checked out the ocean and hung out on the beach. As thanks for their unwitting hospitality, I baked a couple of loaves of bread and left them with a note. I headed up the coast to San Francisco, taking the Pacific Coast Highway from Malibu to Big Sur. I remember getting dropped off in Santa Barbara; the entrance ramp to the highway was stacked with young hitchhikers. I just went to the end of the line, knowing a ride would eventually come. I crashed at the apartment of my high school buddy Michael, who was a student at the University of San Francisco. Golden Gate Park and the Presidio were an easy walk away, but I spent my days wandering all over up and down that convivial city.
By mid-December I was heading back to Iowa to stay with my family while I worked to save money to take a second crack at college at the University of Iowa. I crossed the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge and headed east on I-80. The plan was to hitch straight through to Denver. I lucked into rides that took me through the night, catching naps along the way. I switched from I-80 to US 40 east of Salt Lake City. By the evening of the second day I was standing under a streetlight beside the highway in Steamboat Springs. The weather had been kind to me so far, but a snow front was moving in. I stood in the valley of this ski town ringed by mountains, hoping for one more ride to Denver, just 160 miles away, where I knew I would find rest and refuge at Bobbie’s apartment.
Just as I was thinking of giving in and finding the cheapest motel in Steamboat, a car stopped. This woman – let’s call her Tina – was heading to Denver and looking for some company into the night. She was a few years older than me but had lived much longer than I had. She wore an earned wariness and a ragged determination. She was escaping something, and I know she told me what it was, but the current stage in her escape plan was the only thing on my mind. We had just crossed the Continental Divide, and the snow was starting to come down, heavy flakes swirling around us. Talking a mile a minute, she reached across me to open the glove compartment and pull out a bottle of pills. I didn’t get a chance to read the label, but I didn’t need to; I knew these were going to help her get to Denver tonight. There’s a reason they’re called Co-Pilots, Coast to Coasts, Truck Drivers.
As we drove deeper into the night, the traffic thinned out and the road got harder to find in snow now up to our hubcaps. She finally asked me to take the wheel; it would have to be on me to get us through. We begged for a semi to come along so we could follow its tracks. Beyond the headlights, blackness. Was that a mountain side beside us or empty air? I milked the radio dial for something to focus on. I like to think I found this song Bob Dylan recorded the previous year. Somewhere out there loomed Bear Mountain, Lawson Ridge, Whiteley Peak. No roadside rest stops, no gleaming neon high in the sky to guide us to Stuckey’s or Howard Johnson’s, no golden arches. We eventually connected up with I-70 in the smallest hours of the night – not much more traffic to guide us, but the snow had let up, that weather front stalled somewhere in the mountains.
As dawn was breaking in the east we crested a hill, and laid out below us, lights twinkling, sun glinting off the buildings, was Denver. We laughed, bleary, exhausted, relieved. We coasted down to the edge of the city, stopped at the first roadside breakfast diner we came upon, and celebrated making it through the night and out of the darkness with omelets and hash browns and coffee. A three-hour trip had taken over eight hours. We sheepishly looked at each other, unfamiliar in the daylight. I gave her Bobbie’s address near the University of Denver campus and we figured out how to get there. Of course, I never saw “Tina” again. I wonder if she was able to escape whatever trap she had found herself in. I wonder if she received as good a welcome as I did. I was lucky, catching Bobbie as she was getting ready to head out for her day. Her laughter of surprise and delight, my laughter of relief and wonder. We hugged, we talked. When she went off to classes, I took a long hot shower, pulled out my sleeping bag, found a comfortable sofa, and slept until she came home.
It’s amazing how our lives have run in parallel these past 35 years, raising kids, deciding in the middle of our lives to veer off our career paths to become high school teachers, responding to the direction our country has taken in recent years to march, protest, take action. That first letter from Bobbie was a gift. She wrote, “Your letter has made me think back to the people who shaped me. I know you and your love helped give me the confidence to know that I could be whoever I wanted to be.” Girl, that feeling is mutual.