Tag Archives: Hobbs NM

The Trip That Changed My Life | Part Four

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April 21st – 28th
Once again, something big had been turning in Troy’s head that fully revealed itself only after he had made a big decision. It was no surprise he wanted to leave Hobbs. By this time we all did. But here he was, packed and ready to thumb it out of town.

“I’m going to El Salvador. See the war first-hand, and write about it.”

The Salvadoran Civil War: it was full on, with the Government death squads murdering thousands of civilians a year, and the FMLN waging guerrilla warfare in the countryside. Yeah, he had talked about it, about the war, about working as a freelance journalist. But this?

“Now wait a frickin’ minute,” I said, or something like it.

“Let me ask you: Why am I here, in Hobbs, living in an oil field? Answer: you. Why did I come here? You. For that matter, why did I drop out of high school and move to Seattle? Why did I give up my last $300 and and my last $80? Answer: you.”

“And you,” I added, looking at Mark, “And this idea we had – together. No one is leaving.”

El Salvador. For crying out loud.

As we sat in our sleeping bags wrapped up over our shoulders, we asked Troy several times to sit down to talk, which he didn’t want to do, because he knew its only purpose was for us to talk him out of leaving. Finally he relented, which meant: No, he wasn’t walking across the the field and down Marland to Highway 18 south, at least not until we let him go. We talked a long time, about wars and death squads, and how those work; about how he pulled us back together, and here we were, and we ought make the best of it and figure out a plan. Finally, we convinced him to stay.

Hobbs was a bust, it was plain to see. But where should we go? We talked to a lot of people, roughnecks mostly, and roustabouts. We even hitched over to Odessa, leaving our camp for a few days.

(On the way: Scariest ride ever. When we got in the car the floor was covered two-deep in empty beer cans.Two good ole boys, pie-eyed and bombing down that Texas two-lane going about 90.)

We stayed with Stacy Gruby, who first gave Troy the idea of roughnecking the previous summer. But Odessa was a bust, too. Stacy said try the Panhandle, maybe, or Oklahoma. But it was back to Hobbs for now.

* * *

We survived, and not much else. We got canned food from a church. I think Troy had a little money, but it wouldn’t have lasted long. We might have panhandled. For myself, after getting sick of canned food, I lifted a banana from a big grocery store in town. I mean I stole it, you know, just so we’re clear. Man, I must have wanted that banana. Did it, even though I was scared to death of getting busted and facing Judge Roy Bean.

Luckily we had a handy source of water. There was a faucet on the side of the Totem Grocery that faced our field. There we could fill containers or rinse out our clothes. We could also come as close as we ever did to bathing. The Totem building is a concrete rectangular box with a front door and no windows. Unless we were in the store or in front of the door, they never saw us.

I was now living the full experience of being homeless. All the incidental things of life, like eating, drinking, washing, talking with strangers, these became the substance of our lives. There wasn’t anything else. Your day was an empty canvas, but the only paints were the minutiae of your daily life, and that was what you made into the sprawling pictures your long days called for.

Reading took up most of our days. I finished my Pelican History of Medieval Europe and handed it off to Troy. Then I read The Communist Manifesto, Herman Hesse’s Journey to the East, the Baghavad Gita and Kahlil Gibran’s Voice of the Master.

My favorite thing about Hobbs was the nighttime. Sunset would would quickly turn the light from warm to cool, the temperature would drop, and the stars would pop. Once dark, there was a wild flame in the distance that mesmerized me, sometimes short and sometimes long and waving like a flag. It was an Occidental Petroleum refinery stack southeast of us. When this pillar of fire was burning, we could hear the rushing sound it made, like a jetliner passing overhead, even though it was about a mile and half away.

Another persistent element was the weather. I had no real notion of what was coming. Until now the temperatures had fluctuated drastically: highs of below 60 and over 90 within a few days; and lows of 70 and nearly freezing in the same week. But it had been dry.

Then some rain came. I only remember one real downpour in Hobbs. It happened after dark while we were in the cafe, and enormous drops were suddenly pelting the front windows. Looking out at the torrent, we hurriedly flipped a coin three ways to see which one would stay (it wasn’t me) while the other two ran like wild men across the road and the field to our camp. We grabbed a few things, but mostly piled our stuff up and covered it with the  tarp. Then we ran back, drenched to our skin. I don’t remember how or where we passed the night. The next day, one of Troy’s acquaintances let us dry off some of our stuff in their mobile home. The sun dried up our camp.

April 29 – May 5th
It wasn’t long afterward that we decided to move on. The time had come to see if there was some work on down the road.The day we left Hobbs, April 29th, grew bleak as we headed north, venturing toward the Panhandle. We stopped near a town called Milnesand, NM, and by nightfall it was raining hard. All I remember is giving up on actually pitching my tent, owing to wind, I suppose, and just using it to cover myself from the rain.

The next day, Friday the 30th, we turned due east and landed in Lubbock. That night we went into a big, crowded honky-tonk. At that time the drinking age was 19, which Mark and Troy both were. I used my fake Minnesota ID to get in. Somehow, I got drunk. I mean, I know how that happens, but whence the means, I couldn’t say.

I stood behind a girl playing a video game and watched. Respecting this particular video game, I heard a lewd joke from the girl at the cafe-store back in Hobbs, and stupidly and disgracefully repeated it to this girl, something that I would never have done sober. But there it is. Without looking at me, she shrugged one shoulder at me and let that suffice as “Get lost.” That I did.

A little while later, as I stumbled around this totally jumpin’ joint, I looked over in time to see the girl pointing me out. To her boyfriend. This is surely not the only time, but it is certainly one of the times that I needed a cowboy’s appraisal of my behavior. That was a new experience. I could see it happening from twenty feet away, and it filled me with dread. He walked toward me like Jake LaMotta.

“Did you talk to her? Did you make a suggestion to her?”

Suddenly I felt pretty sober. “Yes, I made a stupid joke. I’m sorry I did, I’m very very sorry. Please tell her how sorry I am.”

“I think we should go outside, so I can teach you how to talk to girls.”

I had a feeling I was going to get taught about unilateral pugilism. Just then Troy nudged his way in. Troy the diplomat. Troy the guy who can talk his way out of any situation.

“Hello, sir,” he said in is most earnest and respectful tone. “Yes, could I please talk with you a moment?”

I couldn’t believe it. He got the guy’s attention, got him to turn away from me, defused his anger. He explained that his friend was pretty wasted, and we’re very sorry, and we’re leaving now, right now, and very sorry. Okay?

Classic Troy.

We hurried toward the door, the three of us. Out to the street.

We found our way to a Denny’s and spent the most of the night there, drinking coffee and trying not to nod off.

* * *

I want to see some friends of mine
True loving people whose hearts are kind
Find that little town that’s in the back of my mind

-Jimmy Webb
Oklahoma Nights

So this is how it was: Whenever we’d come to the next town, we would ask around. “How’s roughneckin’?”

And we’d hear something like, “Ya checked Lubbock?” And so we’d thumb it over to Lubbock, ask around again.

“No, nothin’ here, really. Ya’ll been to Odessa? Zat right? You know what. Y’all oughta see about Anadarko.”

“Anadarko?”

“Oklahoma.”

Oklahoma. Man. That’s another state.

And so we would aim to beat it on down the road, again.

The next day was grey and cool. We were in a little town east of Lubbock. A waitress told Troy we could see the parish priest about some assistance. When he want to the rectory, the priest made out like he was going to help, and told Troy to come back. When he did, he wouldn’t answer the door, told his secretary to tell Troy he was gone, and a few minutes later, as Mark and I watched from a  distance, the police came.

Troy was incredulous that the priest would’ve lied to him. Sadly, the man was afraid. To him, we were scary.

The police told us to get out of town, and we assured them we’d be gone with the first ride. That took us only as far as the next town, Crosbyton.

Then a ride came from a man I will never forget. Driving a car with his teenaged daughter and son, and another teenage friend, he didn’t really have room for three passengers. But he stopped anyway. Bud was a generous, talkative, tenderhearted man, in mourning for his wife who had died perhaps a year before. When he told the story of her illness and passing, and the grief that followed, and how the three of them had drawn closer, I was moved. But I never understood him like I do now.

He got choked up a couple of times.The girl, sitting between us in the front seat, looked at me and said apologetically, “He gets pretty emotional sometimes.”

“I do.”

“When he says goodbye to y’all, he’ll probably cry.”

“I probably will.”

“That’s all right,” I said.

He was driving home to Hobart, OK. All the way, black clouds drifted overhead. I marveled at how green it was on the rolling plains of Texas. Finally, it  looked like spring somewhere. Finally, we were out of the dust.

Bud was in no hurry. He was really enjoying this return trip, with the seven of us crammed into his car. Several stops. Easy drive, on into the night.

He let us out near a town called Mangum, about 40 miles miles south of Interstate 40. And, saying goodbye to us on the roadside late at night, he did cry. It was all right.

We slept in a crop field, and my thoughts, going to sleep and waking, were about rattlesnakes. That morning we headed north. We could have asked Bud to take us all the way to Hobart, which is only about an hour from Anadarko. We decided against it. I can’t say what we were thinking, but it may have been Kansas. I do know that a few days later, continuing north was the crux of a decision that would change the course of my life.

You ain’t gonna find nothin’ down here friend
Except seeds blowin’ up the highway in the south wind

-Bruce Springsteen
Seeds

We came to Elk City, where it was stormy again, and we slept that night in a park in the rain.

Elk City was a town, eighty years old, of about 10,000 people, situated on the old Route 66. Its highest distinction is that it’s the hometown of the great singer-songwriter Jimmy Webb (Wichita Lineman, Up, Up and Away, By the Time I Get to Phoenix, Highwayman, Galveston). The first day or two we were there, I saw a newspaper. It had an article about unemployment. It said that of all the states, the one with lowest rate in the country right now was: Oklahoma.

We talked again about where to go next. Troy thought there could be some roughnecking further north, in Nebraska.That’s where he and Mark thought we should go. I didn’t want to go north. I didn’t want to keep chasing oil. I was done with it. How much work were we going to find, if we found any at all? If we were going to get work, any kind of work, weren’t our chances better here, with the best employment rate in the country?

Of course they didn’t want just any job. What, settle down and get a fast-food job, or farm labor? What’s the point of that? We can get crappy, low-paying jobs anywhere. That’s what  we had, what we left, to come down here.

But I didn’t want to keep drifting. I was tired of going from town to town looking for the Holy Grail, which was, after all, just a job on the rigs. I had become less and less enthusiastic about the idea. Seemed every time I met some calloused roughneck, one that had been at at it for years, he was missing a finger or a thumb. That was from throwing chain, Troy told me.The kind of luck I have, I’ll lose a digit my first day on. No thanks.

On May 5, my friends were ready to to hit the road gain. I told them I wasn’t going. I was going to stay in Oklahoma, see if I could get some work, maybe go home, maybe go to school. I was dirty, tired, and hungry most of the time. It was fun while it lasted.

Look, we tried. We tried in Seattle, we tried here. It’s over. It was a mirage. We chased it, but it’s gone. I’ve gotta quit the road, that’s all. I’ve gotta be done with it.

Perhaps I thought I’d get them to stay, too. I would’ve liked that. But they weren’t going to stay. They had decided, and so had I.

I was telling them goodbye.

The Trip that Changed My Life | Part Three

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And we headed down south with just spit and a song
But they said “Sorry son it’s gone gone gone”
-Bruce Springsteen
Seeds

 

April 1st – 3rd
The first of April, 1982 found me and Mark making our way toward Hobbs, NM, thumbing it out on Interstate 10 in the Arizona desert, reading our Gideon Bibles and hoping for a ride from the ever more seldom-passing drivers.

From a spot near Benson to another somewhere on the hundred or so miles to Lordsburg, we whiled the better part of two days. Finally we got a ride, but got dropped once again at a spot well short of a human population center. This time we were taken to rest area 25 miles west of Lordsburg, with nothing in between. The sun was going down. We slept under concrete picnic tables.

In the morning we were awakened by one RV after another making their morning stops. After talking about it, we decided it made no sense  go back to the road, when everyone inclined to stop was doing it right here. We couldn’t just stick our thumbs our, though. We’d have to ask for a ride. We split up and began walking up and down the long line of motor homes, looking for friendly faces. I found a man in his sixties and his wife and asked if we could at least go as far as Lordsburg with them. As he looked me up and down, I waved Mark over. The man was thinking about it, but wanted a feel for us, to make sure we were safe. He had us sit a spell and chat.

Stagecoach

One of the rich experiences of hitchhiking is that a surprisingly diverse range of people will pick up a hitchhiker, but they all have this in common: they want to give a ride to a stranger. It’s remarkable when you think of it. The inside of a car, or the cab of a truck, is such an intimate space, and inviting a stranger to share it with you is a generous, even a friendly gamble. Sometimes drivers are tired of driving alone. Or they are paying forward the rides they got when they were on the road. Sometimes they want to save your soul, or share a joint or a sandwich, or add a little spontaneity to a routine drive. Whatever the motive, they have this little albeit sufficient bit of trust, enough to reach out to a stranger and help out. It’s a beautiful thing, and I’m sad the psycho killers have all but ruined such an honored custom.

After he had a sense of us, he said we could ride with them. He was a retired rancher, and they were spending a good part of the year on the road. They were solid, conservative, Midwestern Protestants taking on a couple of Northwest lefty drifters, and what a fine time we had! This was one of the nicest rides we got. It came right after we had spent the last of our money, and we didn’t know how we were going to eat, or how many days we were from Hobbs.

As it turned out, we traveled in their motor home for two days. They drove us about 350 miles, to within  70 miles of Hobbs. The first day we went as far as Guadalupe Mountains National Park, where we stayed for the night. Along the way we stopped at a KFC, and when they realized we didn’t have any money left, they bought us lunch, and fed us thereafter.

lone-highway-to-guadalupe-mountains-texas-292824

Interstate 10 dips south at Las Cruces into Texas. I remember my shock as we swung near the Rio Grande and I could see across the rail tracks, fences and the river what looked to me like a shanty town in Ciudad Juarez: the houses of paper and tin and others of bare, crumbling cinder block. The contrast between the two cities, where the houses on one side were only a thousand feet from the houses on the other, was stunning.

And then there was this land we were driving through. As I crossed the Western and Plains states in 1978, I fell in love, deeply in love with the American landscape. Now, cruising across the great desert Southwest, entering Texas and then New Mexico for the first time, I was falling in love again. This was the land that starred in the old westerns I grew up watching with my grandpa, and my dad, who shared this romance. Open, hard, dry ground – red and yellow dust – sprinkled now with green –  against a blue and white sky. There is history here, and timelessness, air that can choke or drown you, but let you breathe deeper than you ever have; land that fights you but also frees you.

At the Park, I believe we pitched a tent outside the RV. The next day they dropped us at Carlsbad, NM. We were one ride away from Hobbs, a roof over our heads, some food and the next chapter of our lives.

By Boston Public Library [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

With any kind of luck, Troy lives at the Barton Motor Court!
(By Boston Public Library [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons)

As we set foot in Hobbs, I looked around. Picture west Texas, just six and half miles away, and you’ve got Hobbs. It was a flat, dusty town, and there was only one reason I could think of for having a town there, or any place like it: oil. That’s just fine by me. Oil is why I’m here.

I pulled out the Rolodex card with notes about how to find Troy. Eventually we made contact. Troy found us at the Totem Grocery, a convenience store on the main drag. (The building is still there, with the Totem sign over the door.) After all the introductory remarks were dispensed with, I said something like, “Well, what do you say you take us to your place so we can drop our loads?” I was thinking of a cool, shaded room, and some real food.

“Yeah, let’s do that.”

We were on the western edge of town. A few sparse businesses, like the Totem and the Caprock Lounge, open fields of scrub, pump jacks – little more. Troy led us in a straight line north and west out into the middle of the field next to the Totem. In a few minutes we came upon a 20-foot canvas army tarp spread out on the ground, with a backpack, a sleeping bag, some empty food cans, some books, and some pots and pans. All around us were pump jacks bobbing up and down. Troy stopped.

“What’s this?”  I asked.

“My place.”

“Your place? This is where you’re living?”

“Yes, it is.  I guess it’s where you’re living, too.”

“You told me you had a place to live. I mean, indoors.”

I looked at Mark, expecting him to be as incredulous as I was. He wasn’t.

“You knew? You knew he was – ? Oh, crap.”

Troy had moved to the field because rent was costing too much money, and money was tight because…

“Well, the work has kind of dried up around here.”

“Dried up? That’s why we’re here – to work. Dried up? You haven’t been working?”

“Not as much.”

“But you made a lot of money. You saved your money.”

“I did. I had some money. Until a few days ago. Somebody came through while I was gone, and ripped me off. I had a little with me, though.”

My heart sank a little. When Mark and Troy first talked about this, they knew they wouldn’t get me to come down here if I knew we were going to be camping in an oil field. That was probably true. But if I had known that work on the rigs was falling off – never. Never. I felt betrayed. They had both lied to me. White lies to them; to me, black.

There was no shelter, no shower, no refrigerator, toilet or sink. No water or electricity. No food, no money, and who knows, maybe no work.

Welcome to Hobbs, the Oil Capital.

April 4th – 21st
Now my grievances against my friends were having a cumulative effect. But what could I do with them? Me, not much. So I filed them away in my overstuffed file labeled, “Crap I don’t want to keep but can’t get rid of.”

And hey: the Alliance was re-allied, after all. And that was great. Together again. I rather marveled at where our friendship had brought us in less than a year and a half: from our homes back in Missoula to Seattle, then dispersed in opposite directions, only to reunite in this of all places. Being homeless and nearly destitute was a small thing. In fact, in light of our travel plans, it was funny. We were back to laughing at our self-made predicament.  Situation normal.

And there was an amusing irony here, that only now occurs to me. What did we do back in Missoula? We griped about our small-town captivity and longed for the freedom and opportunity to make our lives what we wanted. No parental constraints, no demands from school or jobs to hamper us. We didn’t want our lives mapped out for us by family or teachers or society. Freedom, baby.

Well, we got what we wished for. And you know what that freedom looked like? Eating VanCamp’s pork and beans out of a can on a dusty piece of canvas in the middle of an oil field. No jobs or school or parents to pin us down, push us around or rob our time and energy. All the time in the world, in fact. Freedom, baby!

* * *

Not a lot happened in Hobbs. The three of us lived on the tarp for the rest of April. Every weekday we rose early, dressed for worked and went to the Totem Grocery. There we waited as the roughneck crews stopped for coffee and food on their way to work. If a crew was short a guy or two, they’d pick someone up. This is what Troy had been doing. The more work, the  more likely a guy wouldn’t show, so when the rigs were hopping, Troy would get plenty of work. Problem was, the big oil boom, which had been going since 1978 or ’79, was going bust. Just in time for our arrival.

We went every day, but weeks passed, and we never got hired. We would spend the rest of the day on the tarp, or at the library, two miles away. At night, or when the weather was bad, we often took shelter at a place across the road from the Totem, which was a service station with a cafe and a store. (Also still there, under new owners.) The girl who worked there like to flirt with us, and we’d flirt back. We’d drink coffee, and occasionally drop a quarter in the jukebox.

It is no exaggeration to say that every week I spent in Hobbs felt like a month. This is how it had been for me since El Centro. It wasn’t that nothing happened, or that I was particularly bored. It’s that time, every hour, every day, crawled. It moved so slowly because, apart from going to  the Totem Grocery every morning, the notion of time grew irrelevant. I looked at my watch only out of habit, but next to nothing we did needed to be timed by anything more than the rising of the sun. Never again have I experienced this, but I remember it well. I believe it is not possible for this to happen if I have any sense of my current situation being in any way defined or delimited by time. The fact is I live with this time-definition every day, and the only way I know to be rid of it is to not know what is happening next or when. That doesn’t happen on a camping trip or a even a meandering vacation, if you have a job or family to get back to. I was floating, drifting through the days, as if I were in a raft on a river without any oars. I didn’t know where or when I could or would put out.

I only know three dates from that month. The first two are the day we arrived, and day we left. The third is April 21st.

That morning Mark and I woke up to Troy rousting us.When I looked at him, I couldn’t believe what I saw. He was standing there, wearing his army coat and his backpack, ready to go.

“What are you doing?”

“Guess.”

“You’re leaving? You can’t be serious!”

“I am leaving,” he drew out like a carefully worded announcement. I sat up, my mouth open.

“Just wanted to tell you guys: So long.”

The Trip that Changed My Life | Part Two

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In California in the early spring
there are pale yellow mornings
when the mist burns slowly into day.
The air stings
like autumn, clarifies
like pain.

-Robert Haas

March 28th-29th
Saturday the 27th we slept outside a truck stop somewhere in El Monte, near the Pomona Freeway and I-605.

Early Sunday morning, the fourth day of our hitch-hike to the oilfields of New Mexico, we caught a ride going south on I-605. The driver was a young Mexican man named Antonio who was driving south in a small pickup full of fruit. He was very friendly, but didn’t speak more than a few words of English. He understood we were headed south as well. He let us off in Anaheim, where we parked ourselves near an on-ramp to I-5. We rode all the way to San Diego with a flashy Mexican-radio DJ who lived in California and worked in Tijuana. He took us to where I-805 meets the 8 going east.

Almost every driver who gave us a ride talked with us, asked about our destination and told us about themselves. Not the next one. He zipped to a sudden stop in his sports car, picked us up and sped down the highway. He was nervous, and didn’t talk to us or even look at us. I thought he must be running drugs or something like that. Then, only minutes later, just as abruptly as he had stopped for us, he pulled over and let us off. We we were a little to the east of San Diego, into some hills, apparently not near anything.

A white Toyota pickup pulled over with a man in his 50s and two younger men. I don’t believe in accidental meetings; I do believe in divine appointments. This is one of the reasons why.

The older man, clearly in charge, said they lived nearby. And as the day was growing long, he could offer a place to stay for the night. We hopped in the back of the pickup and rode a few miles further to the town of Descanso, two miles north of the freeway. To the rectory of a Catholic church.

The man was a priest, a well-known and well-loved one, as I came to learn. His name was Father Ben Carrier, pastor of Our Lady of Light Church, and helping the poor, including hapless drifters like us, was part of his way of life.

“After he became pastor of Our Lady of Light the rectory was never without strangers passing through or staying on for weeks or even months. They included drug users, ex-addicts, alcoholics, felons on parole or just nomads roaming the roads, homeless, purposeless, twentieth century gypsies. “Lost children,” he called them.

– Enid Lanyon*

He treated us with same kindness and respect he became legendary for among transients up and down the highways a hundred miles north and east – so he never made us feel like ‘lost children,’ even thought that’s just what we were.

Father Ben told us he had come to California in the late 1950s, with one-quarter of a lung and six months to live. Here we was, over twenty years later, full of life and receiving every day as gift. He suffered from TB and brochiectesis. Ben was a raconteur, and regaled us with stories. He made us dinner, and let us sleep on a couple of couches in the living room and shower in the morning.Then he made us breakfast.

Over breakfast he looked at me and said, “What did you say your last name is?”

“Dehner.”

“Do you know if you have a relative in San Diego?”

Suddenly I recalled Dad’s next oldest sibling, my Aunt Ada, a Carmelite nun.

“Yes, I have an aunt – ”

“Ada Dehner?”

“Yes! Sister Ada. But I’ve never met her. She’s been cloistered for forty years or something.”

“In the the Carmelite Monastery. Ada and I have been the dearest of friends for twenty years. I’m her spiritual adviser.”

“Wow. Tell me about her; we’ve never met.”

“Well, you’re going to meet her today. I’ll take you to there to meet her, if you like.”

Fr Ben Headshot

Fr. Ben Carrier

Just a wild coincidence, right? But it was hard for me to see it that way. Something that day turned in my mind, especially when we entered the reception room and this beautiful sister, who I immediately recognized as a Dehner, appeared on the other side of the grille – something about how every time I turned around for the last year, I was bumping into God and his people, someone wanted to tell me about Jesus, or their religion, or their salvation. Or they didn’t mean to tell me anything at all – I just  knew what they were, or saw it. Back in Seattle, at work alone: Cliff the African-American kung-fu Christian; freshman Huskies center Barney Giles and KT the high school senior, friends and Christians; the Mormon couple and the Scientology Squad… And there had been the Christian peaceniks in Missoula… The Christians at the Poverello center, and the Children of God. I never even meant to go to San Diego, never even thought of my aunt the nun – until that moment. And now I have been picked up by my aunt’s best friend the priest and he’s bringing me to her monastery.

Ada was warm and radiant, and I instantly felt her love. She talked to me as if she already knew me, something so characteristic of my dad’s family. She told me childhood stories about my dad he had never told (she was ten years older), and about the grandparents I never knew. What an unexpected and profound gift. It just came out of nowhere. Or did it? It began to make me wonder.

That day Ben drove us east into the desert, and dropped us in El Centro, where we failed to get a ride, and ended up wandering around until late looking for a place to sleep.

Carmelite Monastery of San Diego

Carmelite Monastery of San Diego

March 30th – 31st

If you don’t die of thirst, there are blessings in the desert. You can be pulled into limitlessness, which we all yearn for, or you can do the beauty of minutiae, the scrimshaw of tiny and precise. The sky is your ocean, and the crystal silence will uplift you like great gospel music, or Neil Young.

-Anne Lamott

We thought we would take I-8 and connect with I-10 in central Arizona, which would take us as far as Las Cruces, NM. After that would be on state routes to Hobbs. But we ended up getting a ride in the back of a speeding little pickup with a cooler full of beer (“Help yourself!”) that headed north at Gila Bend to Phoenix. I don’t remember why, but in Phoenix we decided to walk to Arizona State University in Tempe.  It was about eight miles. It took us three hours. We must have figured we could find a place on campus to crash.

Near some dorms we encountered a group of students who invited us up to their room. They were fascinated by us: real live hitchhikers. By this time, hitchhiking as a youthful fad had already become a thing of the past. It was not as common to see kids our age doing it for fun or adventure. And it was harder to get a ride, because a lot of people were afraid to.

The students gave us some food, asked about our trip and told us we could sleep in a study lounge. In the morning a couple of them got us some food on their meal cards. We ate with them in the cafeteria. We thanked them and left, walking to I-10 to head south again.

From there we hitched to Tucson. We were dropped at an off-ramp at the outskirts, and as we approached a man at a service station to ask some directions, he yelled at us, jabbing his finger at the air.

“You just turn your asses right the hell around beat it back out of town. We don’t have any use for your types here!”

Without a word, we looked at each other and did just as we were told.

From Funset Strip. com

From Funset Strip. com

Before long we had a ride, and and made it as far as Benson. Suddenly it was harder to get a ride. We slept near the road that night. I was always thinking about rattlesnakes and scorpions, both of which I had encountered in central Oregon. To those I could now add my worry of waking up with hypothermia, though it wasn’t actually that cold at night. Finally we got a ride going east from Benson. When they dropped us off, one of my fears was realized: We were left on a remote stretch of the road in the desert. Instead of a hundred or more vehicles per hour, only a half-dozen or so passed by.

The temperature climbed toward 80 degrees. We sat on the edge of the highway, and the occupants of passing vehicles would honk, or roll down their window and yell, “Get a job!” One car slowed down, and then stopped. We hurriedly gathered up our books, packs, sleeping bags, and ran towards the car. And then it sped away, with hands and laughter flitting from the windows.

Time had begun to slow. Today and the days that followed grew long. Mark and I read and talked and slept. But we never brooked the subject of our last months in Seattle. I was reading a book I began there, a history of medieval Europe. It wasn’t exactly captivating, but I would have pored over insurance contracts at this point.

Waiting, waiting…for the next car.

A driver saw us from afar, far enough to decide to stop, not past us, but right where we sat. We jumped to our feet, but before we could approach, he bounced out and over to us. He greeted us cheerfully, and handed each of us a little book.

“Here’s something for you to read over while you’re waiting for a ride. God bless!” With that he returned to his car a drove away. Somewhat amazed and disappointed, we looked at our tiny books. The Gideons’ New Testament with Psalms and Proverbs.

The car disappeared down the highway.

“A ride would’ve been nice.”

“Yeah, we could’ve read in the car.”

Again, silence under the sun. Eventually we pried open our Gideons and read. I was looking for a verse, something I heard long ago, but couldn’t quite remember. I had tried to use it once in something I was writing, but I didn’t get it right. I didn’t know how to find it. Eventually I did, some months later.

This is what I was looking for, in Matthew 5:45. It didn’t say what I thought it said, but it was still good.

“…he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.”

—-
*1995. Simply Benjamin. Nashville: Scythe Publications. P. 5

The Trip that Changed My Life | Part One

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3

Kids
When their imagination bids
Hitch-hike a thousand miles to find
The Hesperides that’s on their mind.
– W. H. Auden

How big is a hare-brain, anyway?
My friend Troy left Seattle in October of 1981, breaking the Alliance. About five months later I left, too. So did my friend Mark. He returned to Missoula, and I went to my hometown of Portland. A lot happened during those five months. Mark and I went our separate ways because of what happened. I didn’t know what was next.

I left Seattle in early March 1982, angry over a falling out with Mark that led to both of us leaving town, and feeling guilty and disappointed in myself and my friends. But I arrived in Portland with some hope for a fresh start. After three years I was coming home, and I didn’t feel the embarrassment I thought I would had I gone back to Missoula. I had no idea what I would do. How did I veer so far from the expected high school-to-college trajectory I was on only 15 months before? What now?

Two very generous people, friends of my sister, let me stay with them when I got to Portland, even though they didn’t know me. They asked for nothing from me (I had next to nothing) and fed me. Immediately I hit the streets, going from business to business, asking about jobs and asking for application forms. The answer was ‘no’ at almost very turn. One older man told me unemployment was the worst he’d seen since the Great Depression. I thought he must be right, but I kept looking.

I lived in the Beaumont neighborhood the few weeks I was in Portland.

After a week or two, Mark called me. He had a proposal for me, for us. Even though I was still mad at him, I listened. He said he had been in touch with Troy, and they both thought that the two of us should go join him in New Mexico. Since leaving us in Seattle the year before, Troy had been working the oil fields of the Permian Basin, in SE New Mexico and West Texas. Now living in a oil town called Hobbs, about 90 miles northwest of Odessa, he was earning around $16 an hour working on the rigs (That’s almost five times the minimum wage we were making at our theater  jobs. In 2013 dollars, it would be $38.59 an hour.), and said we should come down. The two of them made the same argument that Troy had made before he left: making that kind of money in a short period of time was the only plausible way of fulfilling the original dream of the Alliance: a trip to Europe.

After hearing all this from Mark and Troy, I reluctantly agreed to go. Mark would come to Portland and we’d leave from there. If what they said was true, at the very least it would be an adventure. But it wasn’t true.

I have an old Washington County tax record Rolodex card, and on the back I wrote, while talking to Troy:

2201 W. MARLAND
TRAILER NO 8   → CAPROCK BAR

TOTEM GROCERY

SAN DIEGO   #10
→ LOS CRUCES ←
EL PASO

Troy was telling me where he was living in Hobbs, in a trailer park by the bar, and where to meet him when we got there, at the grocery. He also suggested the route for us. Already you can see we’re off to a shaky start: I-10 intersects the 5 in central LA, not San Diego. At the bottom of the card, I’d also written, CORNELL OUT: MAY 22nd. That’s when Anna would return to Missoula from Ithaca. This would have been a major reservation about leaving Portland: that I would be in New Mexico through the summer and not make it over to see Anna while she was home from school.

How was it, after the bitter end to our Seattle sojourn, the acrimony, the ways in which we had disappointed one another – how was it that I was willing to turn around a few weeks later and go traipsing into the unknown with this guy? Why didn’t I tell Mark and Troy to take a hike, without me? First, it was impossible for me to not think of  these two as my friends, the best of friends, regardless of what had happened. Did I hold a grudge? Yes. Was it enough in my mind to disown someone, to walk away and have nothing more to do with them? It wasn’t in my nature. Second, I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t really know if it would work out. I thought it might. It would be a venture of discovery, a romantic beatnik quest, to “make the road my home,” to just head out and see what happens. To do here in the States what we had planned on doing in Europe. Third, nothing was happening for me here. In the near field, it looked like another dead end.

Last and foremost:  just like that, the dream I laid to rest was resurrected, the dream of the Old World, of ancient ruins and medieval towns, French cafes, art treasures, Gothic cathedrals and fairy-tale landscapes. It had such a strong pull on me, stronger I thought than on Mark and Troy, stronger than they even knew. It was the very thing that had drawn me into their hare-brained schemes in the first place. Did I want to go? I was already there.

Passport to Nowhere: March 1982

I went downtown and, in a quaint gesture of my faith, had a passport photo taken – but did not submit an application. I didn’t have any valid picture ID for it.

March 25th
We had a flawless plan. Mark arrived in Portland with $30. I had fifteen dollars, but as I was saying goodbye to Nana and Pop, Pop slipped me a $20 bill, so now I was flush, with $35. With our financing secured, we set off to hitchhike the 2000 miles  to Hobbs, New Mexico, make a small fortune as roughnecks and then hitchhike across Europe: yes, a solid plan indeed. What could go wrong? As it turned out, I was beginning what would become for me a journey of over 3000 miles that changed my life more radically than I could have remotely imagined.

My sister Marji drove me and Mark to a truck stop, where we thought we would have a good chance of catching a ride south. We figured we would go down to LA, then take the 10 east across southern California, Arizona and New Mexico.

This was it: we were leaving; I was leaving home once again, even before it had really become my home again. I had a lot of questions that I couldn’t answer. Could the Alliance be put back together after having been so harshly broken? Would we really trust each other? Did we all share an equal commitment to our stated goal, or would would one or two of us walk away again? I was uneasy about all of this, but I decided to leave anyway. Who knew where this road would lead us?

THURS
NORTH PORTLAND TO EUGENE 3/25/82

Electrical engineer from Vancouver on business trip to Salem & Eugene picked us up 10:30. Nice guy about 35. Talked about the best ways of ‘making it,’ real estate, investments, etc. He had an interest in finances… He said frankly that “If I was a few years younger I’d probably go with you guys.”…

“It must be really great to be able to just pick up & take off, go wherever and not have to worry about any responsibilities tying you down.”

“That’s our philosophy.”

Take off, go wherever. That made me feel epic, hearing that in the very first hour of our journey.

He dropped us off at the U of O campus, where we planned to look up one of my best friends from Missoula. She was out of town so we decided to move on. We’ve must have had some trouble getting a ride, or worried that we wouldn’t make it to a good stopping place for the night, because we chose to stay in Eugene for the night. It was raining, so we looked for a place to stay indoors. Neither of us had ever slept in a mission, but we learned that that was one of the few options when staying in town at night.

We ended our first day on the road at a street mission in a house. It was late when we came in. Someone recited the house rules to us and we were told that if we wanted to eat breakfast in the morning we would have to hear a ‘message’ first, something I recoiled at, as tempting as free food sounded. It was a wretched night. There must have fifty men crowded into a living room and dining room without furniture. When we came in, it was already dark and the lights were out. Somehow we found places to wedge ourselves in between the bodies of strangers. I couldn’t sleep. The room stank. Listening to dozens of men snoring, I lay there, cramped, tired and awake for most of the night.

In the morning, we got up early and learned as quickly as possible what we would have to do to get some food. We would have to wait some time. Then we would have to sit through a sermon, then get in line for some grub.

The free breakfast was too expensive, so we left.

March 26th-27th
We got a ride from some scruffy, friendly biker types who dropped us near Curtin, 33 miles south of Eugene.  There, cold and wet, we caught a break: a guy in a pick-up who was driving non-stop all the way to LA. He wasn’t a talker. He drove 75 mph, kept the radio on and stopped every so often for coffee, gas and and a restroom. Twelve hours later (early Saturday morning) we were at his house in Sunland. He said we could crash at his house and later in the morning he would drop us at the 10.

So we woke up in Southern California: golden, promised land, famous, murderous, dreamed-of, end-of-the-Continent California, opposite in so many ways from where I had grown up.

My home is green and rainy, this is yellow and bright. We are towered by firs, well-watered and meet a cold gray Pacific. This is the place of palm trees, dry lands, burning hills and warm safari surf. This was my first real look around, and the beginning of my love-hate dance with the hazy megalopolis built on paved-over, sweet citrus groves. Starting the day in Sunland, met by clear skies and heading for the desert, I thought I was done with the wet. I was wrong about that.

Where we were dropped might as well have been a foreign country. It was Boyle Heights, east of downtown. I remember seeing  the famed LA Corner’s Department, where ‘Coroner to the stars’ Thomas Noguchi worked, and only three weeks  earlier had been asked to step down, on the same day he examined the body of John Belushi. We were dropped from I-5 South on North Mission Road, walked under the overpass to Marengo Street, where we would have spotted the Coroner’s. Heading southeast and then east on Marengo, we would have looked for an on-ramp to the 10. I don’t remember getting a ride. The highways of LA, right near Downtown where we were, are not really the best for hitchhiking; drivers just can’t stop to pick you up. We may very well have decided to forget about the highways, and hitch a main thoroughfare. I think we walked all day.  In any case, by early evening we found ourselves about 10 or 12 miles away, past Alhambra, past Rosemead, deep in the heart of East LA, and now feeling very much – in fact, too much – out of our element. We couldn’t get a ride to save our lives. We felt stranded.

It was clear to both of us that as we walked, or stood with our thumbs out, that our rift a couple of months before was hanging between us. What had happened was serious, it was painful.Two days had passed, and we didn’t talk about it. But it was there.

LA Map 1982As nightfall approached Mark and I got into an argument about how and where to spend the night. Mark wanted us to use most of our remaining money to get a motel room. I couldn’t see spending our food money to get off the streets for one night. After storming off in different directions, and finding each other again, we kept walking east. I believe we were lost, or rather, unsure of where we were. I had a crude motel map with few street names. I guessed that we were in South El Monte. Perhaps we walked east on Garvey Avenue,  a major street south of and running parallel to the 10  – or perhaps it was Valley Blvd., which is north of the freeway.

At some point we gave up on getting an eastbound ride out of the barrio. We decided to head further south. I thought we were near Whittier when we quit for the night. Now I can look at Google Maps and Street View, and I believe we were at Durfee Avenue and Peck Road by the Pomona Freeway – next to Whittier, but still in South El Monte.

We laid out our sleeping bags on the edge of a McDonald’s parking lot. The temperature was dropping, but it wasn’t especially cold. A few hours later Mark tried shaking me awake. I am a light sleeper, and normally just speaking to me would be enough, but not tonight. I looked at Mark and suddenly realized I was chilled to the core. I was alarmed, thinking groggily that if he hadn’t woken me I might have frozen to death. He roused me so we could find a warmer place to pass the night.

It was probably unwarranted, but as I silently rolled my bag, trembling hands brushing away the dew, I was shivering all over and thinking, “I could have died.”