Randomnalities

Galen Green
msmith2210@aol.com
&
mythoklast@mailstation.com
816-807-4957
&
816-523-1813

Wednesday
April 23, 2008
(William Shakespeare’s
444th birthday)

Craycraft Communiqué III: Alone with America

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I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.

-- Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire (1947)

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You just picked up a hitcher
A prisoner of the white lines on the freeway

-- “Coyote” by Joni Mitchell, from Hejira (1976)

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But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

-- Middlemarch by George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), ending lines (1871)

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Listen! I will be honest with you,
I do not offer the old smooth prizes, but offer rough new prizes,
These are the days that must happen to you . . . .

-- Walt Whitman, from “Song of the Open Road”

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Sure, he that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and god-like reason
To fust in us unused.

-- Hamlet, Act IV, scene 4 by Wm. Shakespeare

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Then said I, Wisdom is better than strength: nevertheless the poor man's wisdom is despised, and his words are not heard.

-- Ecclesiastes 9:16 (KJV)

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When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school,
It's a wonder I can think at all;
And though my lack of education hasn't hurt me none,
I can read the writing on the wall.

-- Paul Simon, “Kodachrome”

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Dear Rick,

I thought I might take a few minutes to talk a little bit about my hitchhiking experiences, in hopes that it might help to trigger some of your own memories of hitchhiking, “back in the day,” as the current jargon goes. And if, in the process of rambling my reminiscences here today, I happen to discern any patterns, themes or paradigms which seem to me to connect past and present (i.e. then and now), then please forgive me in advance for veering off the straight and narrow path of my narrative, to take us on “the scenic route” of cultural anthropology. I’m sure you’ve figured out by now that this sort of detour is simply a temptation I can seldom resist. (Probably the result of a lack of “roughage” in my diet as child.)

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In prefacing my reflections on hitchhiking, I probably ought to begin by acknowledging that America was a very different place then than it is today. Back when you & Art Dunbar & I were doing our most serious hitchhiking (which, in my case, would have been between 1967 and 1977), it wasn’t at all uncommon to see mostly college-age males, mostly of European extraction, standing on the shoulder of an Interstate Highway – or even the shoulder of some quieter federal or state highway – with his right thumb in the air, carrying perhaps a guitar case or tennis racquet or duffle bag, along with some sort of backpack or knapsack, not unlike The Sacred Knapsack described in the previous chapter. From the advent of the gas buggy until sometime during the 1980’s (The Age of Reagan), hitchhiking was a socially acceptable (if not always entirely legal) part of American culture. More than that, however, throughout the 1960’s and 70’s, at least, hitchhiking was, as you well know, an acceptable and even semi-respectable sub-culture, in and of itself.

For more reasons than I have time here or inclination to explore today, it no longer is. Nowadays, when I try to talk with younger people about what hitchhiking was like “ back in the day,” they simply cannot compute it; the world has changed that much. This is partly because most of them cannot readily conceive of a world without cell phones, global positioning devices and plentiful highway rest areas. Reasoning, then, by analogy, I’m led to infer that our generation has never possessed an accurate grasp of the world in which my father (1908-1982) thumbed rides and hopped freights to travel his America during the 1930’s.

It’s come to my attention that some of my adoptive parents’ relatives were (when still above ground) laboring under the mistaken impression that it was in imitation of or homage to Harry Green’s lived legend in the Depression Era that I myself set out to taste and see The Deep South in the late summer of 1967. As much as I may have empathized with my father (who symmetrically turned our age that year!), any imitation or homage which might have been operating within me that summer would have been of/to Walt Whitman, as he portrayed (or mythologized) himself in his magnificently inspiring “Song of the Open Road.” Yes, I’ll admit that Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan were also on my mind at the time, but it was chiefly the ghost of Walt Whitman which led the way.

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As just so happened also to be the case with my other two most lengthy hitchhiking odysseys (i.e. to Mexico City/Acapulco in ’68 and to New York City/Montreal in ’69), my very first odyssey (New Orleans/Nashville) in 1967 had its genesis in a random series of casual conversations with other guys, each of whom expressed – at least momentarily – some credible level of interest in accompanying me in a variety of versions of hypothetical joint ventures. As you’ll recall, however, when it finally came down to packing my little knapsack, kissing Mom goodbye and having her drive me out to the highway at the edge of town, I was on my own. Which was probably how I’d wanted for it to be from the beginning – alone with America.

While I, as a budding young poet, was aware of the much heralded publication by Atheneum in 1969 – back during the period of my most ambitious hitchhiking adventures – of poet Richard Howard’s “Essays on the Art of Poetry in the United States Since 1950” entitled Alone With America, it’s been only in recent years that I’ve found myself thinking of – and referring to – my five major hitchhiking journeys as my “Alone With America” odysseys. Perhaps this is because the farther and farther I step back from the movie screen upon which my memory’s machinery replays those long-ago events, the more focused I discover myself to be becoming upon the solitary nature of the thing.

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Every adopted orphan, such as Galen Green, who’s paying any attention at all to his or her destiny, must tumble, sooner or later, to the realization that we’ve always depended on the kindness of strangers. I know that I have; though I also realize that the kindness of a great many of the strangers with whom I crossed paths in the course of my hitchhiking back and forth across the America of the late 1960’s manifested itself in the harm they could have done me but didn’t. If Dumb Luck sees fit to grant me ample good health, length of days, I hope to elaborate on this – eventually. Meanwhile, perhaps I ought to share with you just a few snapshots of the strangers of whose random acts of kindness I was lucky enough to find myself the undeserving beneficiary, during the time I was out there on the road, alone with America, back in my younger days.

The imagery which most immediately flashes up onto my memory’s movie screen, whenever someone mentions hitchhiking, is that of my solitary vulnerable, intensely curious younger self (40 years younger, 50 pounds lighter), dressed in cut-off jeans, t-shirt and sneakers, standing on the shoulder of some desolate stretch of highway, in Mississippi or Alabama or New Hampshire or Texas, waiting for my next ride to appear on the far horizon, hoping to thumb down some gentle stranger who’ll be willing to take me a long way toward my desired destination, and wondering all the while where I’ll end up sleeping that night. That’s the first image that flashes to mind. Hundreds more follow. If we’re lucky, we’ll get to perhaps a dozen or so here in today’s ramble.

Let’s begin, however, with a little bit about the kindness of strangers. One reason for my wanting to begin with this particular facet of my hitchhiking experiences of the late 1960’s is that I find it to be illustrative of what never ceased to surprise and delight me most about being out there alone with America – as well as with Canada and Mexico. And, as I think back on it today, I can’t help wondering whether or not those same kind strangers would respond to a sun-baked, windblown hitchhiking college student as generously and compassionately nowadays as they did forty years ago. The question, of course, is mute, because, as we established at the outset here today, forty years ago was a different world from the one we live in today. I’d have to be suicidal to be out there hitching nowadays; and those kind strangers would have to be suicidal to even consider picking up a hitcher nowadays.

You’ll recall my hammering away tediously, in those chapters I called my Mandle-Oz Memorandum (addressed ostensibly to Dr. Shannon and her husband, Rev. Gene), on the theme of my being the luckiest man alive. It’s true; I am. Even if I were to be diagnosed tomorrow with terminal cancer, the story of my life up to that moment, at least, would have been one of unbelievably, uncannily – and admittedly undeservedly – good luck. I mention this tiresome fact again here only as a preface to the “kindness of strangers” anecdotes I’m about to unravel for you.

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The first of these vignettes begins on the paved banks of the Mississippi River, where it winds through downtown New Orleans. It’s a quiet Sunday forenoon in August of 1967. I’m only a couple of months out of high school and about to embark, in only a couple of weeks, upon what will eventually turn into a lengthy (and expensive!) college career. But this morning I’ve wandered out of what was then referred to as a “men’s rescue mission” (the “faith-based” prototype of a post-Reagan-era “homeless shelter” and the direct descendant of what, in Harry’s hitchhiking days, would have been known as a “flop house”), wandered out into the glorious New Orleans sunshine to do a bit of sightseeing on the cheap. As I’m standing there on the paved river bank with a thin Sunday forenoon smattering of (mostly middle-class white) tourists, watching the boats and barges passing by, I engage in one of my favorite pastimes, that of interviewing complete strangers under the guise of making small talk.

One of my seemingly random interviewees happens to be a middle-aged white woman of average height and only slightly substantial girth. (Picture a hybrid of Helen Newkirk and Evelyn Schulte.) “Matronly,” I believe, would be a fair description. With a notably vivacious, intelligent countenance. Anyway, this vivacious matron has been standing alone, a few yards away from me, here on the paved bank, with a dozen or so other meditators upon boats and barges, for several minutes, before I stroll over and say hello. Almost immediately, we two have diven into a lively conversation touching upon what has brought us here and whither tomorrow will most likely wend us each. I tell her that I’ll be heading east, toward Gulfport and eventually on up to Nashville. She lights up noticeably and explains that she and her husband and two teenagers live in Decatur, Alabama, which is on the way to Nashville, and she gives me the phone number to their hotel here in New Orleans and instructs me to call before I hit the highway in the morning to see if perhaps (after she consults with her husband) a lift might be possible. I tell her I will and thank her kindly, and we part ways.

For the remainder of the afternoon, I stroll through the French Quarter and around Jackson Square with the other tourist, attending a Catholic Mass for the very first time in my entire life at the sumptuously ornate (and mercifully air-conditioned) Saint Louis Cathedral, followed by an historic beer at the historic Hurricane, followed by a meander through a variety of boutiques, in one of which I purchased a faux antique ceramic amulet of the goddess of wisdom, Minerva, represented as an owl. It turns out to be my most extravagant purchase of this entire Deep South odyssey – bearing in mind that I’d left Wichita a few days earlier with (I kid you not!) exactly $50 in my pocket – and in my shoes. (“Never put all your eggs in one shoe!”) (Of course, fifty 1967 dollars would have been equal to approximately three hundred 2008 dollars.) All in all, it turns out to be a memorable afternoon, and the gallery of sidewalk artists on display and hard at work up against the wrought-iron fence surrounding Jackson Square is more than worth the rather sweaty effort of hitchhiking those 899 miles from Wichita.

Along towards dusk, I check into the same downtown men’s rescue mission, sit through their mandatory chapel service with the fifty or so other vagrants and fall asleep on my assigned cot. Just afternoon daybreak, we’re all up and in the shower (etc.), then sitting down together in the dining hall to a simple Southern breakfast of grits & gravy & strong black coffee. As soon as they put us out on the street at around 8:00 a.m., I seek out a payphone and call the hotel where my new acquaintance and her family have been staying. But they’ve already checked out. So I do what I usually do to get to the highway from the heart of any big city – I hop a city bus and take it to the edge of town. In this case, the driver lets me out on the edge of “the boondocks” (as we used to say), right within that magical zone where the roadhouses and mud-paved trailer courts end and the weed-fields begin. (Not someplace I’d care to be stranded for long.)

I’m standing there with my thumb in the air for maybe five minutes. It’s another lovely day in Louisiana. A few semis and some local pickup trucks fly past me. And then, all of a sudden (and this reflects a dominant pattern in my life in general), a 1965 Rambler Ambassador goes flying past me, and I notice that the middle-aged lady in the passenger’s seat is pointing out the car’s rolled-up window at me. Instantly, the driver slams on the brakes, comes to a stop on the shoulder and begins slowly backing up. I pick up my knapsack and begin running toward the Rambler. I can make out that there are four people in the car, but it’s not until I’m only a few feet away that I can discern the face of my new matronly vivacious friend from yesterday on the paved river bank.

Everyone in the car seems unaccountably happy to see me, as though I were their favorite cousin Fred, and not some perfect stranger whom Mama had befriended less than 24 hours ago. Anyway, Mama, whose real name I’ve long since forgotten but whom I’ll call “Helen,” twists around backwards to introduce me to her family, as I pull my knapsack into the car after me and close the door behind me, and her husband begins taxiing down the shoulder for takeoff, back out onto the highway. The names I have managed to retain for the past forty years are those of her daughter, Johanna, as in the title of one of my favorite Dylan songs, “Visions Of Johanna” from his 1966 Blond On Blond album (Johanna being 18, like me), and Mama Helen’s husband, “Daddy Joe,” who’s enough older than his wife (perhaps ten years older) that I’m guessing that he’s not Helen’s first husband and probably not the biological father of these two remarkably polite, articulate, attractive teenagers. Johanna’s brother’s name also escapes me, so let’s name him “Tom.” (No particular reason.)

So here we are: Helen, Daddy Joe, Tom, Johanna and young Galen, flying down Route 90 in the spacious (and mercifully air conditioned) late model Rambler Ambassador, out of the outskirts of New Orleans, past Lake Pontchartrain, on into Mississippi, along the sparkling Gulf coast, past towns and small cities whose names most Americans have come to pitiably associate with the August 2005 devastation of Hurricane Katrina (and the utter fecklessness of the W. Bush Administration) – places with names like Bay St. Louis, Pass Christian, Gulfport, Biloxi and Pascagoula. Around ten-ish that morning, we stop for a late breakfast at a nice homey restaurant about fifty miles up the highway from where they’d picked me up. Daddy Joe guesses rightly my financial straits and generously pays for my breakfast, suggesting that I include an order of grits & gravy, lest I end up back in The North without ever getting to know what they’re supposed to taste like.

I could pour forth pages and pages about the 24 hours or so that follow. For the time being, however, I’ll say only that this family’s Southern hospitality toward the complete stranger from Up North, who is myself at 18, knows no bounds. And realizing that they’ll never see me again after I’ve spent tonight in the guest bedroom of their lovely ranch-style suburban Decatur, Alabama home, eaten breakfast at their kitchen table tomorrow morning and been driven by Daddy Joe back out to the highway (this time to Route 31, heading north to Nashville) – realizing that they can say things to me that they’d never dream of saying to their friends, neighbors or most of their relatives – they each take their turn at telling me their life story and their pointedly non-Alabamian opinions about current Southern politicians of that stubbornly vestigial semi-Jim Crow period, and a colorful array of family secrets – all of which I’ve long since forgotten.

By the time we pull into the driveway of their home in Decatur, it’s nearly midnight. Several hours earlier, when we’d stopped for supper on the other side Birmingham, Daddy Joe had again extended his generosity to pay for my meal along with that of his family. Of all the many ways whereby the kindness of strangers has manifested itself to me throughout my life, however, none makes quite the impact, time after time, as does the strangely kind touch of a stranger’s bed sheets against my face and legs and arms. As I drift off to sleep this August night in 1967, in this rather elegant guest bedroom of this amazing family of strangers – here in the affluent suburbs of Decatur, Alabama, in what had once been the heart of the Confederacy, with these expensive sheets surrounding me (along with this merciful air conditioning), having awakened at daybreak on this same night’s morning on a foul smelling old cot in the second floor sleeping area of a New Orleans flophouse, with its windows wide open to the night noises down in the street, I think of the day’s excitement, of my own (adoptive) mother & father & sister & brother, hundreds of miles away in Wichita, and of how very much I still must learn about life and the world and myself, if I’m ever to come close to becoming the kind of man I want to be.

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As I was writing down that vignette from my 1967 Deep South odyssey, concerning our universal dependence upon the kindness of strangers, I found myself thinking many other thoughts which the which telling you’ve just read has unexpectedly brought to mind. One such thought has to do with some of the other instances of the kindness of strangers I’d completely forgotten about long ago – decades ago – despite the fact that my story could easily have turned out much less tolerably, had even a single one of these kindnesses been withheld.
An astonishing legion of examples of every size and shape of long forgotten kindnesses of strangers which I found bestowed upon me during my time out on the road, alone with America, came swimming back into conscious remembrance from out of the dark recesses, while I was just now telling you about my brief encounter with that amazing family from Decatur, Alabama. A disproportionate number of these long forgotten kindnesses occurred two years later, on my third hitchhiking excursion, in August of 1969 (the summer of Woodstock), as I was thumbing my way from Wichita to Des Moines, Columbus, New York City, Boston, Montreal, Detroit, and back home to Wichita. Taken in chronological order, they happened something like what follows.

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Thanks to the fickle finger of Dumb Luck (my household goddess), I hitchhiked the 1,500 miles from Wichita, Kansas to New York City in just three (3!) rides. The first of these I thumbed down at the on-ramp to the Kansas Turnpike, out on East Kellogg, where Kate Schulte had dropped me off; it was a salesman, who took me all the way to Des Moines, Iowa and dropped me off at the on-ramp to Interstate 80, where I thumbed down my second ride, a young fellow who’d just been discharged from the Navy, out on the west coast, and was determined to drive virtually non-stop, back to his hometown of Albany, New York. He and I were together for the next thousand miles – a grueling marathon of sharing the driving while taking turns sleeping in the passenger’s seat of his haphazardly jam-packed jalopy. He dropped me off, roughly 20 hours later, outside of Albany, at the on-ramp to Interstate 87 (or its 1969 prototype), which, of course, drops straight south to New York City.

Now, all this lucky traveling on my part was taking place at the exact moment in history when members of the so-called Charles Manson “Family” were butchering five innocent people in the Hollywood Hills – among them, actress Sharon Tate, who was carrying in her womb the unborn child of film director Roman Polanski. In other words, it was at the end of the first week of August of 1969, when Woodstock was still several days into the future.

But all this is intended here as mere preface and scene-setting for my telling you about the first extraordinary “stranger kindness” to come my way in the course of my 1969 New York/Montreal odyssey. Here I am, then, at the on-ramp to the highway from Albany down to the Big Apple, standing with my knapsack on my back and my thumb in the air. The afternoon is hot; that’s why they call it “summer;” and I’m feeling thoroughly exhausted from my long lucky ride from Des Moines – when along comes the next kind stranger in the form of a clean-cut, well-spoken (yet unassuming) Ivy League college student, driving what I take to be his father’s Buick.

As I toss my knapsack into the backseat and climb into the passenger’s seat, he informs me that he’s on his way to his grandmother’s apartment in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn. We immediately strike up a lively, wide-ranging conversation – a refreshing change of pace from the taciturn sailor. I explain that I’m on my way to meet up with the mother of a college friend who lives in Greenwich Village and teaches English at Long Island University. (This was, as you may recall, Paula Nelson, Dr. Nelson’s first wife – James & Billy Paul’s mom. James has arranged for me to crash at her place for a couple of days before I head on up north to Boston.)

As my ride and I continue to follow the Hudson River south at a leisurely pace which mirrors the flow of our leisurely conversation, I’m struck by the sheer beauty of the emerald landscape. After a half hour or so, my ride notes that the afternoon shadows are lengthening and that darkness will have fully fallen by the time we reach the city. He suggests that Paula Nelson may not be in any mood to entertain her son’s hitchhiking friend at the end of a long hot work day, and that it might be wiser for me to wait until the next morning to telephone to let her know that I’ve arrived in the city. He then adds that I’d be welcome to crash for the night with him at his grandmother’s apartment in Flatbush. I thank him kindly for his generous offer and, of course, reply that I’ll be honored to take him up on it.

In reflecting upon any situation of this sort (of which, in my life, there’ve been many) one naturally gives consideration to the hideous menu of tricks and traps which the other person might have in mind. That’s why I’ve chosen as my household god none other than Statistical Probability, to more or less complement and counterbalance that god’s celestial sister, Dumb Luck. Between the two of them, I’ve made it this far; though who’s to say what tomorrow will bring? (So far, so good; knock wood.)

Thus, as you’ve undoubtedly observed, I did not end up in little bloody pieces in a dumpster or gang-raped by a Leopold & Loeb or eaten by a Jeffrey Dahmer, as a consequence of my dependence upon the kindness of this particular stranger. What happened that night, instead, was that my ride (Let’s call him “Jeff.”) and I stopped for a burger, somewhere along the highway, an hour or so north of the city -- since, as he explains it to me, his grandmother’s refrigerator is likely to be empty – then continue on to Flatbush.

His grandmother’s apartment is on the top floor of a three-story brownstone walk-up. It’s well after 10 p.m. when we finally pull up to the curb out front. The neighborhood is reassuringly quiet and obviously well kept up, with an occasional neighbor strolling past on the well-lighted sidewalk – some with a pooch or two in tow. Jeff grabs his duffle bag from out of the trunk; I grab my knapsack from out of the back seat, and we climb the stoop to the front door.

As we step into the carpeted entryway, we’re met by the comforting grandmotherly aroma of furniture polish and slightly dusty antique draperies, an aroma which accompanies us up the three flights of carpeted stairs – not merely because the richly-carved oak-stained banister railing is also accompanying us, but because the entire apartment building seems to be occupied exclusively by elegant bourgeois grandmothers.

Jeff’s grandmother’s apartment, I’m pleasantly surprised to learn, takes up the whole of the building’s third floor. It’s comprised of two bedrooms, a spacious kitchen and separate dining area (with antique side-board), a private study/library, two full bathrooms, and a large living room with bay window facing onto the street and furnished with some of the loveliest antique furniture I’ve ever seen in my life, including rich antique draperies, a grandfather clock and upright piano.

Jeff says that he hopes that I don’t mind sharing the double bed in the guest room with him, since the only other bed is his grandmother’s personal bed, which is simply not an option. I reply that that will be fine.

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Even though it still seems only natural to me now, in retrospect, nearly forty years after the fact, that my primary concern in this situation was for my own safety and self-preservation, I’ve asked myself, from time to time, over the years, what was likely to have been going through the mind of Jeff or Helen or any of the numerous other strangers who displayed equally astonishing levels of trust in letting down their defenses to invite me into their homes without so much as check my I.D. Could it have been that they, too, had adopted Statistical Probability as their house god? Personally, I’d guess that that was a part of it. I suspect also that, like me, they each possessed an above-average degree of confidence in their own “sense of people.” Call it intuition. Call it an ability to sense danger from certain individuals and moral intelligence from other individuals. In my own case, it hasn’t steered me wrong thus far. It’s worth noting, however, that the radar of which I speak, like the radar which we frail human creatures through thin air and across dark waters, has only to fail us one time, after which there will be no second chance.

Be that as it may, Jeff and I managed to share the guest bed in his absent grandmother’s Brooklyn apartment that night in the summer of 1969 without incident. If I were to begin a short story with that previous sentence, I suspect that most readers would stop reading right there. Don’t you? But of course, in this case, the absence of incident is the whole point of the story, isn’t it.

The next morning, Jeff and I rose at a civilized hour, showered (separately), dressed, each had a bowl of cereal (There was, as it turned out, a bit of milk left in the ‘fridge.), and sallied forth into the sunlight to seek our separate fortunes. He was even so thoughtful as to drop me off in Greenwich Village, across the river, before bidding me farewell forever. A true gentleman, eh? Certainly a stranger whose kindness I’ve never completely forgotten. I only hope that I’ve succeeded in passing that “good karma” along to a sufficient number of wayfaring strangers who’ve crossed my path in the years since.

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Strictly speaking, Paula Nelson was, of course, not a total stranger to me, even though we’d never laid eyes on one another before that day in August of 1969, a few hours after Jeff dropped me off near her apartment building in Greenwich Village. Because James had provided more than adequate introduction to his mother as to who I was, as well as to the quality of my character, my family background, my relationship to him and to his Wichita family, etc., I think you’d agree that the considerable hospitality which Paula extended to me over the next few days falls into a different category of kindness from that upon which we’re focusing here today.

The same would have to be said of the several kindnesses which Paula’s younger son (James’ younger brother), Billy Paul Nelson (East ’69), bestowed upon me, following his arrival at his mother’s place, 36 hours or so later. Billy was about to begin his freshman year at Brown University, having finished up a sort of summer internship in Oceanography, off the New England Coast – if my aging remembering mechanism has the facts essentially straight. Without going into tedious detail here, I’ll just say that the chief kindness which Billy extended to me that week was to let me ride with him from New York City up to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he’d be visiting family friends before traveling on to Providence to get settled in for the fall.

Sometime in the not too distant future, I’d like very much to come back to the time I spent with Billy and his very gracious mother in New York City. It was a time which proved itself to be more than worthy of one of Billy’s half-sister, the renowned contemporary American fictionalist, Antonya (Tony) Nelson’s, pen and energies – at least in the hypothetical. (I’ve often wondered if Tony ever had the opportunity to become at all acquainted with her father, Dr. Nelson’s, first wife, Paula; and if she did, what a conversation between the two women would have sounded like to a fly on the wall. As you already know, Tony’s mother, Susan Nelson, and I were fairly close friends at one time; Susan played the role of a sort of older sister I never quite had.)

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My crashing, even for a single night, at the home of the family friends with whom Billy Paul Nelson would be staying for a few days in Cambridge was a non-negotiable non-option. Thus did I end up sleeping, my very first night in Massachusetts, under a footbridge, across the street from Harvard University, in a gentrified little shopping area, just up the street from the Harvard Co-op (where I purchased a Harvard University sweatshirt the next morning, after washing my face, brushing my teeth and combing my hair in the co-op’s men’s room basin). You may remember that sweatshirt; it proved a surefire “babe magnet” for the few years I was able to wear it before outgrowing it. After Kate Schulte and I moved to Cambridge in 1972, I engaged my above-average spatial memory to relocate that little footbridge under which I’d slept three years earlier with my knapsack as a pillow. If I could, I’d have had one of those bronze historical landmark plaques affixed to it.

After purchasing the sweatshirt and breakfasting on a hotdog from the street vendor’s cart adjacent to the Harvard Square newsstand, I asked a reliable source which way was north, then sought out an opportune street corner for hitchhiking, and placed my thumb in the air. Within a matter of minutes, a microbus filled with a half-dozen other young people headed north pulled over to invite me inside to join them; and thus was I on my merry way to New Hampshire, Vermont and Quebec. The exact route we took that afternoon I never really knew – nor much cared. I felt safe with this little crowd and trust the driver to play by the same set of rules by with you or I would have played, had we been behind his wheel. After all, it was the week of Woodstock, so that all that hippy jive about which Joni Mitchell later wrote was in the air – and in the zeitgeist and in the Kool-Aid. And Charles Manson and his satanic “family” were, after all, a continent away – albeit, a tightly connected continent with a tightly wired zeitgeist.

But I was supposed to be talking today, Rick, about how – not entirely unlike poor Blanche Dubois – “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” So let me try to cut through all the breathtaking fairytale shimmering emerald beauty of the New England countryside in high summer through which my newly-found best friends and I passed for the next half-day, and hurry along to the next episode of stranger kindness. I’ll take just enough time along the way to mention the coved bridge we stopped for half an hour to climb on and the chilly glacial lake a little farther up that esoteric two-lane road where we all piled out for an hour or so to go skinny dipping.

Eventually, we came to the proverbial fork in the road, at which I had to choose between continuing on with the rest of the troupe or sticking with my original plan to see Montreal before I died. All that I can remember now about either the road or the fork is that that particular fork in that particular road – the fork at which that particular microbus pulled over to let me out to continue my life without the rest of our merry band – just so happened to be at the edge of a pretty little New Hampshire hamlet whose name I seem to have forgotten to write down at the time. As the microbus drove away on the road I chose not to take and left me standing there alone by the side of what turned out to be the main drag of that pretty little New Hampshire hamlet, it suddenly dawned on me that it was nearly dusk. Evening shadows were beginning to lengthen and I was beginning to worry about where I’d be spending the night. And therein begins our next episode of stranger kindness.

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Picture me then, if you will, basically stranded. My best hope seems to be that sufficient daylight remains for me to hitch a ride to some town further up the road which might be enough larger than the one I’m stranded in so as to possibly have a cheap motel room where I can crash for the night. I don’t relish the prospect of spending another night sleeping out in the open; the night I just spent sleeping underneath that footbridge off Harvard Square was enough to convince me of the unacceptable degree of physical vulnerability which such a situation presents. On the other hand, a pretty little New Hampshire hamlet of six or eight hundred souls isn’t going to have either a YMCA or a Salvation Army (-- type…) shelter available.

Just at the point when I’m about to break down in tears of desperation, I glance up the street to see the town constable pull around the corner in a patrol car (i.e. a police cruiser, practically identical to those used in all American municipalities, both then and now) and park (diagonally, of course) next to one of the local men and commence to “shoot the breeze.” Suddenly, I recall what several of my fellow hitchhikers have told me about how small-town cops and sheriffs’ deputies can prove helpful in a pinch – somewhat in the pattern of Mayberry’s Andy & Barney – by sometimes allowing a stranded hitcher to spend the night in the city jail. So it is that, as I begin sauntering -- sort of “hang-dog” -- over to the constable’s patrol vehicle, I find myself mentally rehearsing what I’m hoping will prove to be the magic sob story which leads to my sleeping indoors tonight.

As I amble up to the constable’s cruiser with its windows down – and him in mid-chin-wag with his chatty neighbor – I observe that he’s remarkably more prepossessing in every way than most small-town American police officers of the time. (In retrospect, I’m wondering if he weren’t perhaps a graduate student or high school basketball coach who’d taken this law enforcement gig merely as a summer job.) Anyway, here I am, approaching his squad car with all the rural etiquette and small-town body language I can muster: the shy smile, the humble head-nod, the submissive little half-wave, etc. – and, of course, that universal American male greeting of “How’s it goin’?” (Replaced in urban modernity with “What up, dawg?”)

He immediately responds with a sunny New England smile and inquires as to how he can assist me. (Remember, Rick, that I’m only 20 years old in this reminiscence, so that he may be taking me to be a runaway.) He looks at me pensively as he listens patiently as I explain my predicament and conclude by popping the question about my wanting to spend the night in his jail. He replies amiably that the local taxpayers would likely not take kindly to his turning their precious public utility into a youth hostel – even temporarily. However, he continues, he thinks that he can still help me in solving my immediate problem of where to sleep. He moves his clipboard off of the passenger’s seat and asks me to get in. He then drives me up the main drag a few blocks and across a narrow bridge which spans a little creek evidently separating the civilized section of this pretty little New Hampshire hamlet from a relatively undeveloped wooded area dotted with a few fishing cabins.

I should explain that much of what makes this particular little New Hampshire hamlet so pretty is the way in which it’s more or less nestled between the woods and the woods, i.e. between the verdant area which spreads out along the hollow through which the little creek flows and a resumption of that same verdancy on the opposite side of this esoteric two-lane highway I’ve been traveling. The wooded area across the creek from the hamlet itself rises up gently from the creek’s bank for a hundred yards or so, then much more sharply, so that the woods and the fishing cabins along the creek – and, indeed, the hamlet itself – seem to nestle cozily in the shadow of this steep wooded ridge.

With me in the passenger’s seat beside him, the prepossessing constable guides his patrol car onto a narrow gravel road and then up to the screened-in front porch of one of the fishing cabins. To whom this cabin belongs I’ll never know. What it’s normally used for will, likewise, remain an unsolved mystery. Neither its tidy wood-frame exterior nor its respectably maintained, modestly furnished interior provides so much as a single solid clue, and the possibilities are virtually endless. Perhaps it belongs to someone from down in Boston who seldom uses it and lets it out to friends, including locals – such as the constable. As with Jeff’s grandmother’s Brooklyn apartment, this fishing cabin contains a bit of food, including some dry cereal and some milk in the ‘fridge, to which I’m told I’m more than welcome. And there’s hot and cold running water, an indoor toilet, and electricity. The only bed is an ancient metal-frame double, complete with sheets, pillowcases and blankets -- all of which were obviously purchased prior to World War II.

I take a look around (which takes about 3.4 seconds), thank the constable for his thoughtfulness in rescuing me from my shelter issue, and ask him if I mightn’t reimburse him – or the owner – for these remarkably adequate accommodations. He just grins affably and replies that that’s not necessary. (In retrospect, I’m guessing that the opportunity to extend this sort of empathetic charity is a powerful motivating force in this man’s life – and that Destiny’s having had the two of us cross paths this evening has meant as much to him as it has to me; although the payoff for me is, of course, far more obviously immediate and concrete.)

He hands me a flashlight and shows me where the fuse box is – just in case. He then hands me a key to the front door and asks that I lock the door behind me in the morning and leave the key under the doormat . . . and make the bed, if I don’t mind. Then he gets back into his cruiser and drives back across the narrow bridge into town; and I stand at the cabin’s open back door and gaze out through the latched screen door, through the pines, at the little creek, as it lumbers along through the evening’s final failing purple glimmer.

Even though it’s still relatively early, I have no particular reason to stay up and every conceivable practical reason to hurry through my bedtime ablutions, then turn out the light and crawl under the covers. Although it’s summertime, it’s also rural New Hampshire, and a definite chill is on the evening breeze, so that I find myself huddling in my skivvies under both the blankets and the faded antique quilt. The stillness and the darkness envelop me, and in heartbeat I’m gone.

Asleep in that ancient bed, in the hushed whisper of those New England pines, beside the bank of that lumbering stream, I dream a wonderfully strange dream.
Perhaps because I’m 20 years old, it’s a dream woven from sex and hope and revelation. And, no, I’m not going to go into detail, except to say that it’s one of those rare dreams which, when vaguely recollected a lifetime later, lingers more in the abstract, as an odor or a flavor, than as a visual or auditory narrative. It jars me and soothes me, leaving me with the unmistakably indescribable sense that I’ve been awakened to something I’ve suspected all along, something like a daybreak of cosmic realization illuminating a New England pine forest.

I sleep till way past daybreak, awakening full of newness. I shower, make the bed, eat a bowl of cereal, wash my dish and spoon, brush my teeth, lock the cabin door behind me, and hit the road – never suspecting that, shortly after the sun has set on this bright new day, I’ll find myself living out a scenario strikingly similar to the one I here conclude.

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Until that memorably week in the middle of August of 1969, the week when I skipped Woodstock to take the road less traveled and be alone with America, I’d never been east of the Appalachian Mountains, I’d never seen New York City or Boston – or even Columbus, Ohio, where I’d end up being sent as a V.I.S.T.A. Volunteer after grad school and subsequently spending six years of my life. Nor had I ever seen Canada – expect in pictures. I had nothing like a clear notion as to what I would find in Montreal; I just knew, deep down inside, that it was something I needed to see. As it turned out, I would end up spending less than half a day in Montreal, most of which time was taken up with trying to get around, asking directions with one feeble semester of college French, and feeling a terrible regret that I couldn’t afford to stay long enough to see more.

As I’ve said: the day began with my hitting the road, back there on the outskirts of that pretty little New Hampshire hamlet, back at the fork in the road where I’d parted ways with my momentary peer group in the microbus. Standing at that same fork in the road with my thumb in the air, in the amiable rays of the mid-morning sunshine, I didn’t have to wait long for my next ride. It turned out to be a married couple from Boston, headed up to Canada on the first leg of their vacation of camping out. They were traveling merrily along in a very similar type of microbus as the one before, except that theirs was loaded in back with tons of camping gear, so that the only place for me to ride was sort of sprawled out on top of all their equipment (tent, cooler, portable stove, sleeping bags, etc.). Even so, I was still able to enjoy the verdant sunlit New England countryside as we motored our way north, across the New Hampshire border and on up through Vermont to the Canadian border.

As you know, Rick, until recently, traveling back and forth across the U.S. – Canadian border was a virtually trouble-free process, and one not requiring a passport. Nevertheless, having been hassled by the police in the summer of 1967 because of my “baby face,” and not wishing any similar snags when I traveled alone through Mexico in the summer of ’68, I made sure that I always had my U.S. passport in the hip pocket of my cut-offs, whenever hitchhiking. On this particular day, it was good thing I did, because the Canadian officials at the border expressed an unanticipated wariness toward the young man sprawled in the rear compartment of this couple’s microbus. Again, it seemed to be my baby face which aroused their suspicion; and it seemed to be my showing them my (supposedly unnecessary) U.S. passport which greased my entry into their magnificent country.

Whenever I think back on the afternoon I spent in Montreal, where the vacationing young couple in that second microbus was kind enough to detour a bit to drop me off on their way north, it feels not unlike the memory of some childhood softball game in which I was rounding third base on my way back to home plate. Had I cash enough and time, then I’d have stayed in Montreal for at least a day or two, if not a week or a month; but fall classes at Wichita State were scheduled to begin soon, and I was down to the last $50 of the $150 with which I’d originally left Wichita. Still, it’s my belief that anyone who’s traveled much at all has tasted what it’s like to visit a place so electrified with symbolism and subpsychic charm that simply being there is enough. For me, the fairytale city of Montreal, Quebec, in the summer of 1969, was just such a place. While the sensation I felt then – and still feel – may conceivably have been partially the product of some rationalization born out of the unavoidable brevity of my visit, the buzz, the tingle and the thrill were undeniably profound.

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At dusk, I find myself on the western outskirts of Montreal, at yet another fork in the road. This time I must choose between the highway to Ottawa and the highway to Detroit. And once again, it’s one of those “had I cash enough and time” situations; for had I . . . etc . . . . , then I’d have opted for Ottawa, Ontario, a city I’d still very much like to visit someday before I die. But I didn’t, so I didn’t. Instead, I stand where the road forks to the southwest (down Highway 401, following the history-laden St. Lawrence River), with the Sacred Knapsack over my left shoulder and my thumb in the evening air, resigned to climb into the passenger’s seat of whatever vehicle might pull over to pick me up and take me down that highway, along the floodplain of the St. Lawrence, past Toronto and Windsor, and across that big bridge into Detroit, and then on home to Wichita and the fall semester at the university and Kate Schulte and the rest of my life.

So, here I am in the present tense of a lifetime ago, traveling southwest out of Montreal, into the growing summer darkness, with the little Canadian towns growing noticeably farther and farther apart, as the miles flow past, until my ride informs me that the next village up ahead is where he’s getting off, and offers to drop me off at a service station which, he tells me, usually stays open until around 9:00 p.m. As he drives away into the Canadian darkness, I walk into the service station’s brightly lit interior and introduce myself – in both English and French – to a group of a half dozen or so local teenage males who appear to be just hanging out, talking, laughing, smoking and drinking a variety of canned and bottled beverages. Although the conversation they’re having amongst themselves is being conducted entirely in what strikes me as a rather un-French French, a couple of them are able and willing to converse with me in (an almost unintelligible) broken English. Because of the rapidly oncoming night (considerably chillier than an August night in Wichita, Kansas, U.S.A), I come directly to the point – that point being that I need to find a place to sleep until I can continue my journey in the morning.

After these basically polite and remarkably attentive village youths have interviewed me to their heart’s content – concerning everything from where Wichita, Kansas is (and do we still have gunfights in the streets) to my opinion of President Nixon and of the recent flood of Vietnam War draft resistors pouring into Canada from the U.S. – one of them slips away into the attached automotive repair garage bay. In a few minutes, he returns with a stocky, fortyish man wearing an auto mechanic’s overalls and wiping his hands on a cleaning rag. The younger man introduces the middle-aged man to me as the owner of the service station. The middle-aged man (the mechanic, the owner) extends his freshly wiped hand in greeting and flashes me a warm smile. We attempt to greet one another verbally, but it’s of little use beyond the symbolic, since he can’t seem to make heads or tails of my college French (taught to me, incidentally, by a native speaker – I mean from France), and I find myself running up against a similar dilemma with the owner’s (evidently book-learnt) fractured English. It takes a full three minutes, therefore -- even with much attempted translation on the part of the helpful younger man – for the owner to make it known to me that I’m welcome to spend the night at his house. As you might guess, I cannot believe my luck. (Nor can I overstate my sense of grateful relief.) Through our make-do translator, the owner informs me that he and his wife have a young daughter who has a very nice room of her own but who prefers to sleep in their bed whenever they’ll let her.

So, it’s settled: I’ll sleep in their little girl’s bed. But first, the mandatory half-hour of male bonding and hanging out with the village youths, while the owner finishes up a brake job, counts down the register and closes up the service station for the night. After that, the owner takes me to a local pub where we each have a burger and a beer and make vain attempts at verbal communication using his fractured English and my feeble French, along with diagrams and rough maps scrawled on napkins and placemats – and the usual amount of charades and sign-language. Finally, we drive to the modest bungalow he shares with his wife and their only child. The ladies have long since retired, so he shows me to my quarters and bids me a good night.

With the exception of one night in 1991 when I inadvertently fell asleep while babysitting a friend’s young daughter who’d been reading me a bedtime story after I’d tucked her into her own bed – with that one exception – tonight, the first night I ever spent in Canada, is the only night I’ve ever spent sleeping in a little girl’s frilly little undersized bed. I feel rather awkward at first, like the giant in some Grimm’s fairytale. Perhaps it isn’t so much the dainty little bed itself as it’s the congregation of dolls and stuffed animals whose eyes I can feel staring at me through the darkness that’s putting such a crimp in this particular episode of my dependence on the kindness of strangers. In the end, as I drift off to my Canadian sleep, I begin to accept this position of unique privilege as a rare opportunity to “explore my Goldilocks side” and to gather a bit more grist for the mill – something else to write about, these four decades later.

In the morning, the lady of the house – in bathrobe and slippers – is kind enough to serve me a bit of breakfast before I’m driven back out to the ever-flowing river of Highway 401, which will, I’m hoping, take me as far as that big bridge back into my homeland. As we three adults chew our way through breakfast, I keep wondering where the little daughter is. I can hear cartoons (in French, of course) on the TV, coming from behind the parents’ bedroom door. And a few dolls and other toys appropriate to a 7-year-old girl are scattered in a far corner of the living room, but never never do I ever lay eyes on the child in whose bed I’ve just spent the night. And inquiring into the matter simply seems inappropriate. It’s only been in the past few days, here in the 21st century, that it’s occurred to me that the child may not have existed – that she may have died some time in the recent or distant past . . . or . . . . The possibilities are endless: a heartbreaking custody battle with a former spouse, some childhood disease, a fall from a friend’s tree house . . . or . . . she’s simply too absorbed in watching early morning cartoons on the other side of that bedroom door to come say “bonjour” to the American hitchhiker who spent the previous night in the custody of her dolls and stuffed animals.

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Anyway, the rest, as they say, is history. The kind stranger who’d shown me such extraordinary trust and hospitality made sure that I was safely on my way home, down Canadian Highway 401 – just like Daddy Joe in Decatur, Alabama, two years earlier. By nightfall, I was in Windsor, Ontario, where cheap lodging was plentiful. The next morning, I crossed the big bridge into Detroit, where I spent several hours simply walking around downtown before taking a city bus to the highway. And thus did I arrive safely back in Wichita – via Kansas City, Missouri, the city where I settled after my mother’s death in 1990, so that I could sit down in it today to write this humble summary to you.

To be perfectly honest with you, Rick, until I began to write this “Alone With America” chapter of my reminiscences, I hadn’t given much thought at all to just how remarkable my good fortune had been, back in my hitchhiking days, to have crossed paths with so many incredibly kind strangers. And I say this bearing in mind that those I’ve told you about here today are merely those cases which stand out in my mind.

For instance, it would be remiss of me to close without at least mentioning the dirt-poor family living outside of Fort Smith, Arkansas, who let me sleep on their couch for the night, back in the summer of 1967. It was at the end of my second day out. The night before, at the end of my very first day as a cross-country hitchhiker (Wichita to Joplin), I simply crashed at the Salvation Army shelter in Joplin, Missouri. (“Piece of cake,” as they say.) But somewhere around noon of the second day of my odyssey, an overzealous constable out of Pineville, Missouri decided that I was probably a runaway, despite my driver’s license’s assurance that I was 18. I volunteered to be held in protective custody for something like three or four hours before he drove me back out to the highway, headed south. By then, I had only enough daylight left to make it to Fort Smith. It was while I was standing on the shoulder of some two-lane road on the southern outskirts of that town that a scruffy little boy of perhaps 9 or 10 walked up and started a conversation with me, the upshot of which turned out to be that he was “just sure it’d be alright” with his folks if I slept on their couch that night.

His family lived only a couple hundred yards off the main road in a kind of informal arrangement of dilapidated shacks. From the surprisingly warm welcome I received from his parents and extended family, I gathered that I was hardly the first stray he’d dragged home. As you’ve already undoubtedly guessed, I was invited to break bread with them – such as it was – before we all retired to their big front porch, where they shared their “highly affordable” booze with me while we passed around an old guitar and entertained each other with some even older American standards. The parties most conspicuously missing from that iconic tableau were John Jacob Niles, Thomas Hart Benton and, of course, you.

But, as has already been established, that was then and this is now. America was a different place in 1967; the planet was. If a young person reading what I’ve written here today were to jump out of their chair and declare that they were ready to shoulder their knapsack, hold out their thumb, and take to the open road to be alone with America, I’d sit them right back down, pour them a drink and take the next three hours to paint for them the other half of the picture. Most likely, I’d begin by telling them about all the innocent, unsuspecting young hitchhikers whom Henry Lee Lucas (and his ilk) brutally, sadistically murdered, in that America which immediately followed the one I’ve just portrayed here.

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But now it’s your turn, Rick. I myself have much more to remember and recount. But before I do, I want to hear from you. I know for a fact that you logged tens of thousands more miles, “back in the day,” than I ever did. Meanwhile, I hope you won’t mind my sharing another of my song lyrics with you. It both does and does not relate to the subject at hand. I’ll let you be the judge of that. Anyway, I look forward to hearing from you. Hope you’re enjoying this – our 58th or 59th – springtime (depending on who’s doing the counting).

Until Next Time, Stay Well,

Galen

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WE MOVE AND THEN WE STOP

We move through our space and then we suddenly cease to be.
There’s really nothing to prove. We fly until we drop.
We won’t come around again, once we’ve fallen from the tree.
It’s just this simple: we move and then we stop.

There’s really nothing to prove. We fly until we drop.
It’s just this simple: we move and then we stop.

You can study a ton of Zen, searching for the key.
You can say you’re in the groove with every tear and raindrop.
But here in the world of men, it’s as simple as one-two-three.
What happens is we move and then we stop.

You can say you’re in the groove with every tear and raindrop.
What happens is we move and then we stop.

You’re as fragile as a wren, though your wings are not as free.
There’s a curse you can’t remove. It descends with your first lollipop.
You learn it before you’re ten, so you don’t have to learn it from me.
It’s just this simple: we move and then we stop.

There’s a curse you can’t remove. It descends with your first lollipop.
It’s just this simple: we move and then we stop.

Words and Music by Galen Green c 1979

/gg

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Friday, April 25, 2008

Alone With America by Galen Green

Friday, October 12, 2007

Sunday, September 30, 2007

WHERE I GET ALL MY BEST IDEAS

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