Thumbing to Colorado II

The Fall hitchhiking trip to Colorado was so much fun, I went again in the Spring of ’70 with my college roommate of four years, Roy. Roy’s dad was an employee of Penn Central Railroad, so we two “brothers” picked up a Penn Central passenger train (pre-AMTRAC) in Syracuse, NY and rode it free as far west as we could go (St. Louis, MO). So our thumbing adventure really began in St. Louis.

Unbelievably, we again stood by the side of the road for 11 hours in Kansas City. Not quite true…I remember very clearly that I stood by the side of the road while Roy slept beside the road. Finally, a sedan drove by and stopped about 100 yards beyond where we were standing. We ran up to meet it and then noticed that the car had five guys in it. From that point here’s how the dialog went:

“You seem to be too full already.”

“No, really, we can fit you in. Come on, get in. We’ll take you anywhere you want to go.”

“No, I don’t think so. That’s not going to work.”

“You got any money?”

Sensing that the conversation had reached a practical stopping point, we ran as fast as we could go back down the freeway, and thankfully they chose not to follow. This was the most dangerous situation I encountered on either trip.

Other encounters were more humorous. One in particular was fitting payback for Roy’s sleeping through the visit to Kansas City. A lone young man stopped to pick us up later in Kansas. I climbed in the back seat intent on sleeping, and Roy climbed in front to provide some company for the driver. Soon, I heard the driver ask Roy if he had asked Jesus into his life. We called them Jesus freaks back then, and I was snickering to myself in the back seat, thankful to be pretending to be asleep. Roy later berated me for not saving him.

Later in Kansas, we were picked up by a Volkswagen van filled with hippies, tapestries on the windows, and blankets on the floor where rear seats normally were found. One long-haired guy turned out to be another hitchhiker, and he was stoned out. He moved very slowly and began unfolding a road map of Kansas in a very slow and deliberate manner. Once it was open, he cocked his head and turned the map in several directions before pulling out a pencil and drawing circular shapes in the corners of Kansas, along with the midpoints of the northern and southern borders of Kansas. When he was satisfied with his creation, he looked at me and asked,

“If Kansas was a pool table, how big do you think the pool balls would be? I think they would be the size of tractors.”

I concluded that a conversation with this guy would probably be less satisfying than finding a corner to sleep in, so I curled up in one of the blankets.

Roy had a friend, Dan, at Denver University, so that was our destination. We arrived on a Friday and that evening the Student Union was throwing a party to introduce a new beer, and the beers were free (no sweeter words were ever heard by a college boy’s ears). It was a fun night, with good music and I danced barefoot with the same girl for the entire night on a dance floor covered with about ½-inch of beer. The group continued our celebrating well after the party at the Union concluded, and we decided next day to head for the mountains.

As we headed west out of town on Denver’s busiest freeway, we stopped, lined up on the shoulder, and released some used beer into the roadside ditch (first clue that we were not yet sober). Our trip to the “mountains” went as far as Evergreen, where I was impressed that Evergreen Lake was still ¾-covered with ice, so I dove in with my clothes on (second clue). The reward for my bravery was that I was considerably wet and chilly on the ride back into town. We enjoyed the rest of our stay at the university, but had overstayed our allotted Spring Break time in Denver, and so headed back East.

North of downtown Denver, a trooper picked us up while hitchhiking. I’m sure we got the obligatory lecture, but what I remember most was that he picked us up and took us to the end of his jurisdiction and dropped us off on an entrance ramp where we could continue on outside his area of responsibility. I guess we didn’t look like hardened criminals.

We were very tired by the time we reached Columbia, MO. A couple of Missouri coeds picked us up and offered us a place to stay for the night. We were running out of time, so we told them we had to keep going (I guess our spirit of adventure had reached its lowest setting at that point). We reached the train station in St. Louis, climbed aboard the train, turned a set of seats backwards so they faced toward us, stretched out, and slept all the way back to New York City’s Penn Central Station.

By special request, I will describe my first trip to Colorado as a young adult without the rest of my family. In November 1969 I was 18 years old, a freshman at Cornell University, and students at the school were given a week off to vote and work on behalf of their favorite candidate. At that time I had just had a cast removed from my wrist that had been with me since September when a 265 lb defensive tackle landed on my wrist during a half-speed football drill the day before a freshman game. That ended my football career in college and after all that time in a cast I wasn’t in the mood to go home and support my local candidate.

So, an engineering school buddy, Tom Molloy, and I decided to hitchhike to Colorado just for the adventure. We made it to Western New York through a series of short hops and somewhere near Buffalo we were picked up by a big Mexican guy with really colorful new western boots that he was very proud of, driving a medium-sized straight truck. Before we had gone too far, we learned that he was returning to San Antonio after dropping off a load of migrant farm workers in New York. Being a pretty naïve Midwestern guy, I had no clue whether to even wonder if the workers were in this country legally or not. Even if I had known at the time, I’m sure it wouldn’t have mattered one way or the other.

What really mattered was that this guy was very friendly and genuine. He admitted that he was lonely and picked us up just so that he would have someone to talk to. What I remember is that he talked ALOT about very personal things. It could be that he was trying to get some things off his chest, but I don’t really think that was it. I think he was truly lonely and also very open with his emotions, and Tom and I were fascinated by his story.

Somewhere around Kentucky he asked us to consider riding all the way to San Antonio with him just to keep him company. San Antonio seemed way out of the way for the short time we had available, so we thanked him for his generosity and he dropped us off in St. Louis. There were really only two things I remember about the travel between St. Louis and Colorado. One was that we spent about ten hours by the side of the road with our thumbs out in Kansas City. No one gave us a ride and Kansas City went to the top of my least favorite cities list. Shortly after we left Kansas City, we got a ride from an over-the-road trucker. I remember being really surprised that a trucker picked us up, but he soon explained that he was behind on making entries in his logbook. The authorities were unlikely to ask to see his logbook if they saw that there was somebody else as passenger who most likely was keeping up with the logbook. It also worked great for Tom and I because we alternated chatting with the driver as passenger and catching some zzzzz’s in his sleeper compartment.

I don’t recall anything in Denver, because we didn’t know anyone there and our hearts were set for the mountains, so we headed right up to Aspen. We wandered around that great little place (back in 1969 it was still pretty earthy). We asked around about places to stay and some kids our age directed us to The Snow Chase, a rustic little place just a few yards from the No. 1 lift on Aspen Mountain. We walked into the place and there were kids all over, including some playing cards with the little 65-year- old lady that owned the place. We asked her if she had a room available and she replied that she didn’t. We must have had some pretty long faces because she laughed and said that all she had was beds at $2/night (which was probably one of the last times you could spend the night on the side of Aspen Mountain for $2). She said her biggest reward was playing cards with young people and that’s why the beds were so cheap.

She showed us to a room with several bunk beds in it. That was the best bed I ever slept in. The room was fairly chilly, but there was about 12 inches of down quilts on each bed and once under those covers, I was completely zonked until the next morning. When I got up in the morning, I looked up on the mountain and saw the little old lady driving down the mountain in her Jeep with her dog sitting beside her and a deer draped across the back of the Jeep. She had it hung up in the tree beside The Snow Chase before I even ventured outside.

That night we went to a party at an Aspen home that someone had told us about and we found ourselves dazzled by the people and activity at this Rocky Mountain mecca. John Denver had not yet moved to Colorado or released Rocky Mountain High, but for all I know he may have been at that party. We didn’t stay in Aspen long, and were soon roaming the University of Colorado in Boulder where we heard some great music. I bought a simple backpack with the image of a cyclist on it and the name of the store, “The Spoke,” written on it that I used as a book bag for several years after that.

We were looking on the Ride Board at the Student Union for someone headed east, and found a Hippie guy that was headed to New York City the next day. He had a VW bus with a mattress behind the front two seats and a 3-month old fuzzy puppy that was very happy to meet a couple of new people. The four of us headed east, a cloud of smoke both inside and behind the van as I recall, alternating as driver, passenger, and sleeper (with puppy). We drove straight through to NYC, where Tom and I hitched back to Ithaca.

Cage Kitty

We had an 8mm movie screening at my house recently, wish the whole family coulda been there, especially for the "cage kitty" sequence.... OH, and also Isaac's tractor training! That boy was meant for heavy equipment!