Henney Family

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.