Ron Huber hitchhikes from the Washington DC area to Oregon, July 1981

West again.

1st ride to Frederick. 2nd to Centerville PA, Just across the Monongahela River. 3rd ride is a wrong way sprint! 4th to Columbus, 5th to Dayton, 6th to Chicago.

Wednesday. 1:45 CST. Now outside the wreckage of Chicago, at a "Toll Oasis." Rideless and after several hours he tries the highway. Non serviam? A cop warning-tickets him, tells him to leave the Toll Oasis, proceed to next highway ramp. Very well. He picks up pack, shoulders it and takes hold of guitar case. Through a suburban neighborhood, curious eyes following him, guitar case popping open every chance it gets. Proceeds through a ballpark then an industrial park. A guitarist gives him a ride to ramp which is only 1/2 mile ahead.

From there, a short ride with a well-dressed, pleasant suburbanite leaves him at a junction between 89 and some highway leaving Chicago. Three thumbers pass by. Then a Saab pulls up with a pair of Xstians aboard. Learning they are out of gas, he 'loans' them $40. They are bound for Alpine, Colorado. All night they travel, stopping only for gas and coffee.

In the morning they drop him in Wyoming. An Italian bound for Idaho picks him up, takes him deep into Wyoming past a 'Little America' roadside attraction. He drops here and soon is picked up by a corvette bound for LA. As they cruise along, they sip wine, smoke Marlboros. Ron has himself dropped off at the last rest areas before Salt Lake City, having no desire to be tangled in urban traffic again. Besides, he can call from here. The Corvette drops him off, speeds into the night.

Ron staggers, a little drunk, into the rest area. He drops the half full wine bottle into a trashcan, pisses in the smelly bathroom and heads for the telephone. There is none, for the entire assembly has been torn away, leaving only the Bell company stand with its phony invitation.

As he stalks away, he meets a motor cyclist, very intoxicated, who has been hanging around all day, evidently. All his gear is off his bike, strewn over a picnic table. Long haired, rheumy-eyed, he turns the retired agent on to some foul vodka and orange juice combination. Yech! Brushing aside the biker's plea for company, he gets on the road again. The cyclist sags against his picnic table.

The sun sinks wearily into the west toward the capital of the Mormon-nation. The cyclist walks out onto the median strip as if seeking something. Ron frowns. The biker distracts the drivers, he thinks. He walks along until he is level with Ron, and explains that he is looking for a spot to turn his bike around to head east. Ron tells him there is an intersection not much further along that would be better than the bottle-strewn ditch separating the highway's east and west bound lanes. The biker grunts, then shambles back to his bike. Just then a pickup pulls over. Ron hops in after throwing his gear in back. Where you bound for? he shouts over the engine's din. "San Francisco" he is answered. A rush of relief pours over him as they speed through Salt Lake City, then head through the salt desert.

To pass the time, Ron tells him about his last ride in a Corvette which would have taken him to Los Angeles if he'd been going that way...

"What!" shouts the driver, startled. "That's where I'm headed". He looks around for the map. Ron opens it, saying "I thought you were going to San Francisco?" "San Bernadino" he is answered.

They look at the map. They could go on to the Nevada border where he could head south, but he opts to pull across the highway right there. Ron jumps out, grabs his pack and guitar, and the pickup vanishes back the way it came.

Near total darkness. Ron is somewhere in the midst of the great Salt Desert. SLC's lights glimmer uninvitingly to the east. To the west, only darkness. Nothing to do but push on. He walks along the deserted highway, hoping for a rest area before too long. A few cars flash by, ignoring his outstretched thumb. Onward.

A car pulls to a stop a few hundred yards behind him, too far back to have noticed him. Headlights go out. He keeps moving, hoping someone will assume him to be hitching from his broken down car.

Someone does. He is very drunk, a law student bound for Nevada to gamble. He presses a miniature liquor bottle on Ron, who after some hesitation hands it back full. They drive along, the driver anxious for Ron to help him gamble, which Ron will not. Just before the border a rest area hoves into view. Ron gets dropped off and goes to sleep on a picnic table.

July 3rd. Morning., He is at Bonneville Salt Flats rest area. Salt desert stretched 10 miles and more to the north. he packs his bags, thumb out again., and a van pulls over, carrying a heavyset man. Headed for Sacramento. He starts forward then stops, frowning into his rearview mirror. "Where are they?" he asks himself and, putting the van into reverse, backs up the long ramp into the rest area.

"There you are!" he bellows at a burly grinning truck driver. "What'd you stop for?" "Hadda take a leak" he grins back. They talk together for a while, then the van driver asks Ron "Can you drive? Got a license?" Answered in the affirmative, he hands Ron the keys, says, "Follow us" and clambers into the truck, leaving Ron in the van alone.

He is amazed, but starts the van and follows the truck. They travel into Nevada, eat breakfast , lunch and afternoon snack, and after a temporary breakdown caused by a clogged air line, slide into Donner Pass, where Ron makes a quick phone call, pisses, then back into the van for a sunset ride through piney canyons westward ho! in the gathering dark.

Tired again. Exhaustion is Ron's normal state of mind while doing these crazed transcontinental hops. He steers blearily through the thickening traffic, keeping track of the cab lights of the two trucks as they weave and roar towards Sacramento. A cop goes past and tags an unlucky porsche.

Still the two trucks keep an average speed of 70 mph and Ron dares not lag behind lest they vanish in some roadside rest area, leaving him racing into the west with a rapidly dwindling gas tank.

Finally a truck whips over to the roadside, underneath Interstate 5 on the Sacramento outskirts. The traveler pulls over behind it , then the other truck. Ron gets out proffers thanks and praise, and watches them drive away. It is 10 PM, Independence Eve. Autos whip past in the darkness, ignoring his thumb.

Staggering along the roadway, flinching at imagined CHiPs, Ron opts to sleep now and hitch tomorrow. Waiting until the road is empty of traffic, he throws his pack and guitar over the hurricane fence, then vaults the fence himself, dropping into dense tall weeds. He crawls, dragging guitar and pack, to the shelter of a hedge, where he sets up, unrolls sleeping bag, takes off his shoes and greasy socks, strums a few bards on the ax and passes out after a cigarette. There are no mosquitoes.

7/4/81. Morning. Rice field outskirts of Sacramento. He hops over the fence, tot he highway. Skeeterless and gladly so. Now he feels the coldness of the indifferent driver, the jaundiced eye of the CHiPster searching out its victims to impale upon the sword of the ticket.

The wanderer trudges stolidly along, the morning sun glaring at him, the pedestrian on the highway. S/he scans for a way to escape the cement ribbon and its attendant guards, but hurricane fencing bars his path, once he leaves the embankment. Glancing down, a hat catches his eye, lying amongst the green and brown weeds at the foot of the road shoulder. The Hatless One clambers down and retrieves it, looking it over. Seems fairly sanitary. he tears out the inner lining, tries the hat one. it fits, shielding eyes from angry sun-tongue. But, what of appearances? Does he look a roadweary desperado, awaiting the unwary automobilist.

"Looks is ever'thing" he remembers Colombian telling him sagely so long ago as they perched beside peach orchards near Davis.....but how does the traveler look with the brown felt thing perched athwart his cranium?

Sly and squinty eyed, he imagines, an unlikely specimen to attract the sympathy of hurtling motorists.

He tries it on experimentally, enjoying the respite from morning sunglare, but no one stops and, filled with the superstition endemic to the People of the Thumb, he snatches it back off, wrinkling his brow against the fierce sun rays. Luck, luck, luck, he chants between smiling teeth, walking backwards, a wide eyed goofy expression plastered across his tired face. All the while awaiting the log arm and bellowing p.a. blare of the highway patrol. Luck, luck, luck....

Luck! a red-orange pickup whips over, tooting its horn, The spaced-man grabs hat, pack, guitar and shoulder bag and shambles over, hustling along against a cop-show. Gets there.

Groans inwardly, the truck is covered in back, no where to put anything. he stares stupidly at it, then the driver, swarthy, slight Mexican cast to his features, yells "Put it up front!"

An awkward business, but at last he succeeds in cramming his baggage into the passenger seat and crawling on top of it all. They move off, back into the traffic stream. The thumbster asks the fatal question, ever hopeful, ever hopeless (this could be the ride, the all-the-way-to-Crater-Lake-highway-express.)

Nyet. In fact, in response to his question, the driver says "Paradise." To Ron's travel-frayed nerves the word solicits paranoia (he's a nut!), mirth (Garden of Eden, here we come!) and then memory (Its a town near Chico, California).

He learns from the driver that he'll be leaving I-5 in a few miles to take Highway 99, which veers into an eastern parallel of the superhighway. C'est dommage, mai, c'est la vie," he things to himself.

In a few moments, back on the highway. Highway 99 fades off to the northeast. Air temperature rises along with the sun. Snatch of weather forecast he'd heard on the Paradisean's radio promised temperatures of 110 to 115, hardly the ideal thumbing environment.

The traveler squints, applies hat, removes it, fearing ride loss. In a compromise move, he slips it over a highway reflector post, that, apparently the victim of a careless driver, leans far over, making a fine reclining hitcher's post. Arien leans against it, his new hat seeming to float behind his head and beams smiles at the gaping passers by in their thunder chariots, rocking slightly on the flexing post.

The sun continues in its westward trajectory across a wide blue sky. A sweaty half hour passes, then a red Datsun pickup pulls up. Arien stops singing midway through the chorus of Rejoice, by Yes, grabs his junk and thunks it into the rear of the truck. Hopping in, he greets the driver, a thirtyish fellow, learns his destination ("Red Bluff, CA" wherever that is), and they take off. Air conditioning is greatly appreciated, but it drinks up the gas with great rapidity. When the needle is long past empty, leaving the agent on tenterhooks of fearful anticipation, they finally pull into a fuel station, buying only $3 of gas, which the driver assures him will be sufficient to reach Red Bluff.

They take off again, resupplied with cigarettes (the driver is a chain smoker of Kools) and Arien's eyes follow the dropping of the gas needle with dread fascination. Again it declines with great energy, though in the midst of doom muttering, a Red Bluff exit appears. The driver PASSES IT, for some reason, despite his passenger's pointed remarks about petrol scarcity, evidently bound for some further exit.

Possible, Arien decides, despite the low low lowness indicated by the gauge. But then the engine snorts, backfires, gasps, dies, and they are decelerating smoothly. The exit appears, and Arien warns the driver not to touch the brakes, banking on momentum and inertia to gain the ramp. Too late, though, for George's foot has thumped the pedal, dropping their speed by half, far too low, Arien sees, to even reach the ramp.

On the shoulder now, they crunch to a halt on gray gravel. "Damn!" mutters the driver, and Arien says, eyeing the nearly level ramp, "lets push this mother up there." He leap out, positioning himself at the tailgate and driver steps out his door, uses the door frame as a pushing lever. The truck begins to move, ponderous, ungainly, a mockery of its function.

"Push hard now to gain momentum up" thinks the agent, and he bends his will to the task, mustering lazy legs and the truck ascends, unbelievably heavy. Near the top, sweat squirting freely from both of them, and finally cresting! Now they must traverse a bridge over some river to the east side where an ARCO awaits.

At this point a large pickup honks behind and its driver offers a shove to the station, Excellent. Aries guides the truck into gentle contact and they move over the bridge, sweating, almost nauseous from the burst of exertion in the intense heat, and into the station.

A swarthy Chicano grins through his mustaches, comes out from the combination store/gas station, services the thirsty truck. The Thumbster starts to lift out his pack, etc, but the driver offers and does take him to the entrance ramp, then speeds off.

Hot, tired, spaced, the weary wanderer stands a while in the throbbing heat, feeling his brain cook, eyeing a fast food joint back across the river. Hungrily he stares, saliva squirting, imagining a dark frosty interior.

Surrender, he picks up his bags and guitar, crosses over the weedy shallow turgidness of water, leaves his gear outside the (shudder) Burger King back door, stamps in, relishing the cold air , strides up to the counter and orders, (conscious of his protein deficiency) a big double burger, a chocolate shake and a large order of french fries, waits slavering which the order is fixed.

The burger team assembles his order in a flash, rings it up, presents it with a flourish of efficient mechanization, and he pays, jogs over to a back table, sets the precious nutrients down, douses them with salt to recoup his sodium chloride expenditures outside, and slowly, with an Epicurean delight in every fragment of soy-enriched beef, he absorbs, reading all the while from the life of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Society of Jesus. All too quickly, he is nibbling the last vestiges of bun burger and fries, all balanced, one against the other in judicious small nibbles carefully daubed with catsup.

The synthshake lingers, thick, cold and bloating in its petrochemical chocolateness. Ignatius, ascetic and masochistic, makes a fine counterpoint to the ersatz edibles in his forlorn romantic sufferings: spiked whips, hair shirt and barbed shoes, all of which he found necessary to reach Reality.

Too soon, (around noon) the last droplet of syn-chok is sucked up the plastic straw into the Explorer's thirsty tissues. He shuts the paperback, drops it into his bag, stares at the plump bland horde masticating around him to the Muzak-modified music skirling out the ceiling speakers, their mandibles champing in rhythmic unison, and walks out, into the merciless heat, the violent glare, the automotive groan of Red Bluff, California. Back Pack thumps atop shoulders, gimpy guitar case handle slides familiarly into left palm, and he trudges, (with a lighter step, it is true) nto the road, over the sluggish river and up the entrance ramp.

Warily. Once beyond the No Pedestrians sign, he is on legal thin ice, open to tickets and worse, fair game for prowling police.

He almost loses resolve, halts midway down the ramp. Reasons to himself that he's visible to the general traffic stream zipping past, yet still on the ramp, well away from the roadbed itself.

But no, virtue lies in daring, he mutters, stepping on into No-Ped land employing urgent mode hitch symbolism (face screwed up in an intense caricature of desire,arm full out, stiff thumb wagging side to side.) Yet all for naught: Aries might as well be invisible for all the good his graceless pirouetting does him.

Intangible to all save the agents of order, for a passing CHiPster bellows threateningly into the air, "If I see you on the highway when I come back, I'm taking you in!" Not inclined to test him, Aries walks unwillingly back up the ramp, stopping at intervals to flash his request to passing motorists, one of whom STOPS his chariot.

A quick galumphing trot to the car, a rusty white Dodge Dart.

Baggage ensconced in rear seat, off they go, The driver speaks, "Almost didn't stop, since you were walking up the ramp."

"Um"

"Bet the cops just told you to get off the road," he guesses.

Aries tells him he was correct.

"Well, well," he says, pleased, "Cops have done it to me before, too. I usually just ignored 'em and kept hitching" he guffaws. "Screw them!"

He was going to the city of Redding California. Had been jockeying around the winding mountain roads in his Fiat, and the little sports car had blown its engine on a particularly steep pitch. Now he was coming up to tow it home behind the wheezing Dart, a chancy proposition, at best.

A faint tracery of cirrus clouds appears to the north. Just below rise the first ramparts of the Marble Mountains, a vast tangle of forested peaks walling of the more fecund Sacramento Valley from the more arid expanse of Southern Oregon.

Jim, a bartender, said he'd drop Aries at the town of Redding, California "A great place to hitch hike from" he said. "There's even a trashcan for you guys' convenience along the ramp. Easy to get rides in Redding"

Even in Jim's dilapidated Dart, the temperature had been made bearable by the air's movement. But now, dropped off in a shadeless intersection in the mid afternoon sun, the still air lay thick, redolent of melting asphalt and overheated fry oil from the nearby junkfood emporium. The heat blasts down, shimmering in gauzy mirages off engine hoods, streets and sidewalks, and Aries, cursing, sees a trio of hitchers already filling the hitch ramp. Scruffy and foreboding, they portend a long wait.

But not in the sun, he vows, and plods through sticky tar to a Sambo's, feeling abruptly like an alien as he lugs travelworn belongings into the lobby crammed with holiday families in their neat polyester garments and trim hairstyles.

But even aliens get thirsty and he makes his way to the counter, sees the impossibility of blockading the waiter's runway with his pack, lugs it to the lobby alcove and props it against a slippery plastic chair. Then back to the counter, flop into a seat. A graying waitress tenders ice water: gone in a gulp.

"Iced tea, large, please," pronounces Aries, igniting a cigarette, thinking guiltily how Roger, his brother, had forecast his quick return to the vile habit.

"You'll be smoking in two days," Roger had predicted, as they rode to his first dropping point near Frederick, Maryland; what seemed weeks ago but was only 80 hours and 3,000 miles earlier.

Aries had scoffed at the time, privately convinced he was cured of the craving. But sure enough, the very first ride on the eastern slope of the Appalachians, had brought him into union with the nicotinaceous vapor. Not from the driver, a plainclothes security guard who sat undercover in the visitor galleries of the US House of Representatives, on the look out for disgruntled congress watchers, who might be expected to hurl, if not bombs or other projectiles (such types being weeded out by the metal detecting devices at the door), at least invective or other intangibles that might interrupt the solemn knavery transpiring below.

Indeed, said George Filbert, driver, washing a Quaalude down his throat with a swig of beer, he'd smoked cigarettes only once in his life, at a drunken frat party, and had been rewarded for his experiment with beer splattering nausea.

Never again, quoth the JDL and George Filbert, albeit for different reasons.

No, it was not the drunken druggy protector of the privileged (now only 18 1/2 minutes away from sideswiping a concrete guardwall with his freshly rented Datsun, due to his freshly befogged brain) who brought Aries back under the spell of old King Nic.

It was another hitchhiker, a scruffy lout crouching along I-270, crumbled paper sign scrawled with "Pa" flapping in the automotive breeze.

Spifflicated Filbert zoomed from the left lane over to the shoulder in a shower of gravel, with Aries' hands convulsively clutching the padded plastic edge of the dashboard. His thighs ached and he looked down and saw he'd crunched his beer can, rinsing his jeans with the lukewarm brew.

The hitchhiker approached cautiously, as hitchers will when confronted with unconventional drivers. Still, he hopped right in, a Kool clenched between his teeth. Filbert jammed the Datsun into gear and lurched into the road, sending a pickup truck screeching around him, horn dopplering indignantly into the distance.

"Fug you," mumbled George, He craned his head around to Scruff, saying "S'beer?"

"Sure," grunted Lout, rubbing highway grit from his red eyeballs. Aries handed him one. He snapped it open, took a mighty swig, belched beer fumes.

"Smoke?" this from lout, shaking his pack of Kools suggestively at Filbert, who turned to look, nearly impaling the Datsun on a guardrail, were it not for vigilant Aries, who grabbed the wheel and jammed it sharply left back onto the highway.

"I'll t-t-t-take one", said a bloodless Aries, scowling weakly at drunken George Filbert, who giggled stupidly and said, "Sorry. Whew! Close one. Um thanks" in a soporific mumble, adding, "Naw, don't smoke" in an afterthought to lout.

Aries looked at his cigarette. White cylinder delicately banded like an earth worm, shreds of tobacco peeking out one end, a mottled brown filter on the other. He'd smoked Kools once, when his older brother Rick had been a "greaser" and wore one of the green and white packs rolled up in his shirt sleeve, along with ban-lon socks, high top "Chucks" and "works".

Then Rick'd become a junkie and switched to Marlboro's, along with imitative Aries.

Aries lit the tube, took a tentative hit on it, inhaled the minty smoke. Relaxed as the buzzing numbness of adrenaline ecstasy flooded him. He closed his eyes in contentment just as the Datsun scraped the paint off its itchy left flank against the concrete road divider.

In a bedlam of splashing beers, six hands grabbed at the treacherous steering wheel, bringing the outraged auto away from its abrasive embrace with the concrete, across the highway and onto the shoulder. Lout muscled open the door and made an angry departure, muttering "Drunken shithead" as he stalked off, shaking beer off his cigarette pack.

Aries got out, examined the brightly burnished sheet metal on the driver's side. Filbert leaned his head out the window, inspected the finely grooved metal and said, "Let's get going." He was sober, now,

They got, passed the angry lout, who shook his fist at them. Aries yelled "Here!" and threw lout's tattered "Pa" sign out the window.

He got out at the next town, despite Filbert's protestations and bought a pack of Kools before thumbing onward....

...Eighty hours and 3,000 miles later, Aries is smoking a Camel. Non-filter. Kools had proven distasteful in the heat of the prairies. Marlboro's monotonous.

Now, the gray waitress brings him a tall iced tea. He plies it with sugar, squeezed juice and pulp from the lemon slice and throws the battered peel back into the drink.

He nurses it along, wishing to forestall a return to the inferno outside. Flips open good old St. Ignatius again. Like Gordon Liddy, Ignatius is a proponent of Will, forcing himself to undertake emaciating fasts, self flagellations and a host of other ego and body maulings, supposing a pot of transcendental gold at the end of the agonic rainbow. Gulp. End of iced tea.

Romantic kitsch. Aries shuts it, retires to the pissoir; pisses. Gives sunroasted face a cold shower from the faucet. He supposed that he must venture back Out There, after, perchance, a last glass of ice water.

Reprieve. When Aries threads his way through the packed restaurant to his seat, he finds the teaglass brimming again, a fresh wedge of lemon peel perched atop

He is amazed. Never before, anywhere in the United States, has he gotten an iced tea refill. Having arbitrarily set 3:00 as departure time (it is 2:55) he flogs it with sugar and swigs it down quickly.

Back at the entrance ramp, a couple and their baby are ensconced on the lift off pad. Aries watches from across the street, ready to move in quick once they leave, for the competition could be fierce.

Within minutes a station wagon pulls up, takes the traveling family. Aries sidles over, parks his baggage against the No pedestrians, horses, etc., sign, (adds "nukes" to the list of forbidden items) and gazes critically around the ramp. Quite high on the thumber scale: a gaily painted trash barrel, wide pullover zone, cleverly grafittied boulders all around, a streetlight for night hikers.

Aries takes out his guitar, plays for the brief amusement of passing motorists. The boulders are hot enough to fry bacon; he keeps scrunching around but can't find a cool spot. then an Opal Kadette wagon pulls over. Aries packs his guitar shambles over, arms full of baggage. Luck, luck, luck....

Jan is a lawyer from Marin County, bound for a ten day raft trip on the Rogue River, meaning she'll be driving through to Grant's Pass, thirty miles past Aries' turnoff point.

A funny feeling floods through him. The end of the journey at last in sight, it feels both endless and infinitesimally brief. His sensation of NOW becomes ambiguous, expands so that he feels both the splashing thud of Agent Filbert's collision with the retaining wall and the cracked seat of Jan's Opal at once. A tinge of seeming unreality skims across his memories and he recalls all the sweaty aching hours at random points along interstate throughways, a patina of fatigue glossing all the rendezvous, arrivals, departures, police snarls, and other minutiae into one lump.

The quest is its own reward, whispers the ghost of his former Prince Georges Community College English professor John McCann. The quest's goal merely an excuse, an invitation to embark upon unknown paths, perilous or banal as they may be.

End.

Ron Huber transcription from paper diary.