Track Around the Mountain
I was hitch hiking from southern Oregon out to a place in northern California called Crescent City. I remember it was 63 miles away. Any luck and by late afternoon I would be meeting up there with Tony at McDonalds. In that distant pre-mobile world we had an ‘infallible’ meet up plan which involved the most likely place at regular intervals. 12 noon and every 2 hours after on the hour. A camper van pulled over and I jumped in. “Hey where you headed”? “ No problem”, “ Where you from”? After about a mile we turned left and up a track. Alarm bells started ringing and I asked him where he was going. He said he’d got a back way to go, don’t worry…
The ‘road’ he turned on to was a dirt road loggers track into what became endless forest. We went through junctions of these tracks and I wondered how he knew which way to go. The track was rough and we slowly bumped along like a safari jeep. He was pretty quiet in as much that we didn’t talk about anything other than the usual “do-you-know –the-Queen”? type stuff. The ‘quiet hour’ followed with me looking out into the woods that formed an almost closed canopy over us leaving a pale glow from above, mildly hallucinating. After another couple of hours I asked, “we in California yet”? “Oh yeah, about an hour ago”. I asked him how far to go and he replied that he’d drop me off ‘somewhere good’ and not to worry. I was… surprisingly unworried.
I realised it was getting dark when he switched his headlights on. I now stared down a wood lined tunnel with a single track road appearing and disappearing as we weaved and bumped our way. I knew that 63 miles doesn’t take this long even up this track. I asked him what he did for a living. “I do what a lot of people do up here –I farm… vegetables, fruit and…pot”. He pulled over and rummaged under the floor of the van (I did tense a bit sensing a shotgun) and pulled out a huge plastic sack of Sensimilla buds. He said that there were a lot of ‘farmers’ in Northern California and to look out for “hippies driving Porsches”.
2 more hours staring at the headlights… I did my imagining huge scythes cutting away the trees either side, the odd bouncing star glimpsed through the trees. Can’t get much further away from home than this I thought. Now I wonder why I wasn’t more panicked at the time…maybe he was a nice guy and I thought that I could take him if necessary… Finally, after a ride that started at around 9am and ended in the dark, we joined a tarmac road and he pulled over at a lone store in the darkness saying, “that’s it but don’t worry – there’s plenty of drunken Indians in pick-up trucks that will give you a lift”. Off he went, leaving me standing in pitch darkness in the pine woods silent only as pine woods can be. In what seemed like almost immediately an engine and headlights roared and glowed through the woods towards me. 2 drunken “Indians” (Hoopa nation) pulled over and gave me a lift to the next town. We played pool and I got a deal on a cheap motel. In the morning I looked at the motel map. I was 145 miles from Crescent City. The first car to come by was a Porsche driven by a Hippy. He didn’t stop.
Timm Williams
During the long haul up to Crescent City I sat on my bag by the road and began reading ‘Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee’. I don’t know why I did. I must have been tired because it wasn’t the best way of persuading people to stop. I was probably hung over from my previous day’s journey and drinking with the Hoopa guys. A car driven by a lone man did pull over and I got in. “I don’t normally pick up hitch-hikers but I like the book you’re reading”. It has to be said that nearly all people who picked me up would either say they don’t normally stop or that I was, “lucky” as, “no-one stops for hitch-hikers any more” (!).
His name was Timm Williams and he was going all the way to CC. He asked me about the book and told me that he was a member of the Yurok nation from the Klamath river region around CC. He helped me find my friend/occasional co-hitcher and started 3 great days of walking ancient tribal grounds, hearing stories and meeting his fellow tribal friends. He had beautiful tribal headdresses made from woodpecker scalps and similarly impressive body adornments and clothes. When his friends came to visit they would speak their native tongue but, sadly, Timm said that so few were still speakers and that life was getting lonelier with less people to talk to.
He told us that he’d once been a ‘tribal’ dancer for the Stanford Indians, the Stanford University Football team. He said that he used to curse the crowd in Yurok so nobody would understand. He told me it was along the lines of ‘F**k off white people’, but this may be something I’ve since concocted as memories faded over time or his attempt at atonement*. Many years later I tried to contact him but had no reply. It turned out that he’d died in a car accident in 1987. Now with Googling I have found out more about him. He was a controversial figure…….* https://indiancountrymedianetwork.com/education/native-studies-tribal-colleges/eliminating-the-stanford-indian-mascot/
https://stanforddailyarchive.com/cgi-bin/stanford?a=d&d=stanford19571122-01.2.73
https://stanforddailyarchive.com/cgi-bin/stanford?a=d&d=stanford19730925-01.2.33
Mount Rushmore
I was hitching across South Dakota towards Mount Rushmore. It was getting late and I was trying to get there before dark. I ended up stuck by a road that I was told was the right one. The roads back then weren’t so busy, not compared to now when millions of people go touring the states. Back then it was different. No cars were passing. It was getting dark so I decided to sleep out the night and try again first thing. Maybe a ranger would pick me up on his way to work in the morning. I always had my emergency rations of food, wine and water in case I got stuck somewhere. I didn’t have a clue what wild animals might be there -Bears? Coyotes? Snakes? . I made myself comfortable in my chilly thin sleeping bag and drifted off.
I woke later to an eerie glowing of moonlight. There was something bright hanging in the trees. I knew it wasn’t the moon as that was behind me. I got up and walked towards it. I was scared shitless but there’s was no point in going back to await my doom in my sleeping bag. I came to a clearing. Hanging in the sky above me was Mount Rushmore, the four dead presidents glowing white in moonlight against the sky. My first thought was consumed by jaw-dropping disbelief. My second was, ‘if I’d known I was this close I would have walked the rest’.
Stamford Roundabout
After a tough day getting out of NYC my friend Tony and I had only got as far as Stamford, courtesy of an African-American guy who had taken pity on us. This was early days and we’d decided to try hitching together. Needless to say, two big men weren’t going to get lifts easy, even back then…
We were bound for Boston. We ate at a cheap diner. It created a dilemma when you’d ended up in an urban area. On the one hand, plenty of places to stay, but limited ‘free’ options such as barns, woods etc. The former meant saving laying out our precious dosh. I was feeling a bit exposed wandering around an urban area with bags so I suggested sleeping in the middle of a roundabout we were passing. It was covered in dense bushes. Any ‘robbers/psychopaths’ etc would have to walk across the traffic of the, albeit not very busy, roundabout and crash through the undergrowth in order to take us by surprise. I slept like a log under the orange streetlights, glowing through the bushes. How different from the glow of moon and stars in wild places to come later…