How I spent my summer vacation or Tales of some California Hippies in the early 70s

Day one
(names have been changed to protect the guilty)

I don’t remember exactly how old I was, but I think it was the summer of 1970, which would have put me at 20 years old. Major life changes, my parents had moved from the home of my youth to another town in California and I was in college, living on my own from 19 years old.

We had a friend, Rob, who was kind of a weird kid, I think he had taken some acid and his mind was rearranged to be open to new stuff. He somehow decided that he needed to go to Boulder Colorado and he hitchhiked and famously hopped freight trains traveling through extremely cold tunnels in the mountains somewhere between Southern Cal and Boulder, and really was in danger of freezing, but he made it. He took off without even a warm jacket from So Cal and the trains go over the mountains and it is very cold, freezing and below. So he came back and was telling all about this Mecca of coolness and hipness so we decided to go.

It was me, Bob, and Mike, and Mike’s dog.

Bob.

Geez, what can I say, how can I even begin to describe Bob. Very famous among our friends for ridiculous episodes of forgetfulness, insane episodes with cars and life in general. I guess the best thing would be to give a couple of representative anecdotes:

Broken Neck – This was around the time we were about 22 or 23, I remember because after that Bob and I and another guy got a place together in Seal Beach. It was after I had kind of graduated and was working at a Chemical supply place. So I hadn’t actually seen Bob very much but apparently his behavior was getting pretty erratic. He had been scaring the piss out of guys with insane drunken driving episodes with his mother’s Cadillac. It was like a 70’s model HUGE car, with big fins, white, convertible. So one night he is coming back from Belmont shore across 2nd St. where it crosses PCH and apparently traveling as fast as the fucking Cadillac would go, foot on the throttle, lips around a bottle etc., way drunk. Sometime after PCH he loses it completely, swerves, flies off the highway in the Cadillac, it rolls and launches Bob into the air like a bottle rocket through the convertible top, no seat belt of course. So this is the lucky part, there were no buildings around there at that time, just open land. He lands in some kind of mud puddle, on his head, and is not killed miraculously, but breaks his neck. I knew nothing of this, and his mother calls my mom and tells her Bob is in the hospital with a broken neck, very serious. Shit, he was my best friend when we were younger. So I go to see him in the hospital and he has a full upper body cast, shaped like a tank top, with two metal bars coming out of the cast, connecting to a round piece of metal around his head, with 4 screws attaching the metal band directly into his skull. These screws are actually attached to the bone of his skull, through the skin. After that we went to a Tom Waits concert while he was wearing this contraption. I had never heard of Waits, and Bob had been hearing him on the radio, so we went. Great concert, the Back Room at McCabe’s guitar store in Santa Monica, small club, like 50 people club. Waits comes out and pulls an open beer out of the inside pocket of his sports coat, chugs it down and launches into “Diamonds on my Windshield” reading some of the words on notes, just wrote it I guess. Very memorable evening for Bob’s state and seeing Waits for the first time.

Bob’s Visit to Ojai – OK, I’m living in Ojai with my wife, recently married. Bob contacts me from Laguna I think and says he’s coming up. He has bought a really nice old Olds Toronado and is coming and is bringing some coke too. Well he arrives that night after a high speed freeway blast up 101 and can’t seem to find the coke. He’s got an empty paper envelope thingy we used to use and white powder residue around his nose. So we look in the car and then I see all the coke embedded in his pants around the crotch and butt area. Apparently he had been snorting it out of the envelope while driving 90 mph down the freeway and spilled most of it between his legs and it got on his pants. We tried to snort it out of his pants but this was futile since it was really into the fabric and kind of wet. So his state of mind is completely deteriorated and he is really bummed about his life. One day he is in the guest bedroom and I hear a big kind of yell/gasp, and run in there and find him with a big kitchen knife, scares the shit out of me. Apparently he was thinking about killing himself in our guest bedroom with a kitchen knife and yelled out of exasperation because he couldn’t do it. Jesus! So we go one night to eat at a really nice place up a mountain windy road. He is really drunk and has been taking Quaaludes too, great combination for a semi-suicidal out of control loony. So when we leave, for some reason we had taken separate cars, I told him to follow me and be careful. So about half way down the windy road I see him in my rear view mirror lose control and spin around and bounce of some rock wall on one side of the highway. We stop, his car is totally smashed on one whole side, he is completely bummed since he just bought this cool old big car in really good shape from some old lady or something who never drove it. He says he has to take a piss and walks to the other side of the highway where there is a really long, steep drop off down to the river. So me and my wife are looking at the car and then I go over to where he is, and he isn’t there. WHAT!! Where the hell did he go? Then I hear a faint pathetic drunken voice softly yelling “Larrrry”……..Llaarrrry”. Holy shit, he has fallen off the cliff while peeing, and is caught completely upside down, hanging by his feet and shoes in some foliage or trees on the side of the highway with his dick hanging out. His head is facing down toward the river which is several hundred feet down, certain death if he had not caught his legs and feet in these bushes. So I proceed to haul him out of there with extreme difficulty and care and his sandals are lost, but he’s alive. After that I don’t remember if he just left or what, but we were pretty burnt out by him by this time.
I could go on like this for at least 6 or 7 more totally insane episodes, but I think you get the picture on old Bob.


Mike
High School pot parties at Mike’s house – We had started smoking pot in High School. So we would go over to Mike’s house, kind of a run down area, and he would answer the door and me and several other wide eyed loonies would walk with him through his living room, where his mother and younger sisters were sittings in a darkened room watching TV, silent, us ignoring them like they weren’t ever there, uncomfortable silence, then into his bedroom and shut the door. His room is like tapestries hanging from the ceiling, incense burning, mattress on the floor, wild colored lights and psychedelic drawings on the wall, he was a pretty good artist. We would listen to music in there and smoke pot, like a totally separate world from the room next door with silent weird people watching television.

Fun with Marazine (motion sickness pills) – Somehow some of my friends including Mike, had heard that you could take a bunch of Marazine, which is a motion sickness pill like Dramamine, and have hallucination, like a trip. So of course they immediately had to try it, and Mike takes about 20 of them or some ungodly number and has hallucinations. According to him it was not like, oh wow, cool, I’m tripping on acid and there are some cool colors or something. It was like, your friend Bob walked in and you are talking to him, then suddenly he wasn’t there, a totally real hallucination, like Schizophrenia or something. Apparently it wasn’t too pleasant either. So Mike answers the door and like a cop is there or something, hallucination. Then he sees a bunch of black guys rioting in his front yard. This was around the time of the Los Angeles Watts riots so everyone was kind of paranoid about that. Another total hallucination. This goes on, I cant remember all the details, he is actually calling the police because of the supposed rioting. I think the police really came. It was lucky he didn’t end up in jail or the nuthouse. No one I know ever took this stuff a second time. I had no desire to even touch it.

Now we had this sort of friend who had a pilots license and his father had a plane, so we decided that he would fly us most of the way out there and then we would hitchhike the rest of the way. We would pay the gas for the plane and he would drop us off and go back. So being the stupid kids we were, not knowing much about this, we decided he would drop us of in the town of Bryce Canyon Utah, which was about ½ way. Looked like a nice place on the map. OK, so me and Bob and Mike have our backpacks and the puppy and we show up at the Long Beach airport, total hippies with long hair and backpacks, we are cool.

So while we are flying we had decided to smoke some hashish. I don’t remember if it was the temple ball hash, opiated, or not, but if it was, and we would have found fire, we would probably have ended up in fucking Mexico or somewhere. So we are flying and pretty high naturally just being in a small private plane with a bunch of young hippie guys, and it turns out no one had a match. This was probably a godsend as I said, since we had smoked this stuff a few weeks before at a party at my parent’s house in while they were gone, and I literally forgot my own name.

So we fly over Bryce Canyon in the plane, banking and looking, there are unbelievable formations, like super deep, narrow canyons. Then we land at the tiny airport and he lets us off. Its like all rednecks in the middle of fucking Utah. And we get out looking like the Grateful dead. So the pilot friend takes off as we are walking, I remember seeing him fly right over us, tipping his wings, seeing him in the plane, so cool.

Well now we are hitchhiking, three hippies and a dog, what we were too stupid to realize is that Bryce Canyon is way away from any large interstate highways, it’s the fucking boonies. We should have picked a town near there, right on a big interstate, and we would have been much better off, picked up a ride right away. So anyway, we are ridiculous. Three California hippies and a dog, standing on a tiny highway in the middle of conservative Utah, with our thumbs out. There’s no fucking cars anyway. So night falls, and somehow, we make friends with a local guy who is renovating a hotel right across the street. Now this is the amazing thing about this whole story. In those days, things were more magic than they are now. We always had amazing luck (or karma) and everything always turned out for the best, the people we met were great and helpful. I just don’t think this could happen today. So the guy says, you dudes can crash on the floor in the hotel that we are renovating. Great!! So that’s the way we spent our first night, crashed out on the floor of a nice motel that was under construction, warm, safe, and happy.

Day two
The next day we get up and realize our fuckup about location, so we start walking towards the nearest big road, like far away, but what else can we do. Us three hiking along the highway in totally redneck country with long hair, backpacks, etc . Finally, we practically had to force an old guy with an open bed truck in the back to let us ride along in the back with the pigs, or whatever, I don’t remember but we were definitely in with the low class section.

So we get to a cross roads for a pretty big highway running all the way up the center of Utah and we are hitchhiking, Now our luck really gets good and a young guy in a big U-Haul truck picks us up, He as dropped of some adventure tour people for river rafting and is driving in the truck to the north to pick them up after the tour. The big back of the truck is empty, and we sit on the edge of the truck bed, hanging our legs over and relaxing and looking at the entire beautiful state of Utah pass us by on the way to Salt Lake City in the North, fabulous, I just remember tractors with old guys behind us, lovely countryside, and sun through the trees, so on.,

When we get to Salt Lake City, he lets us out and we are walking. I remember seeing a carload of young pretty Utah girls, driving along the street where we were walking. They were looking at us, were looking at them, two groups from different cultures, but connecting on a boy/girl sexual level. Whoa! They came like one inch from crashing into the car in front of them because we were all leering at each other. Everyone laughs, ha-ha. No responsibility, ah, the youth. Ill never forget that moment of clarity.

So we are hitchhiking and a really cool student guy from Bringham Young University picks up. He was foreign, like French I think. And it’s late so he invites us to his big house where he lives with a whole bunch of other student dudes. Its great, big old wooden house, warm, food, bath, etc. Our luck continues on the second night.

Day Three
So the French Student dude drops us off on the major highway to Denver outside of town. This is near the Sundance ranch area of Robert Redford, very beautiful. Hitchhiking for hours, now comes a AMC Gremlin car with two people in the front. The back seat on these cars is tiny and we are three guys with backpacks and dog. They are going all the way to Denver, so we can’t pass this up. We drew straws or flipped coin or something, since the max was two people space. Mike and I won and Bob stayed. We were so crammed into this back seat the there was no room to move even a finger or see anything except a small section out the side window where I watched the beautiful mountain scenes go by. This was a long grueling trip, uncomfortable, but we made it, to Denver late that night.

We get dropped off at a bus station in downtown Denver late, maybe 10 or 11 pm. Me, Mike and his dog. We are going to get a bus to Boulder. Now the Bus Nazi shitheads won’t let us on the bus with a dog. So out of the night, like an angel, the third magic night in a row, comes a beautiful tall young woman, I think she dropped someone off and was going back to Boulder. We are standing there like pathetic no power boobs wondering what to do in a large city with backpacks and a dog, and she says, “Would you guys like a ride to Boulder”. Shit, no way, goddamm right we would. Let’s fucking go, warm American Narcotic night.

So we get to Boulder late, and of course, she being a beautiful young American woman in those days, and us being two long haired cool guys from California, she invited us to crash on the floor of her apartment. No sex, or funny business, just a wonderful feeling between young people that used to exist in those days.


Day Four
OK, this is the last of the “day” entries because after this the days begin to blur together and the narrative is event driven from now on. So tall wonderful American woman takes us up to “The Cabin”. Now I don’t remember exactly how we hooked up with this place to stay, it was Mike or maybe Rob, but this is the place up in the mountains outside of Boulder were we were set up to live. She drops us off and say bye. Thank you Angel wherever you are.

Then Bob arrives the next night, since we were separated and he had some crazy experiences, I can’t remember. But now we are all reunited in the Cabin outside of Boulder.

The cabin was a three sided structure with the fourth side being a rock wall of the mountain. In the rock wall part was a cave with a fresh water pool/spring at the back part of it. All the perfect fresh clean water you wanted for bathing or drinking. The rest of the cabin was just a room, with a little kitchen and wood burning stove, no bath, etc, bathe in the river nearby. There was a raised platform for sleeping with round porthole windows of varying size in the roof above the sleeping area, totally hippie cool. The moon would shine in through those portholes and provide a show more interesting than any late night TV show while going to sleep.,

Digressing, there is a great story about Bob in this cabin that happened later. I wasn’t there, but he told me about it. He was there by himself, and it was cold and getting ready to light the wood burning stove. Doused it with some kind of firestarter, and lit it. The blast burned off all his facial hair and caught his hair on fire. He ran hysterically, on fire, to the back of the cave and jumped into the mine shaft filled with water to put himself out and save his life. He sure looked funny with his eyebrows burned off.


Summer in Boulder

After that followed a series of wonderful events in Boulder during that summer.

First, there was an event going on at the university called the Whole Earth Festival or Fair. This was a gathering of all kinds spiritual, counterculture persons and events, it was amazing.

There was a guy named Steve Gaskin, from San Fransisco, a self proclaimed guru, leader of a commune. I remember this about him. He said names ending in the sound ee, are bad, like Larry, Mary, bobby, etc. They keep you in infantile state that limits your growth and maturity. Whatever. He was giving a speech on day and there was a thunderstorm, and he was using the thunder like a counterpoint, and it seemed to be timed to highlight what he was saying, kind of eerie.

There was Yogi Bajan.. A guy from India teaching Kundalini Yoga. This is a type of Yoga that stresses controlled breathing, breathing deep, breathing rapidly, to achieve an enlightenment much faster than normal supposedly. I remember doing the “breath of fire” which is rapidly breathing in and out, with Bob behind me, then I heard a “thud” and looked around and he had actually fainted from such rapid breathing. Well, it’s only a small bump in the road on the way to rapid enlightenment.

I remember listening to classical music, which I loved and really affected me in those days, on the campus of Colorado University in Boulder, with trees and natural beauty

I remember an astrologer called Alan Leo. Now I’m not big into astrology, but this guy was the real thing. Me and Bob listened to his lectures and the stuff he was saying about us Pisces was so right on that the hair on the back of our necks stood up. I went to his tent afterwards and asked him if he was still doing peoples charts. Without the slightest hesitation, he said “You are a Pisces right?”. I said yes, and never did get my chart done unfortunately.

I remember a girl, beautiful and young, with ample breasts, running around the campus during the day, completely naked, a vision of Venus from heaven. I was just staring admiring, but people got nervous, she was obviously high on something, and grabbed her and covered her up with a blanket or something.

I remember going up into the mountains on a group deal with I think it was Swami Satchadandanda, heavy Indian guy. We were meditating in a big open grassy area. All the hippie people decided to get naked, and there were couples getting sexual and the Swami dude was like, NOOO, you are wasting your energy and chakras and all. But I remember seeing a young naked dude in front of me (I was alone of course) being stroked by a young hippie goddess, what the fuck, he wasn’t’ listening to Swami whachafuckananda, he was making love naked in the grass to a vision of American loveliness. Well, whatever. There is a great scene in the movie Rainbow Bridge, of a commune in Hawaii with the main hippie spiritual leader and his girl. She was really wanting to have sex, make passionate love, and he is saying the same stuff as the Swami, I’ve got to conserve my energy, close my chakras etc. Watch that movie.

There was a guy named Mo Segal. He was a Urantia book dude. This was a book that told about beings from somewhere other than earth that gave us this knowledge in the book and that have been living among us for years and helping us poor humans, to make a better world. They are under cover of course. There is a whole friggin book on this, and this guy Mo was into it. He was starting a business picking wild herbs in the Rockies and sell herbal teas. Me and Bob and Mike worked for him some, walking overland in the hills, picking wild herbs, for like $5 a big trash bag or something. This guy is the owner/founder of Celestial Seasonings teas. The next time you are in a supermarket, check out the tea aisle. This is a huge multimillion dollar company and has been for years. Help from the outer space dudes??? Hmm.

I don’t have a lot of other strong memories from Boulder that summer, here are a few random ones

There was a girl named Mary, like physically handicapped that lived in a big house in Boulder. She was somehow a friend to us. I crashed in her basement for a while. The basement was like a real basement, all bricks and damp and wet, with a big oil burning heater for the winter.
I was trying to make some money that summer in Boulder, so I remember trying to sell Acid on the street in “the Hill” section of Boulder. I would stand on the street and say “acid?” when a guy walked by. I was a terrible drug dealer. A few times a guy would say ok, and we would go over to Mary’s house a few blocks away and I would sell him a few dollars of Orange Sunshine LSD from Laguna Beach., How stupid to risk jail and even prison for such a small gain, Well I was young and full of Hubris and nothing bad could happen to me. Fortunately it didn’t.

Move to Montana

I had a college Friend, Richard, whose family had a wheat farm near Conrad Montana. He went back there every summer to work on the farm. He hated it, since he was from there and was now living in the Big City, attending California State University at Long Beach. I, on the other hand had never even imagined a wheat farm, what it was like and all. So I had asked him if I could come up there and visit him and maybe work on the farm during harvest at the end of summer. He talked to his dad and he invited me on up.

So I put an ad on a bulletin board in the University in Boulder asking for a ride to Great Falls Montana, the biggest city in Montana near Conrad, at tiny town. So I was crashing in my sleeping bag in Mary’s house on the floor, and one morning like at 7am comes a knock, and a guy says, “come on, we are going to Wyoming and Montana right now, we are waiting in the car”. Now this perfectly illustrates the utter lack of attachment and responsibility that I was involved in during these days. I got up and threw my few possession in my backpack and said rapid goodbyes to Mary or whoever else was there, and within about 15 minutes was out the door, never to return or see any of those people again.

There was group of several guys and girls, I don’t remember exactly, but we were cruising the highways of Colorado, Wyoming and Montana, in late summer, totally free and seeing everything new for the first time as we drove down the highway. I remember we spent the night camping, sort of, in Yellowstone Park, just pulled over and slept in the bushes in our sleeping bags.

So they drop me off in Great Falls Montana at the bus station and they continued on to wherever else they were going. I call Richard and he decides to drive down and pick me up. That was great, he was really a nice guy, country guy that got hippified and into sensitivity exercises and all that. Super goofy laugh, totally over the top sincere about everything. So at his family’s wheat farm they put me up in a little trailer that they keep for the hired help. It was perfect, after I got rid of all the mosquitoes in there. His family is great, salt of the earth farmers, a brother, sister, mom and dad. They were just great to me and I looked like freaking Charles Manson with beard and hair everywhere. I remember when I took a shower it took like ½ hour to comb all the snarls out of my hair for some reason there. OH to have that hair back now.

So here I am, this total city kid, working on a wheat farm. They normally hire an extra man during the harvest which happened when I was there, but they didn’t this year and used me. Every day up at the crack of dawn, big breakfast, out to the fields, working all day, the mom or sister would bring lunch to wherever you were, then work till dark and then back to the house. I loved it!! I started out driving the tractor with a plow. This is used on the fields they didn’t plant that year, they alternate fields so as to not deplete them. So you drive up and down and up and down these huge areas, pulling a disk plow thingy, turning up the ground for planting for next year. You get owls and hawks flying over your tractor because the machine flushes out rodents which they then swoop down and eat.

So then I graduate up to driving a dump truck. You wait alongside the field that is being harvested by the combine. When the combine hopper is full of wheat, the combine drive signals and you drive the truck under an overhanging discharge line while the combine is still moving. You have to drive the truck and get under the chute and go the same speed as the combine. The driver then discharges the wheat into the dump truck without stopping. You keep doing this till the truck is full, then another truck guy comes and you drive to a big silo. You dump the wheat into a hopper and it is augured into the silo. Later then the silo is full you load wheat into the trucks and take it to town. You drive over a grating and dump the wheat with the hydraulic dump truck and it goes into somewhere and the farmer gets credit and eventually paid. I loved this too, although the trucks were very difficult to shift, you had to double clutch then and I never really got the total hang of it.

Then, the best thing of all, I became a combine driver. These things are about the size of a normal car garage and you sit way up on top and its just the coolest feeling. Up and down, harvesting the wheat, the wheat kernels being separated in the combine machinery from the chaff, the chaff flying out the back and the kernels accumulating in the hopper until full, then signaling the truck driver, all day long, only stopping for lunch. I remember getting some funny looks from people driving by when I was near a highway, this long hair flying wearing a headband made with a red bandana. I made up a verse to “This land is your land” by Woody Guthrie. You gotta sing it to appreciate how well the words fit!

As I went walking out in Montana
I spied a young man, with a red bandana
He had long hair, and he was smilin’
This land was made for you and me

I liked it immensely and sang it loudly to myself all day long.

So some other experiences while working on the wheat farm. We’d go into town on the weekends and it was a tiny town. The only thing to do was cruiser from on end of a couple mile strip to the other then back again. All the young locals getting drunk and rowdy.

Once Richard and his brother and I went to Flathead Lake in the evening, made a campfire and sat around, very beautiful. Listen to Walter Carlos Sonic Seasonings, I think it is in the Fall section, where you hear a crackling fire and electronic music. That is how it was sitting by a fire at the end of a beautiful mountain like with the Montana big sky turning from day to night.

One of the most amazing things about this place is the sky at night. Montana’s official slogan is, or was, “Big Sky Country”. This is the perfect slogan. Its really flat and not many city lights to obscure the stars. You see stars right down to the horizon, I mean right on the horizon. Its like a huge bowl, half sphere all around you with jillions of stars. One night we were standing outside the house and we began to see a eerie orangish light that seemed to be coming from down the road, just over the line of sight. It kept getting brighter and brighter and we were freaked out, like we thought it’s a fucking UFO man!. So then comes up the biggest, orangest, most amazing harvest moon I’ve ever seen, right off the horizon over the highway. Of course we were pretty stoned so that may have had something to do with the total experience, but it was just unforgettable.

I remember seeing the most awesome, totally black sky thunderstorms coming across the flat plains while we would be working. You could see them coming for miles, the type of storms that spawn tornados, black gnarly clouds with flashing lightning and thunder above and rain below. Someone would come pick you up from the fields right before they got there and take you to the house because it was dangerous to be out there when the storm hit.

Oh yeah, I remember we rode some horses. I and Richard went over to I think his uncle’s place where they had some horse in a barn. Richard and I had to saddle these horses and they had not been ridden to much so the bastards kept running away. Here I am a city kid, running around trying to grab this giant animal and put a bridle and saddle on the thing, neither of which it wanted. I remember the horse stepped right on top my foot at one point and Im thinking, Great, there goes my foot, I imagined every bone in it being broken, but no, it just hurt like hell and finally managed to get the thing saddled up. Richard had a lot of trouble getting his one saddled too. Finally we head off riding, which was very cool, basically unlimited flat land in all directions, his father’s and uncle’s farms, like thousands of acres of wheat fields. The horse I was riding was like an Appaloosa, grey colored with white splotches. Wearing my red bandana and with the long hair I looked like an American Indian. Somewhere is a Polaroid photo that Richard took of me like this, I’d love to see it again. Suddenly Richard’s horse starts bucking and he is launched off his horse like a rocket, crashes to the ground. I’m suddenly petrified my horse is going to see this and get the same idea, but fortunately he doesn’t.

A very cool thing to do is sit in the middle of basically endless wheat fields, with your eyes just about level with the top of the wheat. The movement of the wheat in the wind with like unlimited sight distance creates a very pleasant optical effect. Definitely try this if you get the chance, very hypnotic.

Glacier Park

So the harvest is over and its about time for me to leave. Another friend of ours, Bob R. from school comes to the farm and stays for a bit, then Bob R. and I decide to leave and hitchhike up to Glacier National Park and camp a little. Richard leaves us off in the town of Cutbank Montana, one of the coldest places in the country during winter. We are standing out there like sore thumbs again, long haired hippies in the middle of cowboy Montana. So a carload of guys pull up and we think UH OH. Turns out they were what is called custom cutters. They follow the wheat harvest around and help the farmers harvest the crops. I told them I was an experienced combine driver and they offered me a job to go with them. I should have taken it, it would have been an amazing experience traveling through Montana I guess to Kansas or wherever. But I didn’t’, and they were cool and said goodbye.

So we are not getting any chance of a ride here hitchhiking and we keep seeing trains go by on a track across the road. I think Bob R. had heard that hopping freight trains in Montana was OK or something or maybe I remembered Rob’s experiences. Finally when another freight train goes by we went for it. The train didn’t stop, it slowed down and we had to run alongside of a moving freight train and look for an open door on a box car, then throw our packs in, then jump in, half hanging on the edge with certain death below, etc. Quite a unique experience.

I guess we had calculated that the train was going north, generally towards Glacier National Park. So we had a map and when the train would go through a town we had to look for the town names and see if we were going in the general direction we wanted to. Luckily we were, I don’t really know how we would have got off, the train rarely slowed down. I mean the thing could have veered off and gone to North Dakota or wherever and we would have had to go along too. The car we were in would jerk back and forth sideways pretty hard when the train got up to maximum speed, so much so it was hard to sleep, like someone violently jerking your bed back and forth, not exactly first class accommodations.

So it was pretty cool going across the beautiful Montana countryside, sitting beside the big open boxcar door, watch it go by. I remember at night we tried to sleep some and at one point woke in the middle of the night at some steel mill or some kind of place where there was red glowing fires and big industrial noises, it was like some weird hellish dream, kind of half asleep. The train spent a lot of time changing cars and we were afraid our car was going to be left there in this hell and filled with molten steel or some horrible thing, but it didn’t, and we were off again.

So by some miraculous stroke of luck, or maybe we were smarter than I remember, the train finally arrives, and stops luckily, in the little town that is at the entrance to Glacier National Park. The hour of its arrival was like the middle of the night, and as soon as we get off the freight train, there is a local cop there looking at us. Uh oh, we figure, but no, the guy is really nice and after we tell him that we are going backpacking in the park, he gives us both a ride in his squad car to the park itself, amazing.
I remember it was the end of the summer and already getting cold, the park closes completely in the winter due to bitter cold and tons of snow everywhere. But we went packing in to a camp site and spent at couple of nights there. I remember we slept I a little tent on a lake and it was so windy it was like that scene in Motorcycle Diaries where the tent took off like a balloon with the air escaping and flew quite some distance away, leaving us shivering there by the lake in our sleeping bags.

The Trip Home

We didn’t stay too long and headed back to Butte Montana where we were supposed to meet up with Richard and hop freight trains and hitch back to Long Beach where we were all starting another year at Cal State University at Long Beach.

I do remember one interesting experience on the way back. Bob R. and I had come into Kalispell Montana, pretty much a cowboy town. Somehow we ended up at a really cool club with live rock music and lots of local girls. Again we totally stood out, long hair hippie types with backpacks, roaming the country free like Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda in Easy Rider, I guess at least in the eyes of the locals. So I hooked up with a lovely young girl who was like googoo over the idea of being with someone who looked like me. It’s late and we go back to wherever she was staying, crashing. It was probably one of her friends house or something, because we slept on the floor. OK, so it’s me, a beautiful sexy young girl, and Bob R. sleeping on the floor. I’m getting more and more passionate with the girl, but Bob R. is right there, finally I just say fuck it, and end up having wild sex with her. I mean she was really young, maybe under 18 and I was like 20, just two kids doing what comes natural I guess. Again, those were the days of no responsibility, no HIV, etc. We left early the next morning while she was still asleep. Thank you wherever you are for another sweet memory of youth. Bob R. mentioned the next day that he was peeking at us. Whatever.

Butte Montana is a real gaping wound in the earth. Look at the photo in Robert Franks Americans book of Butte Montana. It looks exactly like that. From anywhere in town practically you get a good view of the huge open pit mine, little tiny ant trucks (which are really huge dirt haulers) snaking down the trail along the edge that goes down into the pit. I don’t remember too much else about the town itself.

We met Richard at the Butte Montana train station. His family drove him down there. I guess hopping freight trains was pretty acceptable since I remember we went right up to the desk and asked when the next freight train going west was and they told us. We waited around in the waiting room with our backpacks and stuff, til it was dark and the train came. We went out and said goodbye to Richard’s family and got on the train and off we went. We heard from some bums that Idaho was really bad in terms of the cops would bust you and take you right to jail for riding on trains, so we ended up getting off somewhere before the border and tried to hitchhike. It was getting late in the summer and we weren’t getting anywhere so we decided to go into the main town there in Idaho, I cant even remember the name and buy plane tickets back to Long Beach. I mean if we had the money to do that I don’t know what the hell we were doing trying to hop freight trains, be cool I guess. Come to think of it I had been gone the whole summer and left with just a few hundered dollars, and after all the shit I did and unbelievable once in a lifetime experiences I had, I still had enough to buy a airplane ticket home from Idaho. Geez, things sure where different back then.

So we called our fiends in Long Beach to come pick us up at the local airport. We were like returning conquering heroes back from the wild hinterlands of Montana. They picked us up in a pickup truck and I remember us standing up in the back on the way back to the apartment, looking out ahead over the pickup cab, long hair flying in the wind, looking down the road into the future that seemed to stretch out endlessly where anything seemed possible. Not too many times have I felt that high and free in my life, an unforgettable magical journey that I will cherish til the day I die.

THE END

Taylor Swift, guilty pleasure

I don't know when or how it happened but I'm a mature man who has become hypnotized by everthing Taylor Swift. I almost just send away for a $25 Taylor Tee shirt that pictures here in a kind of Hippie headband. I was able to stop myself at the last second before I pushed the "buy" button, I mean Jesus, where the hell am I going to wear the thing, my company picnic?? I'd probably be arrested and put in jail for just admitting I liked her, older man, virgin young girl, etc. You see it on the news every day.

I read that she doesn't talk about sex in interviews because if she did then people would picture her naked. Holy shit, do you think that's going to stop people from picturing her naked? I picture her naked every few minutes pretty much. Again, I hope the brain police aren't reading this or there's going to be a knock on my door in a few minutes and several hooded thugs with hand and feet binders are going to haul me out of here and put me in a dark place for a long time.

This girl has everthing. She writes competent songs with interesting lyrics, sings lovely and plays the guitar. I find my self tapping my foot and smiling in public places where her ubiquitous Love Story song is on. The acoustic version of Tim McGraw song, which I believe is a duet with Tim McGraw a wonderful guilty pleasure. To me it's like bacon with mayonaise, it's not supposed to be good for you, but when no one is looking and Im cooking bacon, I get out the mayo jar and dip a big piece right in there and EAT IT. Same with my girl Taylor, Im cool, hip, I love Pink Floyd, Jackson Browne, people like that, but when I hear her singing, I take a big bite and its fabulous.

And her looks (watch it now!), she is at once innocent and savagely sexy, the combination that has done so much for women over the years. She is lovely tall and slim, but still feminine curvy. I watched her on the Crossroads show with Def Leppard which I thought was great, musically and every way. She was absolutely intoxicating singing and moving like a sultry rock star in that gold shimmering dress, and well underneath.... hmm well enough down that line.

I think she is going to be a huge star, not only in country music, but crossover music into pop or rock, and even acting. I have not seen any of her acting yet but just on the music videos and the Cross road show, she communicates something very special. At least to older, supposedly hip guys like me.

All the best to you Taylor.

the Phez