How I Came to Iowa City…

Anti-war protest on the University of Iowa Pentacrest, spilling out onto Clinton Street, May 1970

… And Found a Home

My family moved from Stow, Ohio, to Urbandale, Iowa, in 1974, while I was living in Western Kentucky. As I understood the story, my father, a liquor salesman for Seagram’s, took the fall for some company malfeasance involving the Ohio State Liquor Control Board. After he did this, the company got him out of Dodge and into Iowa, and to thank him for his loyalty, handed him a promotion – State Sales Manager. For me, the most salient point of this was I could claim Iowa residency and then pay in-state tuition at the University of Iowa.

While working on my high school senior project – an independent study of modern poetry – I had developed an interest in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. It kept popping up in bios in the back of the anthologies I was avidly perusing, books such as The New American Poetry (1945-1960) and An Anthology of New York Poets. Even though I’d never been to Iowa and had not applied to any colleges, in my yearbook questionnaire I listed the University of Iowa as my post–high school destination. I guess that was aspirational. But when my family moved to Iowa, I realized I could make that come true.

I moved in with my family in December 1974, camping out in the basement utility room, applied to Iowa, and proceeded to land three part-time jobs – working the grill at George’s Chili King on Hickman Road, clerking at an Iowa State Liquor Store on Douglas Avenue, and tending bar at Christopher’s, a family-owned Italian restaurant in the Beaverdale neighborhood. I worked until June, until I had enough money for my first year’s tuition, and then quit all three jobs and took off to Ann Arbor to find out what my good friend Jim “Prch” Prchlik was up to. He was sharing a rambling farmhouse on the edge of the city and making bank by working weekend shifts at the nearby Ford Truck plant. During the week we’d work in the garden and then roll into town to hang out with the street people living on and around The Diag and State Street.

Notable among this shifting lineup of characters were Tom and Whiskey Stone, members of a group of wandering souls who a few years earlier in an encampment outside Austin, Texas, had sworn an oath binding them as the Stone Family.[1] These folks helped me master the arts of panhandling and dumpster diving, not essential life skills for me but part of some socioeconomic experiment: Was it possible to live off the wastefulness and affluence of bourgeois America?

After a few weeks in Ann Arbor, I headed to Iowa City to scope out a place to live that fall. I have a distinct memory of coming into town on a sunny afternoon, walking down Iowa Avenue and noticing the C.O.D. Steam Laundry, a combination deli, bar, and music venue. When I heard The Grateful Dead’s “Truckin’” playing on the sound system, I knew I’d found a home. The inimitable and venerable Gerry Stevenson – in his usual garb of khaki shorts and long-sleeved Oxford shirt, glasses tipped on the end of his nose – served me a beer and a sandwich loaded with alfalfa sprouts.

I spent a couple days scouring the want ads, tracking down leads, knocking on doors, and returning to City Park each night to camp out. I’d found Stone Soup Restaurant and would wash dishes for a free lunch. One of the other dishwashers, Tom Leverett, invited me to a birthday party for Kevin Kelso, who worked at New Pioneer Co-op. Early that evening, I was panhandling spare change for, as I readily explained, a bottle of wine to take to a party. I was standing on the corner of Linn Street and Iowa Avenue, in front of Best Steak House, a restaurant run by two Greek brothers,[2] when my liquor store co-worker friend and his girlfriend Laura knocked on the restaurant window and gestured to come inside and join them. I ended up at a party at Laura’s house that night instead.

I did find a place that fit my budget of under $100 a month rent: a room above a Montessori pre-school on Reno Street with access to the kitchen used by the staff. I liked that it was a good twenty-minute walk from campus, and much closer to Hickory Hill, a large rambling urban park. I came to enjoy that walk home via the back alleys of the Goosetown neighborhood originally settled by Czech immigrants, admiring the tidy backyard gardens and grape arbors.

Across the hall lived the poet John Sjoberg and his cat Liz. John’s door was always open to me, and he became a valuable mentor. In the center of his room sat a typewriter with a roll of teletype paper cascading from it. I could always stop in and read where he had gone in his mind the night before. He was a poet of imagination and love. For example, here’s the opening stanza of his poem “Porch Window”:[3]

my head is green

the songs here, the bird songs

here & here & here

are my heart.

John introduced me to a group of poets, most of whom had graduated from the Writers’ Workshop and settled in the Iowa City area: Allen and Cinda Kornblum, Morty Sklar, Chuck Miller, Dave Morice, Jim Mulac. There was usually a reading on Friday or Saturday night at Alandoni’s Used Book Store at 610 South Dubuque Street,[4] and a party afterward. They called themselves Actualists, a name I always considered facetiously applied but one that recognized a supportive community of writers. The ambiguity of the name allowed room for anyone to fit in, including me, at least five to ten years younger than these other writers.

This decision, along with the decision, within a month after starting school, to take a job working part-time nights at the Stone Soup Restaurant’s bakery, established my roots in two Iowa City communities only loosely connected to the university, roots that made this start to feel like home, a place where I could “sit down and patch my bones.”

Having arranged to move into my place on Reno Street on the first of September, I took off for Madison, crashing a few days in an empty room in a large frat house reinvented as communal housing, and then looped back to Ann Arbor. A week later, Prch suggested I check out the Rainbow Gathering, an annual counterculture festival illegally held on some remote public lands the week of the Fourth of July. According to word on the street, it was happening near Hot Springs, Arkansas, that year. So I “got out of the door and lit out and looked all around.” In northern Arkansas I caught a ride from a NASCAR wannabe going 125 miles an hour down I-55, lakes becoming blurry blue visions, streaks of billboard boastings, flickering fenceposts and rows of cotton. Sporting a burning grin and waving his cigarette at me, he yelled above the noise, “Hot damn! Tomorrow’s our country’s birthday! Let’s torque it up in her honor!” I smiled weakly and held on.

When I got into Hot Springs, I could find no hint of the Gathering. I walked around, looking for anyone letting their freak flag fly who might be able to slip me the secret directions. Nothing. It turned out the Rainbow Gathering was in the Ozark National Forest[5] near Mountain Home, Arkansas, almost 200 miles due north, but I wouldn’t learn that until much later. I got dinner in town and spent the night on the outskirts of Hot Springs, near the road I came in on. Next morning, the Fourth of July, I got a ride from a couple of Arkansas Baptist College football players on their way to a party in Little Rock. They invited me to join their celebration.

When we got to the party, held in an apartment building owned by a team booster, I was goodnaturedly introduced to him and the other football players and their girlfriends as “Yankee.” There was a watermelon loaded with vodka and a tub of Budweisers on ice. Early afternoon, with only a breakfast in my belly, the drinking commenced. I somehow felt the need to defend the Union by keeping pace with these Little Rock secessionists. I lasted a couple of hours, eventually accepting defeat by diving into the apartment building’s pool with my clothes on. My friendly rivals fished me out and helped me to an empty apartment where I could sleep it off. They woke me in the morning, treated me to a hearty breakfast at a local diner, and sent me on my way.

Back on the road, I watched a long slow freight train pulling out of Little Rock. I decided to hop it, but by the time I got to the tracks, its speed had picked up. Running with a backpack on a rocky uneven railroad bed and trying to catch an open boxcar proved a failure. I picked myself up, washed off my scrapes, and proceeded to hitch to Bowling Green, Kentucky, where my friend Pat Berkowetz tended my wounds, physical and otherwise. I then stopped in Akron to see some high school chums before landing back in Ann Arbor. But I was soon back on the road, hitching to Minneapolis with Kelly, and continuing on my own, west to Seattle, down to Oregon and San Francisco, back up to Ashland, Oregon, east to Denver, and finally Iowa City by the end of August.[6]

1975 was a restless year. Like many young Americans, I was searching for something I could trust to be true.[7] When I moved into the room above the Montessori school and started classes that fall, it felt right, like the satisfying sound of a puzzle piece clicking into place. I began to see the possibilities of finding my niche in this Midwestern college town – among a group of poets collaborating, engaging with the world, and celebrating whatever felt real, and among a community of folks creating a cooperative network to offer food that was natural, organic, unspoiled by the corporate world. For all the miles of wandering still ahead of me, perhaps I’d found a fit, a home, a place and people I could return to when I needed a rest.

Footnotes:

[1] For a photo of the three of us, see my blog post Friends of the Devil, Part 2. The daughter of an oil millionaire from Odessa Texas, Whiskey was a high school cheerleader impregnated by the star football player. After her dad denounced her and got a court order granting him sole custody of the child, Whiskey hit the road.

[2] Who would respond to every order by asking, “You want fries with that?”

[3] From John’s book Hazel and Other Poems, published by Allan and Cinda Kornblum’s Toothpaste Press in 1976. His inscription in my copy: “To Dave & the House. May Kentucky always grow in your heart an’ help your head.”

[4] One of the 150-year-old cottages demolished in 2015 over the objections of historic preservationists.

[5] Video trigger warning: hippie nudity.

[6] I described some of the events of this part of the trip in my blog post The Art of Hitchhiking.

[7] The Pentagon Papers (1971) and the Watergate Scandal (1972-74) were just two manifestations of that sense of being betrayed.

People We Used To Be, Part 2

Hitchhiking sign for Yarmouth, from my comp notebook. In the underlayer of text, the conjugation of avoir and etre, most of it in Johanne’s hand. I must’ve been driving.

“Perhaps a person can write about things only when she is no longer the person who experienced them, and that transition is not yet complete. In this sense, a conversion narrative is built into every autobiography; the writer purports to be the one who remembers, who saw, who did, who felt, but the writer is no longer that person. In writing things down, she is reborn.” -Rachel Kushner, “The Hard Crowd: Coming of Age on the Streets of San Francisco”

Bidding farewell to my new friends Johanne and Marc and their cabin in the woods near Mont-Joli, I headed southeast on Highway 132 toward New Brunswick. As I passed through the little eastern Québec towns – Sainte-Flavie, Sainte-Angèle-de-Mérici, Saint-Antoine-de-Padoue[1], Sainte-Jeanne-d’Arc, Saint-Noël, Saint-Alexandre-des-Lacs, Sainte-Florence, Saint-François-d’Assise – I thought about the communion of saints, the mystical bond uniting us through hope and love. Was this what I would learn on this journey into the unknown? 

When I crossed into New Brunswick, I entered the Maritimes, Canada’s Atlantic coast provinces, originally the home of the Mi’kmaq, Maliseet, and Passamaquoddy people, taken over in the early 17th century by British and French settlers. The French settlements were known collectively as Acadie. And my route along the New Brunswick coast – Highway 11 – had been named the Acadian Trail. The rides were short but came as quickly as I desired them to, and the entire southeasterly route from the Québec border through New Brunswick was less than 400 kilometers. As I traveled I could make out Prince Edward Island, ten miles across the Northumberland Strait. 

When I crossed into Nova Scotia, I picked up the Trans-Canada Highway again, heading due east and then crossing the narrow Strait of Canso separating Cape Breton Island from the rest of Nova Scotia. I picked up Highway 19, which took me along the northwestern side of the island. As the traffic thinned out and the little towns grew fewer and farther between, I slowed down, enthralled by the romance of the sea and landscape. Sheep grazed the high meadows of yellow clover and lavender, thickets of wild roses, huckleberries, raspberries, leading down to the fishing villages and plummeting into the Northumberland Strait.

A ride dropped me off midday in Margaree Harbour, a picturesque village at the mouth of the Margaree River. I walked around until I found the most popular café. Afterward, hiking across the bridge over the river and out of town, I burst into a spirited song of the road:

Hike a stiff easterly breeze

with a bellyful of fish chowder –

the trawler’s come home with the catch.

Fling yodels off the precipices,

echoing down through the dales.

String the Acadian fiddle, lads!

Blow ye winds on the bagpipes!

Near Chéticamp I entered Cape Breton Highlands National Park, 366 square miles of high plateau and rocky coastlines. No roads led into its heavily wooded interior, and the park contained a wealth of wildlife, including lynx, bobcat, moose, black bear, and coyote [2]. Following the Cabot Trail, the road circumnavigating the park, I pushed on to the Highlands, the cloud-hidden spruce, jackpine, and birch reaches through which the Chéticamp River cut a gorge.

Near MacKenzie Point, knowing that the route was about to turn east and inland along the northern boundary of the park, I stopped for the day. Because I hadn’t stocked up on enough provisions to allow for multi-day camping, and the handful of official park campgrounds offered only the most basic tent-camping amenities, I realized this might be the extent of my stay. I followed a short trail to an overlook, and then wandered off that trail for some tent-free camping. From my sojournal:

camp on high cliff overlooking 

the Gulf of Saint Lawrence.

beyond that Newfoundland, 

the Grand Banks, 

the North Atlantic. 

scrub pine for wind protection, 

moss to cushion the bedrock. 

quarter moon gives way to

milky stream of stars

to glistening blue sunrise. 

Cabot Trail along the northwestern coast of Cape Breton Island

The next morning, I scrounged up a couple of apples and a hunk of cheese from my rucksack and sliced it all up for a little breakfast plate. I’d been on the road for almost twenty days and hitchhiked over 2,000 miles to arrive at this beautiful morning in this spectacular place. And that was it. That was all I needed or wanted from this trip. From that point on, I was moving in the direction home – across to the eastern side of the island and then south along the coast. I was packing Gary Snyder’s Turtle Island in a pocket of my rucksack, reading and rereading his poems and essays. In “Four Changes,” I’d underlined: “Balance, harmony, humility, growth which is a mutual growth with Redwood and Quail; to be a good member of the great community of living creatures. True affluence in not needing anything.” After camping for the night on a beach, I wrote in my notebook:

driftwood and smooth beach stones

are ideal for campfire cooking.

boil brook water

add five hands

of rolled oats

stir until thick

mix in honey, raisins, sunflower seeds

rich helping of peanut butter.

this

will last until midafternoon.

After stepping off Cape Breton Island, I continued along the southeastern coast of Nova Scotia, small fishing ports anchored to the rugged coastline, interrupted by Halifax, the only substantial city in the province. The white horses of the surf raced along, the ocean tossing tangles of rigging and mislaid lobster traps on its shores. Big-boned gulls met up at the cannery docks after following the fishing trawlers home. Little fingers of the ocean curled up into the land, beckoning – Halifax Harbour, St. Margaret’s Bay. The land jutted out its chin where the storms broke and the wind never ceased – Fox Point, Western Head. Across the waves, a white-rocked beacon cast its lonely eye across the ocean, a mother searching for her son, lost, swept away.

I was traveling easily, unhurried, no schedule, no deadline, this time with myself. When I wanted a break from the road, the ocean was never far. Because of the Gulf Stream, the southeast coast of Nova Scotia offered bracing but pleasant waters for swimming:

still cove of rock

shelter from the sea’s turmoil.

cliffside coursing with pink granite

flecked with agate and quartz.

water transparent

twenty feet deep off this edge.

sea tern enters

circles

dives for its meal.

When I reached Yarmouth, at the southern end of Nova Scotia, I took my leave of the Maritimes. I booked passage on the ferry out of Yarmouth Sound, past the Cape Forchu lighthouse, across the Bay of Fundy as the evening fog rolled in – 180 kilometers to Bar Harbor, Maine. I roamed the ship, observing my fellow passengers, stopping at the bar for a Moosehead Ale and a shot of rye whisky. On the stern deck, I met two free-spirited women travelers from Minneapolis and kept their company for the rest of the voyage, sharing their cigarettes, drinking ales and conversing between blasts of the foghorn, falling in love with ballet-bodied, green-eyed Mary – but we kept it friendly. Listening for whale songs through the night, we disembarked at sunrise.

I had one stop to make on my way back home. After graduating from Iowa, my friend Tony Hoagland had moved to Ithaca to test the post-graduate waters of the writing program at Cornell. I took US Highway 2 through the backwoods of Maine and into New Hampshire. Early that afternoon, as I was passing through the White Mountains, ten miles north of Mount Washington, I came upon a cascading mountain stream beside the road. I asked the driver to pull over to let me out, and climbed the hillside, following the stream, until I came to a place where the water pooled beside large basking boulders out of sight of the road. I stripped down and floated in the cool, clear mountain water, high on the wonder of it all, thinking about Tony:

I reached up to draw

the pennyroyal from my ears.

Rushing back came the sound of water.

The river reclined on rock contours,

pocketfuls of coins laughing down its slope,

the sacred chords of silvery promises.

As I lingered, the sun dried thoughts of you on my skin.

One last border to fall before the flints of our souls will strike again.

I continued on Highway 2 into Vermont, then south on I-91 and west into New York State, reaching the Hudson River and Troy by nightfall. By then I was deep into this notion of an epic or mythic odyssey, and scribbled in my journal the next morning:

I’ve descended from the northern lights, where the stars streak with their weight to earth. There I watched the brazen criminal sun break through the granite chill. But last night I walked through the seven-storied ruins of Troy, and today I drift as sluggishly as dust across this valley. How will this compare with you – your movements swift and delicate, like the red fox?

I reached Ithaca that afternoon and spent a good couple days hanging out with Tony, talking about poets and poetry, getting high and swimming in Lake Cayuga. (Tony was always a great swimmer, and a member of that communion of saints.) Although as restless and footloose as I was, he was able to envision a life as a poet and teacher and work toward it. His focus was inspiring.

By the end of August I was back in Iowa City. Changes were in the works. My housemate Pat had given birth to a son, Sierra Soleil, in February. Like everyone in the house, I was helping raise him, but Pat and Sierra were moving to Santa Cruz to stay close to his father. I’d decided to not spend another winter living in the unheated attic of the Governor Street co-op house, and was about to move into the first-floor apartment of a house on Fairchild Street with Thomascyne, a feisty red-haired art student who would open doors and point me in new directions.

Footnotes

[1] When I was thirteen, I selected Anthony of Padua as my confirmation saint. I liked that he was the patron saint of lost causes, and that adding Anthony to my name made my initials D.E.A.D.

[2] In 2009, Taylor Mitchell, a young Canadian country singer, was attacked by coyotes on a trail near Chéticamp, and died from her wounds.

People We Used to Be, Part 1

A page from my composition notebook turned into a hitchhiking sign.

“I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.”  –Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem 

When I returned to Iowa City in April 1977 after six months of traveling, I slowly eased back in. I was tending my co-op house’s back garden and occasionally helping out at the bakery – which had split off from Stone Soup and opened its own place a floor up in Center East as Morning Glory Bakery. But mostly I was chilling, digging the mellow summer vibe of Iowa City. Most of the students would vacate the premises, and cool, interesting folks just came out of the woodwork, or the woods. The day usually ended or started with drinks at The Deadwood or Gabe & Walker’s. A surprising number of good young jazz musicians were playing around town in various combos, before eventually splitting to the West Coast.

New Pioneer Co-op was preparing to move from its cozy second floor location on the corner of South Gilbert and Prentiss streets to a larger storefront beside Ralston Creek on South Van Buren. I was hired to help with the expansion, joining a staff that included my friends John, Sheila, Pam, Sue, and Bob. I learned a lot from those folks. We worked as a collective, sharing store decisions and duties, but as the junior member of the group, my usual role was supervising the volunteers, stocking the bins, running the cash register. I enjoyed the work, and the quality interactions with the co-op community. 

I finally returned for my second year at the university in the fall of 1978. I had decided to work toward a General Studies degree, a liberal arts path that was actually an array of intersecting paths. My coursework was spread across a range of disciplines, an approach that felt natural. English Lit and Creative Writing, Film Study and Production, Languages (Spanish, French, Italian), Anthropology, Geography, Art History, Botany, Jazz Dance – I was omnivorous, helping myself to the buffet of knowledge.

By spring break, I was antsy. Iowa in March was barely thawing to a grey slush; one would need to head south to experience spring. I ignored that pull, deciding to visit my baking buddy Nancy, who had moved to a commune in Magog, Québec. As was often the case, I failed to clearly communicate the specifics of my visit. When I arrived on a frigid snowy night and called Nancy, she apologized that the community was in a spiritual retreat of sorts and couldn’t accept visitors right then. She did give me an address in Montréal. With few sleeping options that night, I went to La Régie de Police in Magog and asked to spend the night in a jail cell. They were cool with that request, but did lock the cell door. 

The address from Nancy led me to a three-story brownstone in Old Montreal, a “spirituality centre” run by a Buddhist Jesuit (or a Jesuit Buddhist). I meditated with him, sitting zazen, quietly walking up and down stairs in my stocking feet, settling into my silence. I slipped out to see the city once or twice, but it was bitterly cold and I had little money. That's how I spent my spring break.

In July, after taking a Poetry Workshop class with the gracious Marvin Bell, I returned to Canada. Similar to Mexico, it was an inexpensive destination that offered a chance to cross boundaries and see new places. For some reason, Cape Breton in Nova Scotia had become a goal. Perhaps I was thinking of Herman Melville’s comment: “Nothing will content [humankind] but the extremest limit of the land.”

I headed northwest on US 151 toward Wisconsin, stopping along the way at New Melleray Abbey, near Peosta, Iowa. Passing through the oak doors of the Trappist monastery, I explained to a young monk, “I had a need for shelter.” Without a word, he pulled from the folds of his robe a small black copy of the New Testament and Psalms and placed it in my speechless hands. I stayed in a private cell (kept unlocked), joining the two dozen monks in the chapel as they chanted the prayers of lauds at dawn and vespers at sunset. They shared their vegetarian meals with me, made with produce from their gardens - excellent bread and sparse conversation. After two days of peace, I thanked them for their goodwill and continued on my way.

I stopped in Madison to see what was happening, because something always was. I hooked up with a couple other vagabonds, and a spontaneous party ensued alfresco. When we had exhausted every prospect, we started to think about a place to crash – we laid out our sleeping bags in a wooded thicket beside Lake Mendota, not far from the student union. Campus cops rousted us a few hours later, telling us we couldn’t sleep there and checking our IDs. For some reason, they could not confirm my identity in their database, which pleased me to no end.

I continued northeast through Wisconsin and into the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. It was quiet, uneventful traveling, a time for contemplation. While waiting for a ride, I wrote in my notebook:

Beside the road i’m following:

ferns, buttercups, queen anne’s lace,

ace of clubs with one corner torn off,

indian paintbrushes, black-eyed susans,

curls of birch bark, grocery lists,

scraps of maps, a lake, water 

lilies, merganser diving.

Coming down through the Lower Peninsula, I stopped in Ann Arbor to get an energy charge  from my old traveling companion Prch, and then on to Detroit to cross the Ambassador Bridge into Windsor, Ontario. I got a ride from a young Black guy going to visit his father in a Windsor hospital. But the border official, noticing my rucksack, asked me about my plans. I told him I was thinking of going to Nova Scotia and would probably be in Canada a couple weeks. I was directed to the Office of Immigration, where I filled out a form and was then told I’d need to have $25 per day and a bus or train ticket to my destination. That amount of money would usually last me a week. After being sent back across the bridge, I walked downtown to the Detroit-Windsor tunnel, where I caught a shuttle bus to Canada, telling a completely different story that time.

I followed King’s Highway 401 through Ontario and into Quebec, along the north shore of Lakes Erie and Ontario, and then the Saint Lawrence Seaway to Montréal. I did some urban camping in Mount Royal Park, big enough that one could keep a low profile and not be hassled. From that same “sojournal”:

The corner of Rue Saint-Urbain

and Avenue Duluth Ouest

Café Santropol

in Montréal

a bay window

large pot of mint tea

old blues and jazz in the air

I make a sandwich

cheese tomato bread

and partake

Leaving Montréal, I picked up the Trans-Canada Highway going northeast along the seaway. I got a ride from Johanne, a young Québécois woman. She soon picked up two more hitchhikers, who proved to be borderline assholes, to the extent that I was becoming concerned for Johanne’s well-being, but they soon reached their destination. She was on her way to visit her friend Marc, who lived near Mont-Joli, a fortuitous 500-kilometer ride. To pass the time, I asked her to teach me some French. As we talked, I became charmed by her smile and laid-back style. Yes, I wanted to travel with her and wanted to travel blind. Later on my trip, with her in mind, I wrote:

Your eyes are bluebirds

Flying from the forest of your lashes.

Your hair is chestnut straw

Where white daisies make their home.

Your skin’s a creamy yoghurt with honey freckles.

The Saint-Laurent wraps you in its blue blouse.

Your breasts are river-worn stones,

A truth humbling Rubens and the masters.

We talk as we follow the river, 

Your hands rippling and fluttering in rhyme.

I learn from you: je suis, tu es, nous sommes,

New ways of saying the world. 

It was dark when we got to Mont-Joli. Johanne invited me to spend the night at her friend’s house. Marc was a burly bearded Québécois brother living in the backwoods and subsisting on a large garden and a small herd of goats. He lived in a one-room cabin, but gregarious and generous, he heartily welcomed me. It was a cozy scene. Marc and Johanne shared the bed and I rolled out my sleeping bag on the floor nearby. Early next morning, they quietly made love, thinking I was still asleep. When Marc got up to milk and feed his goats, Johanne beckoned to me to join her in bed. During my travels, I met people like her who were, by their nature, able to carry others’ weight, lightening their loads. 

Later that morning the three of us hiked to a nearby lake for a swim. As Johanne ran ahead, Marc turned to me, grinned, and said, “She is an extraordinary woman.” I smiled and nodded in agreement.

Going Down to Mexico, Part 6

The route from Ciudad de México to Morelia represents the first 15% of the 2,100 kilometers I traveled in this last installment to return to the U.S. This is the trusty road map I used in 1976-77 and 1980, in the days before Google Maps.

“Really to see the sun rise or go down every day, so to relate ourselves to a universal fact, would preserve us sane forever.” –Thoreau

I left Ciudad de México and its twelve million inhabitants on February 22. Because of my backpack, I couldn’t take the Metro, but a confusing bus ride and some hiking eventually got me to Highway 15, the main road heading west. I quickly hitched a ride from three estudiantes taking a day off from book-learning and going to Toluca. They took me to the Calixtlahuaca ruins just north of the city, and we explored the stone pyramids for an hour before they dropped me off on the western edge of the city. Just as I was about to give up on hitching, two guys going to Guanajuato stopped, and we traveled through the late afternoon pine forest mountains. As we crossed into Michoacán and the sun was setting, I said, “¡Alto aqui!” and climbed a hillside into woods until I found a level spot and rigged up a shelter from the hail that came not long after. 

I started hiking the next morning in the clear mountain air, but soon got a lift from a busdriver, and off we went to Zitácuaro, the bus filling along the way with indigenous Mazahuas, the women identifiable by their beautifully embroidered blouses and layered skirts. I bought bananas at the market and my favorite treat, calabaza dulce, from a street vendor and walked to the edge of town. A friendly couple soon stopped and took me fifty kilometers to Ciudad Hidalgo. Noticing a marker on my map for an agua termal, Los Azufres, I hiked five kilometers to the turnoff and then grabbed a bouncing twenty-kilometer ride in the back of a pickup up a logging road to a blue lake fed by a hot mineral spring. I set up camp on the far side of the lake and dove into the bone-chilling water. The first campfire I’d made in a while warded off the mountain night chill.

In the morning, I found the hot spring by following the rotten-egg smell of sulfur (azufre) to its source. A simple setup corralled the spring in a four-foot-deep pool, the overflow spilling into the lake, so one could comfortably steep in 90-degree water. I shared this delicious pleasure with one family, soaking for over two hours, luxuriating and exfoliating. 

Next day, a couple of quick rides took me to Morelia, where I stopped for lunch and stocked up on fruit, veggies, and eggs, and then camped on its outskirts at the edge of a cornfield. In the morning, the first passing car stopped to pick me up, two young guys just returned from a year in Chicago. I decided to stop in Zamora for lunch, checking out the city and treating myself to their famous chongos zamoranos. Then three men en route to Guadalajara gave me a lift in the back of their pickup. As we passed along the southern shore of Lago Chapala in the late afternoon, I tapped on the top of the cab to stop, clambered out, and found a spot beside a stream at the edge of a strawberry field – laundry day at the lakeshore, sweet juicy fresas for breakfast (and lunch and dinner). 

After a three-day break, I was back on the road, a couple of rides taking me to Guadalajara. I eventually wandered into a plaza where lots of handsome young kids were setting up a stage, so I stayed late to enjoy a ballet performance. I found a church and sought out the priest to ask for a place to sleep. He filled my need by taking me to the Civil Hospital Alcalde, where I slept in a spare bed in the men’s ward. In the morning a nurse placed a glass of milk on the bedside table like a votive candle.

I was now moving steadily, not in a rush but making miles most every day. I hitched a ride from a young couple and their two sons traveling from Mexico City to Puerto Vallarta. So, across Jalisco and into the dry rugged mountains of Nayarit until our paths diverged near Avakatlan. The next morning, a well-dressed elderly man stopped to give me a lift. He spoke good English, and I sensed this was an opportunity to share the message. He listened intently and then offered that he too was a seeker and had found his answer in Kirpal Singh, master of a spiritual practice known as Yoga of the Sound Current. We stopped in Tepic, the capital of Nayarit, and he treated me to brunch at the Hotel Junipero Serra, where I enjoyed enchiladas verdes on a veranda overlooking the city, my fanciest meal in Mexico. He was on his way to Culiacán but diverted from his route to visit the fishing port and surfing town of San Blas, and I tagged along. I thought about staying a few days but had a difficult night camping in a palm grove near the beach, where I was attacked by mosquitoes and sand fleas.

In the morning I moved on, a short hike and then a ride back to Highway 15, now heading northwest. Crossing the Río San Pedro, I decided to stop for a swim to wash off the heat, dust, and sand flea memories. I crossed the bridge and hiked upriver a kilometer, stripped down to my shorts and, in my excitement to cool off, dove from a six-foot bank into four feet of water. Luckily, the bottom was muddy, but it was a hell of a jolt that dazed me and left me stiff and sore for days – from my head and jaw down my spine. My mother always displayed on the wall by our dining room table a small framed picture of an attentive guardian angel hovering near a boy and girl at the edge of a cliff. Was that the spirit that saved me? I rested up and recovered for a day, visiting the nearby pueblo and catching a glimpse of some of the reclusive Huichol people who live in the nearby mountains.

The next day I caught a ride from a semi driver, a thoughtful hombre into writing and philosophy and Kahlil Gibran. We made a connection and I shared the message with him. He dropped me off on the outskirts of the tourist city of Mazatlán, where I wandered through quiet Sunday afternoon streets and down to a stone jetty away from the busy beach hustle to watch the waves break and the sun set on the ocean.

The land was becoming increasingly arid as I continued north. A ride into Culiacán, the capital of Sinaloa and the pre-cartel Mexican drug business, a city with more flashy cars per capita than any other in Mexico. I stopped in a plaza for a lunch of fruit and chatted with a law student. A long walk to the outskirts of the city, a long wait, and finally a short hitch to a naranjal, where I camped that night under the fragrance of orange blossoms. After oranges for breakfast, I stuffed my backpack with a dozen more.

My second hitch of the day, from a friendly taxi driver and shrimper, took me to Los Mochis. He invited me to his home for comida (the main afternoon meal, as is Mexican custom) with his whole family – his wife making bread, son and pretty daughter-in-law, 84-year-old father-in-law, brother. Mucho platicando – lively discussion of life in Mexico versus Estados Unidos. Afterward, he dropped me off downtown. Two days of steady hitching took me another 650 kilometers north into Sonora. My last night in Mexico, I camped at a water reservoir on the outskirts of Hermosillo, celebrating by baking a banana-chocolate cake in a pan over my campfire coals. From my journal:

the dry places

the Sonoran Desert

the wind comes

slipping over the hills like a hawk

hot iguana sun and saguaro statues

in the stillness of the coyote darkness

a sky of glittering diamonds

spirits lose their power

At the end of over 4½ months in Mexico, I took a bus to the frontera, retracing the route of my brief excursion into Mexico two years earlier, the same blind boy playing harmonica for change outside a dusty bus stop diner. His playing had not improved. I crossed the border from Nogales, Sonora, to Nogales, Arizona, like going through some cultural time-warp, except we all were alike in so many more ways than we were different that the differences were insignificant.

I caught a lift from a Mexican American going to Tucson after visiting his dentist across the border. He also picked up Dean, a scruffy young hitchhiker from Indiana, and we headed north on I-19, him drinking tequila as the novacaine was wearing off. I volunteered to drive because he was weaving badly, but he turned me down. As we came up on two Arizona state patrol cars pulled off the shoulder to make a stop, I warned our driver to “maintain.” He did, by slowing down to twenty miles an hour, and still almost took off the driver side door of one of the patrol cars. We were nabbed a few miles down the road, or he was nabbed, drunk, with no car registration and a trunkload of suspicious mag wheels. Dean and I got our IDs checked and our rucksacks sniffed by drug dogs and told to walk to the next exit ramp.

When I got to Tucson, I called Iowa City, nervous with anticipation, and talked with Pat. It was a happy long-distance homecoming, tempered by the news that she had miscarried back in the winter. I was surprised how good it felt to talk with a friend, someone from my household, someone whom I’d worked beside many nights in the bakery. This, I realized, was my home (or home base), my family, all that made the journey meaningful. Pat was heading to California to visit family and friends, so we made plans to meet in Santa Clara in a week.

I took my time hitching up the coast. On the vernal equinox, I camped with a Dutch macrobiotic cook named Biek and another hitcher in a Big Sur meadow, waking at sunrise in a field of California poppies. Pat and I met up later that day, a sweet comfortable reunion. We hung out in Santa Cruz for a week and then hitched back to Iowa City. During those ten days together, our friendship deepened to something that would develop into the foundation for our marriage, four years later. 

Back in Iowa City, I barely knew how to talk about this six-month journey. What happened to Michael, and all the others whose paths I crossed? I didn’t have a good answer to the question Dylan posed in the song he wrote when he was twenty-one years old: “Where have you been, my blue-eyed son?” Perhaps I’m only now beginning to “learn my song well.” My last journal entry ended:

April 1st we return to Iowa City / the end of a lot of miles / i’m here now and something’s going to happen but i know not what / wait to hear from Prch in Ann Arbor back from his travels / think about Naropa, the Rainbow Gathering, Cheryl in Vermont, other places or things to do here in Iowa City – the house, the garden, friends on nearby farms, poetry, Stone Soup, some job or another, connections getting rewired / i’m waiting

Glossary

chongos zamoranos - a sweetened milk curd dessert flavored with cinnamon

naranjal - orange grove

Going Down to Mexico, Part 5

The interior of the Basílica de Nuestra Señora de la Soledad (Our Lady of Solitude) in Oaxaca

As I reflect on this trip, I wrestle to explain the spiritual journey I was on. How did I come to share in Miguel’s mission to witness God’s love? How did I reach a point where I’d write at the end of a journal entry, “May the Lord be with me”? Like many kids my age (22), I was looking for answers. I was looking for a way to be at peace with myself and live in the world. The poet in me also relished, or was comfortable with, the mysterious and the mystical. Deep in my heart I knew this wasn’t the only path I would follow in my life, but it was the one presented to me at that moment, and I wasn’t going to be so stubborn as to refuse it.

Sunday, January 30, was our last day in Puerto Escondido, capped by the excitement of a school of sardines veering into the bay, glittering silvery as they leapt in the air, followed by larger fish and a flock of terns feeding on them. All the niños rushed down to the shore as sardines and other fish were beached or trapped in shallow pools. We followed them and grabbed dinner – a good-sized sea bass flopping on shore. The next morning we got a ride to San Gabriel Mixtepec, about fifty kilometers north, in the back of a flatbed truck carrying spools of barbed wire. As the truck wound its way up a dirt road into the mountains, it took on other passengers – one with a pig, another with a portable corn miller, a family with two children – until the bed was full. Miguel and I slept that night by a stream under coffee trees.

The next day we got a late start, missing what little traffic there was, and hiked through pine forests, quiet cafetales, and crisp mountain air to the next town. We got a better start the following morning, and a ride from the first passing vehicle, a truck delivering tanks of cooking gas to towns along the way, up into the misty morning clouds, cresting the Sierra Madre del Sur, and down into the Central Valley to Sola de Vega, where the pavement began, and on to San Pablo Huixtepec, where we camped by an irrigation dam under a full moon. At the other end of the broad agricultural plain was the city of Oaxaca, thirty kilometers away.

One ride brought us to the edge of the city, and we hiked the last few kilometers, from the farms on the outskirts to el centro. We tested a seminary for a place to stay that night and were offered sixty pesos and directions to a hotel – our first bed and hot shower in months. Asking around for a camping spot the next day, we discovered a long set of stairs, twenty minutes from the Zócalo, that took us up a hill to an amphitheatre and beyond that a forest. We set up camp on Cerro del Fortín, from which we could look out over the city. In the morning we met the men who guarded the forest, protecting it from households seeking stove wood. They were friendly and let us store our rucksacks in their hut during the day.

Oaxaca offered lots to see and do. The Zapotec ruins at Monte Albán were a short bus ride away. The Museo de las Culturas de Oaxaca gave a good overview of the pre-Columbian Zapotec and Mixtec civilizations. We saw a French movie with Spanish subtitles at the French language school one day, went to a free classical guitar concert another, wandered the city, unwinding at times in one of the many beautiful churches, such as the aptly named Basílica de Nuestra Señora de la Soledad. We hung out at the Zócalo, scrutinizing the tourists and admiring the Zapotec women in their beautifully embroidered huipiles. 

A huipil (traditional indigenous tunic) that Pat brought back from a trip to Oaxaca with her friend Sue Martinez in 1974

Every day we stopped at the mercado for a treat of fresh produce or large mugs of café con leche. In one of the small tiendas on the street side of the market, we met Señora Eugenia, who owned a mole shop. (The small containers of peanut butter she stocked first drew us in.) We were attracted to her charm and intelligence, and chatted with her when she wasn’t busy with customers. She sold us a jar of her mole negro and showed us how to use it to elevate a dish of arroz con pollo. Later we visited her home to help repair a chili roasting machine. In her factory, located across the inner courtyard from her residence, all the ingredients – cacao beans, peanuts, chili peppers, onions, garlic, and spices – were roasted, ground, and combined to make this Oaxacan speciality. The aromas and powdery dust merged and drifted in the sunshine slanting through the skylights.

We saw the forest guards only on weekends but got to know them well. We watched one skillfully weave a basket from strips of bamboo, and he let us try our hand at it. We shared our message with a number of them, talking about our experiences: “I once was lost but now I’m found.” Over time, this had become a natural thing to do, and in a country as religious as Mexico, people were receptive and respectful. It was never about proselytizing. I gravitated to the clarity and brevity of the Beatitudes: “Blessed are pure in heart, for they shall see God.”

Miguel and I returned to the issue of taking our separate paths, considering the pros and cons as we walked the city. Acknowledging our spiritual concordance, Miguel tentatively agreed to the proposal. More discussion was needed, but the tenor of the conversation was less heated than that of two months ago. I wanted to make sure the break was clean, positive, and above reproach.

We met two men who offered us information about magic mushrooms, which we’d been interested in since a conversation in Morelia. At their house they showed us photos of derrumbes: psilocybin mushrooms – ten centimeters tall, white stems, phallic black heads, growing in bunches in June and July near Huautla de Jiménez, a Mazatec pueblo about 200 kilometers north of Oaxaca. A strange and powerful mixture of mystical and drunken spirits resided in that house, but they listened intently to our message.

Near the end of our second week in Oaxaca, Miguel came down with a severe stomach flu. On the second day of his fever, he became incapacitated, and I busied myself caring for him. The fever tested Miguel, and in the middle of it he raised the issue of our imminent separation. He chastised me for being self-centered, a charge I couldn’t refute. During the coldest night we’d experienced in a long time, Miguel’s fever broke. The next morning I fixed a hearty breakfast of huevos rancheros (minus some of the chili peppers). As the sun warmed us, we became overpowered by the moment – the return of health and strength, the relief after an emotional trial – and we both realized it was time to part, that this would be a step forward. 

That evening, Miguel and I shared a long farewell hug, two tall lanky blonde guys from Austria (well, my grandfather was), one difference being a decade of experience. I packed up my gear and walked to the station to catch the night train to Mexico City. As I waited for the train, I was tested by doubts. I felt the absence of Miguel; we’d been traveling partners for 4½ months after all. But my thoughts also turned to a promise I made to Pat the day I left Iowa City: to return by April 1.

The second class section was crowded, and I wasn’t able to sit down until our soldier guards detrained at midnight. I stretched out, covering myself with my old woolen serape as we moved through the mountain night, the names of Indian pueblos whispered into my dreams. As morning came we entered the Valle de México – irrigated farms became dirty factory sprawls became working class slums became the comparative wealth of el centro. Disembarking at Estación Buenavista, I wandered the area, getting my bearings, stopping for lunch in Parque Alameda, asking around about places to stay. I was directed to Colonia San Rafael, just west of the city’s historic center. Many of its early 20th century mansions had been converted into pensiónes. (See Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, set in the early ’70s in a nearby neighborhood, to get the vibe.) A sign in a store led me to Serapio Rendon 39 and a tiny room for 25 pesos a day ($1.25) with kitchen privileges for a few pesos more – homey, with lots of families and children.

On Saturday I visited the Palacio de Bellas Artes and marveled at its Art Deco interior and the impressive murals by Diego Rivera, David Siquieros, Rufino Tamayo, and José Orozco. I took a bus to the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, the heart of the student protest movement, where I met a group of architecture students on break from class and talked with them about politics and the student massacre of eight years before. The next day I took the Metro to Parque Chapultepec and spent four hours wandering the magnificent Museo Nacional de Antropología and then strolled through the park:

Everyone goes to Chapultepec Park on Sunday

The Metro line is crammed with

A flood of refugees from the working week

Families lay out picnics on the grass

Babies cry and melt ice cream on their new outfits

Children romp through the gardens

And play futbol around the monuments

Young lovers couple on the sexual merry-go-round

The lonely are not alone

Some visit the zoo it’s so nice

Others evade the cages of despair

They rent boats and row in circles on the pond

For one hour feeding the ducks

Monday, I visited the newly completed Basílica de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe and witnessed the devotion of pilgrims coming from all parts of the country, crawling on their knees the last hundred yards over paving stones to her shrine to petition for help or health. Sitting in Parque Alameda and enjoying my lunch, I was invited to meet that evening with a class of students studying English. Perhaps I’d offer them the message. The city was interesting but too fast and cold and dirty. I was relaxing into traveling solo again, open to the world around me, maintaining a clear-eyed view of my actions.

Glossary

cafetales - Small-scale coffee farms found in Mexico primarily in the highlands of Oaxaca and Chiapas.

Zócalo - Central plaza or square. The Zócalo in Mexico City was built over the ceremonial center of the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan.

mole negro - A marinade sauce that can be traced back to the indigenous peoples of Central Mexico. It can transform a simple arroz con pollo (chicken and rice) dish. Because of its  complex array of flavors and laborious preparation process, it’s often associated with celebrations and festivals.

Going Down to Mexico, Part 4

Playa Zicatela, just south of Puerto Escondido, Oaxaca

“Everything in Mexico tasted. Vivid garlic, cilantro, lime. The smells were vivid. Not the flowers, they didn’t smell at all. But the sea, the pleasant smell of decaying jungle.”  –Lucia Berlin 

We spent a week at our camp home on Playa Azul on the Michoacán coast. Three college students from Mexico City joined us for a few days. A steady trickle of visitors stopped by, bringing reefer to share, nimbly climbing the coconut palms, a knife in their teeth, to harvest cocos – a refreshing beverage in a green-husked goblet. The steep drop-off at the shore made this beach less popular with families and surfers, but the waves were fun and fierce for a novice body surfer. More than once I caught an incoming wave the same moment I was getting caught in the powerful backwash – it felt like 90 seconds in a washing machine. 

On Christmas Eve we went to town after dinner and took in the final night of Las Posadas, Mary and Joseph in search of shelter, the piñatas of Navidad descending until Midnight Mass in the tiny packed church, where gaiety mixed with solemnity. This marked a growing accord between Michael and me, a new bond of partnership. We talked of the spirits – fear and anxiety, resentment and regret, self and egotism, attachment and addiction, depression and despair – that haunted us and held us back. One evening two young men walked into our camp, sat by our fire, offered us drugs we had to refuse, and then silently moved on. After they left, we looked at each other, unsettled by the aura of malevolence, and silently mouthed in unison: Demons. I wrote in my journal:

and if angels sing in my head

if spirits stand over me

but pass on by

how can these be told?

On December 27 we moved down the coast, stopping in Lázaro Cárdenas for supplies and then catching a ride from two San Diego surfers headed to their friends’ house for a meal. We were invited to join them, so across the Río Balsas into the state of Guerrero, and twenty kilometers more to the beach town of Petacalco, where we met Russell, Carmelo, Sharon, Jay, Fred, all transplanted from Cape Hatteras, seeking a higher consciousness and the clean waves at El Faro in Lázaro. They rented the house and land from their friend Santiago, growing papayas, bananas, tomatoes, and beans. We set up camp in a coconut grove behind their house, becoming involved in the community and its efforts to achieve enlightenment by letting go of fears and egos. After dinner we’d all get high and engage in intense discussions on how to “be here now.” We contributed what we could, but they were on their own path.

One day we took an excursion, paddling surfboards across the mouth of the Río Balsas to an island where Santiago’s father, Samuel, farmed a paradise guarded by royal palms rising seventy feet in the air. He tended fields of maíz, jícamas, papayas. He harvested calabazas and camotes and treated us to plates of them, enmielados (boiled in honey). On New Year’s Eve we tried marijuana tortillas, then dinner at the house of Diego and Felipe, two local fisherman friends, and then back to the house, where the scene was lost in reefer, tequila, and rock ’n’ roll. On Sunday we made dinner in gratitude for our friends’ hospitality – tempura vegetables, gorditos filled with fried veggies, sweet creamy atole for dessert.

When we left on Monday, we took on new names to symbolize our new commitment. Reflecting on our experiences at Petacalco, we resolved to abstain from reefer, feeling it might be blurring our focus. I was now Marcos, and Michael became Miguel – one of the freedoms of traveling, because no one is qualified to contest the “truth” of your life. A fifty-kilometer ride took us to the pueblo of Lagunillas, where we stocked up and set off on a seven-kilometer hike down a dirt road to Playa Troncones, recommended by our Petacalco friends. The next day, searching for shellfish in the rocky shallows among sea urchins and mussels, a rainbow of fish darting in and out among the rocks, I was tumbled by the surf, receiving cuts and sea urchin spines I’d later have to extract. That afternoon a fisherman gave us a small shark he’d hauled in, which we then shared with the farmer whose land we camped on. After Miguel figured out how to skin the shark with the tools at hand, we grilled steaks.

We stayed at Playa Troncones for four days, the mountains a blue shadow at our back, the sea shimmering before us, sunsets glowing through the palm trees. We obtained drinking water and eggs from the farmer we’d shared the shark with, all the cocos we wanted when he harvested the grove, a feast of oysters one day from a man who dove for them. The Father provided for us.

After hiking back to the highway, we caught a ride in the back of a pickup to Zihuatanejo, a resort town rimming a beautiful bay. A string of hotels along the beach, a marina where yachts of all types docked, beaches populated with rich Chilangos and English-speaking gringos of all stripes – Murricans, Canucks, Brits, Aussies. After slurping down a bowl of pozole at a street stand, we hiked away from town to the other side of the bay, where we camped by a house owned by an absentee American and cared for by the Mexican family living next door. We quickly became friends with the caretaker, who invited us to attend a meeting for worship with his family, my first experience with a Jehovah’s Witness service. On Monday we exchanged dollars for pesos and treated ourselves to a lunch of hot tortillas fresh from a tortillería, bananas, and crema de cacahuates (yup, peanut butter).

We continued southeast along the coast toward Acapulco. Within a hundred kilometers, we hopped off the road and hiked five kilometers to a spot beside a swift-running stream near the pueblo of Santa María. We camped on a sandbank by the stream and slowed down for a couple days, fasting, reading the Bible, lazing in the sun, slipping into the stream to cool off, comfortable in the stillness. I wrote in my journal: 

Friday morning, we were back to the blacktop and sticking out our thumbs for Acapulco. We got one ride, then nothing for hours and miles until three vacationing students from Mexico City stopped to deliver us to six p.m. downtown Acapulco. We soon met Antonio and Francisco, kids living honestly on the beach. They led us to Playa Caleta, the only Acapulco beach one could sleep on. Near the mouth of the bay, far from the glitz of el centro, we’d sit in the relative quiet and comfort of hotel chairs and enjoy a late meal. At dawn, we’d rise as the workers rushed through straightening chairs and raking the beach. We checked out the city, the glaring contrasts of wealth and poverty, the tapestry and travesty of the tourist trade, and the humanity that exists in spite of that.

Los Ángeles de Acapulco

every Saturday

the children of Acapulco get a bath

and as evening comes

the plazas and calles

become filled with the perfume

of jabón and champú

from the anointed heads

of children at play

We had success at the Mexican Immigration office, extending our tourist visas for three more months. We enjoyed Acapulco beach life for the next few days, relaxing under the sombrillas when the chair-ticket guy was not around. Our little beach urchin friend Manuel would bring us leftovers from his daily hustle of the tourists – hot cakes and pastries in the morning, steak or fish and bolillos in the evening. We chatted with some of those tourists – a retired German diplomat, a restaurant owner from Blackpool, a retired British civil servant – but our patience was tested by overheard conversations that revealed how oblivious they were of the world around them. On Friday we took Manuel to a dentist to have his teeth looked at and bought food for the next leg of our trip. 

The next morning we took a bus through the part of Acapulco we’d avoided – Pizza Hut, Shakey’s, Denny’s, Big Boy, Colonel Sanders – and then got a ride in the back of a camioneta climbing the cliffs overlooking the bay and then south. The road was quiet, but we caught a ride from a crazy young busdriver who burned through his route and then talked with us at its end, sharing his pan dulce. A traveling salesman took us to Pinotepa Nacional in Oaxaca, along the way turning off onto a dirt road to a beach restaurant and a delicious fish dinner. And finally to Puerto Escondido, a fishing port turned surfing and hippie hangout. We scoped out the town, full of hip young gringos, trailer park offering campsites for 17 pesos (85 cents) a night. We hiked down to Playa Zicatela and made a quiet camp in the scrub woods away from the beach. The surfers would come out our way to wrestle and ride the waves, the beach strewn with self-absorbed kids getting high or tan or both. We befriended a Belizean and Canadian couple who had met in Escondido. He was nursing a knife wound suffered at the hands of her enraged former boyfriend, but we admired how completely in love they were.

We decided to bid adiós to the coast and head north toward Oaxaca City, bypassing the Yucatán and Guatemala for now. Over three months in Mexico and four months on the road, we moved slowly but deliberately. Miguel and I still had our differences, but they were the healthy, normal consequences of traveling together. I was asking questions whose answers strengthened my convictions, eased my doubts, and filled me with peace and equanimity. My apprenticeship was coming to a close.

Glossary

Las Posadas - Literally, the inns. A nine-day reenactment of Mary and Joseph’s search for lodging, which ends on Christmas Eve. A popular processional ceremony in Mexico and other Latin American countries.

jícamas, calabazas, camotes - Jícamas and camotes are root crops. The jícama has a sweet, nutty flavor, crisp like a water chestnut. Camotes are in the sweet potato family. Calabazas are in the pumpkin family.

Chilangos - Residents of Mexico City or Mexico, DF (Distrito Federal). When used by those from other parts of Mexico, it can have a derogatory meaning. Citizens of Mexico City often use it as a point of pride.

pozole - A traditional Mexican stew of hominy and pork or chicken, often garnished with shredded lettuce, onions, garlic, chili peppers, avocados, and fresh lime juice.

Going Down to Mexico, Part 3

(Las Cascadas in Parque Tzararacua, Michoacán)

In San Luis Potosí, we bought train tickets to Morelia. Engine problems delayed our departure by three hours, so we missed our transfer. When we did arrive in Escobedo, a little pueblo in the state of Guanajuato, we disembarked to a brass band playing a fanfare. A couple dozen muchachos immediately swarmed us, as if the musical welcome were meant for us, while we inquired when the next train would depart … Not until the next morning. The kids followed us as we walked around town and finally to the Catholic church, María Auxiliadora (Mary the Helper), where we stopped to center ourselves and then talk with them until a Franciscan padre shooed them off. Because the night threatened rain, we asked for shelter, and he set us up in a house adjacent to the church, where we cooked dinner and bedded down on straw mats. The next morning, as we waited for the train, warming ourselves in the sun, we sat on a rusty steel girder stamped Krupp 1928.

That train took us 100 kilometers closer to Morelia. It also had engine troubles, so we missed the last train to Morelia. Acámbaro was a pretty little city tucked in among surrounding mountains. Sitting under the topiary orange trees of the main plaza, we were befriended by a group of muchachos who directed us to the restaurant with the best food and prices. Along the way, we lost one of our new friends when two plainclothes police rushed up, brutally grabbed him, and hustled him off because of some brawl he’d gotten into earlier. Young Mexicans would often gravitate toward us; I’m sure their motivations were various – but they were also simply curious. Sometimes, if they didn’t know or remember our names, they’d address us as maestros.

After our meal, we hiked out of the city and up into the hills, laying down our sleeping bags in a pile of corn stalks, burrowing in to shelter ourselves from the shower that occurred most nights. In the morning as campesinos passed on their way to the fields, I climbed the hillside and watched the sun illuminate the city’s white stucco buildings as it rose above the ridge behind me.

That day, we finally arrived in Morelia, the charming capital of Michoacán, known for its early colonial architecture, especially in el centro. On a recommendation, we made our way to the Seminario Santa María Guadalupe in the eastern hills of the city, and met a priest who gave us a tour and provided dinner and a place to stay at a nearby retreat house. After learning that was a one-night offer, we camped the next night in a half-finished restaurant. 

When one of Michael’s pack straps broke, we found a zapatería and had all of our straps stitched up. Our rucksacks were usually loaded down with supplies: fruit and veggies, cooking oil and honey, rice and oats. Those rucksacks made us conspicuous but also helped us fit in. Men carrying home firewood on their backs, women carrying baskets of tortillas or produce on their heads – we each wore our burdens. Sitting in a plaza as evening approached, we met some jóvenes who took us to a houseful of partying students and musicians. We were invited to crash there as long as we wanted. Sometimes our needs were met in mysterious ways.

We spent almost a week in Morelia, going to a soccer match one day with our new friends. Another day I ran a gauntlet of Mexican functionaries in order to recover $200 of traveler’s cheques that had gone missing – federales, a public minister, local police, office of tourism, and finally a lower-ranking public minister who filled out my report – all so I could take it to the Banco de Comercio and then spend an hour on a repeatedly disconnecting phone call to Mexico City to get my refund.

At the mercado, we stocked up on groceries and plastic sheeting to expand our tent and then caught a bus to a park recommended by our friends, Parque Kilómetro 23, so named because it’s 23 kilometers east of Morelia. (If we had traveled 100 kilometers further, we could’ve entered the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, except that scientists had just discovered this site the previous year.) After walking the confines of the park, we climbed a fence into a neighboring forest with more privacy. It was a good break from cities and travel – cows grazed the steep terrain of pines, firs, cacti, unfamiliar tropical trees, exuberant wildflowers, fantastic mosses. A man passed by to check the pines he was tapping for resin. We set up our camp on a thick bed of pine needles, and arose in the morning to a feast of fried macho plátanos drizzled with crema y miel. We discovered a stream in the next valley where we washed our clothes. 

The nights were mountain chilly but the sun quickly warmed us. We sunned like frogs on large rocks beside the stream, reading the Bible and getting ourselves clear. We talked while stirring the embers of our evening campfire and got in touch with what was going on inside. I still had a lot of old shit to resolve and a lot of blanks to fill in on the questionnaire entitled “Who Am I?” Michael had been a valuable guide on this journey, but I still chafed at his insistence that I wholly commit to sharing the Father’s message. I wondered if we’d reached a fork in our paths.

That Saturday, we fasted on water, lemon juice, and honey, and discussed parting ways. I conceded that it should be a decision we mutually agreed upon. I slept half of that night and filled the rest with ruminations on love unhindered by expectations. Pat was on my mind – my Iowa City housemate and off-and-on lover, she was pregnant when I left. Although not the father, I planned to be there for her and her child. 

The next day we caught a bus back to Morelia and stocked up at the mercado. December 12 is a national holiday in Mexico, el Día de la Virgen de Guadalupe, commemorating her visitation to the Chichimeca campesino Juan Diego in 1531. We wandered off to a nearby plaza, where we met José, who tried to sell us some mota. We went with him to the Bosque de Chapultepec, where we fell in with a group of stoners, got high, and then went to an outdoor concert. We crashed at José’s house that night, on the way stopping at a shrine for Nuestra Señora; we bowed our heads to pass under the folds of blue and white drapery adorning the path to her statue.

Monday afternoon we caught a bus out of Morelia to Quiroga, 45 kilometers west at the eastern end of Lago de Pátzcuaro. We camped on a hilltop overlooking the town and lake, in a garden of herbs and flowers. The chilly night kept the mosquitoes quiet, but by morning we were soaking up the sun’s vitamin D, sans clothing, until getting caught off-guard by a man and his son gathering herbs. By Wednesday we were moving on, hitching a ride in the back of a panel truck to Pátzcuaro, a popular tourist stop on the southeastern edge of that lake, known for its Spanish colonial and Purépecha indigenous cultures.

As we walked along the lake, looking for a campsite, we met some muchachos fishing and bought two lake trout from them for supper. We came upon a string of abandoned houses and moved into the last one. The next morning we caught a ride from a friendly truck driver transporting produce from Morelia to Apatzingán. He entertained us with stories about the area and his life as we swerved through the mountains. Sixty kilometers later, at his suggestion, he dropped us off at Parque Tzararacua, where the Río Cupatitzio descends in a series of cascadas. We hiked along the river to the bottom of a lush gorge, continuing to follow a trail into another valley, where a small cascada splashed into a deep blue pool. We set up camp, bathed, and made dinner. It felt like what I imagined paradise to be. Breathtaking flora frequently visited by hummingbirds. The sound of falling water merged with the melodies of songbirds. The days were warm and sunny; the nights were mild. Michael found another cascada upriver from our camp, a forty-foot drop that gave me a rush when I stood beneath its whoosh. 

After four days there, we headed south toward the Pacific Coast. A man hauling goods from Uruapan to outlying towns stopped to give us a ride. I sat in the back of the truck with six boys grilling me with questions about los Estados Unidos. A series of short rides took us through tropical mountain forests, then cresting the Sierra Madre del Sur into a much drier climate, almost desert, and a long winding ride to a vista of the endlessly blue Pacific. When we arrived in Playa Azul, we hiked down the beach away from the sandy tiendas and restaurants to a grove of coconut palms sheltered from the sea breeze by bushes. We watched the sun set on the ocean in a blink and fell asleep as waves washed up on the beach.

The next day we went to Lazaro Cardenas, fifteen kilometers down the coast, to shop for supplies. We started off the day with a fresh papaya and a joint one of our new friends brought to share … and finished the day with a campfire dinner of spaghetti with marinara sauce and Swiss chard. At dawn the next day, Michael talked with the passing pescadores who fished the surf with nets, getting a promise of fresh fish for tomorrow, Christmas Eve.

Glossary

maestros - It's possible they were messing with us, but I’d like to think not. I felt honored to be called a teacher. It would take me 25 more years to officially become one.

jóvenes - Jóvenes are teenage kids, maybe early twenties. Muchachos are younger (tweens). Or at least, that’s how I used the words.

macho plátanos ... crema y miel - Slice up the plantain and fry in oil, both sides. The cream and honey add sweetness and make it a tasty breakfast dish.

cascadas - The river has a direction to go

down

over the edge into air and mist

cascading down in a white foamy roar

and again calm

onward

Going Down to Mexico, Part 2

(One of the prettiest parts of Tampico, Plaza de la Libertad, near the train station. Note the wrought-iron balconies on some of the buildings.)

Michael and I arrived in Tampico on Friday evening, October 29, and didn’t leave there until Saturday, November 27. Tampico is a fairly typical Mexican city – a mid-sized Gulf seaport, a little neglected since its oil boom days of the early twentieth century, far from the Gringo Trail – and that appealed to us. It seemed a good place to work on learning the language and culture of Mexico. We were given a place to roll out our sleeping bags in the church hall of the Iglesia Presbiteriana Jesucristo El Buen Pastor (Jesus Christ the Good Shepherd).

By this point in our journey, we had established a modus operandi when arriving in a new town. Michael saw himself as an apostle spreading the Good Word, following the instructions of Matthew 10: “Go to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. And as ye go, preach, saying, The kingdom of heaven is at hand…. Provide neither gold, nor silver, nor brass in your purses…. And into whatsoever town ye shall enter, enquire who in it is worthy; and there abide till ye go thence.” We would seek out a person, preferably a religious one, knowing they might be more receptive to our request. The conversation would go like this:

–Hello, can I help you?

–Yes, we have a need.

–What is it, my sons?

–We have a need for a place to sleep.

That was it. If they met our need, we’d gratefully accept the offer. If not, we’d “shake the dust off our feet.” I was the mostly silent sidekick in these transactions, occasionally called upon to translate because my Spanish was better. Michael was pushing me to become more than that, but I tried to explain that I couldn’t fake a calling. However, I wasn’t hearing anything in his message that troubled me. It was ecumenical and inclusive; if he was trying to convert anyone, it was to a life of love and spiritual wholeness. He and I were doing yoga, reading and discussing the Bible one day and books such as Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha the next.

We let the church congregation know we desired to stay in Tampico for a while. Michael wanted to work on his Spanish so he could share his message. We made our home in the church hall that week, buying pastries from a nearby panadería for breakfast, going to the mercado to choose from the wonderful array of fruit for our lunch – piñas, plátanos, naranjas, papayas, mangos, guayabas – each negotiation providing practice in Español. We’d find a bench in a plaza and eat our lunch while enjoying the lively parade of people and the wind rustling the stately palms overhead.

Manuel, a law student and the older son of the church pastor, took a friendly interest, offering us impromptu lecciones en Español. When he had free time, he’d introduce the city to us. We rowed a flat-bottomed boat across Laguna del Chairel and hung out with some of his friends, including Daniel, the son of the family who would eventually host us. Another day, we went down to the docks, boarded a Russian merchant ship, and were given a tour by an English-speaking officer, afterward drinking Brazilian beers with the sailors. On Todos los Santos (All Saints’ Day, or Halloween), we went to Playa Miramar and met a family who welcomed us to their three-room home, where we drank Carta Blancas and conversed about life in Mexico. The next day, el Día de los Muertos (All Souls’ Day), we visited a cemetery packed with people who had brought baskets full of flowers and food so they could tend and then picnic on the graves of their ancestors. It’s a major fiesta in Mexico.

Manuel also helped arrange a meeting with the Rodriguez family, who invited us to stay with them. Our second week in Tampico, we moved into a spare room in their home, becoming the center of attention, falling into the gentle teasing, the endless chistes, of a loving family – Mamá and her young adult children, Daniel, Estella, Chelly, and Estella’s niño, Sofía. The absence of Papá (Señor Juan) and Estella’s husband, Diego – working on Juan’s shrimper off the coast of Campeche – opened up room for us at the dinner table. Manuel stopped by on Saturday to take us across the Río Pánuco to a village in the state of Veracruz, where pigs roamed free in the grass-covered roads. We visited the home of his friend Olga, enjoying a simple feast of pescado, frijoles, arroz, tortillas. One night we happened upon a wedding reception and were invited to join the festivities and dance with the girls. We would accompany Estella and Chelly to the mercado to help with the shopping, learning where to find the best deals. Mamá taught me Sofía’s favorite lullaby, “Mi Muchachita de Corazón,” guaranteed to put her to sleep. And she showed us how to make empanadas: patting the balls of masa into thick tortillas, folding meat or cheese or vegetables into them, and frying them. Simple and delicious.  

Sometimes life in Tampico got pretty intense, sleeping in a room adjoining a busy road, struggling to communicate in a second language, witnessing a tragic drowning in the river. The smells of the oil refineries wafting from Ciudad Madero, the bright red viscera and flesh of the carnicerías in the mercado, the noise and diesel exhaust of autobuses. The incessant discord of the street – taxis cursing, traffic police whistles screeching, bus drivers crossing themselves at each intersection as their brakes hissed, same as the men did from the plaza benches, “Ssssst, senorita!” A block from where we lived, a niña was struck and killed by a car. The next day, while we were on the roof fixing the TV antenna, we saw people gathering at the family’s house for the funeral.

When Señor Juan returned from Campeche, brimming with stories of shrimping in the Gulf, we knew it was soon time to move on. Michael and I took on a plumbing project to fix leaks in the two bathrooms; the experience of hunting around town for parts expanded our vocabulary and language skills. Our last Sunday with La Familia Rodriguez, we prepared a North American feast of spaghetti with a hearty marinara sauce and french fries, onion rings, a tossed salad, and a fruit salad for dessert. We had all grown close in the almost three weeks we lived there. 

Saturday at dawn we took leave of our Tampico friends. The train moved west through the Río Pánuco valley. It was still overcast when we reached the foothills of the Sierra Madre Oriental, but as we ascended, the clouds that seemed to hover over Tampico the last few weeks vanished and a bright sun lit up the beautifully rugged mountains, green with tropical foliage. The train followed the switchback tracks, past swift-moving rivers and waterfalls, sheer rock on one side of the tracks and a steep drop on the other. By the time we reached the Mexican Altiplano, the flora had converted to dry shrubland. As we approached the pueblo of Cerritos, the destination we arbitrarily chose that morning, we took note of a church in ruins on a hilltop and decided to camp there. It was a beautiful warm night, but I slept fitfully, and by morning had a high fever and a severe case of diarrhea. 

Besides getting to know the language and customs of Mexico, we were getting to know its microbial array. As cautious as one might want to be, the Verganza de Moctezuma was unavoidable. Michael had already had a serious case in Tampico, and I, a much lighter one. He proved a great help in nursing me back to health. I slept that day under as many blankets as possible, trying to sweat the fever out of me. Nearby residents visited our camp and returned with chamomile and peppermint, and Michael made teas to calm my stomach. Mexicans are well aware of stomach ailments. The herbalist stalls in the markets were fascinating; nearly everything addressed gut health. 

That night the weather turned cold, windy, and rainy. We moved our camp closer to one of the partially standing walls of the church and set up our tent. By morning the fever broke and my appetite began to return. The clouds scraped the hills surrounding Cerritos, y hace mucho frío, but I felt the gratitude and relief that follows an illness. Michael and I talked about the different places we were in – his commitment to sharing the message, my doubt or indifference. He wanted to be my teacher; I was interested in learning from him, but I didn’t want to be his student. Nothing was resolved, but expressing our feelings eased some of the tensions simmering beneath the surface. That day, we talked of seeking warmer climes, picking Morelia, the capital of Michoacán, about 350 kilometers due south, as our next destination.

Glossary

piñas, plátanos, naranjas, guayabas - The pineapples were especially delicious - smaller, sweeter, more acidic than those found in U.S. supermarkets. Bananas, oranges, guavas were all tasty because locally grown. I wrote a poem that began: “Teresa / the little flower of Tampico / tends a fruit stand in the market.”

pescado - Fish in the sea are pesca; fish on the plate are pescado.

Verganza - How to avoid Montezuma’s Revenge for Cortes’s cruelty? Stay away from tap water. Never stray far from the high-end Cancun hotels. It is the inevitable price paid to truly experience Mexico.

y hace mucho frío - One of our ongoing incentives was to reach warm weather. Even that far south, the Central Mexican Plateau could get cold at night.

Going Down to Mexico, Part 1

(In 1976, I camped on the U.S. side of the border before entering Mexico. In 2021, many seeking to enter the U.S. camp on the Mexico side of the border [in places like this] as they wait, and wait, for court hearing on their refugee or asylum requests.)

By October 1976, I was ready to head down to Mexico again. This time I’d actually make it, and wouldn’t return to Iowa City for six months. Michael, one of the many wanderers who hung out at Stone Soup, had befriended me. A tall lanky thirty-something Austrian who’d moved to Australia with his mother in his childhood and to San Francisco in the sixties, he’d heard about my plans and cajoled me into taking him along. Maybe I was liking the idea of some company. 

The Beats and other writers, artists, and musicians had made the idea of going to Mexico appealing. It offered a destination both easily accessible to and culturally far from Anglos. No need to board a plane to discover a different language, different traditions, and a dollar-to-peso exchange rate favorable to the tight budgets of bohemians and hippies. Adding to the romance of the place was the fact that some of the best weed at that time came from Mexico. If the provenance of the lid you were buying from some shady dude was the highlands of the Sierra Madre del Sur – Oaxacan or Michoacán or, best, Acapulco Gold – you could be assured of its efficacy.

As our trip began, I quickly realized that Michael had a larger agenda. While living in San Francisco, before he’d hit the road, Michael had joined one of the many loose gatherings of spiritual seekers popular at that time. In the parlance of the sixties, he was a Jesus freak. In my research into the evangelical “prophet” Lonnie Frisbee, active in the Bay Area in the early seventies, I can see some aspects of Michael – his homosexuality, his interest in UFOs – that suggest he might’ve been a follower. But Michael was always tight-lipped about the origins of his mission. He described himself as an apostle wandering the world and spreading the Father’s Message, a curious casserole of Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, sci-fi, and hippie principles. Clearly I hadn’t vetted him sufficiently, although I think Michael was keeping some of his light under a basket while in Iowa City, worried I wouldn’t let him come along if I knew his full intentions. However, I decided that I might learn something from this experience, that this journey might evolve into a spiritual one. And I rationalized I could go my own way if it all got too weird.

Michael and I met up in Des Moines at my parents’ house and set out on October 7. As the sun slanted low in the sky on a ride to Joplin, Missouri, we asked to be let off near Sarcoxie, a little town in the southwestern corner of the state. We crossed a creek as we were walking into town, and decided to leave the road and follow it. We made camp along the creek, near a stand of oak and sycamore. We spent a couple days there, relearning how to live in the moment. Waking at sunrise and seeing our breath, cooking oatmeal with raisins and bananas for breakfast. The days warming up so we could strip down and bathe in the creek, the water’s chill setting our hearts on fire. Green soybeans from a nearby field and wild watercress supplemented our dinners, Michael demonstrating his resourcefulness as a campfire cook. Sitting around the fire until the full harvest moon rose and cast shadows, Michael and I talked about our lives, getting to know each other. He gently pointed out the spirits of Fear and Self that held me back. In the morning I looked down into the creek at my clear reflection.

We stopped in Edmond, Oklahoma, so Michael could talk with Hayden Hewes, who, two years prior, had interviewed Bo and Peep, a middle-aged couple claiming to be not only aliens but also the two witnesses from the Book of Revelation who would show us how death could be overcome. (Some twenty years later, they’d gain notoriety.) I was skeptical but intrigued, or at least amused. Michael did track down Hewes –  a young, bearded, wary UFO investigator – but failed to get the answers he was seeking. 

We spent a few days in Austin, always a friendly city for travelers and street people. Hot showers and laundry day at a University of Texas men’s dorm. Hepatitis A and typhoid shots at a free medical clinic. One long afternoon trying to cut through Naturalization and Immigration red tape – Michael had concerns about getting a Mexican travel visa because of his Austrian passport. Urban camping’s always a challenge – one night in Pease Park, another night in Assumption Cemetery, another night in an abandoned house on San Jacinto, five blocks from the state capitol, from which we were rousted by the police the next morning.

By October 22, we were in Pleasanton, thirty miles south of San Antonio, where we caught a ride all the way to the border with Julio, an ex-Marine Mexican immigrant who primed us with information about Mexican food, wildlife, and places from his childhood. He gave us a tour of Elsa, the little town where he lived, and invited us to have dinner with his family, a typical Tejano feast of frijoles, arroz, guacamole, tortillas. On the walls looking down at us were framed portraits of the Virgin Guadalupe and John F. Kennedy, standard Mexican Catholic iconography. Then he drove us the last twenty miles to the quiet border crossing at the Progreso International Bridge. This would be a precursor to the goodwill and generosity we’d repeatedly experience in Mexico.

(Looking upriver at Progreso International Bridge, Mexico on the left, U.S. on the right. Our camp was about 300 yards upriver from the bridge. The road along the river wasn’t there then.)

As we camped that night on the U.S. side of the Rio Grande, the lively, joyous sounds of Nuevo Progreso floated across the river, the jaunty accordions of norteño, the frenetic trumpets of mariachi, the ay-yi-yis and howls of laughter. We spent three nights camping there along the border, intermittent downpours keeping us from drying out our gear enough to move on. The U.S. Border Patrol paid us a visit, pulling up in a jeep and asking some questions, and then left us alone. We swam and washed clothes in the Rio Grande, waving to our neighbors across the border doing the same. One curious young Mexican swam across just to talk with us. We had a surprise visit one night from a Mexican who dried off at our campfire before proceeding onward to El Norte. We read Herman Hesse’s Journey to the East to each other, wondering if we too were on a pilgrimage in search of the Truth.

Because Michael’s Austrian passport flustered and confused the Mexican Aduana officials, that pilgrimage didn’t take us across the border to Nuevo Progreso. Instead, we hitched thirty miles to McAllen, finally got our paperwork in order at the Mexican consulate, slept that night on the porch of the Sacred Heart Catholic Church rectory, and the next morning, walked to the bridge leading into the Mexican border town of Reynosa. On the bridge we passed a distraught Spanish hippie – long red hair, no shoes, just a string bolsita containing his meager possessions – who appeared to be lost, stranded, welcome in neither country. For us, a ten-dollar bribe expedited the stamps in our passports. We didn’t want to spend the money, but it seemed only fair that we gringos should bolster the Mexican officials’ paltry salaries. 

We walked around Reynosa, stopping at a zapatería so Michael could get his sandals repaired, and then caught a bus to Monterrey, enshrouded in a cold steady drizzle. Upon arriving that evening, we received shelter in the form of a semi-enclosed side entrance to the Iglesia Cristo Rey. The padres there were good to us – we stayed three nights, cooking dinners over our campstove, always to a curious audience, arising at seven for morning Mass, leaving our backpacks locked up for the day as we explored that boisterous industrial city. The surrounding mountains are said to be beautiful, but they were constantly obscured by rain clouds and smog. We soaked up Mexican city life as our feet soaked in street puddles.

That Friday, October 29, we bid adiós to the good padres of Cristo Rey and caught a train to Tampico, 500 kilometers south-southeast, much warmer and drier. The ten-hour ride cost 40 pesos (two dollars). As we inched our way toward the Gulf Coast, with many stops in sleepy little towns, we observed the countryside – the thatched roof huts, the orange groves, the fields of maíz and agave. Two Federales sat down across from us and became our amigos, downing a dozen Carta Blancas each, sharing their tacos and tamales with us. We arrived in Tampico that evening. Two tall gringos, our backpacks augmenting our conspicuous height, we would always stick out. We were güeros and, in the opinion of some young girls, guapos. As we walked out of the train station and into the heart of the city, heads on swivel, trying to figure out which way to go, I stepped right into a four-foot-deep open sewer hole, scraping my shin but otherwise unharmed. Everyone laughed, and embarrassed as I was for not paying attention to my surroundings, I did too.

Glossary

Tejano - The first European American to set foot in Texas was the Spanish explorer Cabeza de Vaca (1528). Until the Texas Revolution in 1836, Texas was a part of Mexico, much longer than it’s been a part of the U.S.

Aduana - The visa stamp in the passport received at Mexican Customs usually came at a small price, the bite of the mordida a kind of unofficial toll.

güeros - Michael had blonde hair. Mine was naturally curly and bleaching blonde from all the time spent outdoors. Michael eventually persuaded me to allow him to cut it.

guapos - There’s little photographic evidence, but take my word for it – I was a cutie.

The Art of Hitchhiking

(Pond of water lilies, from the University of Michigan Herbarium website)

This blog post offers a short metaphysical treatise on hitchhiking. In the sense that these youthful experiences were a part of my education, I continue thinking about where I was then and where I am now on this journey.

A hitchhiker should be adaptable, flexible, open to the possibilities, ready to consider any detour as an escapade or learning experience (admittedly, an attitude easier for white men to pull off). Let me offer one example from my three-month-long summer of 1975 trip.

I was in Salem, Oregon, heading for Goshen, 70 miles south, where Pammie lived, a friend of my friends Kate and Prch. Doris and her dog Kiani stopped to give me a ride. We got high and drove to Albany, 25 miles south on I-5. She was picking up her friend Claudette and then going to Claudette’s log cabin. “Do you want to come along?” Of course, I said yes – my prime directive at that time was to partake in every adventure I could, and these young women seemed to offer one. (At the time, I didn’t realize her cabin was in Gates, 45 miles east, deep in the Oregon woods, but that wouldn’t have mattered.) On the way, Shitrat, her ’63 Volvo, blew a water pump in Lyons, and we – Doris, Kiani, Claudette, and I – drinking beers and laughing about our predicament, hitched to Mill City, where they had friends, one who paid Doris $30 he owed her, another who gave us a lift to Claudette’s cabin, where we ate bagels and drank tequila and got high.

When Claudette ran off to check about a job, Doris and I hung out. Out of respect for the fact that she’d given me a ride and invited me into her world, I left the decision to make the first move, if there was to be one, to her. But before long, Claudette returned and we all hitched back to Salem – three folks and two dogs now – staying warm in the back of a pickup under Army blankets and Oregon stars. Back in Salem we went to a bar where some friends in a band were playing. Doris spent the night with Joe, the lead guitarist, whom she’d been digging and hoping to hook up with. Claudette and I stayed at Doris’s house, Claudette sleeping in the bed and me in my sleeping bag on the floor with the dogs. The next morning I was back at that same entrance ramp in Salem, still hitching south, in wonder at the lovely twists and turns our lives take, somehow wiser by the experience.

* * *

These stories might lead you to believe that hitchhiking was an endless series of exciting and diverse adventures. That’s not entirely true. It often entailed long, boring stretches of time, standing beside an extremely busy or empty highway and waiting for a ride. In those moments good hitchhikers learned the value of patience. They didn’t let themselves be taken over by frustration or envy or anxiety or anger. Like the Chinese poet Han-shan, glad to be “free of the busy world,” they simply waited, or they developed some strategy, such as hiking with their thumb out, to pass the time. They knew that when a car did stop to give them a ride, they would feel all the more grateful for that wondrous generosity.

When stalled, I often stopped paying attention to the road and just looked around, taking in my surroundings. I often sang: “I Ride an Old Paint,” Lowell George’s “Willin’” (Linda’s version), Kris Kristofferson’s “Me and Bobby McGee” (Janis’s version). Sometimes I made up and sang little snippets of choruses; sometimes I composed poems in my head. This is from my notebook of that summer of ’75 trip… 

on I-5 near Roseburg, Oregon

going nowhere, going back east

walk barefoot along blind road

to the South Umpqua River

off highway & down to its banks

along the way having my fill 

of blackberries, & invisible

anyway strip down to nothing

splashing, playing hide & seek

with fat wiggly tadpoles

lay on abandoned mattress

drying, relaxing under sunshine

daydreams, read the Diamond Sutra

again searching for … better luck 

on the road, focused on no-ride

one will appear in no time

* * *

As I’ve noted elsewhere, hitchhikers sometimes had to deal with unwanted sexual advances. This was why, even at the height of its popularity, solo hitching by women was a risky undertaking. One can find many articles that discuss the complicated calculus of this and offer tips for doing so safely. I will never truly know half of what women had to deal with – still have to deal with – from men, but my own experiences helped me understand that better.

When I was going to school at Ohio University in the fall of ’74, I hitched up to Ohio State one weekend to see Cheryl, Sue, and Owen. As I was getting into Columbus, I was picked up by men seeking physical intimacy – three times in a row! I firmly declined, but in a way that was part apology, both of us embarrassed by the misunderstanding. Many years later, I realized the way I was wearing my bandanna was likely signalling my availability to gay men. A bright red paisley bandanna was part of my gear and garb then. Worn as a neckerchief, it could protect me from sunburn; folded into a right triangle, it could become a headband to corral my long curly hair. Only recently did I happen upon an article that explained another of its purposes.

I supported women hitchers whenever I could. In the summer of ’75 my friend Kelly was looking for a partner to hitch from Ann Arbor to Minneapolis, via Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. I was getting ready to head to the West Coast, so this seemed like a good way to start that trip. I knew hitching with someone else would slow me down a bit, but I was glad to have the company. We stayed one night at the University of Michigan Biological Station near Cheboygan, where our friends Joy and Alan were doing fieldwork. The next evening we stopped near Iron River, skinny-dipped in a pond full of sweet-scented water lilies, and were given a bed by a friendly couple, in which we slept chastely, like sister and brother, in the spirit of her original request.

Later that summer, my high school buddy Michael, his girlfriend Abby, and I hitched from San Francisco to Ashland to catch some of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Three people hitchhiking was a big ask, and at one point we were so stalled that Michael and I moved off the roadside so Abby appeared to be  alone. No surprise that a car stopped in short order. Maybe the driver was concerned for the safety of this “fragile” woman; maybe he was a sexual predator; maybe he was simply a good guy. In any case, when we stepped from behind bushes to climb in the car with Abby, I felt no guilt about our trickery.

* * *

A hitchhiker should be a masterful glaneur, ready to use what has been cast off by those able to do so. Packaged food past its expiration date, produce with spots, leftovers from the noon pizza buffet. I became a skilled and unapologetic scavenger and dumpster-diver, taking a perverse pleasure in living off the wastefulness of American culture. I have vivid memories of all the produce harvested while traveling: pomegranates from shrubs on the medians in Austin, pecans from an abandoned orchard south of San Antonio, large juicy strawberries from a field beside Lago de Chapala near Guadalajara, sweet crisp Burlat cherries from an orchard in the Rhone Valley south of Lyon, golden pink apricots from the backyard of an abandoned house in Sanary-sur-Mer on the Côte d’Azur. My efforts at gleaning were not limited to food…

The grey serape

that I found in the late fall of 1974

on an Interstate 10 entrance ramp west of Tucson

Left behind by some vagabond

a thick weave of heavyweight wool

a jagged black lightning pattern running its length

Rolled up and strapped to my backpack

it served me well through the rest of that decade

accompanying me as I wandered endless miles of open road 

From the Olympic Peninsula to Cape Breton

from wintry Montreal to San Cristobal de las Casas

from the Isle of Skye to the Tuscan hills outside Florence

Handy and versatile for hitchhiking

to keep off the cold or the rain or the snow

or to supplement my sleeping bag on crisp nights under the stars

No, I don’t know what became of it, or those nights, or those stars

My Kentucky Ancestors, Part 3

(Swiss colonists at Bernstadt, Laurel County, Kentucky, ca. 1881)

My grandmother Margaret (Muster) Duer was born in 1888 in the eastern Kentucky town of East Bernstadt. This was a Swiss colony established in 1881 by people suffering from a farm crisis in their native country, either adventurous or desperate enough to buy land sight unseen in the United States. Arriving here in hopes of planting vineyards, they adapted, learning for example to make corn mash moonshine in backwoods stills. My great-grandfather Jacob Muster came from Bern, and my great-grandmother Amelia Blunschi from the Swiss canton of Sankt Gallen. They met and married in Kentucky and brought my gramma into a life caught up in a scrap with the red clay of Appalachia. 

The second of seven children, Gramma watched the tiny pine boxes containing a one-year-old brother and a stillborn sister be lowered into that unyielding clay. While Gramma was still in her teens, her father, a skilled interior decorator never able to practice his trade here, died from the bite of a black widow spider. The boys all went to work at the Diamond Coal Mine, a deep-shaft operation managed by their uncle John Blunschi. When her oldest brother, Fred, died a few years later from a burst appendix, Gramma ventured to Cincinnati in hopes of finding work that would help support the family. In its Germantown neighborhood, she gained steady employment in her father’s trade, replacing and installing wallpaper.

(The Muster children, c. 1902, from left to right: Willie, Frieda, Fred, Gramma, Ernest)

After the Great War she met and married Johann Baptiste Dür, a recent immigrant from Austria. My gramma and her brothers had bought thirty acres with a house from Uncle John Blunschi to add to the family homestead. Margaret and Johann tried to make a life there, but paydays were few and far between and the farming life did not suit him. A boatbuilder from a fishing village nestled on the eastern shore of the Bodensee and at the foot of the Central Alps, he decided to move the two of them to a city in Ohio named for its dominance of the surrounding land, Akron, where he started a construction company with his younger brother Adolph, a bricklayer. Enjoying the boom brought on by the burgeoning tire industry there, they built solid brick houses, keels firmly moored in this new landscape. But in 1925, Johann died suddenly at the age of 38, leaving Gramma a widow with two young sons, a house on Voris Street, and a few rental properties in the city.

(My uncle Dick’s architectural rendering of the East Bernstadt homestead where he and my dad grew up)

She moved her family back home to Kentucky and, with the help of her brother Willie, raised her boys on the farm. Most of their needs were met by six to eight milk cows, a few meat hogs, a flock of chickens, a kitchen garden, and an acre or two of cash crop tobacco. Willie and Gramma supplied milk for neighbor families, and during the spring calving time, she made many pots of smearcase (cottage cheese) and countless blocks of Swiss cheese with the surplus milk. A large room with a flagstone floor taking up nearly one-third of the house’s ground level was a dedicated “milk and cheese factory.” They ran the country store that was part of the old home place, and for a time she worked in the post office, a job she obtained through her brother Ernest, the East Bernstadt postmaster. In this way, she supported her family during those years. Through it all she made sure her sons received an education, escorting them and all their cousins the fifteen miles down to Corbin every week amidst the Great Depression to attend the Saint Camillus Academy boarding school. By the time her sons had finished high school, the Second World War was underway. The three of them moved back to Akron, where her sons found work in the tire factories until they were drafted. Gramma worked during the war as a cashier in the Goodyear Aerospace factory and settled permanently in Akron.

Her older son became an architect and settled in Cleveland. Her younger son returned to Akron, working in the Firestone tire factory for a time, eventually becoming a liquor salesman, eventually marrying my mother and becoming my father. When I was born in 1954, the paranoid muttering of McCarthyism was being drowned out by the new raucous energy of rock ’n’ roll. We lived in an apartment on the corner of Voris and Washington streets, next door to the brick duplex whose south half served as my gramma’s home while she rented out the other half. A few years later, my parents bought a house in the suburbs, but every Friday, we would drive over the Cuyahoga River Gorge into the city to bring her out for the weekend. As our family grew to eventually include ten children, she became an indispensable part of it.

She was a slight woman, five foot tall on a good day, weighing no more than a hundred pounds, but she exuded a scrappy determination. She could be a stubborn woman, doggedly attached to her opinions, but I felt that after the life she had lived, this was a position she was wholly entitled to. I always admired her independent spirit. She lived in that three-story house on Voris Street until she was in her eighties. Even then, urban renewal (in the guise of a new main post office) was the only thing that could move her. In her new home, a high-rise senior center apartment building in North Akron, she became the unofficial caretaker for dozens of neighbors.

There are specific things I remember about her: the Old World terms – schatzi (dear), schnickelfritz (rascal), humpf-stumpf (knucklehead) – with which she blessed or chastened each of us, the patience and skill with which she’d darn the endless holes in our socks, her special honey-lemon-whiskey potion for our sore throats, the aromatic roots we’d help her to dig up to make sassafras tea, the pokeweed and dandelion greens we’d gather so she could cook them up for supper, the way she could concoct a delicious apple pie out of just two or three of any type of apple, and the long curlicued peels left over from her artistry. She taught me the lessons of self-reliance and persistence, lessons I might not have learned otherwise. When we had chicken for supper, she would ignore my father’s rebukes and choose the neck for her plate. She knew there was enough meat on those bones to sustain her. While the wildly patched jeans of the sixties were for most a symbol of our revolt against middle-class values, the ones I artfully designed and carefully mended also represented an homage to Gramma. I was delighted to learn that her maiden name, Muster, is a German word meaning “model” or “pattern,” because I often think of her life as a pattern for my own.

(The simple nine-patch quilt that Gramma made and gave to me forty years ago. We kept it on our bed for years until it become threadbare.)

In her nineties, she was named Senior Volunteer of the Year by the mayor of Akron for her 26 years of work at the Summit County Old Folks Home, helping residents by tidying up their rooms or showing them how to polka or transporting them if wheelchair-bound. The ceremony seemed to only embarrass and annoy her. She just wanted to get on with her life. Even though her eyesight was failing, she would still get out her treadle-operated sewing machine, set up her quilting frame, which filled the living room of her tiny apartment, and piece together the colorful patchwork quilts that she then gave away. (She would listen to the Cleveland team’s baseball games on the radio while she stitched, and we often discussed the team’s woes.) She walked to mass at six in the morning, and it was this habit that put her in the hospital for the first time in her life, the victim of a hit-and-run accident. Besides broken bones, other medical problems were discovered – gallstones, carcinomas – the sources of aches and pains she’d probably accepted for years as part of her life. 

The doctors operated, but at the age of ninety-six, she lacked the reserves of vitality needed to recover, and early that winter, death overtook her. She died four days after our third child, Jesse, was born by cesarean-section. The responsibilities of my own family kept me from traveling the thousand miles to her funeral. She was buried three days later, and that night I dreamt I helped carry her pine coffin home to the little church cemetery overlooking the eastern Kentucky countryside.

My Kentucky Ancestors, Part 2

(Mercedes Bend farm in 1976. I roamed those hills in late fall, after the first frost, nibbling on wild rose hips.)

When I moved to Iowa City in September 1975 to continue my education at the University of Iowa, I quickly discovered the co-op scene. I was impressed by the folks I met there – vibrant, interesting, talented, inspired by their interest in natural and organic foods, vegetarianism, cooperative enterprise, and communal living. New Pioneer Food Co-op was then located on the corner of Gilbert and Prentiss streets. Blooming Prairie Cooperative Warehouse was two floors above it. Stone Soup Restaurant was operating out of the Center East basement on the corner of Clinton and Jefferson streets. I started working at Stone Soup as a night baker, making whole wheat bread, granola, and beanburgers for both the restaurant and the food co-op. After my shift I’d catch a nap in the empty Yoga Center on the first floor before my morning philosophy class.

Many of the people I met at this time have remained my closest friends. When Pat moved from Santa Cruz to Iowa City that fall, she started working as a baker too. Six years later we were married and starting a family. Many of these friends had a desire to “get back to the land.” They found that the most reasonably priced acreage was often the most unruly – hilly, rocky, wooded, suitable only for subsistence farming. This could describe the Arguing Goats Farm in rural Cedar County, or Mercedes Bend off Highway 1 north of Solon, or the Mozz (short for Mausoleum), an old forsaken farm near Cedar Bluff that John, Sheila, Pam, Jim, and others had revitalized. Such places were generally fine with these hippies, whose goals were modest – raise some chickens for the eggs, a few goats for milk and yogurt, a hive for honey, a garden or orchard for produce to put away for the winter, maybe a few acres of a cash crop of sorghum to make into syrup.

This scenario was playing out everywhere at that time, and in the Central United States it was especially prevalent in the Ozark and Appalachian mountains. Sometimes the hippies and the folks who’d lived there for generations (and who often self-identified as hillbillies) kept their distrustful distance. But sometimes they found a common ground of mutual admiration. Arnie Brawner, a 53-year-old organic farmer from nearby Mount Vernon, became a valuable mentor for my friends living at the Mozz, just one example of that cross-fertilization.

In the spring of 1976, I got an opportunity to visit one of those “unruly places” when I learned there was a spot open in a car of co-op folks heading to East Wind Community in the Missouri Ozarks. East Wind made most of the nut butters sold in bulk at New Pioneer. As a working member, I would often stock their products, opening up 35-pound tubs and stirring in the oils that had separated while the nut butter was in storage. East Wind had invited people to see the operation, offering ingteresting workshops on how to live communally and how to subvert the corporate capitalist paradigm. But I remember best hiking through deep woods and crossing clear mountain creeks with Annette and Sich, who were preparing to homestead a farm in Edmonson County, Kentucky, twenty miles east of where I’d lived two years before that. I felt a spark with Annette and, as we were leaving, made sure to get directions to the farm from her and promised to visit when I had a chance.

That August, I followed up on that promise, but all in good time. I’d just spent two weeks hitchhiking out to Boulder and staying with my friend Tony Hoagland, who was taking classes at the Naropa Institute’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. I’d returned to Iowa City one day before my old high school buddy Michael was passing through on his way to Ohio for the wedding of our friends Jon and Kathy. We met up at the communal household I’d moved into that summer near the corner of Governor and Burlington streets. 

Michael and I arose early to a hearty breakfast of oatmeal with raisins, made a destination sign, rolled some joints, said good-bye to my housemates, crossed the street, stuck out our thumbs, and quickly got a ride out to the interstate. We parked ourselves at the bottom of the ramp, taking turns hitchhiking. The sunny morning was starting to heat up, and no ride for a while until Kevin stopped on his way back to Yale in his climate-controlled Catalina. So we got a ride all the way to Akron, along the way reading, writing, napping, rapping with Kevin, who was young and not all that interesting. As we approached our exit at nine that evening, we got caught in a heavy rainstorm, so Kevin generously took us the extra ten miles into Kent. 

Back in our old haunts, we headed to The Cove, bought a pitcher of beer, and made some calls. It just so happened Jon’s bachelor party was in progress. We called the Brown Derby and found out the group was on its way to the Venice Cafe, just a block from us. We finished our pitcher, smoked a joint out in the alley, and headed to the Venice. It was a rowdy reunion of high school friends, with too many beers being bought for me and my empty stomach. Then Owen invited me outside to share a bowl of hash, and I was stone-cold stoned, rapping wildly and pulling poems out of my pockets. Suddenly we were at the Outpost Lounge, where we slipped a dancer some bucks to perform a slinky, seductive dance for Jon’s benefit. Closing down that dive, we hightailed it to the Chat Noir in downtown Akron. Stepping away from the craziness for a moment, I wondered about this strange tradition, a presumed last chance to taste freedom and wild adventures before settling down, as if marriage itself wasn’t an adventure, as if having and raising children wasn’t the adventure of all time.

I spent the next couple of days with Jon’s family, making multiple batches of bread for them, my customary way of saying thanks, and doing my best to help Jon with wedding plans. I visited Gramma Duer, who was living in a senior center in North Akron, and peppered her with questions about her early life in Kentucky, taking careful notes. The last couple of days before the wedding, I got out of the way and stayed with Benny Semchuck’s family. The wedding was held on a Saturday evening. That day, our old gang got together to go swimming and get high at the quarry swimming hole with its daredevil cliff dives, then to Grins’s house, where we drank beer and shots, listened to Uncle John’s Band “coming to take his children home,” and were handsomely fed to the tune of sweet corn and burgers. We attired ourselves in a bright collage of colors for the ceremony, and as soon as the I-do’s were done, rushed off to Ziggy’s Hall for all the food, booze, old-time friends, pretty women, and dancing we could handle. By three in the morning, we were at Owen’s Cuyahoga Valley pad, drinking coffee laced with gin, finally calling it a day.

Monday morning, I was on my way back to Kentucky, south from Akron into the Appalachian foothills. A ride from an angry, streetwise, big-talking, woman-chasing kid on parole took me into Charleston, West Virginia, home of Agent Orange and antifreeze, mountains of coal, pools of chemical waste, river of salt brine tears, all ratchety hardcore but still brutally beautiful. On a ride to Huntington, I smoked a joint with the driver and helped him deliver flowers to florist shops along the way: “Whaddya think of us hillbillies?” Then a ride from a couple of pimply teenagers skittishly smoking another joint. And then a ride with a couple of guys delivering eggs – two more joints and into eastern Kentucky. Eventually, Gary interpreted the hieroglyphics of my sign and took me all the way to Bowling Green. By 9:30 that evening, I was calling up Pat Berkowetz, a friend from my year living in Butler County; she was working a late shift but let me keep her bed warm for the night.

(Walt and Betty’s eight kids. When I was their neighbor in rural Butler County, I spent as much time playing with them as I did visiting with Walt and Betty.)

The next day I hitched up to Morgantown and arrived just as my former neighbors Walt and Betty Essex were getting ready to move ten miles to Woodbury and a beautiful old three-story house atop a hill overlooking the Green River. They’d be living there rent-free, thanks to the Army Corps of Engineers, in exchange for serving as caretakers for the house that would eventually become the Woodbury Lock and Green River Museum, honoring the days when steamboats plied the river. It was wonderfully roomy, just what they needed for their big family, with a great front porch where I slept. I stayed two days, helping them move in, glad to be of use, going for afternoon swims in the river – and then headed to neighboring Edmonson County to find Tupelo Ridge Farm, and Annette. I got a ride that took me up a dirt road all the way to the farm, meeting Sich and Jean, who as they were getting ready to leave for Bowling Green, told me Annette no longer lived there. I shook off that disappointment and helped them run errands, getting to know this friendly couple who lived on land I’d come to think of as a second home. I admired how they’d wedded the order of a farm and the disorder of the wild. 

The next morning I realized I needed to haul ass back to Akron for my friends Cheryl and Jim’s wedding. I helped Sich milk their cows, picked a couple bushels of tomatoes, ate breakfast, and reluctantly said goodbye to these young farmers and their land. I started walking down the dry dusty road toward the Western Kentucky Parkway, a car coming along every fifteen minutes or so, but the country was so beautiful I didn’t care. I finally caught a ride to Louisville and eventually made it back to Benny’s house by nine the next morning, discovering that the wedding was at eleven. Whew! Just enough time to take a much-needed shower, get dressed, and head over to Coz’s house for prenuptial drinks. The Kentucky poet-farmer Wendell Berry has written, “One who returns home – to one’s marriage and household and place in the world – desiring anew what was previously chosen, is neither the world’s stranger nor its prisoner, but is at once in place and free.” In those days, I was starting to figure out exactly what he meant by that.

My Kentucky Ancestors, Part 1

(From Lookout Pinnacle, a view of Cumberland Gap (and the junction of Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee)

“Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors.” –Ralph Ellison

In my youth, American media seemed to embrace Appalachia, which was often presented playfully but unironically as a both uncouth and undiluted version of America. The Beverly Hillbillies and The Andy Griffith Show on TV were wildly popular.  In the comics section of the newspaper, Li’l Abner and Snuffy Smith were prominent. Sure, we chuckled at the antics of Jed and Granny Clampett and their clan, but the sharpest barbs were saved for the Beverly Hills banker Drysdale and his wife. I have my own connection to a small town in Appalachia.

In July 2020, I planned a road trip to Roanoke, Virginia, to spend time with my daughter, Emma, and my two grandsons, Oscar and Linus. Because of the coronavirus pandemic, I decided it wouldn’t be wise to spend a night with my 87-year-old mother in Columbus, Ohio, as I usually do, so I looked for a different Iowa-to-Virginia route. I realized I could go south from Indianapolis on I-65 to Louisville, head east to Lexington, and then south on I-75, which would take me near East Bernstadt, the Laurel County town where my father and his brother grew up. My gramma Duer is buried there, and I’ve long wanted to pay my last respects to a woman who played a major role in my early life (which I will elaborate on in Part 3). She died five days after my youngest son, Jesse, was born, and I made the difficult call to be with and care for my family rather than make that long mid-December trip for her funeral and burial. 

I have good memories of East Bernstadt. Although it’s a mere six-hour drive from Akron, my family visited there only a handful of times. But when we did, I could sense the powerful pull of geography and history on a people and place, something I came to appreciate over the years, that tarot deck of culture. In 1880, a Kentucky immigration commission sent land agents to Europe to promote the state. And the Swiss colony of Bernstadt was first settled one year later by a group of immigrants – including my great-grandparents, Jacob Muster from Bern and Amelia Blunschi from Basel – who had bought land, sight unseen, and made that leap. They named it after Bern, that city on the fertile plateau west of the Swiss Alps. I imagine they were a bit disappointed by their acquisition, which was better suited to coal mining than farming, but they made do.

Through my own experiences, I became drawn to the romance of the hollers of eastern Kentucky, those narrow valleys tucked back in the mountains. I once paid a visit to a family who lived in a holler, following a dirt road that eventually became the creekbed at the heart of that landform, until we reached a farm nestled between two steep ridges. Even in the middle of summer, maybe seven or eight hours of sunlight could reach the bottom of the holler. Driving around Laurel County, one could happen upon Wildcat Hollow, Salt Log Hollow, Possum Strut Hollow, Copperhead Hollow, Angel Hollow, and of course, Dark Hollow. These were not terrifically telegenic scenes, but they had their charm. Tacked to telephone poles, metal signs advertising Mountain Dew reminded us that “It’ll tickle your innards!” Often used for target practice, they were peppered with buckshot or perforated with .22 caliber bullet holes. And barns painted with Mail Pouch chewing tobacco ads declared, “Treat Yourself to the Best!” – sometimes the only painted surface on the weathered siding.

During the summer of 1967, I turned thirteen and spent a couple weeks in East Bernstadt with my cousin Jeff from Cleveland, who was two years older than me. We stayed with one of Gramma’s brothers, Paul Muster, who grew tobacco on the acreage behind his house. In the early morning, we were tasked to patrol the tobacco rows and pick off fat juicy worms and squish them in the red clay. We’d cross the railroad tracks into town and visit the general store and post office run by Gramma’s youngest sister, Frieda Casteel. We’d hang out and play pool at the home of our second cousins, the three Casteel sisters, who were cute and joked with us about being our “kissin’ cousins.” On hot afternoons, we’d take a rowboat out on a deep murky pond shaded by tall trees, watch for water moccasins, and fish for catfish and bluegill in a lazy, desultory way. We swam at the country club pool in nearby London with our Curry cousins. We waded in the shallow Rockcastle River and picked off leeches. We walked the woods, where I was thrilled to find a twelve-inch-long fossil (later identified as a fossilized fragment of a giant club moss from Mesozoic forests). I think this all was my dad and uncle’s idea to initiate us into the world of their childhoods, and something about it did stick with me.

Saint Sylvester Cemetery, where Gramma is buried, lies behind the little Catholic church atop Muster Hill that I remember attending when I visited. Google Maps helped me get to East Bernstadt, but I happened upon the church on my own, seeing a sign and then looking up the hill at the white clapboard structure, jarring loose memories from fifty years ago. Paul Muster’s tobacco farm across the road is no longer there, and trees have grown up around the church, but surprisingly, East Bernstadt itself hasn’t changed much. Interstate 75 passes within a few miles of the town, as the crow flies, but I had to drive over ten miles from the nearest interchange to get to it, a forgotten town in the Dan’l Boone National Forest. The cemetery is half full of my kinfolk – Musters and Blunschis and Currys and Casteels and Duers. There were six graves of family members who served in World War II. Counting my dad, at least seven of my relatives, from a town that has never numbered more than 700, fought in that war. Army Air Force Lieutenant Henry Muster died in the South Pacific on January 3, 1945. All the others returned home.

Being there felt comfortable and comforting, like lounging on a weatherbeaten couch on a front porch. I drove the five miles into London, the county seat. When I stopped at a Burger King to grab dinner, the woman handing me my change wished me “a blessed day” and the teenage boy who took my order and then handed it to me addressed me as “bud” in a way that made it seem as if we’d always been the best of friends. I camped for the night in Levi Jackson State Park, just south of London, and began the next morning with a walk through fern-flooded woods. I packed up my camp, filled the car with gas, and headed south for twenty miles on a narrow, winding state highway through national forest land, at least two Confederate flags along the way obstinately and obscenely flying from front porches.

I then picked up the Cumberland Gap Parkway going east, which not surprisingly, took me to the Cumberland Gap itself, a V-shaped breach in the Cumberland Mountains ridgeline through which European American settlers had trickled and then flooded west in the late 18th century. I pulled off to take a look, saw signs for Pinnacle Overlook, and drove the steep cutback road to the top for an amazing view from 2,500 feet to the east of that passageway that had been a buffalo trace and a Cherokee and Shawnee trail and then the Wilderness Road.

The story of Appalachia is one of people bound to the land “by the investment of love and work, by family loyalty, by memory and tradition” (Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America). But it’s also the story of a land that for the last 130 years has been far more exploited than nurtured. Maybe I’m drawn to the potential of the beauty hidden within that tragedy. I reckon, after all’s said and done, the place is still right pretty.

Trees of My Youth

My youth was spent in a two-story cross-gabled house on Lakeview Boulevard in Stow, Ohio, in the middle of the Western Reserve, that gift to the Connecticut Yankees (as we learned in our seventh-grade Ohio History class), and on the land of the Kaskaskia and Erie peoples (which we didn’t learn about). I lived there from the time I was five until I left home in the fall of my eighteenth year. We moved there as a family of five – my parents, two younger sisters, and me. When I left, we numbered twelve. And I was happy to reduce the population by 8⅓ percent.

Our yard is still firmly embedded in my memory. That was our domain, offering the potential of a self-contained world that satisfied my budding curiosity. It was a half-acre lot, but it always seemed like more because the house was positioned on the south part, leaving a large side yard that slid down a short hill into the backyard. That was the neighborhood sledding hill, always well stocked with the fresh powder of lake-effect snow. A tight row of red pines delineated the north boundary of the backyard, between the Ingrams’ yard and ours. That row of pines then elled into a privacy fence on the west property line between the Rubels’ yard and ours. When the hill got icy from heavy use, or a novice sledder was making a first try on the slope, the trunks of those pines became dangerous obstacles, inflicting a fair array of stitches over the years. Tucked along those back pines was a row of red raspberry canes that we were expected to tend in the summer, picking off the Japanese beetles and dropping them in a jar of gasoline.

In the middle of the backyard towered a majestic tuliptree – Whitman (in Specimen Days) called it “the Apollo of the woods” – which served as second base on the kickball-wiffleball-baseball diamond that dominated the yard, where the neighborhood kids gathered in the summer to play till dusk. The tuliptree, or tulip poplar, is one of this continent’s largest trees, and ours was no exception, over eighty feet tall. This meant that most balls hit to center field would get knocked down in mid-flight. The savvy kid learned to hit or kick to right or left field. The tree had no conveniently low branches, so we rarely climbed it, unless we wanted to get a good look at the large yellow-green blossoms that would emerge in June. We couldn’t see the orange sherbet swirl at the bottom of the flower’s tulip-like cup unless we got up in the tree. I raked up a lot of those lazy four-lobed leaves over the years.

Two sweetgums flanked the south half of the house, one in the front and the other in the back, arboreal single quotes. They too were tall lovely trees, rising above the steeply pitched roof, so close to the house that some adventurous members of our family were known to have snuck out of the second-floor bathroom by clambering out the dormer window, onto the roof, and over to the tree, then climbing down into the front yard. The sweetgums were fascinating specimens, and comfortable trees to spend time in. Their glossy green, star-shaped leaves were distinctive, as were the small, woody, prickly balls that held the seeds favored by mourning doves, among other songbirds. When I shared the south-facing second-floor bedroom with two of my brothers, I often awoke in the summer to the gentle alarm of their monotonous laments.

The tree’s branches were decorated with corky ridges that we’d pick off during moments of summer idleness. I discovered my first walking stick while sitting in one of those trees. The sweetgum in our backyard was located at the top of a rise that slalomed down to the sandbox, swing set, and tetherball pole that essentially served as the home team’s dugout. I loved climbing to its topmost branch, above the peak of the roof, so high no one knew I was there. I would quietly survey the neighborhood – the Mariolas’ enticingly blue backyard pool, old Weezy’s big kitchen garden, often raided for its tart treat of rhubarb stalks – and, farther off, the magical and misty distances. It was a great way to escape from my life and daydream. Each autumn, these sweetgums would give an impressive final performance, each leaf singing its own part in an elaborate round of gold to orange to scarlet to burgundy.

Our backyard was also home to a pair of Chinese chestnuts, cousins to the beautiful American chestnuts that had been all but wiped out by blight. In contrast to the grand American Chestnuts, these natives to China and Korea were rather scrubby. Nevertheless, the long sprays of white catkins that bloomed like floral fireworks in June always fulfilled their promise of a good nut harvest. The one next to third base had a long low branch that even the littlest kids could hang from or sit on. The runner on third had permission to step off the base to sit on it and swing his or her legs until someone hit them home. Those were the ground rules. 

In the fall, we all knew better than to walk barefoot under those trees – the green chestnut husks were painfully spiky and hard to see. But when they started dropping, we knew it was harvest time. We’d gather up the chestnuts and take them over to the Kempell’s backyard fire pit two doors down, get a blaze going until we had glowing embers, put an old grill over it all, and then set our chestnuts on that. When they were ready, their thin shells would pop open, roasted chestnuts flying everywhere. Nothing tasted better – like tiny sweet potatoes.

The empty lot directly behind our house was waiting to be developed, but meanwhile it was our little patch of wild. I remember once walking into a ground nest of yellow-jackets there. I ran like crazy out of the lot and around our house, wailing and howling until my mom came out and ripped off my t-shirt (beneath which a crew of yellow-jackets were trapped) and then patched me up. A stand of sassafras grew in those woods. Gramma Duer, who was born and raised in eastern Kentucky and whom my dad brought out from Akron to stay with us every weekend, would ask me to dig up the roots so she could steep them to make sassafras tea for us. We thought of it as root beer tea. The large, soft leaves came in three forms – egg-shaped, mitten-shaped, and three-lobed – and carried a hint of that root beer smell when crushed. I took to eating them whenever I had a hankering. I got a fair amount of grief from my friends for this quirky habit, but I stuck with it. The soft leaves had a mild flavor, almost creamy when slowly chewed. Years later, I learned that the Choctaw people of the Mississippi Delta famously dried and ground sassafras leaves to make filé powder, used in Cajun dishes such as filé gumbo. I hope this vindicates me. Or, as I might have said back then, “So there!”

Are any of those trees still standing? Have they been cared for as well as they cared for us? I like to think the tuliptree, at least, endures – its species has been known to live for up to three centuries. In Neil Young’s “Helpless,” he sings about his memories of youth, transfixed by their beauty, unable to return to the past or change it, perhaps unable to be anyone other than who he was becoming. That sweetgum needed deep roots to hold its singular forty-foot trunk in place. I may have swayed in the wind but I knew I was grounded. I don’t remember wanting to grow up to become anything – firefighter, baseball player, president – but I wanted to become something. In that tree, I could rise above my years and gain perspective. The view from the lookout of that tree’s spire, the blurry promise of that horizon, thrilled me in a way that’s hard to explain. I had no idea what kind of life lay ahead, but I knew I was being asked to pay attention to the possibilities, and to say yes.

Where I’m From, Part 1

The ubiquitous Goodyear blimp over downtown Akron

Sometimes I use poetry to excavate and examine my life. I admire how Adrianne Lenker, of the band Big Thief, connects her art to memory. In a New Yorker profile piece she said, “I like my songs to be reminders of certain things that I don’t want to forget.” And in a Song Exploder podcast, she talked about her song “Cattails”: “It’s encapsulated in my memory in this beautiful way that I can return to.” 

A third-grader in 1962, I became an altar boy amidst the changes of Vatican II. In eighth grade, I was tapped to serve funeral masses, which would get me out of class, offer me plenty of chances to sling the incense, and sometimes result in an envelope of tips from the grieving family. This poem was written in response to a prompt I’d handed to my students, based on a poem by George Ella Lyon.

Where I’m From

I’m from the six o’clock mass assignment

the sleepy stumbling five-minute walk from home

to enter the dark silence of the sanctuary

I’m from the black cassock buttoned to my knees

and the loose lacy sleeves of the white surplice

I’m from the lighting of the tall candles

throwing a dim flickering light over 

the widows with their rosaries and novenas

and the rows of empty wooden pews

I’m from the balancing of the weighty Missal in my hands

so Father Archibald could read the prayers and rituals

the presentation of the crystal cruets of water and wine

the lifting of the clutch of altar bells

their sudden ring piercing the silence

signaling the miraculous transubstantiation

I’m from the small black disk of incense

we lit and placed in the censer, which we then 

swung from its chain with sober abandon

the holy smoke rising to the vaulted ceiling

the acrid smell of some burning plant resin

some sandalwood or frankincense or myrrh

I’m from bowed heads and genuflections and 

overheated by the vestments and hungry for breakfast

growing faint and woozy on the altar

I’m from the Pater Noster qui es in caelis

the Latin memorized in third grade

the Dominus vobiscum and the Et cum spiritu tuo

And I’m from stalling after mass as we disrobed

waiting for the priest to leave 

so we could sample the communion wine

to see what God tasted like

In Marilynne Robinson’s beautiful novel Housekeeping she writes, “There is so little to remember of anyone – an anecdote, a conversation at table. But every memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfill itself, and become flesh, and that the wanderers will find a way home, and the perished, whose lack we always feel, will step through the door finally and stroke our hair with dreaming, habitual fondness, not having meant to keep us waiting long.”

Hide and Seek

Immersed in the act of hiding,

finding the unlikeliest nook. Then I become

tiny, silent, still, inconspicuous, invisible,

inside the willow thicket by the swing set,

becoming a part of the background, or 

nothing, a secret never whispered.

When footsteps approach,

breathing is postponed.

The art of camouflage.

One by one, the others are discovered;

they too join the search, increasing the numbers

seeking the lost lamb or lone wolf, who becomes

more removed from this world, more

distant, until he abandons his body,

there in its hiding place,

and joins the search.

As the summer dusk gathers and thickens,

he waits to hear the song that calls him back:

“Olly olly oxen free!”

In the way that memory sometimes works, swinging from scene to scene free-associatively, I’ll turn to another vestment of my past. And another lovely quote from Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping: “For why do our thoughts turn to some gesture of a hand, the fall of a sleeve, some corner of a room on a particular anonymous afternoon, even when we are asleep, and even when we are so old that our thoughts have abandoned other business? What are all these fragments for, if not to be knit up finally?”

Concerning a Pair of Pants

They are floating there in the closet of my memories from some fifty years ago, so palpable that I can almost reach out and touch them. I was sixteen when I bought them at one of the hip boutiques sprouting up in Midwestern cities such as Akron, reeking of patchouli. It was an audacious purchase for a little white suburban Catholic-school kid.

They were silvery and shimmery and sheer, made from some space-age material. Polyester? Rayon? Sprayon? Hip-hugging and bell-bottomed, they felt like nothing and yet seemed to express everything I aspired to be. I figured I had nothing to lose except my virginity.

Occasionally, I wore them to school, but it was hard to feel studious when so attired. Instead, they were my go-to party pants, a costume that put me in the mood to be somebody else: the distant cousin of Ziggy Stardust. I felt Funkadelic and Superfly. I was ready to “take a walk on the wild side.” 

Without thinking, I strutted and sauntered and slunk as if a soul brother – as if! I usually got into some kind of small-time trouble, something involving a carload of guys and a mooning incident or a bottle of peppermint schnapps or a girl named Patty or Sally or Megan. On a particularly fortuitous and far-fetched night, all three.

What became of those pants? Who knows? I literally or figuratively outgrew them the summer after my senior year.

I was born in the Rust Belt city of Akron, Ohio, and until the age of five, I lived with my parents in a third-floor apartment on the corner of East Voris Street and Wolf Ledges Parkway, in South Akron. This poem was certainly paying attention to Carl Sandburg’s “Chicago.” 

I Sing of Akron

Rubber Capital of the World

I’m talking tires, my friend – vulcanized tires

B. F. Goodrich, Goodyear, General Tire, Firestone, Seiberling

Those vast smoky factories making tires for Motor City’s madness

“Wherever wheels are rolling, no matter what the load

The name that’s known is Firestone, where the rubber meets the road”

Friday night high school football games were played at the Rubber Bowl

The working class crowd’s rumbles and cheers rolled out of the stadium

And steered the steep slope of Derby Downs, home of the All-American Soap Box Derby

Not far from the hangars that housed those bulbous leviathans of the sky, the Goodyear blimps

I remember driving across the long high viaduct over the Cuyahoga River Gorge

The orange neon lights flashing A-C-M-E ACME FOODS, teaching me how to read

But in the shadows beneath that bridge, what perverse versions of torture took place?

What did you do to your sons and daughters – your winos, your whores, your day laborers with their glazed eyes?

Afterward, did you give them a bottle of Norka pop – your name spelled backward in all the colors – grape, cherry, lemon-lime?

Do the West Virginia hillbillies who escaped the coal mines, coughing up black lung, still live by the factories, in Goodyear Heights and Firestone Park?

Do the Italians and their ravioli-and-cannoli families still live near St. Anthony’s on North Hill?

Even now, the voluptuous syllables of those Italian names haunt me: Gina Iacobucci, Gina Iacobucci, Gina Iacobucci

Do the Ukranians still live on the south side, within walking distance of Holy Ghost Church?

Debbie Ukraniec and those other beautiful dark-eyed Ukraine girls made me sing and shout

And what magic inspired that hardcourt hero of the Fighting Irish, Saint V–St. Mary’s LeBron?

Meanwhile, the Wops and Micks and Polacks and Bohunks mix it up

In Akron, city of factories and working class neighborhoods

City of tires, city of rubber

Chrissie Hynde’s song “My City Was Gone” will take us out. A couple years older than me, she went to Firestone High School and then Kent State before moving to London and eventually putting together The Pretenders.

Friends of the Devil, Part 3

(Hitchhiking sign from a comp notebook. On the way to see Tony in Ithaca, NY, Summer 1978. I used the Greek spelling of Odysseus’s hometown.)

To reset the scene: It’s a couple days after Christmas, 1975, and I’m hitching back east, from Phoenix to New Orleans, to hang out with my friend Tony Hoagland before heading back to Iowa City to start my second semester at the university. This was not the most thoughtfully planned trip – getting turned away at the Mexican border threw a monkey wrench into whatever itinerary I’d envisioned. But a true vagabond rolls with those punches. I would often use a sign when hitchhiking to suggest that I had a destination in mind, to give the appearance of being goal-oriented, but whenever an interesting detour presented itself, I almost always took it. 

Somewhere in the middle of West Texas, a Volkswagen van pulled off the road to pick me up. The sight of that blocky two-tone body rolling to a stop was always a good omen. Two long-haired brothers from Oregon were on their way to New Orleans – it’s hard to imagine a more perfect ride. To add some frosting to that carrot cake, after we’d gotten to know each other and gone a few miles down the road, they pulled out a big bag of weed and tossed it to me, along with a pack of Zig-Zags, and asked me to roll some joints. I should point out that besides being able to fill the miles with conversation, a good hitchhiker should be able to read a map and navigate and to roll a big tight doobie, both valuable life skills. (And yes, I know that GPS, Google Maps, and the “pre-rolls” at the pot dispensaries now make those skills superfluous.) As we passed around the jay and rolled through the bleak West Texas landscape, I was feeling mellow and decided to share with the brothers my “getting high is an act of consciousness-raising” rap – that pot enables one to see the world and the people who live in it with more insight and compassion. This got no response from the brothers; I assumed they were just taking it in, mulling over the ramifications. But about fifteen miles down the road, they pulled off and told me this was as far as they were going … with me. I was flabbergasted, and obviously disappointed. I guess they weren’t ready for that message.

One of the challenges of hitchhiking was dealing with the occasional unwanted sexual advance. I caught a ride from a traveling salesman somewhere between San Antonio and Houston. Into my second day on the road by then, I grabbed a nap whenever I could, and warmed by the winter sun slanting in through the passenger side window, I dozed off. But I soon woke with a start to find the driver reaching over and fondling my genitals. I quickly disabused him of the notion that I’d be okay with that. It was a gentle rebuff – I still wanted the ride and had no problem with him as long as he understood my lack of interest. It was a bit awkward after that – he was clearly self-conscious about my refusal – and that ride also ended sooner than expected. Oh well.

Getting through Houston was a drag, as it so often was in a big city – dealing with heavy traffic and lots of short rides – but by early afternoon, I was in Baytown, just east of Houston, feeling the warm breezes from the Gulf of Mexico and realizing I might just make it to Tony’s that day. Passing north of Port Arthur, I said a little prayer for Janis Joplin, who grew up there and hated it for how she was treated in high school. Janis, who sang with so much heart and soul, who had died five years before that, who if there’s any justice in the world is somewhere finally being loved by some good man or woman. Just listen to her bluesy rendition of “Cry Baby.” In the adlib solo of an alternate recording of the song (in the “legacy edition” of her posthumous Pearl on Spotify) she says, “There’s this dude, man, walking around the fucking highways of America with a pack on his back, looking for his identity, right? But I wanna say, baby, don’t you know you left your momma here at home – you left your good-loving momma right here at home.” He sure did, Janis.

Late that night I was heading down Louisiana Highway 1. Dropped off at Boogie’s Bar, a roadhouse between Larose and Cut Off (“No Parking on the Shoulder”), about ten miles from Tony’s, I walked in to use a payphone to call him, realizing that everyone in the place was speaking French, more precisely the Louisiana French dialect. I immediately dug the scene. Tony showed up twenty minutes later, and we commenced to hug and spout poetry: “Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road, / Healthy, free, the world before me.” We regaled each other with stories of what we’ve been doing since we last saw each other in Iowa City, maybe two weeks before.

For the next week we kicked back. I caught up on that sleep I missed on the road. Tony would get up and meditate and I would take the family’s Great Dane for long walks down to the edge of the bayou to watch the shrimpers unload their catch. We wrote poems and read them to each other, and those of the poets we were into at the moment – César Vallejo, Anna Akhmatova, Gary Snyder, Robert Bly, Adrienne Rich, Tomas Tranströmer. We listened to The Basement Tapes and talked about Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue, which had just finished its crazy tour. On New Year’s Eve, we hung out in his backyard, sharing a bottle of prosecco, gazing up at the flood of stars and random fireworks in the Mississippi River Delta night.

Over those next couple of years, Tony became one of my most steadfast friends. After he graduated and moved on, we stayed in touch. In February 1980, I connected up with him in Tucson. One night, he and I dropped acid and got lost among the saguaro and cholla in the Sonoran Desert. Slowly coming down later, back at his apartment, we found ourselves gazing deeply into each other’s eyes. It was the closest I ever came to physically loving a man, and some part of me regrets not finding out how that would’ve felt. 

A week before classes would start up again, Tony gave me a lift to New Orleans so I could pick up I-55 and follow the Mississippi, against the current, toward Iowa City. As we were about to part company, we started singing “Friend of the Devil,” trading off Robert Hunter’s verses, joining on the chorus: “Set out runnin’ but I take me time. A friend of the Devil is a friend of mine. If I get home before daylight, I just might get some sleep tonight.” All told, it would take almost four week and just under five thousand miles to get home to my furnished room above the Montessori School on Reno Street.

And on October 23, 2018, Tony passed away. I still miss his sweet brilliance...

(Tony from the mid-1980s. On the back of the photo: “what I look like now”.)

To My Friend Tony

who passed from this world yesterday.

You are already missed, my brother.

I count myself lucky to have known you, to have 

picked the winning Lotto numbers of our lifelong friendship.

I hung out with you when we were young in Iowa City.

Remember walking into Gabe's one night?

A jazz band was playing on the little stage.

You and I seized the opportunity of the empty dance floor

and tore it up – two live wires ricocheting around the room

until there was only room for us,

two unknown poets making up new moves as we went,

unaware of anything else except the sacred chords

vibrating through our bodies.

Every time we crossed paths over the years – New 

Orleans, Ithaca, Tucson, Santa Fe – was a blessing.

And now I’m letting out the dog and standing in the darkness, 

thinking about you and your poetry and your life.

The moon is full of you tonight, Tony.

Friends of the Devil, Part 2

(Summer 1975, at Prch’s house on the outskirts of Ann Arbor, with our friends Tom and Whiskey Stone. One of the few photos of me from those days. )

After spending a few days checking out the Austin scene with my friend Prch and checking in at the Mexican Consulate to get a tourist visa, I was on my way. I continued hitchhiking south on I-35, down through San Antonio to the border town of Laredo. As I got into the Rio Grande Valley and closer to the border, the rides grew harder to come by, but I did make it to the border crossing by that afternoon. The Laredo-to-Nuevo-Laredo crossing was the third-busiest on that troubled and contentious 2,000-mile border. I walked across a bridge to the Mexican customs office and showed them my passport. They asked me how long I planned to stay: “Tres semanas.” What was my purpose for visiting Mexico: “Vagar y maravillarse (To wander and wonder).” How much money did I have: “Cien dólares.” They rolled their eyes and told me I couldn’t enter their country. 

I hadn’t planned on this. Did they want a bribe, the famous mordida, that little bite out of my wallet? I’ll never know. I had no idea how to present such a thing, my Spanish not fluent enough to negotiate the subtleties of such a transaction, and I had little money to spare in any case. Crestfallen, disappointed, somewhat embarrassed, I walked back across the bridge and considered my options. I could’ve tried another border crossing – Piedras Negras was about 120 miles to the northwest – but I’d lost my confidence in this venture. The family of my high school buddy Michael had moved to Phoenix in the past year, and I had their address. He was going to school at San Francisco State, but he’d be coming home for Christmas. I decided to head there to meet up with him and then decide what to do next. So, back to San Antonio and then west on I-10 toward Phoenix. One thing I came to appreciate on this trip was the vast emptiness of West Texas. Between San Antonio and El Paso is a 550-mile stretch of rangeland and Chihuahuan Desert, punctuated by oil derricks and dusty little towns. The soundtrack might be the quiet skittering of small lizards and tumbleweeds, then a single extended bent note on a Fender Stratocaster, then the opening chords of Ennio Morricone’s theme to The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

Hitching was an art, a practice, and a philosophy, all rolled into one. Of course, hitchhikers depended on the kindness and generosity of strangers, but they contributed something to that transaction. It was their job to be good company. That might entail telling stories of the road, or listening to the stories of the driver, or just participating in a conversation to stave off drowsiness. It was the hitchhiker’s responsibility to be interested in the lives of the drivers, to practice empathy. Sometimes this might involve a good deal of acting, but the best hitchhikers were actually interested on some level in the lives of their temporary traveling companions. 

I didn’t get as many rides from truck drivers as you might expect – many trucking companies forbid drivers to pick up hitchhikers, and truckers had less need for company because of their non-stop conversations with other truckers on their CB radios. But Bill pulled his eighteen-wheeler off the road to give me a lift. In his tall white Stetson hat, he was more gregarious than most truckers, and we talked steadily above the roar of the rig and the CB chit-chat. We stopped at the Flying J Travel Center in Fort Stockton for coffee and met up with a few other truckers. Here’s one story passed around: “Once I was driving a rig with this one kid and we get pulled over in Denver and the trooper pulls out his ticket book to write us up. This fool-ass kid rolls down his window and says, ‘I’ll take a cheeseburger, fries, and a chocolate malt.’ The trooper was so amazed by his gall that he let us off with a warning.”

I lucked into a long ride from Daniel, a University of Texas student on his way home to El Paso. We hit it off well for the next three hours, and as we were approaching the city and evening was settling in, Daniel invited me to spend the night at his family’s place. His parents were cool – a Jewish couple living in suburban comfort in the foothills of the Franklin Mountains – glad to have their son home for the holidays and willing to welcome this scraggly kid who had tagged along. After having been on the road for two days straight, I was grateful for the sit-down dinner and bed they offered. Daniel gave me a lift back to I-10 the next morning, and I continued on my way.

I had more good luck that day – long rides from friendly folks – and reached the sun-soaked sprawl of Phoenix by the afternoon of Christmas Eve. It took a while to find the home of Michael’s family on West Solar Drive, but I arrived and knocked on the door, feeling a bit like a Leonard Cohen song, like I “was just some Joseph looking for a manger.” Michael’s parents were taken aback at the sight of me. Though John and Kay knew me well from when Michael, Jon, and I lived together in Pennsylvania, they weren’t expecting me, and it turned out that Michael had decided to stay in San Francisco over winter break. There was an awkward moment, but they generously welcomed me in, insisting I spend Christmas with them and their five kids, perhaps knowing there might not be a lonelier feeling than being on the road on Christmas Day. 

As was often the case among couples of that generation, John and Kay seemed an unlikely pairing – gruff Lithuanian American father and tender-hearted mom of Scotch-Irish stock – but they somehow made it work. Michael’s younger brother Steve was home from Northern Arizona University and staying in the garage, which John had rigged up with two beds, a fridge, and a tv. So I roomed with him, essentially filling in for Michael. Steve and I hung out, drinking beer and watching late-night tv (including a new show, Saturday Night Live), but neither of us knew the city, so it was all rather low-key. I took lots of long walks in the evening to give the family some space.

Four days later I was bidding my adopted family a grateful farewell and heading back east. My goal was to get to New Orleans by New Year’s Eve to meet up with my friend Tony Hoagland. This would be a long stretch of hitching – some 1,500 miles – but I would be assured of mild temperatures and I was well-rested from my time with Michael’s family. In September, Tony and I first met by the bulk peanut butter bins at New Pioneer Co-op on South Gilbert Street and instantly connected. We were both young poets and Deadheads and new to Iowa City. I was working as a night baker at Stone Soup Restaurant in the basement of Center East, on the corner of Jefferson and Clinton, and Tony frequented Barbara Welch’s Yoga Center, located on the first floor of that building, so our paths frequently crossed. Tony was a short wild sprite with long blonde hair and a great zen energy (who would go on to become an impressive poet and academic). Thoughtful, upbeat, brilliantly funny, he lived in the moment, and I immediately admired and liked him. His father, a retired Army doctor, had settled in the little town of Galliano, deep in the bayou seventy miles south of New Orleans. I looked forward to seeing Tony and digging the bayou and celebrating the end of 1975 with him. But as I said, that was 1,500 miles away.

Friends of the Devil, Part 1

(Me with my friends Prch & Jon & the rest of our high school senior class Student Senate. 1972)

A year after my first hitchhiking trip south and west [see Falling in Love for the First Time, Part 3], I pointed myself in that direction again. It was mid-December 1975, the beginning of winter break, and two degrees above zero that morning in Iowa City. I’d just taken a semester of Intensive Spanish at the University of Iowa and was picking it up fairly quickly because of the rather ridiculous fact of my four years of high school Latin. The plan was to get as far into Mexico as I could in a month. So, west to Des Moines and then southbound on 1-35. I joyfully kicked up roadside feed corn and caught a ride from Des Moines to Kansas City before I’d even had a chance to stick out my thumb. By the time I reached Wichita the wind was whipping unabated across the endless rolling prairie and the sun was turning orange and saying goodbye. I stopped at a Denny’s for a cheese omelet and coffee and unfiltered Camels. 

I caught one more ride to the outskirts of Oklahoma City. As deep night settled in, I found myself at a busy highway crossroad with little room for a driver to pull off and pick me up. An Okie state trooper stopped to give me a ride. Although this was a bit unusual – and I was keenly aware of the two joints tucked in my breast pocket – a good hitchhiker never turns down a reasonable ride. The trooper was cool, just helping me out with a ride to a better – and safer – spot to hitch outside of Norman. But it was getting late, the traffic was light, and I was traveling light, with no heavy coat to ward off the winds. It was pitch black except for a fool moon and cold cold cold. I retreated to a nearby Ramada Inn, where I settled into a lobby chair to warm up … and then intermittently sleep till dawn. A man in a red blazer stopped by to tell me his clientele would be around soon, so I should get a coffee and be on my way. Oklahoma was okay.

By that afternoon, I made it to Austin, where the climate was more accommodating. I was stopping off there, hoping to meet up with one of my closest high school buddies, Jim “Prch” Prchlik. Prch grew up in Detroit but landed at Walsh Jesuit High School outside Akron at the beginning of his sophomore year when his dad, a former Detroit Lions defensive lineman, took an executive position at a nearby Ford Motor Company plant. Prch was a hard-nosed linebacker  on the football team, but he was also gregarious, fun-loving, and sweet-tempered. We bonded over our mutual admiration of Jack Kerouac’s novels about exploring the road and all that entailed. We agreed with Jack that “there was nowhere to go but everywhere, so just keep on rolling under the stars.” The summer after high school, we’d hitched back east to Cape Cod, and when Prch started school at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor became an important hub of my own hitchhiking trips. In the summer of 1981, we met up at his friend Albert’s apartment in Kassel, Germany, and then traveled together, one more time, for over a month, down through the Vosges Mountains and into Italy as far south as Rome, a memorable story of hitching and backpacking worth retelling some time.

Prch had given me the address of his friend Kate, whom he was planning to meet up with. He had a drive-away from Ann Arbor to Los Angeles, given two weeks to transport the car and $200 for the effort. Kate was going to accompany him on the Austin–LA leg of the trip. The address led me to a little trailer, where Kate lived with her sister Rose and Rose’s partner Frank and their baby. Prch hadn’t arrived yet, but I met Kate, who could simply be described as a sweet, free-spirited hippie. I know that’s a trite cliché, but there’s a reason it exists. One sensed that carefree Kate was up for just about anything, ready to enjoy the transient party that represented our lives then. That evening, I tried to make myself useful by cleaning up after dinner and entertaining the baby.

Not much extra room in the trailer that night, but Kate directed me to a spot in her bedroom where I could throw down my sleeping bag. We talked for a while, comparing notes about our mutual friend, and turned out the light. Before long, Kate was inviting me to share her bed. I felt a bit conflicted – this was the girlfriend of my best friend after all. But how do I explain the ethos of the time? Kate knew what she wanted, and it was hard to argue with her offer of the comfort of her bed. Our generation wanted to try everything. We wanted to know what it felt like to be impulsive, intense, intimate. We wanted to make sure we didn’t repeat the mistakes of our parents’ generation, of the conventional and conservative fifties of cufflinks and cash flow.

The next afternoon, I was scoping out the scene down on State Street near the University of Texas campus when I ran into Prch. We shared big hugs and laughter, celebrated the serendipity of life, and went off to the Armadillo World Headquarters to catch a show by Quicksilver Messenger Service, one of the fine rock bands that emerged from the late sixties San Francisco scene. I never said anything to Prch about the previous night with Kate, perhaps because I felt that in the grand scheme of things our dalliance was inconsequential, just a bubble in time. Leonard Cohen explains this feeling best in his song “Sisters of Mercy.” After introducing us to these compassionate sisters, he sings, “And you won’t make me jealous if I hear that they’ve sweetened your night. We weren’t lovers like that, and besides it would still be all right.” 

Before I continued south and Prch and Kate headed west, I stayed a few more days in Austin, spending my days with the two of them, and my nights next door in the trailer of Kate’s friend, Bob Fullalove. In retrospect, I realize it would've been better to be straight with my friend. If there was truly no harm in that one sweet night with Kate, then I should’ve been totally up-front. In fact, when Kate and Prch got to California, she did tell him about our night together, and he was cool with it, that generous sharing of ourselves. Back in the spring, they’d agreed to give each other permission to enjoy the company of others when they weren’t together, that it might even be bonding if they were with someone the other was close to. Still, I wish I’d been honest with my friend, and perhaps this will serve as my apology to him. As I get older, and have a little more hindsight, I can begin to forgive who I was, and realize I still have much to learn.

Back to Square One

(Jolly Times in the Fifties. My father the liquor salesman is on the left.)

I’M STEPPING BACK a moment from stories about life during my early twenties to what might be thought of as origin stories. What events in my early years have perhaps guided the course of my life? This first poem is primarily constructed from terms that Merriam-Webster’s determined to have entered the lexicon in the year of my birth. In some ways, I believe, us baby boomers intentionally took paths that were in opposition to the mundane and passionless Fifties of our parents’ generation. During the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, the activist Jack Weinberg was quoted as saying, “Never trust anyone over thirty,” which became a mantra for my generation. I think today’s Gen Z would agree with that: “Okay, boomers, out of the way. It’s our turn.” 

Personal History

I was born in the year of the baby boom

The year of rock ‘n’ roll and videotape

The year of Elvis in Memphis, already turning velvet

I was born in the year of the red scare and the blacklist

I was born in the year of fear and lies (weren’t we all?)

The year of the polygraph and the polygraphist

The year of blockbusting and Brown v. Board of Education

The year of domino theories, air-raid shelters, and UnAmerican Activities

(And I’m not even sure what an American Activity is)

I was born in year of the cash flow escaping to exurbia

The year of the high-rise, the how-to, the soft sell

The year of agribusiness, yellow pages, and teleconferences

I was born in the year of the fish stick

In the year of tie tacks and pasties

I was born in the year of I Like Ike and I Love Lucy

I was born in the year of cha-cha-cha

Elvis in Memphis at Sun Records

Senator Joe McCarthy strangling the mic at a House Unamerican Activities Committee meeting

Some of my father’s ciff links & tie tacks

IN MANY WAYS, my early teen years were defined by a range of rebellious reactions to my father and his opinions about the world. Over time, I’ve come to respect, or at least understand, what made him tick. He was certainly more complicated than this second poem suggests, but it does offer one take on who he was.

Things My Father Used To Say

“Looooorrrrrdy mercy”

His contraction of “Lord, have mercy on me”

A pitiable plea in the face of an unjust world

He would stretch out that first syllable

Injecting equal doses of dismay and disgust

“Oh my aching back” was another of his mottos

The accent anapestic leaning heavily on the third syllable

Although I never knew him to have back problems

Just ten children and a grinding job in sales

That he refused to walk away from

His Kentucky-flavored “Dad gum it”

Dramatic emphasis on the first syllable

The sound-swapping spoonerism made this curse

More acceptable to our uncorrupted ears

Although we knew what he meant

We knew the disappointment and doubt

Expressed in all these slogans

His battle cries strained through gritted teeth

As he engaged aghast in the fight

He had with the world

He was always the younger brother

Trying to prove something to someone

When he’d exclaim “For the love of Christ”

It never felt like love to us

THIS LAST POEM was written to address the theme of and to be performed at one of Drop the Mic shows produced by my friend, the brilliant Akwi Nji. This show’s theme took me back to playing four-square on the grade school playground. I could subtitle it “Confessions of a white cisgender male growing up in northeast Ohio,” as a way of acknowledging or admitting exactly where I’m coming from. Thankfully, this is no longer the only story, or only perspective, that we hear.

Back to Square One

Let me talk a bit about

the cruelty of grade school

lunch recess on the Holy

Family playground

where I was tagged 

with my first nickname

playing four-square

fierce first-grade battle

to become king of the ball

from the name my grandfather

lugged from Austria

from the shores of the Bodensee

from the German or Romansch

or French or Catalan or even Gaelic

the umlaut dumped at Ellis Isle

Dür meaning

hard, harsh, tough, hardy

rigid, stiff, difficult, stubborn

as in durable, duress, dour, like a door

became Du-er and then transformed 

in the scatological minds of my playmates

into Du-Du, a dis or burn which

because I didn't know what else to do

I endured

and learned about the world 

from the playground

liar liar pants on fire

sad tennis shoes dangling 

from a telephone wire

girls on the front parking lot

playing their secret jump rope games

I like coffee I like tea

I like boys and the boys like me

boys like me on the sprawling back lot

monkey business on the monkey bars

in the shadow of the gun-metal grey slide

worn smooth by a billion butts

we each put a foot in the circle

and spoke the magic spell

to decide who was It

eenie meenie miney moe

engine engine number nine 

first through eighth grades

our games were interwoven

and when it snowed

we put on heavy coats and boots

and played smear the queer

and I’d grab that football

and run for dear life

but I endured

the Sisters of Charity

in their grey habits and 

starched white headpieces and

belts of heavy wooden rosary beads

seemed to teach us all but charity

after school I'd clean the blackboard

of our tender-hearted first-grade teacher 

Sister Marie Dolores 

just to get near her joy

but in third grade Sister Augustine

was as cold and unflinching 

as a piece of coal

I endured that too

until I was ten

and working my first job

delivering eighty copies of the news

the Akron Beacon Journal

every afternoon after school

waiting with fellow paperboys

Mike Keller and Bob Greenwald

for our papers to be dropped off

smoking ciggies in the nearby woods

singing Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me Babe”

“no no no it ain’t me, babe”

they rechristened me Du-Babes

they dubbed me Du-Babes

and in the fourth grade Mrs. Voltz

whom none of us liked

neither her nor her mustache

called me out of my name

“I thought you were a doer!”

because I was talking in class I guess

engaged in the task of mastering

the witty aside, the flippant quip

because talking is not doing?

and so she changed the seating chart

surrounding me with girls

my favorite audience

and I avoided the looming presence

of our principal Sister Marie Pierre

and thereby endured

I learned to never wear

white socks with dress shoes

we called them parmas

because only the auto workers

from Parma did that

we wore blue oxfords

with button-down collars

and pencil-thin clip-on ties

and the girls showed us

who they liked by yanking off

the bozo button or fruit loop

on the back of our shirts

and the girls wore blue plaid 

jumpers and white blouses

but when Michelle Micale

came to our school in seventh grade

she did something to that blouse

that made us all think a lot

about the word bosom

and when someone spray-painted 69

on the back wall of the school

we studied and studied that number

until it revealed the mysteries of sex

by then I’d become simply Du 

the syllable affectionately elongated

some element on the periodic table

a noble gas perhaps

some musical note 

an invitation, an affirmation

the buddy you 

and I was finally ready for high school 

because I’d had enough of grade school

Falling in Love for the First Time, Part 3

(US 40 between Steamboat Springs & Denver, Whiteley Peak in the background)

That summer after Bobbie and I broke up, we both got busy with the rest of our lives. Our paths didn’t cross often, but when they did, it was sweet and comfortable. Because we’d developed this habit of writing letters to each other, these epistolary connections, Bobbie and I stayed in touch for the next ten years until we each became too busy with our growing families, me in Iowa City and her on Long Island. But recently, we started writing letters to each other again, picking up our “deep friendship” where it had left off 35 years ago – some kind of grace.

Bobbie and I did meet up in Denver again the year after our breakup. In early October 1974, I left my hodcarrier job in Kentucky and drove to Des Moines, where my family had moved. After I’d touched base with the fam and parked my VW Bug, I started hitchhiking. For anyone who came of age during the sixties and seventies, this wasn’t an uncommon experience, as it would be today. I started hitchhiking in high school out of necessity, walking down to Graham Road when I missed the bus and hitching the seven miles to school. I appreciated the practicality of it – filling an empty seat in a car going where I’m going, having a conversation with someone to pass the miles – as well as the mutual trust the act required. For someone “on the road,” a car can be more burden than convenience. With my backpack and sleeping bag and pup tent, and without a car, I was mobile and agile. Without expenses for gas and motels, what money I had could take me further, in terms of both distance and time.

The goal of this journey was to see the West Coast I’d read about in Jack Kerouac’s novels. Because it was early November, I picked the most southerly route, south to Austin and then west on I-10 to Tucson, stopping in those college towns to see what was going on. On a whim, I crossed into Mexico, catching a ride down through the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, a wilderness reserve, and walking across the border now vandalized by a 30-foot-tall steel-barred fence. Late at night, I crossed over, untouched, unquestioned, into the Sonoran border town of Sonoyta. I spent the night in a little cafe, waiting for a bus to take me the 60 miles southwest to Puerto Peñasco, a Gulf of California fishing town. No passport, no visa, virtually no Spanish, I camped in the dry hills north of town and swam in the sea. I just wanted to see what it felt like to be out of country, to be an outsider (if a white man can ever be such a thing).

A few days later I crossed back into the U.S. the same way – nothing to declare, other than the experience, and nobody to declare it to. I headed west to Laguna Beach, to the home of the oldest sister of my next-door neighbor pal, Pat Flowers. I spent a weekend in her and her husband’s apartment, finding an unlocked window after I realized they weren’t coming home. I checked out the ocean and hung out on the beach. As thanks for their unwitting hospitality, I baked a couple of loaves of bread and left them with a note. I headed up the coast to San Francisco, taking the Pacific Coast Highway from Malibu to Big Sur. I remember getting dropped off in Santa Barbara; the entrance ramp to the highway was stacked with young hitchhikers. I just went to the end of the line, knowing a ride would eventually come. I crashed at the apartment of my high school buddy Michael, who was a student at the University of San Francisco. Golden Gate Park and the Presidio were an easy walk away, but I spent my days wandering all over up and down that convivial city.

By mid-December I was heading back to Iowa to stay with my family while I worked to save money to take a second crack at college at the University of Iowa. I crossed the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge and headed east on I-80. The plan was to hitch straight through to Denver. I lucked into rides that took me through the night, catching naps along the way. I switched from I-80 to US 40 east of Salt Lake City. By the evening of the second day I was standing under a streetlight beside the highway in Steamboat Springs. The weather had been kind to me so far, but a snow front was moving in. I stood in the valley of this ski town ringed by mountains, hoping for one more ride to Denver, just 160 miles away, where I knew I would find rest and refuge at Bobbie’s apartment.

Just as I was thinking of giving in and finding the cheapest motel in Steamboat, a car stopped. This woman – let’s call her Tina – was heading to Denver and looking for some company into the night. She was a few years older than me but had lived much longer than I had. She wore an earned wariness and a ragged determination. She was escaping something, and I know she told me what it was, but the current stage in her escape plan was the only thing on my mind. We had just crossed the Continental Divide, and the snow was starting to come down, heavy flakes swirling around us. Talking a mile a minute, she reached across me to open the glove compartment and pull out a bottle of pills. I didn’t get a chance to read the label, but I didn’t need to; I knew these were going to help her get to Denver tonight. There’s a reason they’re called Co-Pilots, Coast to Coasts, Truck Drivers. 

As we drove deeper into the night, the traffic thinned out and the road got harder to find in snow now up to our hubcaps. She finally asked me to take the wheel; it would have to be on me to get us through. We begged for a semi to come along so we could follow its tracks. Beyond the headlights, blackness. Was that a mountain side beside us or empty air? I milked the radio dial for something to focus on. I like to think I found this song Bob Dylan recorded the previous year. Somewhere out there loomed Bear Mountain, Lawson Ridge, Whiteley Peak. No roadside rest stops, no gleaming neon high in the sky to guide us to Stuckey’s or Howard Johnson’s, no golden arches. We eventually connected up with I-70 in the smallest hours of the night – not much more traffic to guide us, but the snow had let up, that weather front stalled somewhere in the mountains.

As dawn was breaking in the east we crested a hill, and laid out below us, lights twinkling, sun glinting off the buildings, was Denver. We laughed, bleary, exhausted, relieved. We coasted down to the edge of the city, stopped at the first roadside breakfast diner we came upon, and celebrated making it through the night and out of the darkness with omelets and hash browns and coffee. A three-hour trip had taken over eight hours. We sheepishly looked at each other, unfamiliar in the daylight. I gave her Bobbie’s address near the University of Denver campus and we figured out how to get there. Of course, I never saw “Tina” again. I wonder if she was able to escape whatever trap she had found herself in. I wonder if she received as good a welcome as I did. I was lucky, catching Bobbie as she was getting ready to head out for her day. Her laughter of surprise and delight, my laughter of relief and wonder. We hugged, we talked. When she went off to classes, I took a long hot shower, pulled out my sleeping bag, found a comfortable sofa, and slept until she came home.

It’s amazing how our lives have run in parallel these past 35 years, raising kids, deciding in the middle of our lives to veer off our career paths to become high school teachers, responding to the direction our country has taken in recent years to march, protest, take action. That first letter from Bobbie was a gift. She wrote, “Your letter has made me think back to the people who shaped me. I know you and your love helped give me the confidence to know that I could be whoever I wanted to be.” Girl, that feeling is mutual.