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I think I first started hitchhiking when I was fourteen or fifteen, at my father’s prompting. Most of the time it wasn’t worth his time or effort to give me a ride to wherever I wanted to go. So he suggested I either use the ‘ol’ heel-toe express,’ or the ‘mare’s shanks’ or, if I grew tired of walking, stick out my thumb and catch a ride that way.
These days it’s hard to imagine. People rarely hitchhike, and, what’s more, people rarely pick up hitchhikers. I suppose it could be argued that there’s a good reason for this, but I have to wonder…is it any more dangerous than it ever was? Or are the risks simply exaggerated by a sensationalistic media and the power of urban legend?
I was fifteen when I hit the road for real. I was a sophomore in High School, and I was miserable. I had few friends, and I’d recently began feeling more isolated than ever. My best friend in school had simply disappeared one day, and rumor had it that he’d got a hold of some bad pot laced with PCP and had wigged out and had ended up back in the psych ward. Something similar had happened to him before, so perhaps it made sense.
So here it is, just after Halloween in 1981, and I’m standing on a freeway on-ramp in the dark trying to get to Central Oregon. I wanted to go see my stepmom, the one my dad had been with for eight years between the time I was four and the time I was twelve. More than anything I just needed to be away from where I was. My life as I’d known it had fractured and my imagination had alienated the people that had been, up until that point, my closest friends. I wasn’t sure why at the time, but I couldn’t stand being there anymore.
It took me roughly a day and a half to make it to the other side of Mt. Hood. As I was heading down the other side, dreary from lack of sleep and hunger, I was picked up by an officer from the Warm Springs Indian Reservation.
They stuck me in a holding cell and called my Dad, who came and got me a couple days later. He was angry, but, mostly, he was just confused and hurt. I didn’t know how to tell him why I’d done what I had, but it only had a little to do with him. No one understood me, I felt, least of all him.
He took me into Central Oregon and we went looking for people we’d known. A couple of his old friends offered to take me in for a while. They had a small ranch with several different animals, a wood-cutting business, and could use the help, they said. So I stayed there while my dad returned home.
I enrolled in school down there and, for the first time in my life, actually started to fit in. I worked with the father, cutting wood, and helped take care of the animals. At their suggestion, I also began studying the art of cannibis cultivation, since that was their secondary sideline. In fact, as it turned out, they were the largest suppliers of pot that side of the cascades. Among their customers was a prominent pharmacist and the police dispatcher, whose son sold it at the high school.
She was a nice lady and I really liked both her boys, who were a few years younger than I was. Over the time I was there I learned how to work. It was good for me in that respect. But her husband seemed to grow more and more unhinged, and more abusive—not only toward me, but toward his stepsons.
Roughly around the time of my sixteenth birthday, I got in trouble for something or another, and was told to wear a pair of my work-pants—stained and torn from time cutting wood—to school rather than my new school clothes. For the first time in my whole life, I was starting to fit in at school, and I couldn’t bear the humiliation. I wore the pants I was told to wear, but I brought a change of clothes with me. I switched them out before class and as school got out, I returned to my locker to exchange them, only to find the old work pants gone.
My mouth went dry and I knew I was in for it. I went to the office and asked if anyone had come asking about me and discovered that she had been there. It seemed obvious that she’d somehow gotten access to my locker and had discovered I’d defied them.
I got off the bus two stops before my own, turned around, and started walking the other way. By midnight I was walking across the summit of McKenzie Pass. By dawn the next day I’d thumbed a ride south.
It had been she who’d told me how to do up a sign with a destination when hitchhiking, and had made me promise that I’d never use it to run away. And I’d kept that promise. It wasn’t until a couple years later, when I again found myself on the road between California and Washington State, that I constructed a sign and hitchhiked back that way.
One of the worst things these two had done was mocked my interest in reading and writing science fiction. The guy told me repeatedly that it was a waste of time and that I’d be best off abandoning it to pursue more attainable goals.
Now, twenty-five years later, I look back and I laugh. Last I heard he’d been busted and gone to prison. Me? I’m an author with several novels under my belt, and more coming out next year.
What I have to say to him? Well, in a three simple words… “Fuck you, Bruce.”
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