IT STARTED RAINING OUR FIRST NIGHT OUT. SHUFFLING OFF THE ROAD with heavy packs on our backs, guitars in hand, we made our way through the dark trees and found a spot in the woods to camp. Food planning had been haphazard at best; I believe we had Snickers and Marlboro Lights for dinner. As the rain soaked through our clothes and it became clear we’d have to bunk down in the woods amid the trees on the sodden ground, the exuberance that had buoyed our spirits quickly dissipated and was replaced with a gnawing sense that perhaps we hadn’t thought this through.
There is a moment in every poorly planned outdoor adventure where the dynamic among the participants coalesces around a vehement and palpable resentment toward the person who planned the trip. It doesn’t matter if it’s on some fancy-schmancy bike tour of French vineyards and the foie gras isn’t to your liking, or on an Everest ascent and there’s not enough oxygen to go around. Someone is to blame. I have no doubt that as the Donner party descended into starvation, madness, and cannibalism, someone at some point had some choice words for the organizers. See Jim? I told you. I said, “Maybe you should bring more salt pork.” And you were all like, “Nah, one barrel is good.” And I said, “You sure Jim? Maybe an extra barrel wouldn’t hurt.” And you were all sure of yourself. “Pffft! We’ll be through to the coast of California in no time, surfing and eating oranges,” you said. Well, guess what Jim? Now we’re eating Clara. What do you have to say about that?
Poncho and I eyed each other in the gloom, no doubt thinking about who would make the better meal.
In high school I was enamored by the idea of dropping out, hitchhiking across the country, starting a rock’n’ roll band, and living a sun-kissed, West Coast lifestyle replete with hedonistic excess. My friend Poncho and I made a plan to see this scheme through. We met early one morning on the docks of Burlington, Vermont, and took the ferry across Lake Champlain to New York, where we commenced hitchhiking west, making every attempt to embody the cliché of disaffected youth. Somehow, in my underdeveloped prefrontal cortex, I had combined my rudimentary understanding of the narrative arcs of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn with the origin story of Guns N’ Roses. Poncho and I both dropped out of school and ran away from home, leaving notes for our families and setting out into the wilderness to experience hardship and sacrifice in order to hone our creative spirits so we could arrive in California hardened and wise and write songs like “Welcome to the Jungle.”
The band we’d formed was called the Bittersweet Cowboys, and we were the biggest band in our town. Actually, we were the only band in our town. Most of our song lyrics were thinly cryptic complaints about never getting laid. We completely bought into the mythology of rock’n’ roll origin stories. I had devoured books like No One Here Gets Out Alive, the biography of Jim Morrison, as well as Appetite for Destruction, the Guns N’ Roses story, both of which were penned by Danny Sugerman. I thought that if we were truly going to achieve epic rock-god status, we needed to manufacture an origin story replete with homelessness, wanton drug use, and rebelliousness to the extreme. I thought a cross-country trip would do the trick. Hitting the road, I felt, was the way to expand our story, fill our quiver with the necessary experience to write rock ballads of unyielding beauty, and set us on track to sell out Madison Square Garden in a few years’ time.
In retrospect, if I ever get to meet Jack Kerouac and Walt Whitman in the Elysian Fields, I’ve got a thing or two to say to them about the “open road.”
It was a terrible night; the drizzle misted over us and got everything wet. We hadn’t brought a tent, as we’d applied the same preparedness logic to our camping supplies as we had our larder. Poncho and I laid out our sleeping bags on spongy leaves, trying to scootch under the overhanging boughs of a large white pine. We resigned ourselves to misery and discomfort, grimly steeling ourselves for a long night. I tried to lie directly under a large limb above me, hoping that if I could shape my body exactly like the curve of the branch I could stay out of the rain. This futile exercise occupied me for quite a while, and surprisingly, I began to feel sleepy once the sugar rush from the Snickers had worn off.
We lay in the darkness for some time before we began to hear sounds in the forest around us. Rustles and chitters, squeaks and the unmistakable movement of some animal in the night.
Here I will admit to being scared of the dark. Even now, as I near the half-century mark, when I am sleeping in the woods at night, all rational thought departs. It’s as though my mind gets wiped clean of all the logic and practical thinking I’ve accumulated, and is replaced by some primal caveman brain. When I hear anything, it’s a bloodthirsty jungle cat coming to eviscerate me, never mind that I live in Vermont some three thousand miles from the nearest jaguar. I cannot help but have my colon clench up in terror when I hear the whisper of shifting leaves in the dark, and stare out blindly into the blackness of the forest at night, heart racing like a 1980s stockbroker on a cocaine bender.
I pulled out my flashlight, hands shaking, and switched it on. Wildly sweeping the beam back and forth, I saw that we were surrounded.
Prehistoric-sized raccoons stalked us, their lumpen, hissing shapes at the very far reach of the glow of our flashlights. Git! Shhhhht! Pssssst! Hey! Git outta here! My voice had the shaky, reedy sound of a bedwetting child. Poncho and I threw sticks and made as much sound as we could, and finally, probably bored by our histrionics, the raccoons ambled off into the trees and left us alone.
At last, deep into the night, we were able to fall asleep. As anyone who camps regularly can tell you, the moment when you finally start to fall asleep, despite the physical misery and deep sense of regret you feel at camping in the first place, is one of the sweetest sensations ever. I began to drift, thankfully, into oblivion, sinking into my wet sleeping bag emotionally exhausted and spent.
I was soon awoken by the ground shaking as though we were in the grip of an earthquake. A shrieking, clanging beast came charging through the blackness toward us, an incandescent light burning our eyes and illuminating our pathetic little camp. We had unknowingly hunkered down close to railroad tracks, and an early morning freight shook us from our brief rest.
The night continued on in this way, small bits of uneasy sleep interspersed by bitter bouts of bone-weary wakefulness. Finally, the sun made a belated appearance somewhere in the sky, giving us enough light to pack our backpacks and begin tromping along the road again. We were silent as we walked, lost in our own thoughts. My own brain began to vacillate wildly between an almost sexual longing for waffles and a deep, creeping realization that I had clearly not thought through this whole go west, young man, Horace Greeley misadventure.
Finally, after what seemed a lifetime, the rain let up and left us tramping along the side of the two-lane blacktop deep in the piney woods of upstate New York. We were headed several hundred miles west to the campus of a college one of our friends attended, where we planned to stay the night. Thus far, our lack of luck hitchhiking suggested we might not make it, as we seemed to be the only humans slogging along the road in what felt like an endless, dripping forest.
Is there anything more dispiriting than hitchhiking on an empty road? The few cars that drove by did so at Mach speed, and otherwise we were left with the emptiness of the forest, the endlessness of the road, and the grime and sweat collecting under our pack straps. We passed a derelict motel of some sort, long since abandoned, and a makeshift memorial on a tree by the roadside where someone had met their end. Finally, the sun began to nudge aside the thick scrim of clouds that had been casting our adventure in gloom, and our spirits responded as well. Perhaps it was this infusion of spirit and joy that caused a beige pickup, finally, to hit the brakes after it sped past our thumbs and pull to the roadside ahead of us. Absolutely giggling with relief, we jogged up to the idling truck.
The man who got out of the driver’s seat was smallish, with little mole eyes and rimless glasses. Dressed plainly in a T-shirt and jeans, he was maybe thirty-five. He offered to let us ride in the back of the truck in the open bed, a decision that probably made sense, as we had slept in the woods and smelled like it. We threw our packs in and clambered into the bed.
“Have you boys been saved?”
We both were mute, frozen on the spot. As a deeply committed sin-filled heathen, I have always responded to overtures of the biblical sort from proselytizers the same way I’d act if a large, rabid dog was in the vicinity: I get real quiet and try to fade away and make my escape. This time such a ploy wouldn’t work, so I mumbled something purposely inaudible and hunkered down in the bed.
“Where you headed?”
“Next town,” I said, eager already to get away from this guy. He nodded, and handed us both a pamphlet with a picture of Jesus and a lamb on the front.
“Maybe read this while you’re riding.”
He hopped back in the cab and we were off. We politely flipped through the little brochure without reading it, marveling at the speed with which we now crossed the landscape, having gotten used to the sludgy pace of sleep deprivation. Our clothes had the damp and funky smell of mold and body odor, and our stomachs grumbled with hunger. I felt, after only twenty-four hours, totally wrecked and fatigued. I was depressed that our grand tour, the adventure of our lives, was turning out to be such a bummer. Poncho lit a smoke and glanced again at the pamphlet.
“Well,” he said. “If this is being born again, I kind of wish I hadn’t been.”
I smiled grimly, staring out at the trees as they whipped by at sixty miles per hour.
We only made it to western New York before packing it up and going home. Crossing New York east to west may not seem like much, but anyone who’s ever made the drive from Albany to Buffalo knows the state is roughly the size of Mongolia and almost as bizarre. For example, we passed through Oneonta, a city known to have more bars per capita than any other town in the United States, according to urban legends.
We had all the requisite adventures. Met lost souls on buses and beneath freeway overpasses who smelled sour and sad. Grew to smell sharply sour and sad ourselves. Eventually made it to our friend’s campus, where he was following a more practical route of education and gainful employment while we were intent on making or breaking it as a rock band. We stayed the night with him, sleeping on the floor of his room. I got savagely drunk the way only a seventeen-year-old can and spent the evening throwing up in the bushes. Most of the time was spent squatting by the roadside waiting for rides to emerge from murky forests, smoking and playing the part of the romantic wanderers.
We would head back home after only a short time, content to ride out our late teen years in the bosom of home, where someone else paid the rent and kept the lights on. We would go on to rock as hard as we could given our musical, financial, and cultural limitations—we played songs like “Mama Kin” by Aerosmith and “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” by Poison (no, I am not joking). We tried our hardest to be cool and use the cudgel of glam rock to smash our way to some understanding of ourselves. We were ridiculous.
I remember, though, the morning of our departure on the ferry across Lake Champlain. We stood on the deck, guitars in hand, backpacks swaying on our backs, as the ferry chugged across the slate gray waters. The dark line of forest on the other side began to slowly emerge into more detail, and the feeling I had—of impending adventure, of unknown exploits yet to come, of heading into the unknown with a friend by my side—it was one of the sweetest moments of my life. The sublime pleasures of the young and the clueless.