BUT OH, THAT MAGIC FEELING, NOWHERE TO GO.”
I stood by the bridge for a short time, singing Beatles songs to myself and waiting for a ride. It wasn’t long before a VW bus pulled over and the door slid open. I could smell pot and sandalwood, and the hippie kids inside passed me a joint even before we were back in traffic and heading across the Golden Gate to Marin County. We drove into Marin, past San Rafael and the quick glimpse of San Quentin Prison, yelling, “Hi, Charlie,” to Charles Manson.
The bus filled with smoke, and inside the three girls and two boys shared with me a small meal of granola, fruit, and yogurt. One of the boys had long dark hair and big brown eyes. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. For dessert we all shared an ounce of psilocybin mushrooms. We drove slowly—like stoners everywhere—gazing up at Mount Tamalpais as we headed north past the enclaves of the wealthy and the occasional dairy farms and vineyards.
We crossed into Sonoma County, where the developed areas were fewer and farther between. Cattle grazed on the gently rolling hills between stands of redwood trees. Mendocino County was even wilder; the hills and mountains were craggy and there were fewer farms and ranches. We stopped in Willits to gas up, piss, and fill our canteens. We saw lots of kids in tie-dyed T-shirts and many hitchhikers.
Somewhere in Humboldt County we camped by the Eel River, swollen with snowmelt running high and fast. The boy with the big eyes crawled into my pup tent, and we lay in each other’s arms all night listening to the sounds of the forest and the water rushing by and the wind shushing through the giant redwood trees above us. We were naked and skinny and cold in my sleeping bag and we pressed against each other as hard as we could, even as we slept.
In the morning, one of the girls who’d been doing most of the driving sat me down with a map. “You know, you’re like not really on the right highway, if you’re going to Canada. You need to, like, get over to Interstate 5 or it’s going to take you like, weeks.”
They dropped me off at the intersection of a road heading east to Redding and I-5. I said goodbye to the boy but didn’t have time to feel sad; another ride pulled over before the bus was even out of sight.
We stopped in Grants Pass, Oregon, for a piss break, and my new traveling partners—a straight couple and a gangly cowboy-looking single guy from Oklahoma—rolled up some joints, which we smoked all the way to Portland, singing along with LaBelle’s new song “Lady Marmalade” turned up high on the radio: “Voulez-vous coucher avec moi, ce soir?”
Up to this point I hadn’t spent a dime, so I paid for a room at a Day’s Inn where we crashed for the night on two rickety double beds. The couple fucked vigorously for about three minutes before falling asleep. The cowboy in my bed lay rigid for hours, then began kissing me. We made love silently until dawn. They would take me all the way to Seattle.
In Seattle I stood by an on-ramp for six hours with my thumb out in the rain without a single driver slowing down. I wasn’t even sure if I was on the right highway. Finally I gave up and walked a couple of miles to the bus station, handed over some of my precious money, and bought a ticket to Vancouver.
The weather changed as I crossed the border. Fog and wind gave way to rain and then to flurries of snow. Vancouver was still a small town back then, and I searched for any kind of gay scene with little success, though I did find a couple of small, sort of sad gay bars where nobody would talk to me, but then I got picked up by a really sweet and funny older guy in Stanley Park who let me stay with him for several nights.
Henry was hilarious, with great stories of gay life in the Army during World War II. He was American but had lived in Canada for many years. Up until a few weeks before we met, he had been harboring an American draft resister. He also convinced me that it would be foolish to attempt to hitchhike across the Canadian Rockies in early April and that I could easily freeze to death if I attempted it. I knew he was overstating the danger but was touched when he offered to buy me a train ticket and gratefully accepted his generosity.
“I wish I had traveled when I was young,” he said. “They tell you to go to school and get a job and have a family and work your whole life and then travel and see the world when you’re old and fat and retired. That’s stupid. Do it while you’re young and can really make the most of it. Send me postcards.” I promised I would.
The journey across British Columbia was serenely, magnificently beautiful. I settled into the train compartment, occasionally smoking some of Henry’s hashish in the restroom, reading Doris Lessing novels and watching the Canadian landscape roll out on either side of the tracks.
In a town called Hope, the train stopped as the sun broke through the clouds, warming the mountainsides sufficiently to encourage the earliest blossoms scattered between the last patches of snow. I had two hours to kill before the train pulled out, so I hiked a few hundred yards up the hill behind the train station and looked out over the valley and up to the high mountain peaks ahead.
I was completely alone. I found a nice spread of short grass spotted with daffodils and crocus and quickly stripped to lie naked in the warm sun and cold air on the soft earth of the mountain. Every cell in my body quivered with excitement and anticipation. I had resumed my great adventure.
At the British Airways counter in the Montreal airport the sign said, “Student Special, $100, London R/T.” Outside the airport a cold wind pushed the snow around under grey skies. Walking around Montreal the past two days I’d seen how hot the Québécois boys were, but they weren’t hot enough to warm me, so accustomed to Arizona and California sunshine. In my fantasies of Montreal I’d imagined drinking black coffee while smoking Gauloises cigarettes in a café by McGill University with Leonard Cohen. I’d planned to stay for a week, but it turned out that my high school French was not sufficient for real conversation, though it was enough to get me a blow job from a cute Jewish boy and a ride to the airport. Just a few days earlier I had been at home in California; now I was walking up to the counter with my passport and traveler’s cheques.
“One student special to London, please.”
I was certain I wouldn’t be able to sleep, but as the jet headed up and over the Atlantic I nodded off almost immediately, waking to the pink-grey light of dawn flooding the cabin and the pilot’s announcement that we were on our final descent into Heathrow Airport.
It was mid-April; I don’t recall the date. Scott’s postcard said to meet him in at the American Express office in Amsterdam on May 20, so I had a month to go exploring on my own first. It was cold and damp, but I was excited to be in the city where my mother was born. Bedtime stories during my childhood were often set in London, on Hampstead Heath and in Glastonbury, both places where Mom had lived with her parents, Arthur and Vera.
Mom had described the tower at Glastonbury, the pillars of Stonehenge, and the great white stone horses on hillsides in Sussex and Kent so many times in so many bedtime stories that I could see them clearly with eyes closed. I wanted to see them with my eyes open, so I set out for Land’s End, mainland England’s westernmost point. I saw lots of other wandering long-haired kids in Trafalgar Square and Notting Hill Gate, where I stayed in a filthy but cheap youth hostel, clutching my passport and cheques to my chest as I slept.
I tried to hitchhike, but after waiting hours in the cold fog I gave up and bought a ticket from Victoria Station out to Cornwall.
The station was very confusing, loud with the noise of trains and people and the clattering of the split-flat display boards announcing the arrival and departure times of trains from all over England, Scotland, and Wales, as well as the trains to Dover for the ferry crossing to Calais, France, and to Harwich for the ferry to Hoek van Holland in the Netherlands.
I froze for a moment or two on the platform and my heart was racing as I climbed on the train, but once I settled into my seat and had my ticket punched by the conductor I felt a sudden sense of absolute calm and peace and confidence. I sat back, crossed one leg over the other, and opened up the Times while sipping the cup of tea I’d purchased in the club car. I felt quite at home, thank you very much.
Most of that first visit to the UK I’ve forgotten now, but I do remember Glastonbury and climbing to the base of the old Tor, which I recognized instantly from my mother’s childhood stories. I remember seeing the white stone horse on the hillside from the train’s windows. I remember the pillars of Stonehenge; unfenced and unrestricted then; one could walk freely among the giant stones raised on Salisbury Plain many thousands of years ago, perhaps by my own ancestors. At Land’s End, Cornwall, the wet fog and wind-bent trees reminded me of Land’s End in San Francisco with a momentary but sharp jab of homesickness.
In Edinburgh, Scotland, the wind grew colder but the rain stopped, and I tramped around the old city and climbed the battlements of the great castle. I’d heard of a certain tavern and spent much of an evening searching it out. When I finally located the address I was puzzled to find two doors presenting to the street, each door opening to a different side of the same bar, which stretched the length of the building. Down the center of the bar were tall glass shelves bearing warmly colored bottles of spirits and liqueurs. Between the shelves, one could see from one side of the bar to the other, but couldn’t go there without leaving through the front door to the street and reentering from the opposite side’s front door.
The arrangement seemed curious and I said as much to the young woman serving up lagers behind the bar.
“Oh, them over there are poofters,” she replied. I looked between the shelves again, more closely this time, then finished my beer quickly, exited, and reentered on the “poofter” side. I might as well have saved my time—they were gay, but quite a proper crowd and none of them would have anything to do with me, a long-haired American boy in tight jeans with a red star on his denim jacket lapel.
I sat and stared out at the countryside on the train back to London. The afternoon sky was green-grey, and fine mist lacquered the glass of the windows.
Turns out, I’d end up spending most of my life on the road. I couldn’t have known that then, but that’s the way it worked out. The hardest, and the best part of traveling is traveling alone. Solitary travelers inevitably experience unique opportunities for introspection and reflection and invention, but it can be a lonely existence. Travelers in groups or with families can always rely on easy company and conversation in their own language. But if you’re traveling alone and craving human contact, you must reach out, stretch, improvise, and take risks. Or you can sit on your ass alone on trains or in picturesque cafés, or walk down museum corridors for days on end without ever speaking to another human being.
In London, I sent four postcards: one to Henry in Vancouver, one to the guys back home on Central Avenue in San Francisco, one to my parents in Phoenix, and one to Grandma in Michigan. Then I caught the early morning train to Dover. I was sad and alone and a little bit scared as I prepared to leave the English-speaking world, but I was on a mission. My great adventure was now underway; whatever lay before me, I was as ready as I was going to be. I took the hovercraft from Dover to Calais, looking back over the choppy grey waters of the channel as the chalk-white cliffs of England receded into the mist.