1972

CHELSEY JOHNSON

Within a week of arriving in Europe with the Christus Rex church choir from the University of North Dakota, the group unexpectedly disbanded. The priest chaperone drank steadily, the doctor chaperone disappeared behind the Iron Curtain, and the pastor told the students to just meet up again in Brussels in six weeks. My mother, Jill, and her best friend, Jodie—nineteen, from a tiny town in the northwest corner of Minnesota, and flat broke—picked up their bags and started hitchhiking. The first man to pull over drove them to Frankfurt and kindly gave them a room, but in the middle of the night came the inevitable knock on the door and “Fraulein, fraulein, let me in.” When my mother barricaded the door with furniture, he gave up. The next day he took them to Amsterdam and pointedly dropped them off in the red-light district. They found a woman who rented out rooms and had a son in a rock and roll band; they hung out with the band for a while, “a crazy trip.”

This was 1972. My mom and Jodie were living on five dollars a day. They would lurk around restaurants, waiting until people left their tables, and then they’d grab the rolls and run. At a French monastery where you had to pay to shower, they scaled a wall and climbed in for free. In Geneva they hopped a train and sneaked into a first-class private compartment with red velvet seats; along the ride, a distinguished gentleman joined them without saying a word. When the porter came and asked for their tickets, they knew they were about to get kicked off—until the man spoke to the porter in perfect French and he let them be. The man turned out to be the Turkish ambassador to the United Nations.

As far as her parents knew, and still know, she was touring with the choir the entire time. “Things were looser then,” she says. At nineteen they were expected to be able to navigate the world on their own and figure things out, and they did.

Two years later, my mother married—one of the last people in her class to wed, at the seasoned age of twenty-one—and the year after that, she had me. But that singular adventure stayed with her. “You know, somewhere in your heart aren’t you always nineteen? Where you have that completely fearless approach to life and everything is a possibility? Always, even at age sixty-six, there’s still that part of me. Sometimes you forget about it, but it’s always present. You always miss that a little bit. Maturity is one of the most disappointing things in life.”