In the summer of 1969 or thereabouts, I drove to Alaska with my brother
Kevin. We lived on honey and peanut butter sandwiches for three months,
sleeping on a plywood-and-foam-rubber “bed” we’d rigged up in the back
of a Jeep station wagon. Nobody had heard about seatbelts way back
then–if we picked up more than a single hitchhiker, one of them would
have to ride flat on the bed.
At night, in the pine woods, the northern mosquitos were huge. We
carried yards and yards of mosquito netting to slam in the car doors
before falling asleep. One night, Kevin slept with his arm against the
netting–it swelled up to the size of a big hock of ham.
It was one our way north–in Whitehorse, Yukon Territory–that Kevin
met a girl from San Francisco. She was beautiful and sweet and kind of
crazy. Her name, she told us was Strawberry. Strawberry what? Just
Strawberry, she said. She gave him her address, and on our way back we
detoured all the way down to Haight Ashbury to find her. She’d moved on
elsewhere but we stayed a week with two childhood friends who were running a candle store…
Now, back to Alaska–up near Mount Denali, we fell in with a bunch of
glacierologists. None of us could sleep through the sunlit midsummer
nights–the world was just too exciting and too new. We talked for
hours, hiking through gravel-strewn landscapes past moonlit boulders,
eating gigantic pancake meals topped off with our peanut butter and
honey. (We started off with a full gallon can of each, and had some left even when we got home in August.)
Sailor Bill was one of our hitchhikers–quite a bit older than most, he
seemed ancient to us. (He was probably ten years younger than I am
now.) Sailor Bill had spent many years as a hobo, and told us he
know how to ride the rails. When he saw how tempted we both were by his
stories, he told us about one boxcar misadventure.
He had been partying with a woman who wanted to go with him as he
hopped a train. He knew a crossing where freight trains slowed way down
and hobos could climb aboard. They’d ride in a boxcar for a couple of
days–she even brought a suitcase along for the ride. But after the
train slowed down and they both hopped on, he discovered something wrong
with the car. I don’t remember what the problem was–maybe I didn’t
understand it back then, but it was serious. They would both be killed
if they didn’t get off the train, fast, but now the train itself was
speeding up. And the woman couldn’t understand what he was trying to
tell her–she didn’t want to jump off, and the train was going faster
and even faster. “Thank god for the suitcase,” Sailor Bill said.
“Arguing was no good–but when I threw her suitcase off the train she
finally gave up and jumped off herself. Boy, was she mad at me–and I
just saved her life.”
He probably saved my life with that story of his. Thank you, Sailor Bill, wherever you are.