Hitchhiking

In 1965 when my friend Fritz Williams told me that I couldn’t hitchhike to the west coast, of course I took him up on it. I left with a bag of cookies that my then-girlfriend CJ gave me and Fritz gave me a .45 revolver and six bucks. I didn’t think I would be gone long. They both saw me off at the Pennsylvania Turnpike Entrance. I wanted to get to Santa Barbara and I did.

Santa Barbara’s a rich area. It was a rainy afternoon, and I was bone tired. I’m walking through town and I see this house with a big porch which I crawl under and go to sleep. It wasn’t until the next morning that I saw it was a police station. Luckily, I saw them before they saw me, and I was out of there. I don’t think the police would have been too happy to find a gun on me. But God, was I hungry, but the only thing of value I had was my gun. I walked to the center of town, found a pawn shop, and sold my .45 and seeing no point in hanging around Santa Barbara, I hitched a ride to railroad yard outside the city where my instinct told me I’d find some hobos. A lot of empty freight cars were there. The bums were really friendly. Remember, I’m as far west as I can go. So I can only go east at this point. I found out that a lot of the hobos were on the run from their families. Back then, you could get lost and not be found even 10 miles from home. A good number of them were migrant workers going to the vineyards in Oregon. They still carried their belongings wrapped in a piece of cloth at the end of a stick. They didn’t carry suitcases, and no one had backpacks. It’s funny to think of that now. They used cardboard boxes for shelter if they lived in the yard. You definitely didn’t want anything heavy to carry. You wanted something you could discard when you left.

It was easy to meet them. I just went up to a guy and said, “Hey, I’m new to this,” and he asked me, “Where you headed?” It turns out eight or nine of them were headed in the same direction. They educated me on how to jump on a freight car. You had to go up the tracks a way till you were out of the yard so the guards wouldn’t see you. Then you had to wait until the train was taking a curve so it slowed down and the trainman in the locomotive car couldn’t see you. A passenger train would be going too fast. So, you had to find out which freight trains were going your way—in my case north. There were about 20 or 30 lines going north/south. They knew the schedules and timing of all the trains and told me I wanted one going north to San Francisco.