September 7, 2006 – The day before leaving

When I was 10, or maybe 12, at least sometime in the late 1950’s, two young men in my hometown of Madison, NC walked out on Highway 220, stuck out their thumbs and headed for California.  They thumbed and bummed rides all the way there.  They got a job in the bean fields and earned enough money to buy an old broken down jalopy that was to get them back to North Carolina.  Half-way back the jalopy blew up and they returned home as they had left, on their thumbs.

 

They became instant celebrities because in the late 1950’s in a small southern town, before the coming waves of integration, Viet Nam, The Bay of Pigs, Kennedy and King’s assassinations,  and the countless other complexities of the next decade, theirs was a feat of almost heroic proportions to a pre-adolescent such as myself.  Their story ignited wanderlust in my soul that has yet to be quenched.

 

In 1965 I read Kerouac and the flame burned brighter.  In 1968, at age 21, and knowing that in a year I would either be in Viet Nam or in the start of a career, my best friend and I threw a pup tent in the back of  a 1967 Plymouth Barracuda and began our own westward trek.  Unfortunately we did not return as hometown heroes; in fact except for our families the event went pretty much unnoticed.  In 10 years the world had shrunk and although it was a tremendous personal adventure it proved not all that newsworthy.  Although today when people talk things like San Francisco in that time period I know I was there.

 

As my life has progressed I have chased this traveling muse from Shanghai to Piedras Negras, from Ranier to Nova Scotia.  I have done more than I ever dreamed and less than I want.  So now it is time to begin again.

 

Tomorrow morning Nancy and I will leave in red Mustang convertible, headed for Chicago and the  trailhead of old Route 66.  We will start there in Sunday, September 10 and will stop whenever we get to the Santa Monica pier in California.  We have set plans in Chicago and St. Louis, but beyond there our only plan is to have no plan.

Life is good.