Chapter 1 of Free Love, Free Fall, "Fun" 21 pages!!

Merimée Moffitt
816 Parkland Circle SE
Albuquerque, NM 87108
mmoffitt@cnm.edu
505-262-2508
word count 7,533
memoir
FUN
1964

By mid-May, New York City was getting so hot we were going naked half the day, only getting dressed to wander around the neighborhoods and parks in the late afternoon. We'd also run out of dough, and my sister Gretchen wouldn’t want us hanging on, waiting for her to buy groceries. “We have to do something,” I mumbled to him in bed one morning, hours after Gretchen had gone off to work.
“Yeah, I know. But I hate this city. There's nothin' here for me”; he lay back in bed despondent, desultory. He wanted to get back to farmland and fresh air. We’d all come East in the drive-away car, dropping his friend at the Great Lakes to do his merchant marine thing, but Steve hadn’t gotten on without a union card. We were lying on white sheets in the sun that streamed through the only window in the tiny apartment bedroom. Yesterday's Times was spread around; nothing that either of us wanted or were willing to do in the classifieds, and I was tired of reading rumpled paperbacks, tired of malaise.
“Well, what happens if we do go back to Oregon?” I asked him. I knew we had to get jobs, and the trip across the country sounded fun even if we didn't have money for tickets.
“There’s a town called Weston; I've driven dump trucks there for years, so I know I can get on”; his eyes lit up and he seemed excited, leaning on his elbow. “You could work on the belt or stacking boxes or something,” he said. “We just have to get there by June 1st to get on the list.” I was convinced by his enthusiasm, but that feeling of following a drug-taking farm boy washed through me, vaguely aware again that in choosing to follow this man, I would be getting surprises that might not seem like first choices. With all of New York City in front of us, he wanted to run back West to his comfort zone, his old job, his life as a laborer and taxi driver, a dropout, and drug taker. Well, he was so gorgeous and generally fun, I was curious. I wanted to see and know this life too.
We agreed to hitch back to Oregon for the pea harvest in Weston, near Walla Walla, Washington. We had one week before the deadline. Gretchen didn't want to go even though I really encouraged her; she said she'd stay on in her good job and see what happened. She thought we were both plumb nuts, going around naked and not finding work, wanting to hitch to Oregon when we'd only been in New York a few weeks. I figured, as my older sis, she was fairly tired of us mooching off her anyway, but she did loan us sixty-five bucks for the trip across Canada.
We took the subway as far as it would go, and the plan then was to ride our thumbs all the way. I’d never hitchhiked, but the word itself was exciting to me because of Kerouac and the road. Kerouac was my fantasy man, my guru and Bible all in one. His books had given me a way, a glimpse into vital lives in real bodies lived by people who loved and fucked and enjoyed themselves. Steve was one of them, and I’d slipped into formation behind him, the only place I knew for women in those days.
The first truck that picked us up dropped us somewhere upstate at twilight. Twilight, the time for mosquitoes, but I didn’t know much about that either. The driver just stopped his semi on the side of the road and said he'd be turning soon. “Well, thanks,” I'd said, looking around at open country.
“Yeah, thanks, man,” Steve added, as we backed down from the cab. We were a little puzzled as the guy roared off, wondering why he'd dump us between nothing and nowhere on a long stretch of country road. At first I thought there were leaves flying in the breeze or something because the particles hitting my face and arms and bare feet were so dense, but the air was still, and we weren't under trees. Tall grasses and what appeared to be a stream off to the side of the fields, gave a lovely twilight view, and I wondered if we should just stay for the night and start hitching again at dawn; then I realized what the flying objects were—mosquitoes the size of bumble bees—whapping at us as if competing to get the blood before their cousins or other relatives drained us dry.
“Steve!” I yelled at him as he was coming back from the bushes where he'd taken a pee. “I’m getting eaten alive.” We both were slapping skin as fast as we could but not fast enough to keep up with the feast the little bugs were enjoying. It was twilight without shadows, a late spring dusk, and the air was so thick with voracious bloodsuckers I was afraid, and not a vehicle in sight –a real trucker's joke.
“We better start running,” Steve said, already turning back at me from a run. “Let's keep moving and you stick out your thumb. I'll carry the pack and the sleeping bag.” I'd been one of slowest runners in every PE class of my life. As I started panting along behind Steve, who looked like he could gallop all the way to Oregon, I wondered if the trucker was laughing at us now. Steve had long, thick, golden hair that swept his shoulders, a style that just made a lot of straight, working types really mad. Twenty-five years old, not working, hanging out with a teenage girl, and the Thor-hair made him a target in '64. In 1964 it was a punishable crime for a guy to flaunt his lack of regard for society with the wrong length hair, but the punishment was usually vigilante style. The trucker had nailed us.
“Shit,” I started screaming as I whapped bugs, my left thumb joggling along, sticking out into the road, but it was working. There were only about a dozen little suckers on me instead of hundreds. I was in a short loose dress so they were all over my legs, too, but God and all her universe proved essentially good, and before I collapsed, a pick-up pulled over in front of us. We threw our things in back and hopped into the front seat. It had only been a few minutes, but I knew I couldn’t have lasted much longer.
He was an older guy; said he'd be driving all night and most of the next morning, too, and he needed company, to keep him awake. “Where you kids from?” His voice seemed friendly with just a bit of a Canadian accent, a nice man in a clean plaid shirt with a stubbly beard; maybe a day's worth. He wore a baseball cap and laced-up leather boots that looked comfortable. My sandals had broken the day before leaving the city, and I'd tossed them—no money for shoes but it didn't matter. Hitching across Canada barefoot would be even more fun, I figured—different, and a statement about how much stuff we really don't exactly need. The driver of the truck made no remarks about our apparel or hair.
“We're from Oregon,” I answered, sitting in the middle between the two men, “but we've been in New York a few weeks, visiting my sister.” Steve had his arm on the back of the seat, loosely resting on my shoulders. I noticed how I didn't really want to tell the truth about myself, that I'd been doing nothing for weeks but screwing Steve all day every day and living off his friend's loan, and then my sister's first couple of paychecks. It wasn't so much to be telling someone about.
“Well, where're you headed now?” the guy asked.
“Oh, we're going back to Oregon,” I said, “to work in the pea harvest. We have to get there by the first of June to get jobs.” I thought about the list Steve said we'd have to get on, and I pictured the clipboard with our names. I'd have to use his last name, I realized, without being married. It would be odd to just take his name like that—no wedding, no proposal, just a silent capitulation. I had simply become his after our fourth date, by dint of necessity. I wondered how this really felt to me—to be his pretend wife—this cave-in to social norms I disagreed with in so many ways. But if we wanted to work, I knew it would have to be done. I couldn’t be his whore and expect fair treatment, not way out in the country at least.
On our first date in San Francisco Steve had ridden up on a borrowed BMW motorcycle and taken me to Mount Tamalpais for a ten-mile hike on a beautiful day, then home across the Golden Gate under stars and the afterglow of sunset. He’d taken me to meet some friends of his where they listened to jazz and drank wine. He’d been a tuba player in the Army, and he sang crazy old blues songs that made me happy. He had left a wife and two little kids somewhere in Seattle before I’d even met him, and he didn't want to talk about them. I didn't either. I didn't want kids or want to care about anyone else's kids. I'd had enough of that with my little siblings, and that day on his borrowed motorcycle, flying up hills and across the bay, he'd won my heart. And besides that, he looked like Adonis in the nude. At the top of Mt. Tam, he’d stripped for a swim across the small lake and back. I simply watched him in astonishment. His perfect ass and dream-lover tanned body melted some of my defenses, then the way he shook like a puppy to get dry and slipped back into his clothes. It was quite seductive, alone on the trail in a Maxfield Parrish-like setting of fallen oak leaves, sun, a lake, silence, water, promises of a body like his to hold me. Everything fell away from me that might have been deemed sensible behavior. But I was fairly virginal at the time. He was courting me with at least a little nuance, élan, control—whatever. Did I mention his thick, blonde, Thor-like hair and sea-blue eyes above a strong jaw. Sensual lips and flawless physique. God!!!
Steve would drive a pea truck, and I would sit at a conveyor belt, checking for sticks or mouse parts as the peas cascaded toward the machines, which directed the peas toward canning or freezing. I felt excited about going back to Oregon where we would work the summer season and get enough for a car. It would be my first real job, and now I needed money. That was new, too. I'd never needed money before; it always came so easily to me as allowance or working for my mom during my teen years at home after Daddy’s business finally took off. I couldn't quite imagine a factory with me in it, working for paychecks. I was curious and eager.
“We'll be coming to the border pretty soon,” the man said, “and you guys’ll be fine. I'll say you're coming to Montreal with me, and from there you're taking a bus.” It was dark by the time we pulled into the border station, and the Mounties weren't concerned at all about us sitting in the pick-up. I worried that we'd be denied entry with only sixty-some dollars, no real destination, no way to get across the continent, but the border guy only shined a flashlight into the cab and asked how long we'd be staying. Steve's smile, my smile, and “Just traveling through,” seemed to satisfy them. His warm body by my side, arm up over my shoulders, made me feel safe. I'd go anywhere with him just for the fun of it. What the hell else was there to do? No way to go but forward. When I’d crashed out of Reed College second semester, my parents were so pissed and disappointed at my inability to be a super student on their schedule, I was basically shown the door. I had left home with one hundred dollars and a suitcase, most of its contents promptly dumped into a parking lot trashcan. I was determined to be “On the Road” and heading into an undefined territory.
By morning, two more rides got us to the middle of nowhere again. This time no mosquitoes, but the broiling sun and dust started getting old after a couple of hours. Alternating pacing with standing and sitting on the rolled-up sleeping bag, I was seriously thirsty, tired, and angry at the few possible rides which passed us up. Things got so quiet between cars I could picture a map of Canada with me and Steve as a pinpoint, crawling at a snail's pace. The dust was drying my feet to leather, and I was and picking away at a shard of glass in my heel when a car with two young guys zoomed by, one leering and hanging out the window laughing.
God, it made me mad to see them leave us in the cloud of dust they'd stirred up on the road. "Fuck you, you assholes," I screamed, trying out the new language I was rapidly picking up from Steve; running out into the road, I flipped them off in their old Chevy, about the umpteenth car to cruise by as if we didn't even exist. “What the hell are we gonna do if no one stops?” I demanded. Steve was tossing pebbles overhand into the woods as if it entertained him, long shots like from the pitcher to center field, and gracefully. Just looking at the way he threw stones calmed me, but I also felt creeping, hungry-angry doubts about the wisdom of our plan.
“They will, don't worry. Someone always does.” He acted as if waiting were just part of the deal, standing around patiently, throwing rocks and pebbles, stretching, yawning. He'd hitched before. He was a Leo and he waited like a lion, royally, bored, and confident of his inherent rights.
“Uh oh,” I said, as the Chevy stopped, slammed into reverse and roared backwards in curves to where we stood watching. The two guys in military fatigues were looking out the open window at us now, and I thought maybe we were in for big trouble; the one riding shotgun grinned and opened the door, scooting forward to pull the seat towards him, an invitation for us to climb in. I had some misgivings, but anything was better than one more minute in that same spot of hot, dry highway.
“Where y'all going?” the driver asked, sounding Southern while he stuffed his mouth with sandwich. They were kids my age, just out of high school, I guessed.
“West,” Steve answered, “as far as you can take us would be great, man. Hey, thanks for stopping.”
The shotgun guy looked back at me with a big smile, “Well, when we hear a little lady talking like that, we figure she must really need a ride.” He grinned at the driver as if hearing a girl say “fuck” was really very entertaining. He stressed the “really” and kept grinning at me. Jeesus, I thought, don't Southern girls ever swear? I knew I'd learned the word from Steve though. No one I knew talked like that back home. North Eugene High School was clean, white bread.
I was truly grateful that someone in the entire morning had manners, however, and I smiled, feeling embarrassed at my own swearing which I wasn't really so used to either. I averted my eyes to look out the window. “Thanks. We've been here for hours and no one would stop.”
The driver waved the sandwich in his right hand and nodded to Steve, “There's fixing's in that bag by the little lady's feet, and you all just make yourself some sandwiches and grab a drink.”
Nice people, I thought, thank God for nice people. “Hey, thanks a lot. Are you sure?” There were cokes and bread and bologna and lettuce in the bag of groceries at my feet, and I put together two sandwiches and relaxed, letting the breeze blow my long brown hair around. The dry wind felt good, like childhood summers when my father would drive our family down the Redwood Highway through construction stops, dust covering everyone and everything in the heat.
It wasn't so hot once we were moving, and it was a quiet ride for an hour or so. The guys didn't want to talk; they just listened to the radio and talked to each other a bit. It turned out they were kids from the States, too, both of them running from the draft and headed way up north to look for refuge and jobs. The uniforms were from a surplus store in New York where you could pick them up cheap. No one at the border had bothered them either. They'd gotten by with fake papers and a story about a three-day leave. They dropped us at their turn off, and we only waited briefly this time.
The next ride was a man going home to his farm in Ontario somewhere who invited us for the night. They were having a barbecue, the man said, and Steve and I would be most welcome; he'd bring us back to the main road at dawn. The guy seemed decent and sincere, and I was so tired it sounded perfect to go to a party and then have a place to sleep and bathe and eat. Why the heck not, if the man was so generous? And there were no real plans for eating and sleeping along the way; it was going to be whatever came our way, whoever’s path we crossed.
These people lived in a paradise house with bright green grass sloping down to a small lake; aspens and willows drooped into the water around the shore. The man who picked us up was a dad about my own dad's age, and he took me and some of his guests out in his canoe to fish and paddle around before dinner, something I'd never done with my own dad. This family seemed happy to be together. I loved the part near the shore, floating quietly under branches just coming into full leaf, filled with sunset light. I was too shy to say much to anyone else in the canoe, and very tired, but the evening felt lovely, like being in a painting. The kind man let me sit and enjoy the scenery, no questions asked. We showered and hung out in the den his wife showed us to while the party went on. Later, she invited us to the table, too.
The wife, who had soft, dark hair arranged in a twist at the neck, gave Steve and me a very close look. We were sitting in a formal dining room, formal but cozy too. A mahogany china cabinet was stuffed with collectibles—something my wanna-be-fashionable mother would’ve turned her nose up at, gleaming dark-wood chairs sat randomly against walls; not everything matched. The woman was on my left at the corner of the table. By her slight smile, I knew she was registering the difference in Steve’s and my ages.
She asked me, "How old are you?" and I lied, adding two years, afraid that seventeen was just as illegal here as in the States. I had graduated high school at sixteen but couldn't explain all that. It would be better, I decided, to act old enough, like I had confidence in myself. The woman was looking down at her coffee and seemed kind like the husband, feeding us in her dining room. The others had finished and gone outside. She was younger, I thought, than my own mom, or maybe just more relaxed, prettier and more at ease with her womanliness. “Don't you think you should head home after this adventure?” she persisted, taking a motherly stab at rescuing this teenage, vagabonding girl from the fully adult male. I heard in her voice a warning that things, maybe Steve, looked like trouble to her, but I knew I wouldn't bail out of the silent pact we had, at least not yet. The plates of potatoes and green salad, rolls, juicy meat, fruit salad became the focus of my attention. I felt glad that listening to a lecture would be optional. If we had to we could just walk away, but I bowed my head towards the food and hoped the woman would let the subject go. I felt fairly happy with Steve, and the eight years he had on me were part of that comfort level. He’d been around, and I wanted to learn from him—how he managed. He loved life in his own silly way, everything from weather to pebbles to art and music and me, and that's what I wanted. We were renegades already, almost two months together on the road. I looked at him sitting beside me, enthusiastically devouring the home-cooked meal. My own mother wouldn't want me back anyway, I thought; she didn't really care where I was as far as I could tell, nor did my father.
“No, I won't go back,” I told the woman, looking up into her dark eyes, briefly acknowledging the warning. “We're headed the pea harvest, in Oregon.” I looked at her again, proud that we had a goal, proud that I'd stick to my plan of not having a real plan, of not going home again to parents lost in the oblivion of their cocktail hour.
My mother was annoyed and upset that I'd had run off with Steve, but she hadn't tried very hard to stop me. I felt a wave of longing for someone besides this Canadian woman to care where I was or what I was doing—my stomach felt an alien seed of fear which I didn't want to acknowledge right then; there wouldn't be room for fear in my adventures with Steve. I devoured the rest of the dinner and thought about going home to tell my mother I loved her anyway, somehow, some way. But there was no way—there was no connection. I was an encumbrance to her. She needed my bedroom for my little sis. She needed to have less kids in the house, apparently. We could at least have a drink together one day, a meal and maybe some cocktails on the patio.
The woman gave me another deep look which I felt seep in, the kind my mother had never indulged. Now, if you were my mother, I thought but didn't say, I might have something to go back to. After dinner, the woman generously gave us an extra sleeping bag, to keep, and we returned to the little room with a soft carpet, a den I supposed from the books and the chairs.
We were just about asleep when a knock came on the door; one of the guests from the dinner party came in the room and squatted down beside Steve's bag. We both sat up, fully clothed, to hear what he was telling us about, a train that came through at midnight. The guy, backlit in the light from the hall, said, “You know, if you want to get across Canada fast,” he was pointing his finger now, as if we'd know there was a train station just blocks away, “be over there at midnight when the Royal Canadian comes through.” I was thrilled by the idea of a train ride at midnight, and one with a royal name, although it seemed scary, too. The man went on to tell us about getting on the second engine. “The train stops for water for about ten minutes, but it'll have a couple of extra engines back-to-back that ride along behind, and no one's ever in the last one.”
“Well, how do you get in an engine?” Steve asked, sounding interested in the possibility; we'd already spent two days just getting to Ontario and were way farther north than we should have been—and no map of Canada. I felt assured by his asking for help.
“Get on the south side; it'll come on the third track,” he said, “and when the train stops—you'll hear the long whistle blow just before it stops—there'll be a ladder up the side of the engine and a little door that should open. Get in and get on the floor and stay down until you're outta town.” We looked at each other in the light streaming in from the hall.
“Well, thanks for the tip. We'll talk about it,” Steve told the man who went out and closed the door. We decided to wait a bit then pack up and slip out the window.
At the station, we huddled together out of sight in the grass by an outbuilding, watching, waiting in the cool, spring breeze and sure enough, the whistle blast and the noise of the train were right on time on the third track; it stopped with a great screech of brakes. Steve darted out first, and I followed in the moonlight to the ladder, which was silver like the extra engines, just as the man had said, the last two cars of the train, and gleaming.
“Not bad, our own car, even if it is backwards,” I thought, glad that Steve was sure they didn't shoot you for trespassing on trains. Jail maybe, but no bullets he assured me. I looked around and saw not a soul; the buildings were all on the other side. Steve went up first and slipped in the little door with the pack and one bag. I tossed the other bag to him and scrambled up the rungs. Its interior was cab-like, something like a car or boat. Two padded seats sat high off the floor so each rider could have a full view through the wrap-around front windows which, of course, were pointing towards the track behind the train. There was a tiny door under the panel of dials and controls that led to the nose of the engine car and another tall door that opened behind the two seats into the engine room itself. As we looked around from our positions on the floor, both leaning against opposite sides of the car, we laughed with relief. One thousand miles, the man had said. One thousand miles to Calgary where we'd get off and hitch down to Idaho and over to the Washington/Oregon border.
We laid one sleeping bag behind the two seats, on the floor next to a tall door that led into the back of the car, and we slept very close with the other bag opened over us. The engine, which was now a caboose, rocked and rolled along the rails. With my ear to the floor, the thundering noise of the wheels would have been uncomfortable if I hadn't been so dead tired.
We awoke the next morning to sunshine and what seemed like quiet, no sounds but the engines and the rocking of the train on the rails. When I peered out the window, I realized we'd been riding already about eight hours, hadn't gotten caught, and that we were seeing something special: gad-zillion miles of virgin forest broken only by the train, as if we had been dropped back in time, just evergreens and a winding track behind us. From some of the curves we could see out over treetops, and the forests looked like rolling oceans going on forever and ever. I also realized we hadn't thought of food or water. “We're gonna get hungry,” I said to Steve questioningly. He said we would find something, somewhere.
We established a bathroom area in the nose of the engine, fortunate enough to find a gallon size can that some conductor had used for a spittoon. It was hideously noisy down there and dirty, but it would work for a hiding place, too. There were open spaces on the sides in the nose where we could see the ground speeding along under us. I found that when the train snaked around a curve, we could be seen if we were at the window, so we were careful about what we dumped and when. I decided that peeing out the engineer's window would be superior to trying to use the can, but we could only go for it when that side of the window was on a wide, outside curve.
We'd been awake for hours: standing up, sitting down, and moving into the nose at the watering stations when we could feel the train slowing down. After sharing our only food, an orange that I'd bought on Canal Street, the thought of two or three days on the train loomed like a long, long, time. We didn't have a plan yet for how to get water or a meal, but that didn't seem as important to me as the fact that Steve hadn't really held me or touched me since we'd left New York City. I was leaning against the tall, skinny door in the back of the cab, wrapping my arms around myself. “Hey,” I said, but he only glanced at me for a second. It didn't seem right that he was acting so distant and moody all of a sudden, and here we were alone together with not much else to do, nothing that I could figure except watch some more gad-zillion trees. He was sitting looking out the window as if I didn't exist, and it was really starting to bug me that he wouldn't notice me. For the first time since I'd known him, there was an uncomfortable silence between us. From the vantage point of now, I can sympathize that maybe sex with jailbait in public places might have quenched his normal ardor, but I had no respect then for such straight-laced squeamishness.
I moved over to the engineer's seat he was slouched in and ran my fingers up his biceps, the skin so much like my own soft texture but tantalizingly male, tantalizingly not my own and attached to so much power. I wanted to be ignited by the power under his skin. “No, not now,” he answered my unspoken request, surprising me totally, as if he didn't even feel my fingers on his arm. I'd never asked anyone for sex and hadn't expected a rejection. He seemed to be sulking as he looked out the train window that was hurtling us backwards across Canada, booted foot up on the open sill, his wide square jaw nestled into his hand.
“Why not?” I asked, guessing that he wouldn't really be able to resist; after all, he'd pursued me through three states, risked jail for me already, abandoned life as he knew it—whatever that was—all for me. I knew, facing twenty or thirty more hours stowed away together in an extra engine of the Royal Canadian, that sex was bound to happen, and why not now in broad daylight, when it seemed like a good idea to me? We'd been making love without giving it a thought, at least I hadn't. He was so passionate, so natural, so easy.
“It's just not a good time,” he said again, holding his face away from my gaze, his chin still propped in his hand, legs stretched out across the control panels, looking at the forest as if it interested him more than my body did. I wasn't about to accept a silly no—what kind of precedent would that be? I bent across his torso and kissed him on his reluctant but beautiful lips, and that was all it took, really.
We were on the sleeping bags behind the seats when the tall door which we hadn't dared mess with, that led back through the engine and on to the next car, and then the next, opened a crack; I felt the pressure as it pushed on my hip while we were in the thick of it. I was naked on my back with Steve on top of me, and as our visitor pushed on the door, Steve collapsed in a frozen attitude, not looking up to see the audience. But I did. We were all frozen in time, just my eyes making contact with the conductor's.
The man was gray haired and sturdy looking, and kindly, I hoped. His eyes locked to mine, expressionless. As soon as he couldn't easily enter the extra engine, he must have suspected stowaways. Half drunken with the effect of lovemaking, I was still aware that my eyes should hold out a prayer of innocence and mercy to this man.
All the man could see of us was the back of Steve's head, his face now tucked down over my breasts, his thick, wavy hair like Godiva's giving me some coverage. His arms had slipped under my back and head, and my arms loosely held him. The man seemed to decide on how to handle his discovery as I noticed his cap, the traditional overalls, a denim jacket. He surprised me by politely and without a word, averting his eyes and solemnly backing away, closing the door, as if he’d simply entered the wrong room. We jumped up in a panic, scrambling into our clothes.
“God fucking damn it!” Steve swore. “God damn it, damn it, damn it. That's exactly what I thought would happen.” He was jumping up and down in a Rumplestiltskin kind of fit, tucking in his blue work shirt and looking down the way I loved to see him do as he buttoned up his blue jeans. But I didn't feel guilty; no way in creation did our disrobing and lying down together cause the train personnel to become aware of our presence. I wasn't that superstitious. Besides, shouldn't love and its expression have the highest value—shouldn't my own lover be willing to risk all for my love and affection?
“Well, damn it, too,” I said. “It was pretty funny that he opened the door just then.” I could see that he didn't think it was funny at all. “We've been on the train for hours without seeing anyone,” I went on, “and then, bam, just like that,” I snapped my fingers and laughed at the irony that sex would produce such a reaction. Steve wouldn't even look at me but was back to sulking in the engineer's seat. Now we were caught but the train kept right on rolling. I half expected a jolt on the brakes and a bunch of angry men storming through the narrow silver door, telling us to get the hell off their train, out in the middle of the endless forest we'd been winding through all morning. But nothing happened; just the two of us waiting and waiting in what I thought was fairly blissful cruising.
Hours passed before the little door opened again. Neither of us had a watch, but it was getting close to twenty-four hours since we'd eaten dinner or had water. This time we were both seated in the swiveling engineer's seats with our eyes riveted to the door as it opened. “Okay you guys,” the man said, a different man. Neither of us breathed a word; we just looked at this person who might be both judge and jury. I figured the first guy must have been nice, too embarrassed to talk to us after seeing me naked like that and in the act. His buddy had been sent. “The train will stop at nine tonight for about twenty minutes, just enough time to run like crazy to a market that's open late. You'll be able to get some supplies.” We were speechless, just nodding our heads in gratitude. “There'll be a depot and a street just north of it. Go left about three blocks down that street, take another right one block, and hurry.” He tapped his watch. “Nine o'clock, twenty minutes.” Without another word he turned to leave, then added, “And stay down when we're in the stations during the day.”
“Thanks,” I whispered as the door closed.
When the train came into the depot and stopped, it was dark. We knew it was the stop the conductor guy had told us about. I didn't want to run carrying our things all the way to the store and back, too afraid we'd miss it if I had to stop and catch my breath so I waited, just down the ladder in the dark. There was no one on the platform and even though Steve told me to stay on the train, I waited with the pack and the sleeping bags at my feet, peering around, praying he'd get back before the big engines started moving again. As the “all clear” whistle blew, Steve came sprinting down the platform and followed me up the ladder with not a second to spare. We sat on the floor and divvied up the goods. Our feast was beyond delicious: canned pork and beans, two quarts of orange juice, bread and bologna. There was milk for breakfast and apples, oranges and peanut butter. We guessed we'd be on the train for almost another day.
When we climbed down in Calgary, it was noonish, bright daylight, and the paying customers were visible along the track, station side. There was no other way out so we jumped quickly, and I acted as if it were totally not us who had just done so. The station was true old West style, but I tucked my head down and we walked quickly along. Only the one or two who had actually witnessed our scuffle down the ladder with our pack and bags could verify that we’d been stowaways on the backwards second engine trailing the Royal Canadian, a thousand miles across virgin forest, and they had turned their heads politely. As soon as our feet were on the ground, we were simply bums in the train yard. Once off the platform steps and meandering down the street, the fear of harassment and arrest lifted off my shoulders and I felt euphoric—we’d done it—a thousand miles closer to our goal and with a few bucks for a cheap hotel.
The streets were dusty; the architecture looked to be mostly wooden, two-story Victorians in the train station neighborhood. We found a hotel in the second block, and I waited on the curb while Steve went inside to see if we’d be welcomed. Mr. and “Mrs.” were given a second story room, one with lace curtains on the tall, sash windows overlooking the street. An even quicker wedding of our names than I had thought. I sat alone outside, noticing even then a sad consequence of the tag-along woman. I seemed to be keeping a tally book of major deficits to the counter-culture I had willingly entered. It wasn't called that yet, of course, and Steve didn’t seem intellectual enough to qualify as Beatnik, but I knew my path was way off the norm, also knew I hadn't a lick of choice in the matter—not at this point. The reward was a bathroom with a shower, old but fully functional and a slopey double bed with iron frame—all original vintage and fine with me. Shower and sleep we did. The rest of the weary but not the of wicked. It didn't feel wicked, just alive and living.
*****
In the morning after a breakfast from a grocery bag, we walked to Main Street, found the highway out of town in bright summer sun, and headed south into the States. Canadians must have thought it the right direction for funky-looking kids, and we were over the border and headed southwest to Walla Walla in record time.
It was almost dark when the last car dropped us in the center of Weston, Oregon, our final destination: population 165; altitude flat; attitude, pea harvest factory town. The only intersection in town with stop signs hosted a tavern on one corner, a café across the street, a store and some general shops—a one block downtown. But the tavern was hopping, and Steve went in to ask about rooms for rent, alone again; I was still seventeen and too young for bars. Luckily, the upstairs apartment over the tavern had just vacated and, costing only one dollar a night, Steve paid up for a week and we had shelter.
It wasn’t pretty, but I didn’t care about pretty. Pretty had only gotten me nowhere and nowhere is what I had to learn about, being all new territory—not school, not home, not like my mom’s—not anything I’d ever imagined. Steve had said there’d be jobs for us in this nowhere, and I trusted fully that there’d be a job. At least for him, and maybe for me. Until we rented the rooms above the bar, it hadn’t occurred to me that we’d also have to find a place to sleep, cook, fuck, too—all the necessities of life besides the job. It struck me as damned fortunate that a tiny apartment—just poof! —appeared, and we were allowed to rent it.
The living room had a patterned, rolling linoleum that I found it best not to look at too closely, having no desire to change its slightly gritty surface, and a sofa, scratchy, old, small and gray. There were two windows with curtains of thin fabric that let in light from the neon tavern sign and in the morning, the light of the desert and the new day. The small kitchen with one window had a table with two chairs, a stove with four burners, a fridge, sink, and an overhead bulb. The bathroom was just a toilet and a funky tin shower—but it all worked. Hurrah! The bedroom was off the kitchen with one dresser and a bed so bowled out we dismantled it and put the mattress on the floor. It was a corner room with two windows overlooking the desolate yard and alley behind; the lot next door had a tiny Airstream sitting dead center, where eventually, a cowboy would play his fiddle on the steps. This place would be home for a while, and I would be mistress of the house.
In the morning we were at the factory by dawn, signing clipboards—the list that Steve had emphasized as essential. There it was: my new name at the bottom of the “people wanting jobs,” and I could check back daily. The trucks were already rolling twenty-four seven, the machines of the factory grinding and slamming; the sign-up man said we’d probably arrived in time to work. They were still hiring, but it would be night shift. Both shifts were twelve hours: seven to seven, whether AM or PM.
By the first check-back, after caramel sundaes at the café, and yucky beans in the apartment which neither of us knew how to cook, we landed a pair of the 7:00PM to 7:00AM’s—my first real job, and I was so happy. They didn't care about his shoulder length blonde mane: he was a farm-boy and tall and built and he'd driven for them before.
On day one the supervisor showed me around a bit. Women on stools at the conveyor belts sat high on a loft a full story of metal stairs above the factory floor, checking for foreign particles as peas poured in streams to the vats that would send them to packaging. The boss started me at the end of the system: loading boxes, full ones, onto the last belt that would take them to the loading docks, boxes of cans of peas—sealed, labeled, heavy and ideally without too many mouse limbs or twigs cooked in. I did that for a while until some woman in a flannel shirt and jeans decided to put me in the freezer moving things around. Then came break time for which I had no snack or money, just a jar of the horrid beans Steve had cooked the night before. I sat alone in the locker room, too embarrassed by my own foreign-ness and the jar of beans to sit at a table. One invited me to come out of the dressing room, but I just smiled and thanked her. I guess since I hadn’t cried or died after a few hours in the freezer, I was told to go upstairs, introduced to the ladies at the belt, given a stool too high to fall off of comfortably, and told to put anything that wasn’t a green pea into the bucket that hung on the edge. The noise was daunting. Above us the trucks roared up to the wall on the higher ground behind the behemoth factory.

Little Story 3 (very rough draft)

In 1963 I had nothing to live for but the thrill. School, college, a wash; jobs a wash; I had no training in anything but dieting and dressing to seduce. So that would have to do. Steve was smitten and my work in seduction would, at least for a while, pay off. I didn’t need a job—I’d just follow Steve Mork around, sit when he told me to, eat when he said so. My honors track in high school hadn’t kept me afloat in college; I didn’t respect or understand the man’s world of everything by, for, and about men only in every class offered including my parents’ points of view. The deans at Reed had given me the boot—I could take my 3.0 GPA and hit the road;go on home they told me. They had assessed me as “amoral.” Well, that was no surprise being without religion or any spiritual practice, and it even seemed to please my dad the atheist. My college-born attitude of trouble maker (murals on closet doors, hitch-hiking in Washington State, stealing gum and getting caught at the local store—horrid, unbearable crimes) wasn’t working out. Then out the door at home too; the house was crowded and my return to the nest hadn’t been anticipated; they didn’t want me at all. That was pretty much a shock but in my numb state of repression even shock barely registered. Tossed into the cold cruel world at seventeen, and I couldn’t even type. But I could drink--they had taught me that and smoking quite well. I could also look pretty, read, write, draw, cook, clean, change diapers, sew, and, well, keep my hair shiny—that was it. My hobby of singing folk songs got buried in my own confusion at Reed. I no longer wanted people looking at me. The unconscious plan would be to hide behind my man; everyone accepted that. In the fifties and sixties, men were not only, in most cases, the sole providers, they were also the sole decision makers. Women where I grew up were expected to bend to every demand, foresee a man’s whims and needs. Having had free reign in reading my father’s books, however, dozens, maybe a hundred literary novels and histories, I had inadvertently developed a world view that wasn’t going to tolerate mindless subjugation. Whoever owned me was going to have hell to pay trying to keep me in line, down on the farm. It wasn’t going to be a pretty picture, but who knew?

Little Story 1

The guys at Morningstar were building adobe walls, making sun-dried
bricks set out on the mesa first. They were separating themselves from
politics, at least the sound of it, their shirtless torsos all one sweating effort
to make shelter. I stood and looked, not with them, a visitor. Someone had brought me across the mesa to see, and I did not know how I fit in. I didn’t.
The sun blared with not one leaf to give shelter. Now there are buildings and trees.
Now there are roads, wells, plots of irrigated soil. I think goat John got his
start at Morningstar. Then he moved to Buffalo and owned a milk van. He tootled
along those dirt roads and would come up my drive down in Seco every other week with fresh goat milk and cheese. He was tall and lanky, very much the business man. We bought as much as we had change and dollars for. Traded back his bottles. I learned to make cheesecake from his fresh cheese and goat ricotta, graham crackers crusts. Honey and cinnamon. The days were filled with surviving, driving, working in town and at home on my machine, sewing stuff for us and others. No father, no man. Just me and my son, our various roommates. A commune of sorts, women living together in a shady adobe rental on a plot of farmland beyond anybody’s means that I knew. We’d go out to dance now and then, babysitting each other’s kids or bringing them along. It was all going nowhere for me until I cleared my head with modern day therapy, brand new in that neck of the woods, well, slice of the valley. I set my emotional clock back to fourteen and started all over again.
It was Fermin’s house on El Salto Road when I found my center. Ricocheting from suicidal to conscious, the little needle on my odemeter hovered over “good-to-go” at last. I had set myself free from the need for a man. What a load to put down. Them guys is heavy!