Edwin Forrest Ward
Splunked
Our
hitchhiking adventures, me and Lucy’s, on Cape Cod are a bust. Constant rain,
no sex, sand in our shoes, grit in our underwear, humidity so high it’s
cloudlike, sleeping bags wet, two day old bagels already moldy, uncountable
insect bites. That we are not nearly as inspired or as engaged as we were when
we first hooked up in Cape Hatteras after meeting on the road is what I’d write
in a letter to myself if I had an address. First class, of course, for a dime,
up twenty-five percent since the spring’s eight-cent rate. Our agreed-upon
plan, that we will go wherever a ride takes us, might need revision, but it is
our plan at this point.
Ignoring
my disappointment and frustrations, over the course of the next few days, we
slowly make our way west. Nature can be kind and it is the morning Lucy and I
eat blackberries we find alongside the road and listen to the wup wup wup
wup wups of horny
ruffled grouse. The birdsong and fruit help to evaporate Lucia’s sullenness – a
mood engendered by my inadvertent revelation that I am not yet officially
divorced from my wife. The upswing
in her mood is further enhanced when we catch a wild ride in a soup-ed up Dodge
Charger with a mustachioed dude selling illegal radar detectors. Bucko, his
name as well as the verbiage on his license plate, travels from small town to
small town with a trunk full of black market electronics. He brags that he will
never pay taxes, not with the likes of Richard Nixon playing king, an
anti-establishment attitude that Lucia affirms she can relate to. I, too, find
his outlaw braggadocio refreshing and I paraphrase Dylan, reminding us all
that, as oxymoronic as it sounds, honesty is required to live outside the law,
to which our speedster adds an addendum: a 440 cubic inch V-8 also helps when
it comes to out running the law.
Bucko deposits us just west of the Delaware Water Gap in Monroe County
Pennsylvania after a day of druid spiraling around north Jersey and western New
York. From there, our rides are sometimes short and local; we seem to zigzag
north and south as well as west. For the most part, under canopies of pleasant
and dry summer starry night skies, Lucy and I sleep aside each other in
separate down bags wherever we find ourselves to be, when the odds of securing
a ride indicate the practicality of calling it a day. Daylight hours we spend a
lot of time at rural county crossroads in Pennsylvania and Ohio. Sometimes,
even miles apart, such intersections look the same. The people who offer us
rides all have the good intention of taking us further: a trucker moving
produce to Harrisburg; a California university chaplain returning home for the
summer to visit his parents on their farm in Lancaster; steelworkers looking
for work in Bethlehem after being laid off in York, and my favorite, two
different carloads of teenage locals out looking for fun, from towns sixty miles
apart, who, after a phone call to arrange it, pony express us to a third
crossroad of a town in Western Pennsylvania, a hundred and twenty miles from
where we met the first carload. Something I learn about the small towns of
Central Pennsylvania is that adolescents play there a game they call
“splunking” wherein one drives on moonlit nights in the thick of the mountain
forests with headlights off to, one, scare the hell out of anyone not
knowledgeable of the road and of the practice, and, two, for the sheer
excitement of enjoying the marvel of a large rising moon above the treetops
serving as the only source of light thirty miles from the nearest town zipping
along at sixty miles an hour, an experience that turns most serene after my
initial fright abates, standing next to Lucia, her hair a wake of jet black
voodoo in the wind, holding on to the roll bar affixed to the rear of the Ford
cab, swaying with the turns in the road, side-to-side, leaning true against the
torque of curving roads, knowing right now that we are sharing this experience
of speed and moon and danger and delight.
Finally
out of the sylvan woods of William Penn, we spend a night in Cincinnati aside a
concrete bike path under a pedestrian walkway spanning some tributary of the
Ohio River. An unseen industrial area generates a humming that’s matched by the
rumbling of trucks on Interstate 275. Our night of uneasy urban unsound sleep
dictates that we alter our modus operandi: we will still go in whatever
direction a ride takes us, but we will pass or quit a ride early rather than
ending up in a city from here on out.
Our
first multi-state ride takes us from the outskirts of Cincinnati to western
Missouri, and turns into a two-day adventure, the first hour of which is touch
and go, or should I say, as you will see, a time of touch and no-go.
Dave, a law student at The University of
Missouri in Kansas City, stops to pick up us on the interstate. He’s driving a
Mustang and pulling on a trailer, some kind of small, sleek, most modern sailboat,
a dual pontoon-ed catamaran. After securing our backpacks to the bridging
structure of the catamaran, we squeeze into the backseat of Dave’s exceedingly
crowded car. Dave has gear for fishing, boating, mountain climbing, and target
shooting (rifle and bow). He even has a parachute. After a quick exchange of
first names, the would-be pompous lawyer in him starts lecturing us about the
dangers and illegality of hitchhiking on the interstates.
“You
should only hitch from the state entry to the on-ramps. A state trooper can
arrest you for even walking on the interstate. In Ohio, they’re sticklers, I
know. I used to hitchhike back and forth between Notre Dame and Cincinnati.” He
also tells us that in some states, like Colorado and Wyoming, it is illegal to
hitchhike anywhere, a bit of information that will prove useful later on in our
adventuring.
Dave
is willing to take us all the way to K.C. with him, and asks, an hour into our
acquaintance, “Can either of you drive?”
He complains that driving more than an hour or two at a time always
stiffens his neck and prompts headaches. When I volunteer, he asks to see my
driver’s license, for the purpose of checking its expiration date. Along with a
Blue Cross membership card, my New Jersey driver’s license is the only
identification I carry, both of which are clipped to all the money I have in
the world: four Ben Franklins and a Jackson, $420. What with Dave’s scrupulous
attention to legality, I decide not to bring up the issue of marijuana with
him, even though drugs of one sort or another had been a part of practically
all of our prior rides. Besides, four twenty doesn’t yet mean what it will in
the future. The jack-Amish chaplain had had the best dope, Maui Wowee!
he had called it. I still had in my pocket a couple of the Quaaludes
that Bucko had swapped for some of the Columbian Cheeba Cheeba that I
carry. Unfortunately, this guy,
Dave, his heart and psyche immersed in the waters of law, reminds me of
Perkins, a former boss, the vice-principal where I used to teach, who was also
an undercover narcotics agent, a spy in the house of the Seventies, working the
law to collect two salaries, one federal, one state. Such shenanigans had
weighed heavily in my decision to leave my tenured teaching position.
Naturally
Dave is more interested in the beautiful Lucia, the exotic New Yorker, than me,
and as with everyone with whom we will get involved during our travels, the
first thing on our benefactor’s mind after his lecture about hitchhiking is the
wonder: Are Lucy and I lovers? When I get out of the back seat with Lucia in
order to drive, Dave takes the other front seat without offering it to Lucia,
and I wonder: is Dave’s intent the game: divide and conquer? I find his obvious
study of Lucy’s reflection in the visor mirror burdensome and annoying.
From
her seat in the back, Lucia speaks interestingly on sundry subjects. When she
quotes the last line of some Trouffe movie in French, Dave responds in French.
That they both speak French delights Lucia. Apparently she asks Dave in French
if he would like to have his stiff neck massaged, for he centers himself in the
bucket seat, lays his head on the rest, and reclines the angle of the seat
back. Lucia hasn’t put her hands on me sensually or sexually since the Last
Motel in Cape Hatteras, and here she is massaging Dave. Envy and anger well
within, for as I drive, I detect upon Dave’s countenance, a gloating, a
fantasizing, a reading of much into Lucy’s massage. I’m afraid he’s about to
respond to the good vibes of Lucy’s touch with some touching of his own and
complicate my life. I consider that maybe Lucia like myself is out looking for
her mate; maybe, I wonder, I’ve already been ruled out.
Dave’s
fingers, nervous in his lap, telegraph his intention to put his hand on Lucy’s.
I’m reminded and well aware that Lucia understands little of the absolute lure
of her being, of the innuendo of her fingers upon another’s flesh.
I
formulate a conditional proposition: if this scene is right out of the movies,
then I had better act as well as watch. As did the Pennsylvania teenage
prankster driving his father’s spanking new Ford F-100 pick-up in the thick
woods of the Alleghany Mountains, I turn off the headlights of the Mustang.
With the sudden disappearance of both his dash lights and the illumination of
his headlights Dave bolts upright in panic and his head lurching forward cracks
the vanity mirror on the sun visor he’d been using to watch Lucia in the back
seat. In the spidery remains there can be seen dozens of fragmented Lucys.
“What
are you doing?” he shrills, as he strains against his seat belt, stretching to
reach the headlight switch to which I block access.
I
respond, “What, you never splunked growing up in Cincinnati?”
“Driving
without headlights is illegal,” is the best Dave can come up with.
“Yeah,
I know, but that don’t mean it ain’t fun.” The man in the moon smiles just
enough light on the highway that I can see well enough not to drift, to hug the
road.
Smoke
and mirrors. Distraction. And the lawyer gets my drift. I win. The massage is
over.
