When I Was Young and Reckless

My daughter Palesa has informed me that I don’t have to be profound in my blog.   This sets my mind at ease.

If anybody can stand an old gasbag reminiscing about in his past, I’m going to talk about an 18 month adventure which virtually shaped the rest of my life.  In 1973, after 13 years of high school teaching, I decided to throw off restraint, resign my job, discharge myself of most possessions and hit the road, Jack Kerouac style.

I had a back pack, a sleeping bag, a two man tent, cooking utensils, and a small gas stove.  Since I was in Connecticut at the time, the logical direction was west, so I stood out on the street with my thumb out.  Hitchhiking, with its many qualities at the time, was a great was to meet new people.  In a few days I found myself in Boulder, where I went to the local office of the state employment agency.   They sent me to a dude ranch where my job was picking up bales of hay and loading them onto the back of a truck.  This led to work cleaning out the horse stables. 

This led next to peach picking in western Colorado where for two or three weeks I shared a cabin with seven other pickers.  They would have been described as hippies.  Whatever, they were great people and all were vegetarians.   Not wishing to be disruptive, I too became a vegetarian and remain one to this day.  My rationale: I didn’t want to kill animals to feed myself.

We decided as a group to set off for apple picking in the Yakima Valley of Washington, using the car of one of the pickers.   After spending a few days in Yellowstone National Park, we wound up at an orchard where we were put in another pickers’ cabin.  We prepared food in a central eating shack with about twenty other “hippies.”  All were on various religious experiments: as a result it took at least five minutes for various contributions to grace from reciters of “Om” to fervently Christian prayers.  We were paid $15 for filling a 25 bushel bin.   Many of our co-pickers were Canadians.

Flushed with picking cash, I bought an old station wagon for $195 and headed west for hiking in the Cascades Mountains and then the Olympic range where my tent, sleeping bag and stove were mighty handy.

I next headed south with a couple of hitchhikers I had picked up and wound up at a lily bulb farm in northern California.   I hadn’t known there was such a thing a lily bulb farm, but we learned to  climb on the sides of a potato picker, a tractor with a digging fork, a conveyor belt and places for the men to stand.  As the belt moved we picked the bulbs up as they passed by and loaded them into boxes.   The farm had an assembly line where the bulbs were potted in soil, all ready to bloom in time for Easter.  We slept in an abandoned farm amid the cow stalls.  

After a stop in San Francisco at the home of a friend of my two hitchhiker friends, I gave away the station wagon preparing to head south.   Before leaving I went to the Berkley employment office where there were pamphlets for the Marines and the Peace Corps and others.   While I was waiting for a job, I filled out a Peace Corps application and mailed it in.  I essentially forgot about it until months later a letter showed up in my rental P.O. Box in Boulder inviting to become a Peace Corps Volunteer in Lesotho.  How little we know that small acts can lead to big changes: I went to Lesotho, where I taught for five years, met my wife, applied for the Foreign Service in which I served fourteen years, all the result of filling out an application while waiting for a day labor job.

I next went to Yuma, Arizona, where I picked lemons.   Many of our co-workers were Mexicans.  There were border guards in spiffy uniforms and whenever we saw them we alerted the Mexicans who magically vanished until we gave the all clear.  To this day, I’ve been partial to undocumented immigrants and am an enthusiastic supporter of legislation granting them a path to citizenship.

Finally I left Arizona and headed south eventually to Mexico City where I joined the North-American-Mexican cultural institute and started taking Spanish lesson.   To support myself, I took to playing my recorder (which I had packed) in the streets.  I earned enough to support myself, but, alas, I was picked up by the police for working without a permit.  This led to five days in jail where I continued to play my recorder to the applause of the other inmates.  Eventually I was escorted out and we headed for the airport.  But my backpack was in a $1.50 a night hotel and I begged to go pick it up.   Not possible.   I was put on a plane which eventually wound up in San Antonio, Texas.  There I was with no possessions, little money, and nowhere to go.

How I survived and thrived is another story for another time.