“You,
who live on the road,
must have a code,
that you can live by.”
- Teach Your Children Well,
Crosby, Stills and Nash
In the early 1970’s, gas was cheap and great herds of hippies in Volkswagen vans roamed the land like migrating buffalo. Hitchhiking was not only a viable option, it was sport. A backpack, a pair of jeans, a t-shirt and well-turned thumb could get you across the country.
It was The Road, and there was a code: always help other travelers, share your food, share your stories, keep moving - don’t overstay your welcome. Moving about the country was cheap and easy. Every new ride brought new stories and adventures. The Road was a pin-ball machine bouncing and ricocheting travelers in odd and interconnected directions. It was a great time to be poor. It was a great time to be a hitchhiker.
Two years out of college in 1975 and freshly fired from a job as an all-night FM disc jockey, I hitchhiked from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to San Francisco, Montana and the Canadian Rockies, returning via the Winnipeg Folk Festival and International Falls, Minnesota. The trip lasted all summer, from early May until mid-September. I traveled alone, carrying a cheap, metal-frame backpack loaded with the bare essentials: small tent, sleeping bag, tarp, rain gear, a change of clothes, some gorp, a bottle of tepid water, chapstick, toothbrush, harmonica and notebook. I slept in other people’s cars, I slept in other people’s homes. I slept in the woods, on picnic tables, and on a packing crate at the opening of an abandoned mine shaft. I ate bread, cheese and fruit. The entire summer cost me no more than $200, and I returned home as buffed and as healthy as I’ve ever been in my life.
But for all the many things that The Road WAS, one thing it WAS NOT was hygienic. Sanitary facilities were wherever you created them, and hot showers sometimes came many days to many weeks apart. Standing along the side the road in the sun and the dust and the car exhaust, a hitchhiker acquired a certain earthy patina. Coming through western Oregon eight weeks into the journey, I began to develop a serious crotch and body rot, and by the time I reached southern Idaho, I was so badly afflicted that I could barely move – my skin was red, chaffed and bleeding. It was time to circle the wagons. So when I reached Sun Valley, I changed my plans:
I would climb into the mountains to seek a cold, clean, isolated mountain stream to sit in for a couple of days. That would surely do the trick!
On cue, as if my change of plan had been broadcast across some network, an orange and blue van pulled to the side of the road, and a hairy arm motioned me ahead as the side door swung open enthusiastically. I hopped in. The driver, a tall and lanky fellow with a bushy mustache, was slumped comfortably at the wheel. His passenger was a burly fellow with unkempt hair and a thick black beard that never really stopped growing up his face, just thinning out a bit as it approached his eyes. The driver’s voice was relaxed and easy. “Hi,” he said, “I’m Al, and this here’s Al.” I looked at them quizzically and they laughed. “Yup,” he said, “we’re both named Al.” They looked at each other like there was more to this joke but Al continued: “We live in Sun Valley, we’re partners in Triple Al Answering, a telephone message and answering service for wealthy people that are in Sun Valley on vacation. Ever hear of it?”
“No, sorry,” I offered, “I’m not from around here.”
Al and Al told me that they were heading up into the mountains to pick up a third partner, presumably also named Al, for a fishing excursion along some secret river to the north. Jeez, I wondered, with all the Als out of town, who’s answering the phones?
I told them about my trip and explained my plight and they happily offered to take me to an old abandoned shepherd’s cabin along a mountain stream at 9000’ that was known only to a small group of locals. They said that I’d be welcome to stay there for a few days on the one condition that I do something nice for the place during my stay. I readily agreed. Thus, after a quick stop at the local market to pick up a few supplies, we headed off and up into the mountains that gathered ahead like a huge rumpled blanket. The Road continued.
We drove up and up Highway 93, following the path of least resistance as it clung to the side of the mountain. At a spot known only to Al and Al and a few others, we turned off onto a what appeared to be an abandoned, rutted truck trail that shot up a narrow canyon along a raging torrent of a river for about 6 miles until the road was completely washed out, and Al and Al were forced to turn their old van around. They assured me that I would reach the cabin in less than a mile by crossing and then following the river upstream. There was no road, but the river would take me there. We sat for an hour or so laughing and trading stories. Then we bid each other a fine journey and Al and Al headed back down the rutted trail to the highway, to Al#3 and to a weekend of fishing.
Exactly as they indicated, an easy hike of no more than 30 minutes brought me to a quiet, grassy, high mountain meadow where the raging river was silenced into a clear meandering stream, and just across the meadow, cowering in the shadows of late afternoon, sat a small shepherd’s cabin.
It was a remarkably clean one-room cabin, with an old black wood stove resting on a square of sheet metal in the far corner. Two bunks were built solidly into the corner and on the wall by the door hung two wooden shelves upon which sat a box of baking soda, an unopened bag of candy, a yellow vase with some not-completely-but-almost-dead meadow flowers, a box of safety matches and a Merriam Webster Dictionary of the English Language. There was clean glass in the windows, a stack of wood along the wall and a time-worn rug on the floor that said: “Wilkommen”. Out front was a stump, a remarkably sharp axe and a sturdy old wooden chair that had long ago lost all of its paint. What it lacked in paint however, it more than made up for in character, and it was upon this chair that I sat motionless and lost in thought until well after the sun had disappeared behind the mountains, 9,000 feet up the side of 11,400 foot Castle Peak in the Sawtooth National Wilderness.
The cabin had a sheet metal roof. I discovered this fact in the middle of the first night when a crashing storm snuck over the ridge and did a drum solo above my head. Hearing a scurrying noise somewhere in the cabin, I turned on my flashlight and found a healthy field mouse dining on fat chunks of gorp that fell from the tiny hole he’d gnawed in my bag. …share your food… I spilled out more gorp and as lightning flashed and the roof boomed, the mouse and I broke down mouse-human barriers and dined like kings. …share your stories.
The next two days were spent sitting naked in the cold waters of the river for as long as I could stand it and then rolling onto the grassy bank to lay in the sun. I evened out my hitchhiker’s tan and read Zen and the Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance for at least the third time. I swept out the cabin, fed the mice and chopped enough wood to last a winter’s month. I bided my time by whittling a series of abstract figures in wood. And then along with some thread, a branch and some rodent skulls and bones that I found in the woods, I constructed a little mobile and hung it in the window to tinkle and clatter lightly in the thin wisps of mountain air.
By the third day, the plague had lifted and I was cured. Since I was already within 2000 feet of the summit, I decided to climb the remainder of Castle Peak. From the cabin it appeared to be a relatively easy climb. The snows of a huge ice field that spilled down the mountain, came to within 1000 yards of my cabin and provided an easy boulevard up the mountain - so long as the angle remained shallow. But as the snow became deeper and the slope approached the angle of repose, I worked to the edge and sought the sure-footing of the rocks. The climb took much longer than I had anticipated. The mountain kept leaning back from me, getting taller and taller with each crest that I topped. By early afternoon I had reached the summit wearing just shorts and hiking boots and pulling on a wool shirt against the brisk wind that came spilling up and over the far side of the mountain.
At the very top of the peak, a cairn of rocks had been constructed. Wedged beneath the rocks was a coffee can wrapped carefully in plastic. “How exciting!” I thought, and eagerly dug out the can. In the can was a map, a small folding telescope, a collection of environmental quotes, a Snickers, and a picture of a couple in a joyful embrace. I sat down next to the cairn with the map and telescope and enjoyed a view of what seemed to be the entire known world. Or, if not that, at least a very large chunk of north-central Idaho.
Eventually, cooling temperatures and gathering clouds convinced me that it was time to return down the mountain. I replaced the can and its contents in the pile of rocks. This time however, I included a road-worn harmonica in the key of G that I had been saving for just such a spiritual occasion.
The trip down was exhilarating. At first I hopped cautiously from rock to rock, avoiding the steep fields of snow. But soon I discovered that the blinding-white slope of corn snow would whisk me down the hill at breathtaking speed. In hiking boots I surfed and slipped and tripped and jumped and ran and belly-slid almost to the very door of the cabin. And with frozen feet, bleeding palms and aching, exhausted legs I collapsed on a large warm rock - laughing with boots and shorts full of snow. My nose peeled quietly as water ran all around me. The trip up the mountain had taken five hours, the descent barely 50 minutes.
I was up before the sun the next day. The code said that it was time to move on, don’t overstay your welcome… to not monopolize the spot because there would surely be someone else due along soon, right on cue, to enjoy it. I fed the mice, left Zen And The Art on the shelf and headed quietly down the canyon and back to Highway 93, and then to Missoula, Glacier National Park and into the Canadian Rockies.
Someday the road may take you there. If you have the time, work your way up the flanks of Castle Peak. At the very top you might find a coffee can buried in a cairn of jagged rocks. If time has been kind and people have been true, the can might still contain a harmonica in the key of G that can play “Shenandoa” like nobody’s business. Replace the harmonica and the can and work your way down the southeast side of the mountain, down the huge ice and talus slope to a remarkably well-preserved one-room cabin with a sheet metal roof hunkered down along the edge of a meadow where a mountain stream stops briefly to collect its thoughts.
Take a look inside the cabin. It shouldn’t be locked. In fact, you can stay there for a night or two if you do something nice for the place. Hanging in the back window, a small mobile of carved wood, sewing thread and the tiny porcelainous bones of long-dead rodents may still catch the late afternoon sun. Sit on the edge of the bunk until the echoes of life have filtered from your head. Unless it’s gone out of tune over the years hanging there in the sun, you should still be able to hear the mobile tinkle, ever so quietly, as the little wisps of Idaho mountain air force their way through the cracks in the wall.
