The Best Ten Cents

The sound of distorted music being played much too loudly reverberated from inside a parked car, escaped through open windows, and swirled upwards from the narrow alley below. Two automobiles in a chance meeting were parked at 3:00 a.m., their windows open, their occupants shouting, boasting and laughing loudly.

Seven stories above, in a small apartment, a man had been sleeping. The noise coming in his window was only mildly annoying at first and the man awoke only partially. It was just another sound of the city he reasoned, the type of minor disturbance that happens 24/7 here in San Francisco or in any other city of any size. At least they weren’t gun shots. The man rolled over and tried to go back to sleep, but the noise persisted, piercing upwards through an early Tuesday morning known to some as late Monday night.

It was an old building on Fell Street, on the cross town route, heading towards Golden Gate Park. It butressed the last hillside facing downtown before you crossed over a small crest and began the long gradual downhill through the “Avenues” and towards the Pacific Ocean. The neighborhood that was on the edge of a regentrification zone, where new money, primarily gay money, was buying up beaten up old properties and refurbishing them. He had chosen this apartment because it was far enough from downtown to have what passed for reasonable rent in San Francisco. Out each of his two windows he owned a million-dollar view of downtown, a mile or so away, that glowed like a jewel when not obscured by fog.

But there was also a down side. Although new money was coming into the surrounding area, none of it had yet reached this particular building. The neighborhood remained a scary one. It was situated just a block from a large public housing project and the streets beyond the locked lobby door on the first floor crawled with an assortment of winos, derelicts and major scary dudes. Just a few months before, Chris Pursig, the son of author Robert Pursig, and a major character is his father’s classic “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintanence”, had been senselessly murdered while waiting for a bus, three blocks away. Three weeks ago, the man himself had been held up and robbed at knife-point and then thrown into a stinking dumpster while walking home with two bags of groceries. The last thing he heard was: “Stay in there for ten minutes!” The next thing he saw was an old women pearing into the dumpster to see if he was OK.


Still fearful and angry from the dumpster incident, the man went to the window and looked down. The fog obscured his view of the cars but he could see the eerie glow of headlights, each pointing in opposite directions. The cars had stopped in the middle of the alley, directly below his window, driver’s sides facing in. Engines had been shut off but stereos left blasting, and ‘yo dudes were being loudly exchanged. A glass bottle smashed and someone laughed hysterically. A fresh round of name-calling ensued, another bottle exploded, and the music was turned up.

He leaned out the window. “Hey, shut up down there!” he hollered in the direction of the parked cars, his vitriol accelerating at the rate of 32 feet per second/per second, as it plummeted downward. The music dimmed for just a second. “Well, that was easy,” he thought to himself. But then the clamor resumed with the music turned up even louder.

He hollered again, peppering it with the appropriate expletives. But this time there was no response. The din continued unabated. The man knew he would never get back to sleep as long as the ruckus continued below. Unlike the occupants of the cars, he had to get up in just a few hours and begin the 30-45 minute walk to his job in a small lithography shop south of Market Street.

Something shiny caught the corner of his eye.

Spilled out upon a nightstand near the window was an accumulation of pocket change, an assortment of dimes, pennies, quarters and nickels that were the remnants of what had been dollars the day before. Stealthfully, with a single eyebrow raised, he lined five pennies, side by side, on the window sill. He adjustted them as he eyed the trajectory. A little right. A little left. He had to clear the sidewalk but didn’t want to overshoot the alley. There was gravity to consider, and angular momentum… and fog.

He decided to go by feel.

Cocking his middle finger behind his thumb like a crossbow, the man applied pressure and then let his finger fly:

Flink.

A penny was jettisoned into space.

And then in rapid succession, he recocked his finger and sent the other four pennies off on their missions:

Flink.

Flink.

Flink.

Flink.

They descended like a squadron of falcons in a power dive. The wait seemed forever, although it couldn’t have been much more than three seconds.

… one-thousand-one-one-thousand-two-one-thousand-three...

Bam!…
…(pause)
Bam!

Bam!

Bam!

Bam!

It sounded like gun shots ringing out as the pennies slammed into hoods and trunks and roofs, and glanced off windshields like truck-tossed pebbles. The pennies then ricocheted about the alley, creating a secondary disturbance, clanking and crashing as they went. “What was that?!” a voiced hollered. The music stopped and the air was quiet. Worried voices spoke in hushed tones.

Five more pennies were already in place.

Flink.

Flink.

Flink.

Flink.

Flink.

…one-thousand-one-one-thousand-two-one-thousand-three…

Bam!

Bam!

Bam!

Bam!

Bam!

Car engines ignited. Bottles were jettisoned and drugs were stashed. The tires of old Oldsmobiles squealed and screeched as they tore off into the fog in opposite directions up and down the alley, leaving behind a wet spot in the night that was quiet - except of course for the usual minor disturbances that you’d expect in any major city of any size at 3:00 a.m.

The man looked out at the never-sleeping downtown lights, just beginning to twinkle as they poked through the lifting fog. He peed, got a drink of water, made sure the door was still locked, and then crawled back into bed for a luscious few more hours of sleep.

You get what you pay for, he thought. All things considered, it was probably the best ten cents he’d ever spent.

Sweet Old Burt

My father, Burt Howe, was an enigma, a modern day Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde. He was a man of many faces. At times he could be the sweetest, funniest, most wonderful person in the room, bringing a fresh smile to every person that he met. He was jovial, convivial and intelligent – full of stories – a twinkling eye. Over the years he earned the nickname “Sweet Old Burt” (“SOB”) which he wore proudly.

But at other times, he became an angry, irrational tyrant. He could be the meanest, angriest, most ornery s’nof’a‘bitch you could imagine, angering those around him and causing even his friends and family to turn away. At those times the moniker “SOB” applied equally as well.

Somewhere along the way he acquired a large lapel button that he displayed prominently at his home and loved to show to anyone who visited. It read: “SOB – Ask Me Why.” It was a statement that, on many levels, fit the man.

• • •

One sultry summer evening around twenty years ago, he and I sat in nylon deck chairs, watching the sun slip into the water at his cottage on Gun Lake in northwestern lower Michigan. Our conversation eventually turned to death and dying, and finally to epitaphs. “Just a minor asshole in a valley of giants,” I told him I wanted mine to say. His was more pragmatic: “Here lies Burt Howe, teacher of science and mathematics for 40 years - but he couldn’t figure this one out.”

• • •

On a clear Florida morning in April of 1998, Burton L. “Slug” Howe passed away due to complications arising from a slew of cancers that spread through his body. In the end, it wasn’t pretty, but death is seldom pretty, and often it can be merciful. I’m sure that on some level he must have been sorely disappointed to have lived almost three-quarters of the 20th Century, and yet failed to sample so much as a taste of the 21st. In retrospect, he hasn’t missed that much.

Sweet Old Burt (SOB) was buried in a small cemetery near his hometown at the headwaters of a tiny creek that springs gently from the sandy soil of Mason County before meandering into the Pere Marquette River for a short run to Lake Michigan. He had spent a boyhood in the woods and dunes that surround that river, and the cemetery contained the graves of his mother, father, grandparents and a variety of aunts and uncles.

After the service, the funeral director took my brother and sisters and I aside to make a few decisions. My father’s will insured that the entire funeral would be paid for, including the stone, however we would have to decide what the stone should say. We would all be leaving town shortly thereafter and he needed a decision.

We boggled.

I knew that it had to be distinct. It had to hold some hint as to the nature of the person who no longer took breath. I told my brother and sisters about the epitaph that he had shared years ago by the lake. But it seemed long and unwieldy and we decided against it. We were searching for something meaningful to put on the stone, something that showed the humanity of the person buried there. “How about,” I suggested, “SOB – ask me why”? I expected my siblings to object, but we need a quick decision, and it struck us all as appropriate. As I recall we all nodded in agreement. The deal was done. The stone was carved. The epitaph was written.

• • •

I’ve always felt a little uncomfortable about that gravestone over the years. I can’t help but wonder what his friends might think when they visit the grave. “What kind of a thing,” I imagine they remark, “is that to put on your father’s gravestone?” And I’m afraid I can’t disagree. I’ve debated many times whether it might be best to just replace the stone with a more traditional one and be done with it.

But I don’t think that Sweet Old Burt would agree. There is far too little humanity written on gravestones. A person must search far and wide before they can get beyond the usual “born and died” dates and repetitious religious platitudes. But when you do stumble upon a stone that reveals something about the person – who they were, what they thought, what they valued, how they were perceived – you have to celebrate it, capture it, revel in it and take it home with you. There can be humanity in death.



So in the end, I decided to leave it. It’s a statement. It’s irony, and SOB loved irony. Within another dozen years or so, most all of his old friends will be dead. And then, for as long as the polished granite can withstand the elements, the grave of Burt Howe, Sweet Old Burt, the SOB, will stand testament to the nature of the man. The dense, cold granite should last into the 22nd century and beyond. And through those centuries, quiet visitors will stop and reflect on who this man might have been… and why this was written of him.

So go there some time. Head about a mile west out of Scottville, Michigan to the grove of whispering oaks and maples on the south side of the road. Take the first of four entrances, the only one on the east side of the steep ravine that slices through the cemetery. Bear to the right around the rough “figure 8” and park your car when you reach the top of the eight. Step out of your car and look directly to the rear. Just to the right of where they dump brush into the ravine, sharing a small row with two other graves, sits the polished, pink granite gravesite of Burt Howe. It’s so close to the road that you risk backing over it if you try to move your car. Visit at the crack of dawn and the sun will be shining directly upon it:

Burton L. “Slug” Howe.
Born - Jan 15, 1925. Died - April 5, 1998.
SOB – Ask me why

Go there sometime. Ask him why.

And then listen.

Tee up a golf ball and duff it into the woods.

I’m sure that SOB will enjoy the company.

Cowgirl With A Farmer's Tan

Baker, Montana, loiters quietly in the dust along U.S. Highway 12, crammed up against the border of North Dakota like an afterthought. You can’t get anymore east in Montana than Baker without actually becoming North Dakota. And for Baker, being North Dakota is only slightly better than being Chicago, St. Louis or, forbid, New York City.

Which is probably why Baker is right where it is.

Marmarth, North Dakota is parked along a side track outside Montana, just about as far west as you can go and still be in North Dakota. Both Marmarth and Baker are old railroad towns along the famed Milwaukee Road from Chicago to Seattle. In the late 1800’s, Marmarth was a hub of rail repair activity, servicing the big engines before and after they made the climb over the mountains to the west. It had a population of over 5000 people – rail workers and their families mostly, with a growing fraternity of shop keepers and cattle ranchers. But times have changed, the railroad has moved its operations elsewhere, and life has largely passed Marmarth by. The town is abandoned now – save for one bar, one restaurant and a population of maybe 50 people, give or take. In the winter, considerably less.

Baker and Marmarth are separated by just seventeen miles of tracks and seventeen miles of wind-swept, coyote-tramped, straight-shot asphalt highway through the fossil-rich badlands of the Little Missouri River.

During the 1980’s, I spent a summer in Marmarth, living in the old railroad bunkhouse with a group of scientists from the Milwaukee Public Museum. We were there to study dinosaur extinction. The badlands surrounding the area contain sediments that date precisely to the very moment, over 65 million years ago, when dinosaurs went extinct. Fossil fragments of dinosaurs, turtles, fish, rodent-like mammals, insects, plant material and other fauna and flora related to the extinction literally spill out of the buttes, canyons and mesas like rock candy. We had come to make sense of it all.

There were rumors, during our summer in Marmarth, of a rundown cowboy bar in Baker that had a stripper. Not “strippers” per se, but a single stripper – a solitary woman who nightly gave away the details of her plot not in chapters, but in slow, anguishing paragraphs. Occasionally a few of the scientist/greenhorns bravely ventured across the border into town in an attempt to verify this rumor. Unfortunately, I never made it. To me, the mysterious stripper of Baker remained as enigmatic as the fossil ghosts that prowled the badlands.

A year or two later I was again traveling in the area and decided to return to Marmarth to check on some of the old sites and maybe do a little unsupervised fossil collecting on my own. Looking up some of the locals who I had befriended the summer before, I arranged to stay in the old bunkhouse for a couple of nights.

On the second night, as I sat under the whispering cottonwoods next to the Little Missouri River, I recalled the stripper bar in Baker. I had been doing a lot of traveling and it was time for a night on the town. I decided to drive the seventeen coyote-straight miles of asphalt into Baker to grab some dinner and maybe, just maybe, try to find the bar, if it really existed.

It wasn’t hard to find. There was really only one bar in town. I don’t recall its name, but it really didn’t need one. A single, well-worn door half-stepped awkwardly up from the dust of the street so that patrons naturally just stumbled in and stumbled out.

I stumbled in.

The bar was dark and cool inside. It was quiet and deserted except for two old half-drunken cowboys hunched over the mahogany bar, retelling old stories for the hundredth time. They looked instinctively in my direction. Immediately sizing me up as a dude, they returned to their stories and the careful, thoughtful, long-term study of their beer glasses.

I spun up onto a butt-polished stool at the far end of the bar. Trying to look rough, or at least less dude-like, I ordered up a beer and a shot: whiskey… double… straight. I requisitioned a ranchburger with home fries and grabbed the local newspaper off of a stack at the end of the bar - a flimsy little rag of a dozen pages named the “The Baker Cattleman.” In most places it would have qualified as the local Shopper, but in Baker, it contained all the news that was fit to print: cattle auctions, obituaries, used trucks for sale, and a couple of articles about a car accident on the highway and the recent Founder’s Day parade, celebration and rodeo.

I read through the paper, slowly ate my ranchburger and watched a few people – locals it seemed - stumble in, have a drink and then stumble back out. (Cowfolk seem to be perpetually falling forward in a graceful, stumbling motion not unlike John Wayne. It must be the boots.) No one stayed for long, except the two cowboys at the far end of the bar. Like the faded pictures on the walls and the dust on the floor, they appeared to be fixtures.

By early evening, I had pretty much decided that those two cowboys were about all that was happening in Baker when a door to the rear of the bar opened and a woman carrying a leather shoulder bag and a large boom box walked in. She was thin, 40-ish, possibly 50-ish. She wore dusty jeans and a fancy pink cowboy shirt, with tassels on the sleeves, open in the front, pulled over a tight black t-shirt with the words “Bulls Balls” spelled out in rhinestones. She had the loping, slightly bowl-legged gate of someone who spent a lot of time on a horse. Long, stringy sun-bleached hair poured from beneath a dirty cowboy hat, and her dark, leathery skin was dry and blotched. She wore heavy makeup and was smoking the stub of a brown cigarillo.

She set the boom box on a conveniently placed stool, plugged it into the wall and clicked a couple of switches. The room suddenly lurched as a throbbing pop tune filled the room. Ignoring the drunken cowboys and looking directly at me, (the only other patron in the bar) she set the bag on the floor, pulled off her hat, slapped it against her thigh and began to pull at the tails of her shirt. This was not what I had expected. I buried my nose in the “Cattleman” and tried my best to look non-chalant.

The two drunks at the bar looked up from their drinks and glanced over in my direction with a tired, quizzical grin. They had seen Bernice perform a thousand times. They knew her story: chapter and verse. It was the dude’s move.

Glancing up into the large mirror above the bar, I saw the woman pull her t-shirt up over her head, buoyantly releasing two unnaturally large, somewhat saggy white boobs into the room. They rolled like ocean waves echoing in the harbor a couple of times before settling down flat against her chest, pointing directly at the tips of dusty boots that appeared to have slipped into at least a thousand stirrups She was looking directly into the mirror, directly at me.

I tried to concentrate on the “Cattleman”.

“What’s this,” I said to myself, “an estate auction out at the Looten farm!? Hey! A John Deere 1350 for $500!” But it didn’t sit. Over the disco beat, I heard a zipper zip and another glance at the mirror revealed Bernice slipping out of her jeans, a G-string wedged firmly up her tired, leathery, white butt crack. I needed to meet this train wreck head on, so I turned to her and nodded, trying to smile casually – but all I saw was white skin, bad teeth, boobs, and stretch marks. Mostly boobs.

The jeans fell to the floor and I returned horrified to my paper.

“Hey,” I heard, “hey you!”

The music stopped. The drunks looked up. I froze.

It was the dude’s move.

“Hey!” A woman’s voice bellowed from across the room. It was aimed directly at me but I tried to ignore it.

“Hey! You! Professor! What’s so god-damn interesting in the New York Times?!” I looked at the drunks for help. They looked at me for an answer. It was, they thought, an awfully good question.

The bartender poured me another shot. On the house. I summoned all the courage I could find and turned to the woman. She was stark, fricking naked – hands on hips, burning a hole in my direction, a pile of clothes at her feet. An old stripper with a farmer’s tan! Now that’s a sight you just don’t see every day… unless, apparently, you’re a drunken cowboy from Baker, Montana.

I didn’t know what to say. “Actually, it’s not the New York Times,” I said weakly, “it’s the….” I glanced at the paper, “ it’s the Baker Cattleman.” The cowgirl stripper with sagging udders kicked at the pile of clothes and began to walk in my direction. She was pissed. It was bad enough that she had to take her clothes off every night for drunken Bert and Ernie over there, but being ignored by a traveler, fresh meat for cri’sake, this was too much. My indifference had added to her, already, bad day. A cowgirl stripper with an attitude. Jeez.

It was a standoff. Just me and Bernice. I held my breath.

The door of the bar kicked opened and two rough-looking ranchers came billowing in, wrapped in noise and swirling dust behind them. “Well, will you looky here!” whooped one of the ranchers, looking at bare-assed Bernice like he’d just found a stray mare. “Yeee-hah!” he shouted, whooping and slapping his thigh like a rodeo cowboy, spreading a thin cloud of fresh gumbo clay dust out over the room.

The tide had turned. Bernice quickly regained her stripper composure. Pulling her shirt seductively back over her shoulders and flipping the boom box back to “really loud”, she resumed her bump and grind for the obvious and noisey pleasure of the ranchers. Bernice was back on message and back in form.

I looked at the drunks and they nodded towards the door. I threw a large tip on the bar and slipped out in all the commotion.

At The Beer Tent, Milwaukee SummerFest, 1988

Shirtless young hard boys
spitting false bravado,
swilling and spilling beer
as they laugh much too loudly
and leer
at heavily-boobed young maidens
walking on the arms of geeks.

Squirrel Chicken

Up until this morning, the squirrels have been winning. I’m not talking about the Battle of the Bird Feeder or the fact that they maraud through my bonsai garden like miniature bulls in a china shop. I’m talking about the head games, the test of will - the outwit, outlast, daredevil game of chicken that squirrels play out on roadways every day all across America.

You know the routine. Just at the very last moment, a squirrel will leap from the shadows right in front of your car. You gasp and grip the wheel as adrenaline squeezes through your system. The squirrel zigs right. You zag left. The squirrel zags left. You, in desperation, zig back right again. The squirrel stops in its tracks literally mocking you as you slam on the brakes and pray that you haven’t hit it. At the very last moment, the squirrel jumps easily to the side and laughs with his buddies, having completely freaked yet another hideously stupid human being.

You can’t tell me that there’s not something going on. This happens just too many times for it to be chalked up to pure chance. Those squirrels have had ALL DAY to cross the road but instead they wait there until just THAT moment when YOU come along before they lunge, hesitate, and then dart out in front of your car. To them, it’s a game, mere sport, a good laugh at your expense.

This morning all of that changed. I decided that if it was chicken they wanted, then it was chicken that I was prepared to give them.

I watched for my opportunity. Soon enough, right on cue, a fat little squirrel jumped from the shadows acting perplexed and gave his weak little “oh what do I do now?” routine in the middle of the road, watching for my reaction. I was ready for him. I didn’t flinch. He sneered and faked left. I turned left. He was momentarily confused. He faked right. I turned right. The blood drained from his little squirrel face. He bobbed and did a little head fake but I stayed the course. In sudden desperation, he feigned to the center and then lunged for the edge of the road. I swerved hard for the curb and caught a tread-full of short hairs from the end of his terrified tail as I followed him into a pile of dead leaves.

“What the heck was that all about?!” I knew he was asking himself, as I pulled back on to the road. And when the next squirrel jumped out in front of me I did it again, and then again. And then again.

The word will get out. I’ll just keep calling their bluff until soon, very soon, the word will spread from oak tree to oak tree, from one squirrel to the next - to watch out for that crazy old bastard in the old green Ford Escort wagon with the balding tires…

He means business.

The Perfect Ice

In 1980, Eric Heiden thrilled the world by winning all five gold medals in speedskating at the Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, New York. A boyish man-child with flowing hair, linebacker thighs and a golden suit as tight as skin, Heiden sped around the 400 meter outdoor oval of perfect ice in record time, setting standards of excellence that have never been broken. (As speedskating has moved indoors, his record times have been bested, but the impact of his accomplishment lives on in all who witnessed those two weeks in 1980.)

I was glued to the Olympics in 1980. I had been living in California for four years and I was starving for winter. Eric Heiden was my approximate age and each time he came around that final turn, shoulder to the ice, thighs pumping, skates flashing, I leaned slightly in front of my TV, the muscles in my legs flexing in unison, my fists subconsciously opening and closing ever so slightly.

• • •

THE frozen, interconnected lakes and rivers of the moraine country of Michigan drain a chaotic jumble of pock-marked hill and fields. They are remnants of the Ice Age, left behind 20,000 years ago by retreating glaciers. In this land, the reliable grid of farm roads that is so characteristic of lower Michigan disappears into a tangle of twists and turns were the roads struggle to thread their way along what dry ground remains.

While the other boys spent the long Michigan winters losing teeth playing hockey along the shore, I preferred to go out on to the silence of the open ice, the perfect ice. Slowly and methodically, I would lower my head and skate into the wind: skrit, glide, skrit, glide, skrit, glide… gradually picking up speed, skating for miles. When finally I’d gone far enough, I let the wind turn around to my back. Then in a glorious, effortless glide, I simply stood straight up, opened my arms and let the wind take me home.

After the Olympics, more than twenty winters passed before I found myself in Lake Placid on an impromptu winter vacation with my family. To my utter amazement, the perfect outdoor oval where Heiden won his medals and set his records was still there and was open for public skating every night. It was unthinkably ordinary, almost disappointing. In fact without the peeling Olympic rings and row of international flags flapping against the night sky, it was little more than a high school track with ice. It was difficult to imagine the entire world in this town, on this little rink.

I hadn’t set skate to ice more that five or six times in all of those twenty-something years. But happily we strapped on rented skates and cautiously, reverently approached the ice. The zamboni had just finished it off with a glassy polish so fine that the waving flags of all nations were reflected perfectly on its surface. The ice was hard, slick and incredibly unforgiving. Suddenly I became very old and brittle. With my first tentative thrust I lurched forward, ankles wobbling, calves complaining, wind turning me against my wishes ever so slightly to the side. Slowly and ponderously at first, I began to skate around the track: slipping and stumbling at times, even falling spectacularly right in front of my family, much to my daughter’s delight. But after a couple of uncertain laps I began to regain the knack of it. “Hey,” I said to myself, “this wasn’t so bad.” I could still skate. Why, this was a lot of fun!

I worked at trying to appear casual, like so many of the other skaters: chest out, eyes fixed, keeping my momentum working in an always forward, straight ahead fashion, not wasting unnecessary motion from side to side. I bent lower, leaned a little farther forward, feeling my skates cutting into the ice with each push and feeling the hard, perfect ice sliding by beneath my feet. I became less brittle, more young.

Going around the back turn I tried crossing one skate over the next like the racers do. I stumbled awkwardly at first but remained on my feet. My next try was smoother and the next was smoother still. As I gained speed around the turn, my shoulder dipped closer and closer to the ice – so close that the chill of the ice sucked the heat from my cheek. My nostrils flared open as I sucked in perfect air, the same air that Eric Heiden sucked in when he came around that final turn twenty-something winters ago. As I broke into the straightaway I could hear the crowd cheering!

My strong arms swung in perfect harmony as my bulging thighs thrust my long racing skates into the perfect ice. “Skrit, glide, skrit, glide, skrit, glide, skrit.” The sun glistened off my golden suit, my hair flapped against my face as I skated faster, faster. I passed the Russian, I passed the Dutchman, I passed two Frenchmen and a Swede. Pretty young girls were cheering and waving and old men threw their hats into the air as I closed in on the finish line in world record time. “Skrit, glide, skrit, glide, skrit, glide….”

• • •

“OK hot-shot, slow it down!” snarled the rink security guard in a red jacket as he glided up effortlessly alongside me from behind, “who do you think you are, Eric Heiden?” I pulled up sheepishly, embarrassed, and saw other skaters looking at me, shaking their heads, smiling behind their stern looks.

Busted.

Slowing down, I continued to skate, with each lap becoming more and more effortless, more and more fun. Lap after lap after lap I skated into the darkening wind, grinning as a single thought kept coming back to me in all of its humorous glory:

I’ll bet rink security has to go out there two or three times a week to flag some balding 40- or 50-something from Ohio, or Kansas, or Pennsylvania, out of his reverie and back to reality… back from 1980.

Eventually the big lights were turned off and the rink was shut down. The zamboni began its slow, methodical crawl and the perfect ice was closed for another evening. Back in the warming hut, I whistled as I unlaced my rented skates and returned them to a tired woman behind the counter whose eyes were already locking up the hut and heading home to dinner with her family.

Like Herds Of Buffalo

“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.