Summer of Fifty-Seven - Stephen C. Joseph

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      I spent hours haunting the library of the Anthropology Department, voraciously reading the accounts of the early students of the Plains Indians, of the Northwest Coast, of the Arctic peoples. And then, one wet, cold Boston March afternoon, I came upon a hand-written 3x5 file card tacked to the library bulletin board:

      “Wanted: Riders to share expenses and driving to California.

      Leave early June. Call Gene at 824-9787.”

      So, perhaps, riding with Gene part-way to California wouldn’t exactly be crossing the Cumberland Gap with Boone, but it could be a first leg to Alaska.

      Alaska seemed to me to be what was left of all I had dreamed of. It was expected that Alaskan statehood would take place in either 1958 or 1959, truly closing the American frontier. If I could get there before that fact, while it was still the Alaska Territory, I could have a taste of what my heroes had felt in the Dakota Territory, in Montana in the early days, in Arizona and New Mexico before 1912. If not, it might be all gone, forever, and something might also go out of my young life with it, something I would never know, but always regret the absence of.

      And so, in the second week of June, Gene, Allan, and I piled into a creaky Chevy, and pulled out of Cambridge, headed, as the best dreams on this continent have always been directed, West. My plan was to ride the Lincoln Highway with them as far as Rock Springs, Wyoming, there to leave them and then strike out alone north through Yellowstone to Montana, and up across the Canadian border to the Alaskan Highway. That road was scarcely 15 years old, four years younger than myself, pushed through the muskeg and mountains as the AlCan Highway by military engineers, to forge a land route from the Lower 48 to Alaska, and thus to pre-empt a possible Japanese invasion through the Aleutian Islands. The Road West, and the Road North, were fused in my mind.

      Family and friends were aghast. But knowing my stubbornness and eccentricities, no one raised much of a fuss; my folks kissed me good-bye over the phone, and my friends just shook their heads.

      After much thought, and some experimentation, here is what I took with me. On my back (below a 1950s ‘crew-cut’ so short as to preclude the need for repetition by a licensed barber for some time to come): a short denim Wrangler jacket, the one with the metal buttons, washed soft and supple. A cotton work shirt. A nondescript Bulova watch with leather band. Denim jeans (we called them “dungarees” or “Levi’s” then, and you never, ever, turned up the cuffs unless you were a girl, or a city guy). Cotton ‘sweat socks’, and a pair of poorly broken-in Red Wing work boots. A broad plain leather belt, from which hung a four-inch leather case enclosing a bone-handled pocket knife with four blades: long and short cutting, a slot screwdriver/bottle-opener, and an awl. No hat, no sunglasses, both of which were then considered to be affectations.

      In my hand: a weathered Gladstone bag, the kind that opens from a top zipper to offer broad and square access. Inside the bag: three extra shirts (one a warm flannel), three ‘T-shirts’, all the same plain white (no funny illustrations or double-entendre slogans, no designer logos in those days), three pairs of Jockey shorts (the fourth I wore under my Levi’s), the other three pairs of sweat socks, two extra handkerchiefs and a red-checked bandanna, a spare pair of Levi’s, a pair of white Converse ‘Hi-Top’ sneakers, a shaving kit (toothbrush and paste, a Gillette ‘safety’ razor and packet of individually-wrapped double-edged ‘Blueblades’, a small plastic soap case for washing and shaving, a travel shaving brush, a small metal mirror, and a few Band-Aids), a hand towel, a half-roll of toilet paper crushed flat, wooden kitchen ‘Strike Anywhere’ matches and a small candle, a small flashlight with the old grey, blue, and red ‘Every Ready’ batteries, and a hundred feet of parachute cord.

      Strapped to the top of the Gladstone, between its handles: a light cotton sleeping bag, protectively wrapped inside a rubberized Army surplus rain poncho.

      In my pockets: no keys at all—surely the sign of the liberated road traveler. A wallet with my identification (including my draft card), pictures of my mom and dad, brother, and dog, and a rolled-up condom. The latter had rested hopefully, but unsuccessfully, in the wallet for so long it had created a permanent circled ridge in the leather; Planned Parenthood should be grateful that I, like many American boys, never got the chance to use that particular dried and aged device. But I was ever hopeful, and, as the Tom Lehrer song of that era advised, was prepared to “Be Prepared.” I had about one hundred and twenty dollars, some in my wallet, some in the Gladstone, and the majority tucked in a plastic bag under the sole of my left foot in the Red Wing boots.

      Gene and Allan were neither scintillating nor sympathetic companions, being graduate students at the Business School, and thus intolerant of both my callowness and my adventuresome idealism. But I was a full-share paying passenger, didn’t fill the Chevy with heavy luggage, and thus was, in their view, a reasonable cost/benefit addition. We didn’t talk much, the radio filling the silence with Chubby Checkers, Fats Domino, and The King. The miles rolled by: Boston down through old Routes 16 and 30 to Connecticut and the Wilbur Cross Parkway, through Hartford where the gas wars always allowed you to fill up at an economical thirty-two cents per gallon, into the New York suburbs and across the George Washington bridge, struggling down the Jersey Turnpike until we reached the old Pennsy Turnpike, one of the country’s earliest-built, controlled-access, long-distance roads.

      Somewhere in western Pennsylvania, we stopped for the first night. Gene and Allan looked for a motel in the farm town along the pike, but I was counting dollars for the miles ahead, and determined to lie up in the woods, where they would retrieve me the following morning. I rolled my bag out in a low and sheltered spot as dusk approached, lulled by the sound of a distant tractor, using the last of the Daylight Savings Time light to cultivate a few more rows. Soon the closer-in whine of mosquitoes drowned out the tractor, and I was faced with an uncomfortable choice, one that would often recur that summer. You either put the rubberized poncho over your face, neck, and hands, and sweltered, or hunched over as close as you could at the top of the short bag, and bled. Alaska seemed very far away, and I felt very small and alone.

      Somehow, dawn arrived, my companions of the road re-appeared, and we moved on, through Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, to Iowa, along Route 30, the old Lincoln Highway, which would take me all the way to Rock Springs in western Wyoming. Green country, endless rows of corn just coming up to ankle height, squared-off dirt section roads enclosing farmland, and that corn stretching to the ever-receding horizon. The Lincoln Highway was mostly two-lane, sometimes three-lane, blacktop, and you had to be careful, going fifty-five miles an hour or more, watching for farm tractors turning out of the section roads onto the Way West.

      Crossing the Mississippi River meant little to me, but the thought of crossing the Missouri, the route of Lewis and Clark and of the fur-trading keelboat men, the route to the Big Sky country, stirred my blood.

      We had stopped for the night in the college town of Ames, Iowa, where the world-weary proprietress of a homey motel looked doubtfully at the three of us when Gene asked for a “double room.” Accepting my pleas to be allowed to sleep on the floor in my bag between the two beds, and possibly touched by the sight of the swollen lumps on my face, she agreed to charge only my companions. I dined upon what I believe was my third burger and malt of the trip, and got a good night’s rest on the hard floor.

      The third day saw another endless haul, this time across Nebraska and Wyoming. On the outskirts of a small Nebraska town, I saw a posted sign that has puzzled me to this day: ‘Swedes—we don’t want your kind here. Move on.’ It was not the bigotry, but the unusual choice of ethnicity, that I have not been able to comprehend.

      Southern Wyoming was mostly dry and broken country, marked at long intervals during the last century where the head of track of railroad construction had left a good-sized town. And each town, in descending pecking order from east to west, had been graced with a public institution: Cheyenne (State Capitol), Laramie (State University), Rawlins (State Prison), and Evanston (State Mental Hospital).

      In the mid-afternoon, we arrived in Rock Springs, a dusty grey straggling place that certainly looked to me to be at least seven parts rock to less than one part springs. Gene, Allan, and I

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