Driving Interests
The Wrong Way Home
It was after 2 a.m. and I was 50 miles west of Las Cruses, New Mexico on Interstate 10 when I saw the train. It was coming fast and clearly looked like it going to intersect with me. My heart raced, could we be on a collision course? I was going 75 and would not be able to stop ... but wait! the train seemed to be on an overpass? Or maybe … in the air? No .. no .. Oh no, wait! this wasn’t a train at all, it was just an odd reflection moving across the windshield of the RV I was driving. Was I hallucinating? Was I sleeping? Should I be driving? What the hell was happening?
It had been almost 12 hours since I left Dallas and I had only stopped to gas up and eat some tacos. The winds in west Texas had been fierce and I had to steer the vehicle at a slight angle to the road in order to keep the giant box in its lane. The motor coach, as they were pretentiously called, was very light, considering that it was mainly empty space, flimsily built and was, at that moment, only carrying me and my bag. So, when the winds hit it was like trying to sail a boat without ballast or a keel. You were pushed every which way, you had to try to tack with the wind. It was exhausting and I was wearing out, my mind was fried.
I needed to get farther out into the New Mexican desert, just beyond Deming to a Truck Stop I knew where I could grab some dinner and get maybe get a few hours sleep. The next day, I could make it to California, maybe Redlands — another nine hours of driving — and find some place to cool out before making my final push into LA and Dodger Stadium, where I would drop this sucker off at the big RV show they were having that weekend.
Thank god for Richard Nixon. He, or rather his troubles, were the main things keeping me awake during these long, long days at the wheel. It was 1973 and I was obsessed with his lying and lawless administration and how it was coming apart at the seams. The Senate impeachment hearings were being broadcast live with surprising revelations coming on what seemed like an hourly basis. It was fascinating and I felt more than a little schadenfreude on behalf of those who, like myself, had despised the man for years.
Just a couple of months earlier I had decided that I was going to try my hand at editorial cartooning so I carried a tape machine with me to record ideas for drawings as I listened to the news. I also carried a sketchbook in my bag for idea doodling when I took a break.
I love driving, likely in part, because I was raised in Texas. Texans have a peculiar relationship to driving. It isn't just the immense amount of space that there is in the state, it’s that so much of that space exists between all the places you want to spend time. In my day, the interesting venues where you might want to hang out — coffeehouses, say — were few and far between, existing mainly around college campuses. The same with good bookstores and art-house cinemas. Texas always had bars and honky-tonks but when the Rubaiyat coffee house and music club opened in Dallas in the late 50s it likely was the only venue of its kind in the state. Music lovers would drive from many hours away to see the likes of Townes Van Zandt, Johnny Cash or Janis Joplin. A bit later, in the early 60s, the Vulcan Gas Company opened in Austin as did La Maison and the Old Quarter in Houston to create the early music scene, all three to four hours apart.
All of the cities (except Dallas and Ft. Worth) were inconveniently far apart and the areas where the natural phenomenon might be a draw to outdoorsy people seemed to exist mainly on the edges of the state (excepting the Hill Country, smack dab in the center). So, in order to engage with what was on offer in the region — culturally, intellectually, artistically or geographically — you often faced the prospect of spending hours —sometimes many hours — behind the wheel to get to do something you wanted to do.
Fancy housewives might drive from Dallas to Houston and back just to go shopping. College students in Lubbock might head on down to Laredo — around nine hours away — for some questionable weekend fun on the Mexican border. To drive from the deep pine forests of east Texas to the west Texas high plains can take 12 hours, which is half way to the Pacific Ocean, all without leaving the Lone Star state. In order to connect the two biggest Latino cities — San Antonio and El Paso is around an eight hour drive. If you were lucky enough to be a musician living in the little artsy town of Marfa a gig in Dallas or Houston was eight or nine hours away. Or, more reasonably, one might drive a few hours — each way — just to go to dinner with your girlfriend. Also, Texas may be gigantic but it has little in the way of snowy mountains, whitewater rafting or decent surfing. So driving a dozen hours or more to recreate was an easy sell. We-all drove a lot and didn’t generally even think about it. Driving was a way of life.
Driving alone is a particular pleasure. It was an opportunity to reflect and maybe to have some serious conversations with one’s self. To argue things out, so to speak, and get your head straight. For years after I quit my RV delivering job, when I needed to think through an issue I was struggling with, I would sometimes just get in my car and hit the road. And so, that’s what I was doing on this trip to L.A., seeing if I could come up with enough decent ideas to reasonably and predictably fill a space every day in a newspaper. So, I drove and I talked, to me, about me and about Richard Nixon, about cartooning and about politics.
Solo days on the road can get lonely and boring, when I felt the need to connect more directly with the world outside the metal box I was stuck in, I would take a side trip. It was an easy way to break the hypnotic spell of too many hours staring at the white lines. There were times when you just had to leave the “Interstate Reality”— as my friend and fellow RV deliveryman Mike Cochran and I referred to the utter sameness of the roadside world that had grown up around the Interstate highway system. The seemingly always present Dennys and Arby's and Arcos and Exons and other shitty places with their awful cartoonish logos and obnoxious overly bright colors. A sad vision of a soulless America.
When I felt myself getting too weary, or perhaps if I was just craving to eat something not sold in a drive thru window, I would seek out a local restaurant or perhaps take a walk in a park or stroll down the main street of some dusty little nowhere town or sit in a local bar where I could drink a beer while listening to the local guys talk about their lives.
The problem on this run was that I had a schedule. There was a drop off date that I had to make. There would be no side trips. On runs like this where there was no time to take for myself I would break my routine by picking up high-hikers. Their shock at being picked up by an RV was always a lift to my spirits.
If I made enough money on this trip I wouldn’t have to work again for another month, leaving me time to hole up in my studio and work on my drawings. Part of my pay package included the funds to fly home and money for gas but I wanted the cash more than the convenience. If I could show up with the gas tank on empty it meant a reasonable amount of extra dough for me. The gas tanks on those babies were huge.
Once, when making a run to San Diego I’d been on empty long enough to get very anxious but I knew the dealership was less than five miles away. I could not be sure if I would make it there. Running out of gas would be a major inconvenience so I pulled into the first gas station I came to. It was an old fashioned establishment that actually pumped your gas for you. You could see from the manager’s smile and bounce in his step as he neared my RV that he anticipated the large sell of 50 gallons of petrol. His smile vanished when I asked for 75 cents worth — gas was only around 40 cents a gallon back then.
The other way to make extra cash was to join the other folks on the highway and hitchhike home. It was easy back then, there were lots of people out on the road, thumbs out, going somewhere, anywhere or nowhere in particular. My plan was that I would find my way from the stadium to the closest highway and stick out my thumb.
I arrived at the stadium midday and parked my RV. There were dozens of similar vehicles lined up in the parking lot. People were coming and going through the Centerfield Plaza gates, so, after I signed over the vehicle I strolled over to the gate to have a look. Everyone was busy and paying little attention to me. I looked like most of the other workmen in the area putting up the temporary huts and offices for the show. I walked through the gate and could see into the stadium. The center field wall was open as well, so I walked all the way into the playing field. WOW. Now I was standing in on the grass in deep centerfield. The stadium was amazingly impressive. So huge and surprisingly beautiful. I’d had a lifelong love of baseball —in fact listening to a Dizzy Dean broadcast of a Brooklyn Dodgers game would count as a highlight of my youth — but, I had never been in a major league stadium, much less in centerfield. The place looked like it had been polished and was glistening in the midday sun.
Unfortunately I couldn’t hang around, I had to get back on the road and try to thumb my way out of town before dark. I made my way to an on-ramp of Interstate 5 and took my stance. I wore an old army surplus coat and an Australian soldier’s cap, the type you can snap up on one side. I thought the army attire gave me a leg up in terms of eliciting sympathy from car drivers plus the hat would maybe give me some foreign intrigue and therefor seem less threatening. Maybe it worked, maybe it didn’t, beats me. But for whatever reason, after about an hour, I got a lift from a fancy couple in a mid 60s Porsche. There was just enough room for me to squeeze in behind their seats. They assumed I was an Aussie, so at least that much worked. If they were disappointed at finding out I was only a guy from Texas they didn’t let on. They dropped me at an on-ramp to the west bound lanes to Interstate 10. I was now, at least, pointed in the right direction.
Depressingly this spot turned out to be a dud. I stood there for several hours while the sun got closer and closer to the horizon. If I didn’t get a ride before dark I might be stuck there all night. Then a black muscle car rumbled to a metal-on-metal stop. I paused, this ride looked iffy but I knew that I had to get away from this location, so I swallowed my nerves and walked over. Four latin guys reeking of pot sat in the car. The door flung open and I realized I had a decision to make.
I made the wrong one. I got in.
The car growled, jerked and lumbered its way back onto the ramp and lurched onto the highway. I realized immediately just how big a mistake I’d made. These guys were incredibly fucked up on at least too much pot and probably too much cocaine as well. They were all talking to me at the same time. Some in english, some in Spanish. I had no idea what was going on. It was finally conveyed to me that what they wanted was gas money. They offered to take me beyond El Monte in exchange for a tank of gas. I offered them $10 and they accepted with a lot of heated discussion I still couldn’t understand. The driver seemed incapable of actually driving in only one lane or going any speed even close to the limit. It felt like we were a mobile car accident looking for a place to happen. I wanted out. Now. They laughed. I demanded. More laughter. I pleaded for them to stop. Finally they pulled over in the breakdown lane — at the median, for god’s sake! I fairly flew out the car and they shot off again, with my $10.
I was so relieved to be out of that car that running across four lanes of the Interstate at dusk seemed a relatively OK thing to have to do. Luckily the traffic wasn’t bad. When I reached the other side I stood there reeling and feeling like a fool, which I absolutely was.
Unfortunately, not only was darkness setting in but I was also now on an urban Interstate which meant no hitch-hiking allowed. The CHP would pick me up for sure if they saw me. I hurried as fast as I could toward a distant overpass where I prayed I could stand legally. Before I even got there, a white Ford Econoline van pulled over. It had only been 10 minutes since I had fled the muscle car and I already had another ride!
The van only had seats for the driver and the person next to him, the rest of the truck was an empty metal box except for the four other hikers that had already been picked up. Again, money for gas was the issue, but these folks were trying to make it to the east coast and were planning on driving straight through to Dallas or beyond. Close enough! I lived in Denton, a mere 40 miles from Big D.
I couldn’t believe my good fortune. The last time — the only time — I had hitched from the west coast to Texas was in the aftermath of a disastrous motor malfunction in the little VW bug that a friend and I were traveling in. It was his car so he stayed where it happened, in Eugene, Oregon, where he eventually joined an ashram and worked with one of the fellow meditators to rebuild the motor. I did not see him again for six months.
I, on the other hand, only had $15 on me and felt the need to try to get home before I was totally broke. So I left Eugene to hitch my way back to Texas. The traveling was slow — short rides and long waits — and I ran out of money in New Mexico and got stuck near a tiny farmworker town on the edge of the desert. I spent the night next to the Interstate half asleep and fully terrified of snakes or scorpions getting into my clothing. I never, ever, wanted to be stuck like that again.
We all took turns driving over the next 20 hours, talking to each other and especially to the driver to make sure he/she was awake. We only stopped for gas and to eat. Grueling for sure, but we all got to know each other and it turned out to be a very friendly group with only one exception, a sullen guy who tried to steal money from a girl’s backpack. He was voted off the van in west Texas.
During the ride I made a point of being friendly with the two guys who owned the van and eventually convinced them to drive me that last stretch from Dallas to my home. If they did, then I would put them up for as long as they wanted. They jumped at the idea of beds and showers, which meant that I somehow would have managed to get all the way from LA to Denton in only three rides across half of the country in about 25 hours. Phenomenal, but I wasn’t planning on trying that again, ever.
The next month I sold my first cartoon to a newspaper in Dallas, but that’s another story.
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