Day Eighteen (Wednesday, July 14, 1971)

I shivered the whole night. The inside of my nose felt lined with ice. Otto’s teeth clicked. As soon as light was reborn and dawning we had the tent folded and packed up. Otto secured it next to the truck wheel. I wrote a thank-you note and clipped it to the truck windshield. The Beach Boys were snoring inside their tepee.

Why couldn’t we get a ride? Consider our circumstance. We were on Highway One, an eloquent, two-lane road, the only access in and out of the area, propped at the baseline of a deep-red mountain. The scenery surrounding us was full as a painter’s canvas: yellow brush, tall ponderosa pines; deep blue sky emerging from under the separating fog; the vast Pacific in full view. It made me feel part of the whole. Hummingbirds danced. Red-tailed hawks played over our heads. Tons of traffic poured past . . . with none of it giving us the slightest consideration.

What was the problem?

Damn lazy hitchhikers! That’s what. They were clumped around the first bend, the second bend, the third bend—every eighth of a mile or so. An endless string.

You couldn’t call these bozos authentic. They were lightweight jackasses who expected something for nothing. They half-paid attention to traffic while lying in the grass, smoking from the guardrail, eating and goofing around on the shoulder. Otto and I hiked our way past this adversity. You had to. I didn’t want to be identified with this milieu.

“How long you been standing here?” I asked one guy.

“All my life, man.”

“Where you coming from?”

“From far, far away.”

“Where you headed?”

“To a place you don’t wanna know.”

“Where did you spend last night?”

“In the ozone. Say, got a cigarette?”

The height of the summer season was kicking my gonads. The sun worked on me from head down, while the pavement did its damage from feet up. My hip was sore from how I’d slept. I strained a muscle in my chest. My mind switched music, from the Beach Boys to a more appropriate song, “I’ve Got Enough Heartache” by Three Dog Night.

“Come on, California!” I yelled to the hills and ocean. “Show me some hospitality. Make your case. Give me some love. What’s going on here? Don’t turn on me!”

Otto was mostly quiet, swearing occasionally about a developing blister on his heel.

The Pacific was a glimmering fantasy. During our numerous rest periods I sat on the guardrail and dreamed. Let the wind blow my mind where it wanted. California sure knew how to dish out extremes. The water was so vast, sky so blue, forest so green, cliffs so steep, the wildlife so rife. We saw an elk. We saw chipmunks, buzzards, a badger, a fox, an opossum, and butterflies.

Otto’s pace was slowing considerably, with a noticeable limp. There were no stores or gas stations; nowhere to take refuge. I felt meek and powerless. After that wore off, irritable. If another stray hitchhiker asked to bum a dollar or a cigarette, I would’ve punched him.

“Being stranded like this is only good for one thing,” Otto hobbled bleakly. “You can take a leak wherever you feel like it.”

I took advantage of that several times, letting my stream blow in the gullies indiscriminately. I didn’t worry if I’d be seen by passing cars, or if they’d do anything. If they stopped, great—I’d ask for a ride.

We walked for five hours. How many miles that equaled I didn’t know, but it was my all-time worst showing (easily) in the realm of hitchhiking. In the grimmest moments I was prepared to walk all eighty miles to my Aunt Betty’s in Hanford. There was no way out. The common consciousness said it wasn’t happening. Walk, walk, walk. My legs were throbbing and my mind was ravaged. The sun’s beat was hot, steady, and unchanging.

“What’s that sayin’ on the Statue of Liberty?” Otto worked the kinks out of his neck.

Perhaps he didn’t expect me to know, but I did, which claimed a higher laugh value. “We’re the huddled masses of the faceless indigent.”

Yet out of all this chaos, Otto and I copped the ride. A maroon jeep with a canvas top pulled over. A small, uncomplicated girl in a tangerine uniform waved hello. Her brother or somebody equally uncomplicated was in the passenger seat, wearing the same uniform.

“We left the house with a vow not to pick up any hitchhikers.” The brother lounged with an easygoing smile. “But after seeing a million and one of you, we felt it was our duty as human beings.”

“It’s worse than normal out there today,” the sister agreed.

Otto slumped in the seat with his legs limp, strung out. “Them miracles keep rackin’ up.”

The pair worked at Hearst Castle. They were astonished that neither Otto nor I heard of it. It was a world-renowned landmark formerly owned by media mogul William Randolph Hearst, set on top of a mountain. The estate took twenty-eight years to build and was a major tourist attraction.

“Say sis, why don’t we give these guys our visitor coupons? They can see the place for themselves.”
The sister agreed. Just like that, Otto and I agreed to spend the day at Hearst Castle for free.

“I’m ready to fall into any thing. Any some thing. A thing.”

“Free is the right price for me.”

The castle was huge and opulent, almost in a haphazard way. It was supposed to look like a Spanish cathedral. We saw everything—165 rooms, 41 bathrooms, and 127 acres of gardens, cloisters, terraces, sculptures, and arched walkways—thanks to those free employee passes. Paintings and antiques didn’t just abound—they were the best money could buy. I liked the indoor Roman pool, featuring blue-gold Italian mosaic tile and statues of Roman goddesses. Otto liked the “Gothic Suite,” containing tapestries, monastery ceilings, and wall-to-ceiling paintings, depicting famous war battles.

We returned to the visitor center for snacks and rest as needed. The tour guides looked like Pan Am stewardesses—prim and cute. They weren’t shy talking about Hearst’s darker side, like his thirty- year extramarital affair with actress Marion Davis. Hearst loved newspapers, politics, and art. He had truckloads of money. A long stream of Hollywood celebrities like Clark Gable and Carole Lombard visited not for days, but for months.

“If I had that kind of cash I’d buy a house one-tenth this big and give the rest to the New York City subways.”

“Not me. I like it here,” Otto said. “My new plan is to buy this place back from the park service and live here myself.”

When the brother circled back late in the afternoon to see how we were doing, he brought along a couple. They were dressed in the same tangerine uniforms.

“Meet Harry and Mary. They want to put you up for the night, on their boat. They can also drive you down to Morro Bay tomorrow morning.”

“That’d be a help,” I said to Harry. “Thanks. You sure?”

“Our pleasure,” Harry said with a friendly nod. “We like being in other peoples’ travel slides. It gets us out of going on vacation ourselves.” He laughed with badly-stained, gray teeth. “We’ll get down to the marina in no time, riding my badass thrill machine. Mary, I’m not talking about you.”

Harry looked twice the age of his “domestic live-in,” Mary. Harry worked with the tour busses and Mary was a cashier at a kiosk. He was tall and scraggy with premature white hair and a withered face. Mary was no beauty, but buxom and more than adequate as Harry’s consort.

“I’m game.” Otto stared at her breasts (you couldn’t help it). “Lead the way.”

It sounded glamorous, “living on a skippy down at the marina.” That is, until we climbed aboard the smallish, shabby boat. It was gnashed up and battered, caked with mud and grime, smelling as if it had been raised from the sea floor. The furniture was junkyard chic. Every tip and sway made a creak. A bell clanged whenever a wave rocked.

Harry and Mary subsisted on busting on each other. That was their modus operandi, their chosen form of communication. Everything was a joke. They passed the evening (which got quite long) recounting every detail of how they rammed into each other’s car enroute to Harry’s birthday dinner the week before. For their efforts, each wound up with a police summons.

“I never believed in hell until I met Harry.” Mary held up a spatula for her casserole, slowly twirling it.

Harry replied, “And Mary told me I’d never meet anyone like her. I hope not. One of her is enough.”

They laughed at everything—the wording of the police report, the tow truck driver trying to grab Mary’s ass, the repair shop saga, the bump on Harry’s head; all the outrageous explanations which they seemed to have repeated over and over to their friends.

At dusk, Harry outfitted me with a captain’s hat from his collection to take a cruise out to the ocean. But the weather got too foul to enjoy any real boating. We puttered a modest distance away from the marina and then came back. We played card games inside the cabin all night. We listened to the tide rise, then fall. I slept next to Otto in cramped quarters with that bell still clanging.

The last thing I heard was Harry telling Mary in a laughing whisper from their bedroom, “Those guys might learn that ‘ram’ is more than a docking maneuver.”