(The auther, who wishes to remain anonymous, thinks that Yana is Linda Kasabian, one of those arrested in the August slaying of Sharon Tate. He also believes that "The Man" Yana talks about is Charles Manson; several members of the commune he led have been charged in that murder.)

I WAS standing underneath one of those towering gas station signs you see by the highway all the time, at the eastern edge of Gallup, New Mexico, when the girl picked me up. It was about nine o'clock. Thursday morning, August 14. The girl driving the car looked about five feet tall, and she wore a leather jacket over a maroon-and-blue striped knit T-shirt, and a hemless mini-skirt made from cut-off corduroy jeans. She had a sharp face-rather pronounced cheekbones, triangular eyes, and a smail, sharp nose. Her blondish hair was uniformly short except for one long, very thin braid in back. There were two long-haired guys with her.

When they asked me where I was going. I didn't really know, so I said Taos, Santa Fe. Albuquerque. Texas... She said they were going to Taos, I said that was great and that what I really wanted to do was to camp out in the mountains. The girl said she'd take me to a commune where I could camp and I eagerly consented.

The two long-haired guys were college students from New Jersey who were headed home after having "made the scene" in L. A. They weren't open or friendly and I didn't much like them. Almost from the moment I got into that old white Volvo. I could sense friction between them and the girl. The guys especially seemed nervous. Apparently. I had interrupted an argument. After a little while, one of them said to the girl. Look, is this even your car?"

"Yes, this is my car." said the girl. She paused. "It's not just mine." she added. "It's mine, it's your, it's anybody's who wants it."

"I'm gonna get rid of this car." said the girl a fear miles later. "

One of the guys asked her why and she said it was because she was getting tired of it.

The highway that goes from Gallup to Albuquerque rises and bends through one small section of hills before stretching out across the desert. As we drove through those hills, the girl told us to look for a place that sold gas and merchandise and that accepted Shell credit cards. We spotted a likely place-it had a sign that said "We accept credit cards" -but as it turned out, you couldn't charge the souvenirs. We stopped and got gas and browsed around this stupid curio shop for some time, looking at the standard souvenirs and the over-priced Indian jewelry. Abruptly, the girl decided we should leave. As we were getting into the car again, she said to us and herself, "Some of that's nice, but I don't want to get hung up on that materialistic bag. I've already done that once."

One of the things that struck me first about the girl and continued to strike me was the lack of sophistication of the things she said and the simultaneous intensity of her conviction. It was obvious, even before she told me, that she had not had much education. The things she said I might have heard before, but not with the same "naive" intensity. The feeling with which she spoke each word overwhelmed my college-conditioned tendency to dismiss without a second thought any ideas expressed poorly or in cliches. I knew nothing about her, but I could tell that whoever and whatever she was, she was something special. I looked forward to spending time with this haunting, strange, wild girl-a witch, she called herself.

About an hour after we left the curio shop the car began to get hot and sputter. The girl repeated her dislike for it. It finally died in the middle of the desert. The upper radioator hose had a leak and the car wanted water. I flagged down a diesel driver who took me about fifteen miles to the next gas station. I bought some electrician's tape and a waterbag which I filled. After waiting quite a while. I got a ride back to the car, fixed the hose, and refilled the radiator. The car started again and ran for a while.

The car died again about ten miles past the station. This time it had water in it but wouldn't restart. The girl and I stood out on the loose gravel and hot asphalt of the road shoulder, trying to get a car to give us a push start. She had no shoes, so she stood with one foot on top of the other, danced lightly on her toes, or sat on the car. She said that it looked like there were a lot of freaks on the road-someone ought to stop pretty soon. I said that was what I had thought, but that all the time I had been in New Mexico. I had had lousy luck on the road. The freaks gave the peace sign. I said, the straights gave you the shaft, and they all drove right by. She said, "Yeah, well they're killing people like that out in L. A."

"Like what?" I asked.

"Pigs that try to act like freaks."

I told her that that wasn't too cool, that I thought the revolution or whatever it was that was going on all around us had to offer something more than an eye for an eye, that it was time we outgrew violence, and that peace had to start with "us" or else the revolution would just be trading one set of pigs for another, one fucking system with no room for deviants for another.

"But you see." she said, "it doesn't matter." She asked me what I thought about death. I dodged the question. I could have given her the drop-going-back-to-the-ocean line, but I mostly wanted her to talk about it. Besides, all that trippy theorizing and intellectual speculation about death is, after all, pretty shallow compared with the feeling you get at the most unlikely moments that you, too, are going home to that big ocean one of these days. With that intense witch of a girl, surrounded by that awesome desert and those miles and miles of highway, and those screaming blasts of air pushed into us by the cars that wouldn't stop. I was in a new world, and I had no use for cosmologies you wear on your shirtsleeve.