I sat for ten minutes, tried to walk on, stopped, sat some more, walked another hundred yards or so, lay down on a rock, watched a middle aged fat man and his kids, all undoubtedly newly-arrived from Iowa in their shiny, sleep Winnebago, pass me by, bummed a beer from some longhairs heading down, slept and dreamt pleasant dreams about heat exhaustion and dying in canyons and the human equivalent of being slowly cooked in a Crock Pot. The last mile took as long as the first four had, and two ten-year old girls passed me on the way but I didn't care, I'd done it. God, I was tough. I decided to take a bus to L.A.

I spent most of my time in L.A. on the freeways, to and from the blond surfer-studded beaches and the cute little restaurants and pseudo-intellectual hangouts and quaint shops. Urbanologists have developed computer models that show L.A. will be completely paved over by 1982, except for a three by five foot square patch of grass that will be used to grow avocados. Swallowing my intellectual pretensions, I also made the required trip to Universal Studios, but was enraged to find that the Jaws exhibit was not operating that day. 3000 miles from New York and Bruce the Shark isn't home when I get there.

The best show in town came primary day, when a largely-unheralded question on the ballot burst into national attention and sent liberals scurrying for their fiscal integrity cliches. Proposition 13, the tax revolt, the great middle class reaction. And there on the tube was old Go-with-the-flow Jerry Brown himself doing the best broken field running and backtracking since Gale Sayers hung up the cleats. Politicians by the truckload began making the pilgrimage to the shrine of Sir Howard Jarvis, slayer of the mighty dragon of Big Government.

If Horace Greeley had lived in Los Angeles, he would have said "Head north, young man--quickly." For to the north of L.A. lies San Francisco, a city almost universally loved in this country, even by those who have never been there. Mellow--everyone I met on the coast as I headed north told me the main thing about Frisco was how mellow it is. Maybe it's the natural environment, or the Spanish legacy, or the peculiar effect of its Gold Rush origin, or simply all those people up there who've destroyed their brain cells with acid, but the city certainly seems mellow, with a capital laid back. Somehow the country forgot to tell Frisco that the Right-on Sixties had become the New Mood Seventies, so like the Japanese hiding in the jungles fighting world war II to this day, San Francisco bounces anachronistically on, retaining the feeling of community and the optimism that much of the rest of the country lost after Vietnam, Kent State and Nixon. But not even the warm, dark womb of the Bay Area could keep me from wanting to move on, to get out and see the world. I headed for Yosemite and points east.

Several days later I was on the road through western Nevada towards Oregon. Out past Reno I took up with another hitchhiker, a 40 year old permanent wayfarer who sold home-made turquoise jewelry to other roadies to survive. He was on the way to a rock concert he'd heard abut in Oregon, and since he had lost all his money the night before in Carson City, he was in a hurry to sell as many necklaces and roach clips as he could to the concertgoers. I hadn't heard of any concert, but he'll, he'd been hitching 20 years against my two weeks, and we made it as far as Mount Shasta, California before a rainstorm and the approaching cold night forced us to seek shelter. We were just glad to be there--all day long we'd been stoned out of our minds because the only people who pick up two male hitchers who looked like we did have hitched themselves and generally have massive quantities of dope in the car.

We took a hotel room and sat down to make some necklaces for the concert. My nerves, a bit frayed, were not helped any when the hotel's proprietess banged on our door and threatened to arrest us for overflowing the shower. Now I knew that doing one to five on an illegal bathing rap was unlikely, but this small town and its seemingly endless supply of cops would take the word of a respectable citizen against two dirty, hippy-looking hitch hikers, so we ignored her demands to open the door lest she see our jewelry spread out on the bed and call in the local National Guard unit. I didn't sleep well that night, expecting the wailing of sirens at any minute.

After five more hours on the road--we had split up to travel faster--I began to look forward to this gathering immensely, so when I got to Roseburg, Oregon (where you turn east into the Umpqa National Forest to get to White Horse Meadow, my destination) I began to look forward to food, a good sleep, some music and comfort. Roseburg was crawling with hitchhikers, all heading where I was, to this great Sixties type rock concert. Woodstock, here I come. A VW van slowed down, picked me up, and then took another hitcher, and another, and we headed off. By their conversation I was able to deduce something was amiss. It turns out this rock concert was the Rainbow Gathering Healing Festival, a collection of people who believe they are the fulfillment of a Hopi prophecy that said five generations after the white men destined to live in harmony with the great Spirit of the Earth. Karma, reincarnation, natural foods, meditation, tai chi, buddhism, astrology, yin and yang, ecology, TM, astral projection, cosmic consciousness, acid--anything spiritual or far out and freaky was right on with these people. I got to the gathering--7000 hippies in a cold, wet, muddy meadow in Boondocks, Oregon with dogs, goats and drunken people and a huge, disgusting pot of beans--this was not my ideal of a good time at the moment, after Mt. Shasta and Tioga Pass.

I got back on the road, went all the way to Portland that night, slept in the Greyhound station and next morning got on the eastbound bus and didn't get off until I had reached St. Louis two and a half days later, having seen the Rockies and Salt Lake City and the Great Plains as one great blur en route. Thanks to a friend in St. Louis, I had a nice warm bed and some home cooking again. I gave up all pretense to membership in the great club of hippies, freaks, road people and adventures. Six days, four friends and Cincinnati and Philadelphia later, I was home in Brooklyn.