Chapter 1
THE ROAD TO HEAVEN
"It's written on the wind that's everywhere I go"
Reg Presley
"We're traveling far, we're traveling light.
And we got drunk again last night."
Mark A. Garcia
Mike and I took this trip out west. We picked up all the hitchhikers we could from Minnesota to the Oregon coast.
The year was 1978, back when people weren't afraid to hitch or to pick said hikers up, besides, on the road Mike and I were fearless. There is a state (somewhere west of where you are) where you rise high above fear not to mention common sense (I never do) and we were definitely there. We were twenty- four years young and stuck in perpetual adolescence. There were some people we picked up and then made them drive, so we could relax in back. We had a pick-up truck with a camper; we'd go back there, drink, smoke, and pass out. When the hitchhikers got to where they were going they had to come back and wake us up. Like all good travelers we took pictures, lots of them. I remember looking through the photo's years later when we finally had them all developed and realizing we took pictures of everything. Birds, the sky, birds in the sky, the sky without birds, weird side view, rear view mirror shots, the inside of the truck including one of each other just before we passed out. Once in a while we picked up some guy who would stay with us for a few days, maybe longer. We'd make them feel right at home by letting them sit between us in the cab where whenever we were about to launch a toxic combination cheap beer, processed food fume strike, we would first roll down our window giving them clear pre-emptive warning. We were ahead of our time. We were caring, carefree, careless spokesmen for a generation. All our answers were blowing in the wind.
I'd like to go back a bit and talk about this woman we stayed with for a couple weeks before we left. She was a bit of a lush, about a case of beer a day. She had two young kids, a boy and a girl. The boy was eight and the girl about six. They slept on mattresses on the back porch since we were renting out (her drinking money, you know) their rooms upstairs.
She used to stay up all night drinking and listening to this cassette she had made of old hits from the sixties, over and over again. I should remember them all since they were played so often while I was in a half-conscious state. I do recall a few; "Midnight Confessions", "In the Midnight Hour", "American Pie", "American Woman", "Girl, you'll be a Woman soon". A pattern of sorts, it seems, (I wonder if she was sober when she compiled it)? It was a long tape, about half a good nights sleep in length.
We went along with this arrangement since the rent was cheap, we could do whatever we wanted and we were gone most of the day working at this body shop in Taylor's Falls, which is on the St. Croix river border between Wisconsin and our home state of Minnesota. We were working there temporarily to get extra money for our trip out west. I will get more into Mike and my differences later but a quick note here will give you some idea. Mike was very good at body shop- mechanical type work; he'd grown up with that kind of thing. Learned it from his Dad or older brothers I guess or maybe it's more than a learned behavior. He understood it. I didn't and still don't. It's a matter of understanding how and why something works. I had no clue, how or why. I used to try and relate it to something I understood, see it in some kind of artistic way. So I'd make these little designs, like islands or clouds on the cars the few times I got to use the sander (which needless to say was very little) but for the most part I was just there to hand Mike the wrong tool right when he didn't need it.
We usually smoked pot while we were at the shop then more along with a few beers on the way back to her place in Stillwater, MN.
Needless to say, neither one of us was in a clear state of awareness to see that things were not right with the Mom (loose term) and especially the kids we were staying with until one day when we heard her talking to them about how they were all going to take a trip, get in the car and go to Utah. She also mentioned a road to Heaven (which reminds me now of another song on her tape). The next day she elaborated a little more and told them there was a cave in Utah and in the cave there was a road to Heaven. Now the fact that she was telling her kids this at night could have been seen as an innocent bedtime story but it was the only one we ever heard her tell. She started telling it a lot and we realized she believed it (probably the alcohol sponge masquerading as a brain). We decided that she could be of danger to the kids whether they really went out there or not. She had been very cruel to them at times, screaming at them to 'get to your room', (their filthy mattress's in their non-existent room, which we we're starting to feel guilty about using) and then having her tape blasting all night right next to where they were supposed to be sleeping. We decided to let their father know. He seemed like a nice guy who came around to see them and take them places on weekends. We told him what was going on and he got the authorities involved. I'm not sure what happened, Mike and I had made enough money (for us) and were ready to go on our own little trip with no preconceptions of any roads to Heaven. So, now we're back on the road where I started and I can talk about our favorite hitchhiker, Will.
