By far the longest section of text that I slashed out of my manuscript was the tale of my six-week trip from San Francisco to my final destination in Norway, a journey that was tinged with the lingering hippie spirit of the late 1960s/early 1970s. My telling of the trip also reveals some of my own history that does not come out in Accidental Shepherd.
Below is the first part of the journey, about 700 words of the 6,500 or so that were cut out of the book’s early pages. If you’ve read Accidental Shepherd, you’ll already be familiar with some parts of the narrative below.
April 12, 1972
The young men and women clustered around a van near the Ferry Building on San Francisco’s waterfront looked tired: worn out, perhaps, by too many summers of love, or maybe because 7 a.m. was ungodly early after a long night of packing and farewells.
The men wore their hair long, in ponytails or freeform. The women’s hair was long and unfussy, too. My own was drawn back in a short brown braid. Most of us were dressed in blue jeans and nondescript tops, but a sprinkling of paisley knee patches and hand-embroidered shirt collars testified to the lingering spirit of the 1960s.
I was about to cross the country in a second-hand bookmobile, one of those libraries-on-wheels that makes weekly visits to grade schools and rest homes. I’d found the ad in the San Francisco Chronicle’s classifieds: only $40 from one coast to the other. Better yet, when I called to reserve a seat, the driver told me to bring a sleeping bag because there were bunks on board.
Of the twelve passengers about to embark on this odd journey, I was the only one being seen off by family. My mother and one of my sisters had brought me here from our home in Mill Valley just a few miles north of the city.
Considering that I was about to jump into a hippie van on the first leg of a three-year, round-the-world trip, my mom was remarkably sanguine. Maybe she was remembering how she’d eloped from her staid Minneapolis home when she was 18 and spent a decade hanging out with poets, writers and other Bohemians in New York, Taos and Big Sur. Or maybe watching her five children come of age in the Bay Area of the 1960s had thickened her skin. She’d sided with us as we threw ourselves into the political passions of that era: unionization of migrant farmworkers, civil rights, protests against the Vietnam war. And she’d watched us steer through the counter-culture revolution of drugs and free love. Now in1972 she must have been breathing a bit easier, recognizing that although we’d been shaped by those heady years, we were all tackling adulthood with a sense of responsibility.
As I stepped into the bookmobile, eager, excited and ecstatic that I was setting out, she again delivered her one imperative, her singular condition.
“Write,” she said. “Write me a letter every week. If you don’t have time, then send a postcard, just one line to let me know how you are. If I don’t hear from you, I’ll worry.”
Then she and my sister watched from the curb while Mike, the driver, put the van in gear, beat a syncopated farewell on the horn, and headed toward the Bay Bridge and I-80 East.
***
The van was perfect. Mike and a second driver sat up front like pilots in a cockpit. A partition separated them from the main cabin which was outfitted with benches and a table. A sliding door walled off the back room where berths were stacked two-high along the walls. There was a small refrigerator on board and a place where we could prepare food, but no toilets or sinks.
At our first rest stop, Mike pulled open the door to the main cabin. He demonstrated the ins and outs of our rooms then delivered his standard spiel. “I’ve only got two rules. No pot smoking and no dawdling at rest stops. You sleep on board while Rick and I take turns driving at night. We’ll be in New York in two or three days, on Friday or Saturday.”
***
I woke on Friday in time to watch a pale sun climb into the sky over the city of Denver. Its cold light pierced a wispy layer of clouds and filtered over the bookmobile and the mechanic’s garage where we were parked.
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