Author: Liese

  • Journey to Norway: Part 2

    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 garage where we were parked.

    Mike’s itinerary hadn’t taken the weather into account. While we’d been getting acquainted on the Bay Bridge, clouds were dropping more than a foot of snow onto the Sierra Nevada. On the radio they described the mid-April storm as a “ten-year event.” Its ice and snow impeded our progress all the way to Salt Lake City. By Thursday night the delays had soured our mellow mood, and it got even worse when Mike informed us that the bookmobile needed servicing. We’d have to spend the better part of a day in Denver.

    After Mike wheeled the vehicle into a mechanic’s bay at 7:30, most of us wandered over to the café next door for breakfast. We had little to say during the meal and afterwards we walked through the industrial neighborhood to kill some time. When we got back to the garage, we found 42 cases of Coors beer stacked behind the driver’s seat and under the benches of our cabin.

    “They don’t sell Coors east of the Mississippi,” Mike offered. “I’m taking it to my friends in New York. It’s their favorite.”

    “He’s going to make a killing selling it,” someone whispered. “It’s against the law and he knows it.”

    We also found five new passengers on board, so now we were short four sleeping spaces. That evening after we’d hit the road, I was fixing a sandwich  when the pungent scent of marijuana seeped into the cabin from the sleeping quarters. I opened the door and peeked in. Six people were sharing two joints.

    “I don’t know why he thinks he can tell us we can’t smoke pot when he’s running beer,” Carol proclaimed.

    “Yeah, but if we get stopped, he’s the one who’ll get busted,” I said. “It’s his van.” My argument didn’t change anyone’s mind, so I went back to my dinner, glad that I was going only as far as Ohio.

    In Nebraska we left the ice and snow behind and the going was easy all the way across the Great Plains. Although we now had to get used to sleeping in shifts and we occasionally stumbled over the beer cases, the bad vibes faded away as the adventure of the road again raised our spirits.

    Someplace in Iowa Mike poked his head into the cabin. “When we get close to Chicago, I want this place to be really clean,” he said. “The cops always stop us there.”

    As if on cue, a highway patrol car swept across two lanes of traffic and pulled us over at the very western edge of the Windy City. The bookmobile was a big vehicle that didn’t have commercial plates, we heard the officer telling Mike. He checked the drivers’ licenses and the van’s registration, then eyeballed the cabin. He asked where we were headed then waved us on with an unspoken but clear warning, “We don’t want any trouble from you in Chicago.”

    Half an hour later we stopped for dinner at a place called Fred Harvey’s, an architectural oddity built like an overpass across the freeway. The waitress had just handed us our food when we saw another highway patrolman enter the restaurant. We all watched as he scanned the room then picked his way toward us over the crowded floor.

    “Are you with that big van in the parking lot?” he asked.

    Somehow, neither his words or body language gave us the impression that he was welcoming us to his city.

    “You,” he said, pointing at Paul, “I got some questions for you.”

    We put down our food and watched in silence as the patrolman prodded Paul across the room. We knew that we were being singled out because our retrofitted bookmobile stuck out in Chicago like a chicken’s neck on a butcher block.

    I glanced at my fellow travelers and could see that they were as nervous as I was. The Chicago police force had one of the meanest reputations in the country. It was impossible to forget the television images we’d all seen of angry Chicago cops clobbering demonstrators with billy clubs during the Democratic National Convention four years earlier. I could hardly believe that now in real life I had been confronted by not just one, but two policemen who were dead ringers of the thugs we’d seen on television.

    “The pig,” Paul said, after the officer finished his questioning and left. “I had to show him my driver’s license and tell him where we came from and where we were going. He didn’t have a reason for asking. He was just trying to hassle us.”

    Later that night Mike steered his bookmobile onto the turnpike off-ramp at the south edge of Toledo where four toll booths lit up the night ahead of us. Mike had cued me earlier for what was to come, so I was standing up front with my luggage at my feet.

    We skidded to a stop and Mike pulled open the door.

    “Now!” he shouted, and I jumped to the pavement. Paul heaved my backpack down to me and Carol threw me my sleeping bag. Everyone waved and yelled goodbye and good luck as Mike peeled a wide u-turn past four startled toll-takers and continued east on I-80.

    ***

    I didn’t have to be in Norway until mid-May, so I’d charted a slow route to Øystese on low-cost buses and trains that would let me visit friends all along the way. I had to wait only an hour and a half at the toll plaza before Char arrived in her old car to take me to East Lansing.

    I spent a few days with her in Michigan and then traveled by buses—the regular kind – to Toronto, Burlington and New York City, staying with friends for several days in each place.

  • Journey to Norway: Part 1

    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.