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.