Bob Bell - Hitching Across USA Circa 1980 - Part 5
May 1980 - Leaving Houston, Westward Bound.
Gaining consciousness besides the highway, with the rumble and roar of the increasing pre-dawn traffic rapidly changing from snooze button to full on alarm, I rolled over sleepy eyed with a foul tasting mouth. God, a shower would be heaven - pure, pure heaven.
Stumbling from my resting place, my sad little green bag hanging from my shoulder, I walked alongside a city street looking for a diner. Houston is a big sprawling city. Big city blocks - not a pedestrian town. Not at all. Or not where I was that morning, anyway. A Mexican diner appeared at the end of the block, across the street, and I waited for the light to change so I could cross.
Going in, I took a seat at a small booth by the window. It was just gone six in the morning and the place was full of Latinos, drinking coffee, eating huevos rancheros with beans and rice, fuelling up for the day. Most had the look of being day-labourers, wearing worn jeans, old sweatshirts and tough looking boots. Most wore cowboy hats or baseball hats, the peaks turned backwards. The juke box was on, with full throated Mexican tenors singing melodic love songs, tinged with longing and melancholy. Spanish was spoken - the speakers talking rapid fire style while the listeners nodded gravely, or smiled gently. The day was upon them, there was much to be discussed and settled before pushing their chairs back, leaving a handful of change on the chrome and formica tables, and exiting through the door and climbing into battered pick ups and clattering off down the street.
“Yes darlin’, and what cin I git you?” a middle aged and smiling raven haired woman appeared, knowing immediately that I was Anglo, and in all likelihood didn’t speak Spanish. All through the South darlin’ is the chosen greeting in diners and restaurants, and I found it charming and endearing, and completely proper.
Ordered coffee and huevos rancheros, with refried beans, tortillas and guacamole and while it was being prepared I hit the bathroom to wash up, clean my teeth, change socks and try to feel human again. Not easy to really spruce up standing at a sink, but it’s possible and very necessary. Gotta look sharp to catch a ride.
The food was good, inexpensive and fast, and leaving the place I had a spring in my step and whistle upon my lips as I headed back towards Interstate 10 and the road to San Antonio. Who knew, maybe I’d make El Paso by the end of the day. Over ambitious thought of course - El Paso was a good 750 miles away, and that would be fifteen hours of traveling even if I was lucky enough catch a ride straight through. And of course, I didn’t.
Instead I snagged two shortish rides in succession. The first was another gay guy who came on to me. But then when he realised I wasn’t what he had assumed - earring and all - he became very apologetic, and I just laughed it off. He was cool, and talked about England, where he had been a couple of years before, and Texas, where he had spent most of his life. Then he turned off at Gonzales, and I was on my own again.
Next ride was with a young couple, going to San Antonio. Sitting in the back, I just leaned back and dug the ride, answering their questions about England, where I had been in the US and the usual raft of inevitable queries that I was beginning to predict.
The land around these parts is flat farmland, wooded here and there, and then - when nearing a township - car dealerships, agricultural dealerships, boat dealerships, huge industrial parks embrace the highway, their presence heralded from afar by giant signs atop massive steel poles. ’Tis the land of billboards and advertising, of production and consumption, and down here in Texas they do it up really, really big. As I had spent the previous few years in England working on the land, I was constantly amazed by the vastness of everything, the casual use of immense acreages just given over to highway interchanges, and wide wide expanses of grass verges either side of the road. What abundance. What unused space!
Texas is a long-assed old state, and indeed it does seem that it goes on forever. But the roads do actually lead somewhere, and by noon we hit San Antonio, and the young couple, with gentle admonishments to ‘You be careful out there’, let me off in the middle of downtown and headed north.
I’d always thought of San Antonio as San Antone, mainly from youthful listenings to Carl Perkins ‘Where the Rio del Rosa Flows (down in San Antone)’ - and so here I was, in old San Antone, and, of course, looked for the river. And found it just a block from where the couple had dropped me. I looked over a bridge, and down below me was a river, and alongside each bank were sidewalks, little stores, bars and cafes. It was achingly beautiful, señoritas walked serenely arm in arm with senors in wide brimmed hats, kids running around them like moons around planets, musicians with giant guitars which I later learned were called guitarrons and were really basses, and families just strolling, digging the sights, smells and sounds. Spanish was in the air, in the atmosphere, in the very DNA of the town.
Carl Perkins
San Antone was first settled over three hundred years ago when hereabouts was still the Spanish Empire. Heck, before that, and during that time, the native peoples were what today would be called Mexican or hispanic, and they still live there, on their land. After the industry and the commercialism of Houston and many of the towns I had passed through, San Antone was gorgeous. Old, historic - in the downtown part anyway - with the feeling it had been built by people for people. I looked in vain for Rio De Rosa. I had thought it Spanish for Colorado River (Color of Red River hence Rio de Rosa) but it wasn’t so. Indeed, the Colorado river doesn’t go any where near San Antonio. The river going through town was called the San Antonio River, but whether it was perhaps called Rio De Rosa by the locals way back when, I couldn’t find out. Thing was, the city had made a great and fine use of the watery loop that left the main river, and rejoined it a little further down stream, by creating this beautiful river walk. My heart sang and I wanted to stay there forever.
I spent the rest of the day in wanderer mode, checking out The Alamo which was nearby, scene of that great battle for independence from Mexico back in early 1800’s, with visions of Davy Crockett, old muskets and coonskin caps batting about in my brain. Found an open air flea market and browsed for 78’s and saw dusty piles of Western swing records by Milton Brown, Bob Wills, and blues records from the thirties, but reluctantly passed them by. Too heavy to carry, too fragile to schlep. And just impossible anyway you looked at it. Didn’t see any 78’s by Robert Johnson, but of course didn’t really expect to do so. And if I had, I would definitely had bought one. The legendary blues singer first recorded in a San Antonio hotel in 1936 - one of only two recording sessions he participated in. From such stuff are legends made, and certainly in old Robert’s case, the legend has grown, magnified, enlarged and cast a huge all enveloping shadow over the entire world of blues. I didn’t know the name of the hotel, otherwise I would have sought it out, and gazed at it with wondering eyes, sniffing the ambience, and tried to imagine that lost faded world of forty five years past, but it was not to be.
Robert Johnson
As much as I was enjoying the town, I needed to get to the outskirts or beyond to find a safe place to sleep, and so walked towards the highway. Interstate 10 and 35 shared the same road for a few miles through town until 35 split for the north, and 10 for the west. Not wanting to get offered rides on the wrong road, I walked for what seemed to be miles to get to the fork and position myself for destinations west.
And then an amazing thing happened. Way before I had reached the split, walking on city streets, thumb idly extended, a car pulled up beside me, and a beautiful young woman leant over, and said: “Looks like you need a ride.”
I nodded and hopped in. Turned out she lived on the outskirts of town, and always looked out for hitch hikers because her brothers were in the services, and had told her that giving folks rides would get her to heaven. Well, maybe not, but she did say they were in the services, and often hitched themselves. We drove through hilly neighbourhoods, and she told me about her family, how her mother and father had grown up here, and she was going to move to Austin next year to take a job in a law firm - and before I knew it, we were in her hometown of Boerne, a few miles from San Antonio, and like some Hollywood fairytale, she smiled the sweetest smile, dropped me off, and was gone, one hand waving back at me.
Anyone that has ever done any hitch hiking knows that it is very rare to get a ride from a woman, for very good and very understandable reasons. And this one had indeed been a beauty, with all the mystic magic clinging to her that made one think of Dylan’s immortal line ’She wore a diamond ring, it sparkles before she speaks’.
Stood in the evening gloom a while at the bottom of the ramp, and then an eighteen wheeler pulled over. Hanging onto the handrail, I hoisted myself up the steps and settled into the passenger seat. “Oh man, a thousand thanks! This is luxury!”
The driver, a big chunky guy with hands the size of hams, laughed and said: “Well, tell me that when you’ve sat a while … I’m going on to El Paso. Where you headed?”
I told him El Paso was my current destination, but I was aiming to get to Phoenix, and then head north up through Utah to Wyoming. I had arranged to meet up with my North Carolina friend Cam in a little place called Fountain Springs in Arizona at the end of May.
That big old truck just ate up the road, headlights cutting through the darkness, cars and pick ups passing us now and then, their tail lights getting smaller in the distance, us passing other trucks with all the old world courtesy of indicating to each other when it was safe to pass, and when it was safe to cut back into the travel lane in front by the new world technology of flashing and dipping headlights, and every now and then a conversation on the CB, warning of the presence of cops ten miles up the road, or of a washout on a feeder road not far away, all accompanied by wry asides, jokes, sports references.
Some bawdy talk, and then a female voice cutting in and saying: “Hey, there’s ladies here, watch your language buddy boy.” And still we rolled through the long night. Segovia, Junction, Sonora, Azona, Fort Stockton, where we made a truck stop around 2am to fuel up, and got out to stretch our legs and visit the bathroom, sit awhile in the neon diner, drinking sweet black coffee, and then walked back through the insect buzzing hot air and up into the cab and back on the highway.
That black ribbon of 10 snaking through the undulating hills of west Texas, and then the first flickers of dawn seen in the rear view mirrors, and slowly the great panoramas around us open up as we flash by limestone cuts, dusty fields and then, off yonder tall hills fill the horizon, or be they mountains?
The billboards increase, as do the commercial strips alongside the highway and at six in the morning we are in El Paso. We've been hauling auto parts for a big distributor in the town, and I’m let off on the edge of a huge industrial complex, and so set out for the town centre, looking for a diner where I can clean up and get some breakfast. It’s a replay of the previous morning in Houston, or was that the morning before? What day is it? Time is becoming a blur. A Friday, Houston was just yesterday… I realise that apart from an hour or two dozing in the truck, I’ve been up for twenty four hours. No wonder things are a bit blurry. Time to try and lie down and sleep a while. Real lying down sleep. First find a diner, eat something to quiet my demanding stomach, and then find a park, or some shady area to lie down. One more Mexican diner, one more heaping plate of eggs and rice, no coffee - gotta sleep - a quick cleanup, and I’m outta there. Headed downtown along city streets, switching my bag from one shoulder to the other. I’d purposely not brought a rucksack which is certainly a bit more comfortable to lug around, as I had figured that a shoulder bag made me look a little less traveler like and thus a little less vagrant like. It was my plan to wander through America, wraith like, anonymous.
I found a little park, with an empty playground, big shade trees and a scattering of benches. Picking a bench that was a little distant from the others, I rolled out my sleeping bag, bundled my jacket for a pillow and lay down on top of the bag and closed my eyes. Sleep, blessed sleep. Must have slept for four or five hours, and woke up in the blazing sun to a park full of shouting kids, young mothers pushing strollers and a group of teenagers with huge transistor radios, playing loud and sonorous Mexican music, all accordions, tubas and trumpets.
So this was El Paso, in the sunlight, in the day, with the people. Rolled up and folded my belongings, stowed them in the bag, and set off to downtown, the Rio Grande and the border. And there it was, right in front of me. The park had been almost next to the river, and I had been in downtown. There was a bridge across the river - The Bridge of The Americas - and you could just walk across it and be south of the border in Cuidad Juarez, Mexico. Just like that. Had to flash my passport, but the border guards just took a quick disinterested look and that was it. The culture changed immediately. The parkland south lacked the groomed look of the park I had just left. The buildings were smaller. After a few more blocks, the roadsides were crammed with taco stands, fruit and vegetable stands, small open fronted shops repairing motor bikes and small engines, here a tire shop, there a place selling leather hats and shoes, a wild mishmash of goods, people, architecture and sound. Music was everywhere, urgent rhythms, sad lingering melodies, and the constant sound of humanity, everyone talking a mile a minute.
The urbanity of the USA could have been a thousand miles away. I was most definitely in a very foreign country. Rounding a corner, I suddenly felt fear for the first time in the trip. A group of six or seven men, twenty feet away, were spilt across the sidewalk, and they had a rough hard ambience, projected a sense of in your face aggression, and I immediately knew that if I carried on towards them, bad things were going to happen. With a start, I glanced at my wrist, at an imaginary watch, and acted as though I had instantly remembered a forgotten meeting, spun on my heel, and sped off back around the corner, and carried on walking, for a couple of blocks, getting lost in the crowds. Rationalising things to myself, I knew that my fears were on the face of things totally ungrounded, but I didn’t care. There had been something so dark, so menacing about that encounter that I had recognised a danger, and acted accordingly. And why not? I didn’t want to get robbed, or have my head bashed in. After that, I spent another hour or so wandering around, but the moment had dampened my sense of adventure, replacing it with a strange foreboding, and I headed back to the bridge, and crossed back into the States.
Late in the afternoon I was back on the road. 10 goes right through El Paso on the western side, and it wasn’t much of a walk to an on-ramp. Within moments a VW bus pulled over and a young longhaired guy waved me over. “I’m not going far, but I can get you out of town and on the road to Las Cruces, or if you want, you can stay the night at my place.”
And that sounded like a good option, provided the guy wasn’t some kind of serial killer or something. As we drove along chatting, we talked about music and he asked If I played anything. I said I used to play a bit of harmonica and he got all excited. “I play myself,” he exulted. “We can have a jam.”
I thought to myself, should have kept my mouth shut. I was really a very amateur and very bad harmonica player. And when we got to his place, out in the desert a few miles from town, I was able to prove it in a very short and embarrassing way. After a brief meal, he pulled a bunch of harps out of a box, tossed one over and said, “Here’s an A - we’ll play in E.” And we did. He did anyway. I kind of sputtered along, and it was rapidly apparent that my talent did not exceed my musical dreams. So the harps were put away, and we settled down to chat a while. Not quite sure how we arrived at the subject, but for some reason or other I mentioned cocaine and before I had finished saying the word, he threw himself across the floor and pulled the phone cord out of the wall.
One fast and fluid motion… “Never mention those kind of things,” he said. He did not elaborate, and I was left wondering just who this guy was, and whether he was just amazingly paranoid or was really some big time dealer. If he was, he certainly kept his stash well hidden because we just smoked a little weed and that was it. I mentioned that I was ultimately headed for California, and he went into a long rap about Rolfing, EST, and Esalen in Big Sur. It all sounded fabulous, weird, wonderful and probably way beyond my budget.
The one great and positive thing that came out of my stay with this strange cat was his Great and Wonderful Hitch-Hiking Tip. Hearing that I was headed for Phoenix, he found a rectangle of cardboard, wrote ‘Phoenix’ on one side and ’Thanks’ on the other. “Here’s what you do,” he said. “Hold out the ‘Phoenix’ side as you hitch, and just as the car draws real close, flip the sign to ’Thanks’. It works great.”
He drove me back to the highway, clean, showered and fed, and we said our goodbyes and once again I was alone at the side of the road. A car approached, I held out the sign, waited until he was nearly abreast of me, flipped it and simultaneously went down on one knee, flashed the ’Thanks’ at him and gave him a mad and huge eyes twinkling shit eating grin. He pulled over, held open the passenger door and laughed. “Man, you’re on a winner with that! … get in, I’m not going to Phoenix, but I can take you a ways.”
