Bullhead, Arizona 1977

It was 115 degrees in Bullhead, Arizona in late September 1977. We sat still, barely moving, on top of our backpacks wearing ball caps to shade our faces, in full view of the traffic passing by us; and we just baked in the Arizona sun. When a car approached we stood up and stuck our thumbs out, but after a while we stayed put on our gear and just raised our arms with our thumbs extended. We didn’t have the energy to stand anymore. No one would pick us up. We remained the entire day in one spot.

The day before, we took the bus from San Jose to Bakersfield, California, arriving early in the morning. We slept on the bus overnight in fits and starts, because the bus made frequent stops to let people disembark or climb up and stow their gear and get situated for the ride. Doug Riddle, a high school classmate, decided to move to California with me after I ended my term of service in the army. I worked retail in San Jose, managing a men’s clothing store named Tops and Trousers and he worked construction. We lived in an apartment with no furniture, sleeping on matts with sleeping bags on top of them, eating at a wooden wheel originally used to spool copper for plumbing houses. It was about three feet in diameter and we scooted up close to it while sitting on the floor to reach our dinner plates.

After arriving in Bakersfield, California, we hauled our stuff off the bus and hitched a ride right away that took us to Bullhead. The driver of the car let us off on a state highway and we got ready to start the journey again, but we remained grounded in Bullhead, Arizona. We could not figure out why. We were on the state line, on a two-lane road, out in the sun and we were not sure we were going to make it any further. Let me tell you when people tell you that “It's a dry heat in the desert.” I say, “So is an oven.”

Today, in 2018, I’m driving a brand-new car with a wonderful air conditioning system and a pocket full of cash. Last night when I was planning my route to the Grand Canyon I decided to stay in Flagstaff, Arizona. That is where Doug Riddle and I ended our trip and took a bus home. Bullhead, Arizona cracked our heads wide open. Flagstaff showed that we just didn't have the grit to do what we needed to make the money to survive.

Back in the desert, forty years ago, the sun started to set. We needed to decide where we would spend the night. We grabbed our backpacks and walked out into the desert, hopped a fence, and erected our tent in sight of a couple of empty railroad cars. After we set up our camp we opened a couple of cans of tuna fish and two cans of spinach and made a cold dinner. Doug, the son of a Sioux Indian woman and a white man, scared the hell out of me by telling me that we were, likely, on reservation land. He said the young men, of whatever tribe made claim to this land, would not be very appreciative of two outsiders camping on their ground. That was enough to spook me.

As it started to get dark we made a small fire and dug out the last bit of our pot to roll our last joint. I opened a bottle of cheap wine that we packed in San Jose, hoping to drink it as we smoked our joint. I had never seen stars as densely clustered before, or since, that night. The sky seemed so close, so close that one might reach out and touch the stars. The star filled sky stretched from horizon to horizon in the Arizona desert. The sky appeared to merge with the desert, touching the ground 360 degrees all around our little camp. It was awesome and it was inspiring. It is no wonder that the ancients looked to the sky to find God.

With the screw-topped wine bottle opened, I was getting ready to take a swig, and suddenly, headlights came on from the darkness in two different locations. We were surrounded. Confident that we were about to be beaten by some young Indians toughs that had managed to corral us in pick-up trucks, I resigned myself to an ass whooping. When I heard somebody talking to us through a loudspeaker, telling us to stand up where we were and put our hands behind our heads, I knew it wasn’t Indians that were on to us. It was the police. The pot was sitting on the ground next to me. I took my hand and I scooped out a little ditch in the desert pavement, put the pot in it, scooped the sand back on top of that plastic bag and sat the wine bottle on top of it. Back in the day, the state of Texas had what they called the two or three particle law. If one had two or three of the tiniest little pieces of marijuana on one when one was busted, one was going to jail for 10 years. No probation. No commutation. I had no idea what was in store for us in Arizona if they found that pot. Slowly, we stood up, put our hands behind our head, and waited for further instruction. Neither of us was fully dressed. We were in our underwear and t-shirts. Remember, that day it had been 115 degrees. Thank goodness both of us had our hiking boots on. Yeah, I know I’m not painting a very pretty picture, but it is what it is. The Arizona State Police instructed us to walk backwards through the scrub and the brush, through all those nasty thorn bushes with spikes on them, brandishing barbs like you've never seen. Today, in fact, Teddie got few of them stuck in her foot, at two different rest stops, while she was out to do her business. She limped over to me, in obviously pain, and I bent over, grabbed each paw, and pull out those horrible spines.

Back on that starry night in 1977, our hands clasped behind our heads, while backing up towards the light, I kept shouting, “Please don't shoot us. We're just college boys hitchhiking back to Michigan.” Of course, neither of us was in college, but I thought that might help us. It didn’t. When we'd walked backwards far enough to satisfy the police, they told us to slowly lay down on our stomachs while keeping our hands on the back of our heads. Let me tell you – that is not an easy task to comply with; it is very awkward. While we lied down among the thorns on the desert pavement I had images of Easy Rider going through my head, images of Bull Connor. I had no reason to trust the police. I had been abused by the police on more than one occasion where I grew up in the suburbs of Detroit. I’m sure Doug Riddle felt exactly the same way. We believed that the cops were just going to verbally harass us, thump us, then take us to jail. Thankfully, we were wrong. That's not what happened.

They were actually looking for specific people. The good news is they quickly determined that we were not their suspects. In fact, the fellows that they were looking for turned out to be the reason that nobody would pick us up while we were trying to hitchhike that day. Apparently, a couple of guys walked off a work detail from the local county jail and they had last been seen the night before in the box cars that were sitting about fifty yards from us. Once the state troopers determined that we were no danger, except maybe to ourselves, they told us to be careful and informed us that the railroad generally did not take kindly to people camping out on their land. That piece of information, in and of itself, was a great relief to me, because that meant I didn't have to worry about getting beaten up by Indians. The police left us out there on the desert, quite shaken. We were so dazed, in fact, that we completely forgot about the pot that I buried, leaving it in the ground where I concealed it when we left the next day. It was not until we got to Flagstaff that we realized that we left that joint behind. It could still be there today, forty years later, inside that plastic sandwich bag.

Like I said, we were really spooked. Later that night, just before we fell asleep in the tent, we heard a bell softly clanging in the distance behind our tent. Doug resurrected the fear that some Indian youths were having fun with us. Of course, we could not go to sleep. Every time we heard that clanging we got more alarmed. At one point it sounded really close to us, so we jumped out of that tent, barefoot and in our underwear, me with an axe in my hand, Doug with a knife in his hand, and me yelling, “Come and get us motherf*****s.” There was no response, just the soft clanging noise coming from somewhere behind us and moving from side to side, one place to another. Finally, after a couple of attempts to make a stand, we went to sleep. The next morning when we emerged from the tent and looked behind us, we saw an old mule, probably about 25 yards away, with a bell tied around its neck. You can imagine how stupid we felt.

We got a ride early the next morning, all the way to Flagstaff in one jump. That was quite a relief. Flagstaff offers a completely different temperature then the kiln that is the desert floor around Bullhead. Its flora is completely different, too. Flagstaff, Arizona is in the mountains, about 7,200 feet in elevation. It was a welcome relief from the past few days that we spent in the California and the Arizona deserts. Our ride let us out in front of a bar. It was an outdoor patio affair. We pulled up a seat and ordered a couple of beers. There was a crew sitting around a big table drinking beer who had just come into town after spending a month camping in the mountains and thinning trees from the forest. They had a federal contract to thin out the trees to help keep the scrub down to help prevent forest fires, at least to help make them less likely. I don't think the feds do that anymore. This group spent a month in the bush wielding chainsaws, then a few days in Flagstaff spending most of their money drinking. I thought that that was an incredible way to live your life. They told us that we could get on that crew if we wanted to, they were always looking for new hands. So, we said we were so inclined. Then as we drank more beers I started to notice that a lot of these guys were missing digits off their hands, some had really ugly scars on their forearms or on their legs; one guy was missing his hand all together. I asked the fellow who was missing his hand where it went. He told me that he lost it to a chainsaw accident. My reply was, “. . . and you're still cutting trees?” He said, “Yes.” He had a specially made sleeve for his chainsaw, so he could fit the stump of his wrist into it, so he can employ the chainsaw. By the time we were done drinking that night, Doug and I told the crew chief that we didn’t think we wanted to work out there cutting down trees. We decided to do something else.

The next morning, we walked over to a construction site and asked the foreman if he had any work for us. He was short of workers and he hired us on the spot. He asked if we had any experience. Doug told him he had some experience framing and swinging a hammer. I said I had no experience. With that feedback, he put Doug on a crew framing up a bathroom in some small house under construction. I, on the other hand, was given a gigantic crescent wrench to disassemble concrete forms. That job sucked. After about an hour and a half of scraping my knuckles I sought ought Doug and told him I didn’t want to do this job. He said he didn’t want to do his job either. Apparently, he wasn’t that good at what he said he could do and, as a result, his crew chief was riding his butt for all the mistakes he was making. We walked over to the foreman, thanked him for the opportunity, telling him that we wanted to be authors not construction workers. The next day we spent much of our remaining funds on Greyhound bus tickets to Michigan.

I'm reminded of that time as I drive across the desert today in September 2018. When I saw the road sign for Bullhead City today, back in the day it was just called Bullhead, it all came rushing back to me. Today, I’m on my way to nice hotel in Flagstaff, Arizona, glad I didn't end up working for some tree service. Glad I have a pocket full of cash. Glad I didn't lose any digits to a wayward chainsaw. Glad I didn’t spend months at a time living in the forest, just so I could drink lots of beer on the weekends.

I’m pulling into Flagstaff, Arizona as I dictate this. It's 78 degrees up here in the mountains. It was 103 degrees in the valley today. Teddie and I have all our digits. Dinner is at a dog friendly BBQ restaurant tonight. Tomorrow . . . Teddie and I get to see the Grand Canyon.