I have experienced a few Hurricanes, or their aftermath, although I have never lived within a thousand miles of where they typically do their worst. One occurrence was in the summer of 1972, three months before I left my home town and my family forever. Agnes would be the third and the last of my hurricanes.

I was a Senior at Syracuse University in 1972. I had a nice apartment on Clarendon Street with my girlfriend Sheila and a succession of roommates. It was a duplex, two apartments side by side, each two stories, on the "good side" of the campus. That was the side away from where the Southside Syracuse ghetto butted up against the Syracuse University campus. When I arrived at Syracuse University in 1969, I was housed in one of two dormitory towers on that edge of the campus, where nightly security patrols were accompanied by very large German Shepherd dogs. The towers were called St. Mary's after the name of the cemetery that had once occupied that land.

Clarendon Street (pictured here) was on the opposite side of the campus, up on the flat, where I didn't have to climb the hill to get to classes, but I did have to walk by people shoveling snow out of their driveway so they could get to work in the morning. Those frozen morning walks made me decide that I had to get out of the endless winter of Central New York State.

It was 3 AM one night I couldn't sleep, and I went to the bathroom window and looked out at the city sky. I couldn't tell any difference between day and night because the city lights reflected on the overcast made the same gray glow that had been there during the day. It was March and cabin fever had me in its cold dead grip.

The next morning I bought a bus ticket to New York City. Upon arriving I looked up my friend Brian, who had been my roommate while I was at Fordham University in the Bronx three years earlier. We went to Central Park. There were Jamaicans playing the steel drums along with other street musicians. Street music and sunshine and colorful clothing and shirt sleeves instead of shivering and cold feet. Spring wouldn't come to Syracuse for another 2 months. Brian was still living in a cheap apartment in the Bronx, but now he was dabbling in heroin. Both facts were depressing. I stayed a couple of days, enough to chase away the cabin fever, and headed back to Syracuse.

Spring finally came, and Sheila, the girlfriend with whom I had lived for two years, agreed that we would end our living arrangement and our relationship. She had another year to go, and I was finished and on my way to parts unknown. Sheila left for a summer job in the town of New Paltz in the Hudson Valley to room with a childhood girlfriend. I stayed on at Clarendon Street until after my graduation, and until another renter could take over.

My college days were coming to an end and I had no idea what I was going to do. Graduation day came, and I decided against a cap-and-gown and instead wore a suede jacket and matching suede trousers. It was my nicest outfit. As I approached the football stadium where the graduation was held, The Seneca Girls pulled me toward them and asked me to sit with them. I was happy to sit with the girls instead of sitting in the area designated for my own college. The Seneca Girls were a trio of dark-haired beauties, pretty Jewish girls from Long Island who were roommates at the Seneca Arms, which was a sort of rooming/sorority house. I had spent quite some time with the girls in the past year or so, flirting and making them laugh. It made me feel good to be with them now.

In those days Syracuse University had around 18,000 undergraduates. With a graduating class of thousands it meant that the ceremony was so big that it required the football stadium. There was no procession of graduates with names being called out. Diplomas came later in the mail. They simply announced the various colleges in turn, and all of the graduates from that college stood up en masse to be graduated. When they called out the College of Forestry I stood up at the same time as the rest of that college, who were seated some distance away from where I was with the Seneca Girls. I had no connection with any of my classmates. I was a longhair. They weren't. I was the 1960s. They were the 1950s.

Graduation day was the last I saw of the Seneca Girls, and many other people as well.

A short time later it happened that three other girls took the place on Clarendon Street. They were strangers to me, but they graciously allowed me to stay on until I could arrange other accommodations. One of them, Kathy, decided to let me stay on in her bedroom.

Earlier in this last semester my best friend and High School classmate Gerry Komrowski had found me a part-time job at the machine shop where he worked, and I worked there while I was still taking my last classes at the University. My work schedule interfered with one of my classes, and I simply stopped going to that class, because the instructor had told the class that if you aced the first of three tests you would get a C. I aced the first test.

I had a Honda 350 motorcycle that had replaced the Triumph motorcycle that had been stolen from me two years earlier. Gerry had a brand new Bultaco dirt bike, and we rode together whenever we could. Gerry had his own place a few miles away in Liverpool where he was living with his girlfriend Ginny. One day I blew up my motorcycle racing it around and Gerry towed me home with a rope behind his motorcycle. He helped me find another motorcycle to replace the Honda. It was a BSA Victor 441 single cylinder thumper. A British bike, light and powerful.  (BSA 441 pictured).

In the meantime the old machinists in the machine shop helped me by repairing the engine from the Honda so I could patch it all back together and sell it.

My school mate Fred Gaske had been living in a two-flat apartment house on Westcott Street with several of his fraternity brothers, just a block or two away from my apartment on Clarendon Street. Fred Gaske and I had gone all the way from kindergarten through college together, with a 2-year break when I was at Fordham University. I visited Fred almost every day while I was at Syracuse University. We would spend our days smoking pot and listening to records. Fred Gaske and Gerry Komrowski, may he rest in peace, were the best friends I have ever had. At the end of the semester Fred and his roommates had left for Long Island with the idea to make money raking clams, so the house was empty except for one last holdout, Berkowitz.

This was big house - two flats plus a finished attic and a full basement. Fred and his roommates had rented both flats. This was a common type of structure in this part of the city, and it was the third one of its type that I had lived in while at Syracuse. The house belonged to a lawyer who grew up there and whose mother had until recently lived there. It was a grand old house with high ceilings and heavy dark painted wood moldings. The lawyer rented the place out with his mother's furniture still in it, which I thought was rather mercenary.

My sleeping arrangements on Clarendon Street ended abruptly one afternoon as I got home from work at the machine shop and I was met by Kathy, who promptly demanded that I help round up a dog belonging to her visiting house guest (who I suspected was also her lover). I was exhausted from work. The dog was a standard poodle who pranced around in no mood to be rounded up. I told Kathy I was tired and I didn't have time to chase the dog around. That was the end of that relationship. Kathy handed me my walking papers.

My friend Gerry had helped me find the new motorcycle and get it up to my apartment on Clarendon Street. but now that I was moving a few blocks away I had to get the bike over to Fred's old place. I hadn't yet registered or gotten a license plate for the bike, so I pushed it along on the street in order to avoid getting thrown in jail for riding without these items, as had happened to me before. A city cop saw me pushing the bike and suspected that I was stealing the bike, so he stopped me and demanded papers. Fortunately I had the bill of sale in my pocket, but I could see that this rookie cop was disappointed. He wanted to arrest me. Syracuse cops were total Nazis and they hated longhairs, especially around the University campus that anti-war protesters had closed down the previous year.

I had already moved everything else in my possession on a previous trip, carrying a couple of cardboard boxes. At Fred's house the boys had long since abandoned the bottom floor where there were packs of cards and beer cans strewn about. Apparently after a year or so of partying the boys has simply taken the party up to the 2nd floor, but now that floor was empty as well since they had all gone clamming on Long Island.

Someone had left behind a water bed on the 2nd floor so I filled it up using a garden hose stuck out the window. I slept on it that night but there was no heater and I woke up frozen like a Popsicle. Brrr. I didn't know that water beds need a heater. Then the damned thing sprang a leak while I was at work and I came home to find water dripping from the ceiling on the first floor and water all over the room on the 2nd floor.

The warmest place in the house was the attic so I moved up there, where I ran into Berkowitz. I asked him where I should send the rent.

"Rent?"

A few days later I looked out the 2nd floor window into the back yard and I saw that the same cop who had pulled me over was snooping around and searching the garage where I was storing my new motorcycle until I could get it licensed. This cop was on a vendetta.

Gerry and his girlfriend Ginny then introduced me to Ginny's best friend Katie. She lived in my home town, Baldwinsville (B'ville), with her parents. She and Ginny had just graduated high school the previous year. She was really cute. We hit it off right away and we both started hanging out at Gerry and Ginny's place in Liverpool, and I was also making frequent trips to B'ville to party with them at the Forum (a local bar) and at Ginny's Mom's house in B'ville.

One pleasant June evening I brought Katie up to Fred's old house on Westcott and we sat on the 2nd floor porch on a porch swing and watched the residents of a drug halfway house across the street sitting out on the lawn. and they watched us as we cuddled on the porch swing. I was a happy man. Close to homeless, barely a penny in my pocket, but with a pretty girl in my arms.

Berkowitz had absconded to parts unknown, and I sold the Honda 350. I found out from someone that the State of Vermont did not require insurance on a motorcycle, so I mailed an application off to Vermont and got a Vermont license plate for the motorcycle. I was being very careful with things like the license plate and bill of sale and so on, f because three years earlier I had purchased my first motorcycle and I took a little joy ride on it right away before I had plates. That time I wound up being pulled over by the Syracuse cops and thrown in jail overnight because there was no license plate on the bike.

Gerry and I took our motorcycles on a long road trip with Ginny and Katie on the back, up to Ginny's Mom's cabin up in the Adirondack mountains. On the way up I had several flat tires on the rear tire. There was a nail or something in the tire but despite all my efforts I could not find it and it kept puncturing the tire. Also along the way the baffle plate inside the muffler flew out, which made the motorcycle much, much louder. The loud muffler would soon come into play.

I was rattling around all alone in the big two-story house and Gerry suggested that I come over and stay in the house he was renting in Liverpool. It only took two trips on my motorcycle to move what few belongings I had over to his place, but as luck would have it on the last trip, just as I left the house on Westcott and I was approaching the first traffic light I saw the cop who had been bird-dogging me at the cross street, I knew if he heard my loud muffler he would pull me over, so I grabbed the throttle and ripped through the light, and sure enough he flipped on his lights & siren & started chasing me. There was no way he could keep up with me cornering, so I made a few quick lefts and rights though the neighborhood, and I lost him pretty quickly, but I knew I could never go back to that neighborhood. Then when I got to Gerry's place I realized that my wallet had fallen out of my back pocket. This was a disaster, because I had my birth certificate and the paperwork for the motorcycle in the wallet.

Gerry and I had already started growing a few patches of marijuana plants in different spots. We each had a private patch of our own, and we also had a community patch at the edge of a cornfield over near the town of Solvay where my brother has clued me into the fact that this Polish farmer had a deal with the New York State Fair that he could haul as much cow manure as he wanted from the State Fair barns. The soil in this corn field was super rich and our pot plants grew rapidly. Gerry and I would sneak over on our motorcycles, hide the bikes, and creep through the adjoining woods to get to the plants, where we would pick a few leaves. The pot laws in New York were really severe in those days, and we knew if we got caught it would mean serious jail time, so we were really careful and really paranoid. Gerry's private patch was out on a farm outside of B'ville where they had chickens and the chicken manure made his plants grow about 8 feet tall. Awesome.

Gerry got into an accident with his Bultaco dirt bike. He was riding along a village street when a lady pulled out from a side street. Gerry T-boned her car & got launched over it. It was entirely her fault. She never saw him, and this was very common back East where motorcycle riders only ride for a few months each year. Gerry's bike was totaled, but luckily he wasn't too badly hurt. Unfortunately his insurance company wouldn't replace the Bultaco, which was an expensive bike, but they did give him enough money to get a 360 Yamaha dirt bike, which was a good bike, but still, not a Bultaco.

Gerry and I rode out to B'ville and found a nice spot in the fields at an old abandoned WWII factory complex that everybody called "the Projects". We decided to cut a path through the fields and small trees and make a dirt bike motocross riding circuit around which we proceeded to ride our bikes. I was always fairly cautious and would ride around a few times to get the feel of the course, but Gerry was always pedal-to-the-metal right off the bat. He was fearless. Unfortunately this got him into big trouble, because someone with a bulldozer decided to cut a big cliff into the side of the hill where our circuit exited a patch of woods, and Gerry ran right off the cliff with his bike, which landed on top of him. His first accident had not injured him more than some scrapes, but this time he was banged up really badly. His bike fared better this time because it landed on top of him, so all he had to do was straighten out the handle bars, but he wasn't going to be riding anywhere for a while. It took him a week or so to get back on his feet.

Now about the hurricane. June-July 1972. Hurricane Agnes - the most destructive hurricane in United States history up to that time. The damage was heaviest in Pennsylvania, where Agnes was the state's wettest tropical cyclone ever. So destructive, the name Agnes was retired. No future hurricane will be named Agnes, at least that's the excuse they're giving. No one is ever going to name their daughter Agnes either. It wasn't Agnes, it was her hag-ness.

It rained every day that summer, or so it seemed. It rained every time I was on my motorcycle, or so it seemed, but it was a tropical storm, so it was a warm rain - almost like taking a shower while riding, except when the horizontal rain ran down my shins and filled up my shoes. That was cold. At first my motorcycle had knobby tires for riding in the dirt, but on wet pavement "knobbies" are really dangerous because they don't grip, so after sliding through an intersection one afternoon on top of the bike like a sled, I got some street tires.

One night I ran into a high school classmate in the Forum bar, John Coates, and he told me that his job that summer had been cleaning the mud out of house electric meters from southern New York State where the Appalachian mountain valleys concentrated the rain and caused flash flooding.

My brother Gary was living in our camp down alongside the Seneca River, and as the rain kept coming down the river got higher and higher. Eventually the river was running about seven feet above normal high water, so high that he wound up sleeping on his picnic table on the porch. The water kept rising so he had to climb into his canoe tied to the picnic table and abandon ship. Gary had been living in the camp for some time, and had collected wildflowers and planted them in his yard, and done a lot of work to fix up the camp, but it all got washed away by Agnes. At least the shack itself was intact so he could clean it out and start over. Gary got the worst of hurricane Agnes of anyone I knew. By the time Hurricane Agnes reached Central New York it was just an ocean of warm water up in the sky that parked itself overhead and dumped water on us for weeks.

One of my closest friends in High School was Ed Hamm. Ed had gone to the University of Nevada Las Vegas to study Hotel Management, but it was only a two-year program, so when he finished the program he got caught by the Viet Nam draft. Fortunately he wasn't handed a rifle to get shot in the jungle. He was assigned to a unit that tried to get a handle on all the venereal disease that soldiers were catching. I think part of it involved tracking down the local prostitutes and convincing them to get treated. Ed was stationed at Fort Carson Colorado, outside of Colorado Springs, where a lot of draftees were returning from Viet Nam to spend a short time being processed out of the Army. I think the Army was trying to reduce the number of men returning to the general population with aggressive strains of gonorrhea.

Ed Hamm came home to Baldwinsville on leave in June, and he brought along with him a couple of his Army buddies. There was a young fellow named Gary and another named Eston T. Hansen, from Klamath Falls, Oregon. Back in Colorado Springs they all rented a house together with another soldier, C J Mangum, who hadn't accompanied Ed on this trip home.

I brought Ed and his Army buddies out to Whiskey Hollow, a favorite place of mine near where I was born, and we hiked up to a meadow on the plateau where we picked wild strawberries. Ed and his friends were talking about their impending release from the Army. They were all within a short time of fulfilling their obligations under the draft and were making plans for the future, which consisted of buying some land in Oregon and forming a communal farming relationship. They were inviting me to join them, and I was enthusiastic about the idea. My parents had both come from farm families, and I was confident I could that I could make a contribution, even if all I had to offer was hard work. I began to prepare mentally for doing what it would take to meet up with Ed and his partners in Colorado Springs prior to making the move to Oregon.

A few weeks later Ed Hamm and I exchanged letters after he returned to Colorado Springs and Fort Carson. I now had an address which would be my goal to reach once I had made the necessary arrangements. 1610 South Tejon Street, Colorado Springs, CO. "Tejon" is Spanish for raccoon, but I didn't learn that until after I had arrived. There was a lot to get done before I embarked.

(Pictured - 1610 South Tejon St. Colorado Springs CO today .  It is now a business. The neighborhood has completely changed to commercial use.  On 4th of July '73 we exchanged bottle rocket fire at our neighbors from the front porch)

I had worked myself out of a job at the machine shop. It was ever only a part-time job. They had me working with a massive punch press machine that punched all the ventilation holes in the fiberboard panels that became the back of television sets. General Electric had its main television and radio assembly factory in Syracuse, and they were the customers for the output of this machine shop, which as such was a "job shop". My last job for the shop was a run of stamped metal parts. I was adept at setting up the machine, and I was able to set it up so that the sheet metal roll from which the parts were struck kept feeding my punch press without stopping. I had the foot switch pedaled-to-the metal and I had a pair of needle-nose pliers with which I whipped each piece off as it was struck, making an unceasing Boom-Boom-Boom of the press. The noise was driving everyone in the little factory crazy. It was a 10,000 piece run and I was pretty far along when the machine broke down. The big ball-and socket joint that was the size of a bowling ball had run out of grease and seized up. It took the old master machinists a couple of days to re-finish the ball and get me back in production. I finished the run and the machine shop manager, a young engineer in his late thirties, came over and handed me a pink slip. It was actually pink. I was now unemployed.

This little machine shop was operating on the edge of non-existence. It would not be long, a year or two, that General Electric moved its entire TV and radio assembly operation to Singapore. Many of my neighbors where I grew up on Barbara Lane lost their jobs.

The letter from my friend Ed Hamm in Colorado was a ray of hope. The summer months passed quickly - Katie and I living with Gerry and Ginny at their house, Gerry and I visiting our pot patches, picking off a few yellowed leaves, riding the countryside on our motorcycles. It was our summer of love, but we couldn't take advantage of my friend's couch forever.

I visited our communal patch in the Polish farmer's corn field and I was stunned to discover that the plants were all gone. This was a disaster. I immediately suspected they had been taken by a person I had unwisely told about the patch, but I eventually came to the conclusion that the farmer himself had discovered the plants and destroyed them. My brother seemed to confirm this. Inasmuch as the farmer did not know who we were, there was little danger that we would be arrested as long as we stayed well clear of the place. Fortunately Gerry and I still had our individual patches in different locations.

In late August the new semester was about to start at Syracuse University. I got a call from my ex-girlfriend Sheila, who was returning for her senior year after spending the summer working in New Paltz. I wondered how she had managed to find me now that I was living miles away. I think she must have contacted my brother Gary to get my whereabouts. Sheila had found a new apartment and was very annoyed with me for having sold our mattress to one of the girls who had taken over the Clarendon Street apartment. She also wanted me to bring her some marijuana. I put together a baggie of weed from my growing patch and headed over to her new apartment, which was located in the same neighborhood where we had lived on Clarendon Street.

We spent an hour or so talking and she wanted me to stay over, but I said no, I had to leave. I knew I was taking a big risk being, there because this was the neighborhood where that rookie cop had harassed me and chased me on my motorcycle. I thought I should take back streets to avoid running into him , so I detoured through nearby Thornden Park, where the water reservoir sat on top of a big hill.

My route took me right past the park administrative building, where sure enough there was a cop car. I didn't even get past the next stop sign before that cop and his partner had me off the bike, handcuffed, and in the back of the cop car. On the way to the police station I remembered that I had a joint in a pack of cigarettes in my jacket pocket. I couldn't reach the pocket in time before we were in the police station booking area. The booking cop went through the contents of my pockets and found the joint.

"What's this, spinach"? I failed to appreciate the humor. I got booked into jail. Actually the joint was about all they had on me. They had no reason to stop me in the first place, other than to gert revenge for having blown them off earlier.  The next morning my Mom & Dad bailed me out of jail. There was little conversation . I think by that time my parents we aware that I was being harassed by the cops. On an earlier run-in with the cops one of them had told me they were "going to get all you hippies out of this town".

A long time later I found out why the cops were giving me such a hard time. My Dad's half-brother (Uncle Bill) and my cousins lived in the city of Syracuse. Uncle Bill and my Uncle Gabe, another of Dad's brothers, were carousers from back in the 1950s. They occasionally got into bar fights. Years later Bill's sons, my cousins Ronnie and Randy, kept up the tradition. One night Ronnie was in a bar fight and two Syracuse cops came in to break it up, and Ronnie beat the crap out of both of them. Now during this same summer of 1972. although I was not aware of it at the time, the cops caught up with Ronnie and they ran him over with their cop car. Uncle Bill hired a bodyguard to watch over Ronnie in the hospital so the cops couldn't kill him. Uncle Bill threatened to sue the city, but the city told him they would close down his business. It wasn't a long time later that Uncle Bill moved to Florida.

After my Mom & Dad bailed me out I went back to Gerry and Ginny's place and waited for the trial date. When it came up the judge noted that I had a Vermont license plate on the motorcycle and I explained (lied) that I was moving to Vermont very soon.

"Good, see that you do." So they didn't hang me for having a joint. That was a break, because Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller was building a reputation for sending pot smokers to Attica prison. Rockefeller was one of the leading proponents of the liberal "War On Drugs". Although I was now out of immediate danger,   I felt like things were closing in on me.

One morning as Katie and I were sleeping together on Gerry's couch there was a sharp knocking at the door. We roused ourselves and I answered the door. It was Katie's two older brothers and they were there to give me a hard time about corrupting their younger sister. They wanted to know what my intentions were, and I really didn't have a satisfactory answer for them. It was embarrassing and humorous at the same time. Katie was 19 years old, I was 23, but Katie was with me of her own free will.  I think her family thought of Katie as a "bad girl". She wasn't going to college, she didn't have a job, and she had been hanging around with classmates who were into drugs. Her family was very concerned that now he was shacking up with a longhair motorcycle dude.

A week or two later as we rode into Baldwinsville, with Katie on the back of my motorcycle, I proposed marriage to her on the way, and she accepted. We were both a little tipsy, and very happy. So my travelling plans had a new wrinkle. I would not be travelling unaccompanied to Colorado.

It turned out that as we were riding along that evening the heel of her hiking shoe had caught between the tire and the swingarm, and the spinning tire had melted off the side of her shoe heel. Close call.   It would not do to have a gimpy bride.

Our plan was to get married as quietly as possible. I asked my best friend Gerry Komrowski to be best man. We decided against a church wedding. Our families would not attend. Nevertheless, the word of our plans reached Katie's family, and the pressure began to change our plans. Katie's older brother was married to a very pretty Italian woman who was a few years older than I was, and she went on a charm offensive to change my mind. I could not resist her. She only asked for a little family reception after the wedding. It would be cruel of me to refuse, and I had nothing against Katie's family, even though her mother could barely conceal her contempt for me. On the whole Katie's family were good people, albeit from a world that no longer existed - 1950s America.

On October 5, 1972 I was married to Mary Karen (Katie) Hammel in the Family Court Judge's Office in City Hall in the City of Syracuse, with my brother Gary, my friend Gerry Komrowski, and his girlfriend Virginia (Ginny) McNeil in attendance. Afterward we arrived for a dinner at the Jack's Reef hotel in Jack's Reef, New York. Jack's Reef Hotel is located across the street from what was once a trailer park, the same trailer park where my family lived in a trailer for a month or two when I was four years old, after which my Dad moved the trailer and set it up on Barbara Lane in advance of building a new house for us. Jack's Reef was only a mile or two away from the home of my birth on Perry Road. So I had come full circle after nearly twenty years. We had spaghetti for dinner. Katie's mother and father were there, as were my own parents, and I remember my darling youngest sister Joanne, eight years old. She was shy and she looked like she might not have understood what was happening with her big brother.

Katie's mother gave her a peignoir negligee for our wedding night and paid for us to spend our wedding night at the Sheraton Hotel.

Within a week Gerry and Ginny announced that they too would be getting married as well. And so they did, at the same City Hall office of the Family Court Judge. The ladies in the office were sniffling. They said that they never got to see a wedding there. It was always divorces and child custody matters.

The morning of my wedding I was met by a friend of Katie's, Joe Sacocci (Rest In Peace) who paid me $100 for my crop of marijuana leaves. That was my cash for the trip West. Katie had $700 that she had saved over the years. My brother Gary was working for my Uncle Gabe, my Dad's brother, who had a driveway paving company. When my Uncle heard that I was moving out West, he offered to give me a car. It was a godsend. Up until then I really had no idea how I was going to manage transportation. The car was a Dodge Polara station wagon in somewhat rough shape. My uncle had used the station wagon to haul a "short load" of asphalt a couple of times when the driveway needed a little more than the big truck had brought to the job. The loads were more than the back springs could handle, and the driver's side spring had a broken leaf, so the car drove lopsided. But it ran, and it already had a trailer hitch.

The next three weeks flew by in a blur. I made arrangements to rent the smallest available U-Haul covered trailer for our belongings, which consisted of my motorcycle, some college textbooks, some clothing, and a small table and two chairs, as well as Katie's clothing. To save money I would wait until the last minute to pick up the trailer. In the meantime we drove over to Katie's house to get her belongings, and I noticed that the fuel tank on the Dodge Polara was dripping gasoline. I climbed under to have a look and spotted a rust hole in the bottom of the tank. I remembered a trick I had learned from somewhere long forgotten. I bought some bubble gum, chewed it up, and stuffed a wad of it into the rust hole. It worked. It stopped the leak.

On October 25 we loaded up the wagon and the trailer and headed for Colorado. At the last minute, an acquaintance of Katie's, Dick Norton, who had graduated a year ahead of me in High School, asked if he cold bum a ride with us out to Colorado. It turned out that a childhood neighbor and fellow classmate of his, Steve Rice, was living with his family in Colorado Springs. So Dick Norton joined us on our trip.

We took Interstate 90 (in New York State it's called The Thruway, one of few toll roads in the Interstate highway system ) - West toward Buffalo and then down the coast of Lake Erie, passing through Erie, Pennsylvania and Cleveland, Ohio. From the highway Cleveland looked like a bombed-out hulk of dark, abandoned factories. A citadel of the Rust Belt. It appeared that Cleveland had not yet dug itself out of the race riots of the late 1960s. The rest of Ohio was one long cornfield on the flat coastal plain of Lake Erie.

We stopped for the night alongside the road in Indiana and slept in the car. The next morning Dick Norton was startled awake by the explosive thumping of a rear tire throwing off the retread and thwacking the wheel well. After putting on the spare tire we continued through the beautiful farms of Indiana, where they painted their barns pure white instead of the red barns I was so accustomed to seeing in New York. We stopped in Gary , Indiana to get some food. Gary Indiana was a steel town at the southern tip of Lake Michigan , around the corner from South Chicago. Whereas the slums of the South Bronx had been dominated by 5-story apartment buildings, Gary Indiana was a sea of single-story buildings covered in soot and grime. I had never before seen an armed guard standing in front of a grocery store. We bought a loaf of bread and cans of tuna and made sandwiches. Later I was ill from the tuna.

We made our way past Chicago, where Interstate 90 becomes Interstate 80, and entered Iowa. As we crossed the Mississippi River, Henry Kissinger was on the radio promising "Peace in our time".  The election campaign of 1972 between RIchard Nixon and George McGovern was almost over, but the Viet nam War would drag on for three more years.    The farms in Iowa were the most beautiful I had ever seen, and the roads seemed to all be brand new. Iowa has more miles of road per square mile than any other state, serving the prosperous farms that cover the whole state. The yellow light of late afternoon made the colors of the red barns and green cornfields even deeper. As twilight descended we entered Nebraska and drove through the Southeast corner of the state to where we split off South to pick up Interstate 70 into Kansas. In Kansas we once again stopped for the night to sleep in the car.

I picked a specific spot in Kansas to stop for the night. A year and a half earlier I had been told by an acquaintance at Syracuse University of a place in Kansas where marijuana grew wild. This was the place he described, near a town whose name I have long since forgotten. The next morning I found a place with a grove of trees near the road, in a place where a creek near the road cut the trees off from the farm fields. Sure enough, there was a wild plantation of pot plants among the trees. The plants were all brown and dried in anticipation of the coming winter, which made it easy to strip the leaves from the plants. I filled a pillow case full of dried leaves.  A bonanza.

(pictured - Dick Norton, Barb Rice, Steve Rice, daughter Sarah)

We drove through Kansas, which was an experience almost as frightening as driving in a blinding blizzard. The empty plains of Kansas seemed like they would never end. Not a tree or a house for endless miles, just an occasional faraway grain silo barely seen on the horizon. As night approached, the flat plains gave way to the rolling prairies of the High Plains of Western Kansas. It was dark as we entered Colorado.

As we crossed the country, the car radio played the same songs, which became embedded in my memory.
"Garden Party" by Rick Nelson.  "Burning Love' by Elvis.  "In The Beginning" by Emerson Lake and Palmer.   I can't hear them without thinking of our trip. 

It was nearly midnight when we arrived in Colorado Springs, and we dropped Dick Norton off at Steve and Barb Rice's home. Then we arrived at 1610 South Tejon Street, where Ed Hamm and his Army buddies lived. They welcomed us in, and we went straight to bed in a bedroom they had generously vacated for us. It was good to sleep in a bed for the first time in several days.

The next morning I woke up and went out into the yard. I looked up to the west, and I saw what looked like white clouds up in the sky, but it was Pike's Peak covered in snow, and it took my breath away. I went across Tejon Street to a Seven-Eleven to buy a snack, and the store clerk gave me a big smile and said "Good Morning". It set me back. I was so accustomed to getting the cold shoulder from strangers back in New York State, where "hippies" were universally despised. The openness and friendliness of Midwestern people was a surprising and welcome change. We made a batch of pot brownies from the huge bag of weed I had gathered in Kansas, but it soon turned out that the stuff was absolutely useless for getting high. It was hemp, a crop that had been grown during the second world war as a source of fiber for making rope and burlap sacks, and which had grown wild.

Katie and I lived with the soldiers on Tejon Street for a few weeks, where they played endless card games of Spades and smoked weed all day when they weren't "putting on the pickle" (their uniform) and going to their jobs on Fort Carson. They were all coming toward the end of their time in the Army, and all of us were making plans for what would happen next. There was no longer any talk of proceeding to Oregon and establishing a commune, now that I was married.  Katie and I and Ed Hamm and CJ Mangum decided to find an apartment we could share, and look for jobs.

There were so many young people landing in Colorado Springs from back East and the Great Plains that the U-Haul company would not accept the trailer we had rented in New York.  The closest place that would accept the trailer was the town of McCook, Nebraska, a hundred miles or thereabouts back from where we had come. So the next day I made the trip to McCook, Nebraska, a grungy little farm town where it seemed like all the local boys had jacked-up muscle cars. It was then that I realized that Katie and Dick Norton and I were a tiny part of a Great Migration of the 1970s. Sometime later I was told that in the 1970s around 100,000 people left the city of Buffalo, New York. Young people from the vast farm country of the Great Plains were also heading to new lives away from the endless emptiness. So many of us would be completing for employment and housing in the cities of the Rocky Mountain West, but that is another story for another time.

We had made our journey West .  My uncle's car had delivered us safely to a beautiful place that I would soon come to cherish as my home. Our big adventure would give way to a time of settling down to married life and going to work and making a living. There would still be much uncertainty, more hardships, and some adventures, but now I hoped for some stability, security; new friendships, and family.