Trippin

The directional highway sign suddenly loomed overhead; it was so unexpected I almost missed the darn thing. Quick I said, “which way did he say we were supposed to go?”

“Heck, I don’t know,” came the response from the passenger seat of the car. Great, we had to decide and in a hurry. We were three quarters of the way to Amarillo before we realized that we had gone the wrong way. This was the beginning of our great adventure.

Sharon and I had packed up and left our rented duplex in Denver the day before. We had left all of our furniture and dishes and household items right were they were. We told our other roommate that she could do what ever she wanted, as far as the stuff in the duplex was concerned. We always figured that she had just left everything there and moved out. It was going to be hard for her to find someone to share the rent with her, as she was rather hard to live with, especially if one had a boyfriend who frequented the premises. Can you say “slut?”

Sharon and I had decided several days before that a change in scenery was definitely in order. We were sick of our other roommate and wanted to be rid of her. After all, she had invited herself to live there, it wasn’t our idea. In addition, she had brought this huge dog home with her one night without warning, it was a Malamute with no manners. Our lease did not allow us to have a pet of any kind in the duplex, much less one that resembled a small horse! Trying to get her to understand this was like talking to a wall. Val was adamant, the dog was staying. The dog was left in the house all day while everyone was at work and proceeded to totally destroy the kitchen and the living room curtains. That was the last straw, it was time to make some changes.

I was the proud owner of a 1965 Corvair Convertible at that time and we would put it to the test.

We had informed my parents what our plans were a couple of days before our intended departure. They were worried to be sure, but they didn’t try to stop us, especially when they found out where we planned to go.

We were going to go to Oklahoma and my mom’s relatives all lived down there. They figured that there would be someone for us to run to if we got into any kind of trouble. As soon as we were out of earshot my mom got on the phone to my cousins and aunt to let them know that we were coming. Daddy gave us one of his gasoline credit cards, for emergency use, and had given us very detailed directions to our destination. He demanded that we delay our departure long enough for him to take my car to his service station so that he could check the brakes, lights, oil, etcetera.

While we were waiting for the car we went to the bank and purchased travelers checks, we had been convinced not to carry what little money we had (all of $200.00) in the form of cash. We really thought that money would last us for quite some time, but actually, we didn’t have a clue.

Finally, the day arrived and we were ready to go. All of our stuff was crammed into the little tiny trunk of the Corvair. There was so much in there we didn’t think that we would get it closed. In the back seat was a stash of candy, cigarettes and some pop, for the road. Our last stop before leaving town was my dad’s gas station to top off the gas tank and to receive final last minute instructions. Although he didn’t voice it at the time I’m sure that he was a little uneasy about these two half-grown kids taking off cross-country on their own. Albeit, we had been living in our own place for months, we were only sixteen and seventeen years old at the time.

Let the adventure begin, with the top down and the tank full off we went. What a thrill this was to us, to be setting out cross-country on our own. The world was a playground and it belonged to us, at least for the moment. We drove and smoked (Sharon was in charge of lighting all the cigarettes, no easy task in an open car) and turned the radio up loud enough to be heard above the wind that was whipping through our hair and buffeting our ears. It was exceptionally hot that day, but we didn’t notice it. We were having way too much fun, here we were free at last to be who we wanted to be, which was subject to change without notice.

We stopped somewhere in Kansas to get a drink and get some gas. Only then did we realize just how burnt we were. We were both wearing the drop shouldered peasant blouses that were popular then. Consequently, our backs, shoulders and the backs of our necks were fried. This didn’t bother us much until we stopped for the night and tried to sleep. To this day Sharon still has freckles on her shoulders to prove it.

Dodge City, Kansas, what a long way it was across Kansas! We decided that Dodge City would be our stopping place for that first night. Driving into town we spied the place that we would have dinner that night. It was “Miss Kitty’s Longbranch”, an appropriate place indeed.

The place we stayed that night escapes me all these years later, so it must not have been worth remembering. On the way out of town the next morning we stopped at “Boot Hill” Cemetery, like any good tourist. We weren’t very impressed, as I remember it, the place was not very well taken care of. Weeds had long since bullied their way in and around the fake head stones, most of them were nearly covered in weeds. What little grass that was there, had been scorched to a dull brown lifelessness. Sharon’s romantic notions of Dodge City were totally crushed that day and she still hasn’t gotten over it. Where was Marshall Dillon’s memorial, anyway?

Soon we were headed across Kansas again, with Oklahoma as our final destination. That second day was as long and hot as the first one. We were forced to keep the top up for most of the day, so that we would not get burnt any worse than we already were. By mid-afternoon the huge openness of Oklahoma City had surrounded us. The place was bigger that we had imagined but by Denver standards seemed to be almost uninhabited. There was an erie quietness to the place that we were not used to. We soon learned that Oklahoma City was a very large city, and it spread out for miles and miles, thus, the empty feeling. It was while we were discussing this new city that the directional highway sign appeared and we went on our happy way, the wrong way!

It wasn’t too very long before I started noticing that the scenery didn’t look much like what I had been used to seeing. It had been a long time since I had been down this way, so maybe I had just forgotten? Not likely. Soon we spotted a sign that said Amarillo, three hundred and some miles.

Sharon turned and asked me, “Are you sure we are going the right direction?” Well, I wasn’t sure, not at all.

It took us another fifteen or twenty miles to find an exit off the highway. We pulled into the truck stop that was just off the highway. I went in and asked the kid behind the counter (never mind the fact that he was about our age) which way I needed to go to get to Seminole. He looked confused like I’d just addressed him in a foreign language. He had no idea where Seminole was, in fact had never heard of the place. I settled for directions back to Oklahoma City. All together we probably lost about an hour and a half on the unplanned detour. Once we got back to the city, by default we took the highway in the other direction. Before too long I began to recognize some of the terrain, I had been here before.

In a couple of hours we pulled up in the driveway of my cousin Margie’s house. She was waiting for us, mama having called ahead and all. She was real glad to see us and we parked ourselves in the kitchen to catch up and gossip. Later, when her husband Jerry came home the spontaneity of the conversation dissipated quickly. He was a pushy, nosy sort and proceeded to tell us that he was responsible for us while we were there. Now, this didn’t set well with us, we had been on our own for some time. However, we let it slide, just giving the whole idea lip service just to get him to quit carrying on. That first night was calm and quiet, the fun began the next day.

The next day was spent roaming around town checking out all of the non-existent “fun” activities. We went to the local bakery for donuts for breakfast and were stared at like we had just landed from Mars or some other far away planet. We did not feel that we looked any different than any of the other kids our age did in Denver, but “stranger” must have been flashing in neon above our heads. All the kids there were dressed like Wally Cleaver! Local women openly pointed and whispered out loud to each other.

Lunch was at the local lunch counter at a small department store called “Wackers,” we went because it was different. We didn’t have things like that back in Denver. By the end of the first full day there, we were bored silly.

Hanging out at Margie’s was not high-level teenage entertainment. We had been looking forward to hanging out with her, but she wasn’t the fun person I had remembered. She was a totally bored housewife, with a beer problem and an overbearing, chauvinist pig for a husband. Not our idea of a good time.

We had also taken a trip out to visit another cousin of mine who lived in an even smaller town south of Seminole. She had been calling all morning wanting to know when we were coming out to visit, we finally made it that afternoon. Now my cousin Sheri lived in a house that might have been decent at the turn of the century, the nineteenth century that is. The entire house was made out of rough, bare unfinished wood. The whole place shook when you walked across the floor, especially in the kitchen. The floor in the back bedroom had a definite downhill slant to it. A misplaced spark of any kind would have sent the whole thing up in smoke and flames like so much kindling wood. Poof! It was set up on what appeared to be little short squatty stilts. Anyway, one could crawl under the house with no problem, except that was where the dog lived most of the time. The house set in the middle of a large chunk of land with a water tower, an oil well and an old abandoned trailer house close by. The air was always filled with the “chuga-chuga” of the oil well as it labored away hour after hour. There was also an outhouse located behind the main house, as was the well house.

This was where the washing machine was and where they showered. The water was not good for drinking or cooking, but they could wash and bathe with it. My cousin’s parents went to town at least once a week and hauled drinking water back home. Sharon was absolutely shocked to discover that they had no running water or other plumbing in that house. This was 1972, what in the world was going on here?

She thought she had seen it all until Sheri summoned us into her bedroom so that she could show off by cataloging the entire contents of her “hope chest” for us. Now, we always knew about such things, but we really didn’t think that anyone still collected hope chests full of household stuff. Sheri’s hope chest had long since overflowed the boundaries of its cedar home and had spread all over her bedroom. She had enough stuff to marry all three of us off, and still have extra! The excitement was about to do us in!

We decided that the next day we needed to go back to Oklahoma City and check out the job situation and maybe find a place to stay. We found no jobs or any place to stay that next day, but we did find the local amusement park called “Spring Lake.” This would be fun or so we thought! When we got there and got up to the front gate it was obvious that the place was packed with other teenagers! Turns out that it was a special day for the high school kids and every one of them in the city must have taken advantage of the offer.

We headed back to Seminole and Margie’s without any real plan as to what to do next.

We were hanging out in the kitchen that night when Jerry rather boldly told us to take a walk or something. Well, we had that one figured out, there were no doors on any of the bedrooms in that house. So, we left, on foot and without the car or the keys. We figured that we would not need them. You could walk from end to end in that town in less than a half hour. It was hot and rather sticky that night, so we decided to go get something to drink. That is when we ran into a bunch of guys. The kind of guys that young girls were always warned about, no good, dangerous, old beat up pick-up truck, etcetera.

The very same kind that young girls always find infinitely fascinating.

“What’ch doin’ girls?” Uh huh, we were on the way.

“Want to go for a ride?”, of course we did. All of them were rather rough looking, tattooed, shaggy beards and just overall grungy appearing. The one that seemed to be their leader introduced himself as Snake.

There were four of them and us. Sharon and I and two of the guys piled into the back of the truck and away we went. We were off to visit an old Indian burial ground. Or so they said. Before long we were on the two-lane road that led from Seminole to Bowlegs an even smaller town to the south. I was not unfamiliar with Bowlegs. As I mentioned earlier, I had another cousin who lived out there, but it was really dark out there on that road. Very eerie.

We hadn’t been on the road for very long when one of the rear tires on that old beat up truck decided to blow out. There was no jack for the truck, even if there had been a spare. No jack, no spare, half way between nowhere and god knows where. I was starting to get a little nervous about the situation. Sharon didn’t seem to be worried though. We all stood around by the side of the road. They made Sharon and I move behind the truck away from the road. They then removed a shotgun from the cab of the truck, our knights seemed to be letting us know that we were protected from whatever harm lurks in the black of an Oklahoma summer night.

The guy who seemed to be the alpha dog of this pack said that he knew someone who lived down the road a ways. He thought that he could get the truck that far. We all piled back in and the truck limped down the road for another fifteen or twenty minutes. He pulled the truck into what seemed to pass as the yard and parked it under a tree. A woman in cut-offs and a halter-top with bare feet came out into the yard and looked us up and down.

“What’ch doin Snake? Who are your friends?”

He looked over at us and said, “These here young ladies are visiting family in Seminole. We met them at the “Sonic” drive-in there in town and thought that we would go for a ride, but as you can see the truck developed a mite of a problem.”

She looked us over again, warily this time. I was really starting to get nervous now and I wanted to get back to the relative safety of Seminole. At this point, you are probably wondering why we just didn’t call someone to come and get us. There was one very good reason, no one seemed to have a telephone out there. This was quite foreign to us, it was very strange to run into someone who didn’t have a phone in Denver. There was a pay phone at the little general store down the road a ways, but of course, it was closed up tight and had been for several hours. The idea of breaking into the store to use the telephone was batted back and forth for a little while and soon dismissed.

This made me even more uncomfortable. Oh how I wished that we had brought the car, at least we could have left whenever we wanted to. We milled around the yard for a while and then somebody brought out some beer. Everybody set down with their beers and there was some small talk about fixing the tire on the truck, but nothing that sounded serious. Pretty soon Snake came out of the house carrying the biggest shot-gun I had ever seen. He walked around the yard with it for a while and then set it down, propped up on the trunk of the tree. This was not good, now I was really worried, bordering on down right scared.

Without giving the statement much thought I announced that I was going to walk back to
Seminole and pick up the car. Sharon indicated that she was going to stay there, fine I said, I’ll come back and get you. There was a great deal of conversation after my announcement.

Everybody was of the opinion that what I was purposing was not a good idea. It was a little more than five miles back to Seminole and there were no street lights along the way. One of the guys offered up his advice. He said that I’d better stay where I was because someone would be sure to shoot me if I took off walking down that road at night. The dogs would start barking and those folks were just as likely to shoot as to check out what the dog was barking at. Folks here bouts’ don’t take kindly to strangers walking around at night. Still, I would not be dissuaded. I was going. I didn’t like it there and I certainly didn’t like leaving Sharon there, but she seemed perfectly fine with the situation.

I started off down the road and didn’t look back. That road went on forever, nothing but long dark road. An occasional dog did bark, but never once did I see a vehicle of any kind. I was walking along at a quick clip and suddenly I twisted my ankle and almost fell flat on my face. Good grief what was that? I was almost too scared to try and find out, but something inside me made me go and take a closer look. What I found was a chicken, a very dead chicken, by the side of the road. It was right in my path and I had stepped right in the middle of it. Yuck! Thank goodness it probably hadn’t been dead too long! I walked on at a slower pace, trying to catch my breath.

I walked on for quite a while before I started to even get a glimpse of the lights that would indicate town was somewhere up ahead. I don’t know how long it actually took me to walk all the way back to Seminole, but it seemed like forever. It was probably more like an hour and a half or so. Finally, the railroad tracks appeared in the darkness, by now I had adjusted to the dark and could see better than I had expected. I knew that the tracks meant that town was not too far off.

Lights, I could see the street lights in town! I had made it, despite what they had all said back at the house. I picked up the pace now.

Margie’s house was on the other side of town, but that was not all that far. I walked across the back porch and tried to open the screen door very quietly (nobody locked their doors in Seminole back then). I just needed to get my keys and my purse and get back out there to pick Sharon up.

I attempted to sneak in the back door of my cousin’s house. The door wasn’t locked, but it hardly had to be it made so much noise! There was no way I could not have gotten in and out again unnoticed, but I tried. I was through the kitchen and half way across the living room reaching for my purse when Margie’s husband shouted from the bedroom, “where are you going?”

Apparently, he had not noticed that we had yet to return from our walk. I tried to think of something that would not trigger any more interest on his part. I couldn’t think of anything feasible. So, I told him, “I’m just going to grab the car and go to pick Sharon up.”

This of course, produced only more questions. Just where was Sharon? I said, “she’s out at Bowlegs.” That did it. He said, “wait for me and I’ll go with you.” I told him that wasn’t necessary, but it was too late.

“What was she doing out in Bowlegs?” He wanted to know. None of your business, was my first thought. He was really beginning to irritate me, but I told him what had happened as we drove.

We walked down to the Sonic and these guys showed up and asked us it we wanted to go for a ride with them. We did and the truck had a blow out about half way to Bowlegs. There was no jack, no spare so they drove the truck on the flat tire until we got to the house of someone they knew. When no one showed any signs of trying to get the flat fixed, I decided that I would walk back to town and get the car. Sharon didn’t want to walk back so she stayed there and I told her that I would go get the car and come back for her.
Jerry wouldn’t let me drive my own car, he insisted on taking his car.

As I had climbed into the front seat it occurred to me that I remembered Jerry showing me a gun that he kept in his glove compartment. He delivered early morning newspapers before work and said that it was just some extra protection, although I could never figure out from what in a town like Seminole. The thought of this gun worried me, Jerry’s buttons could be pushed pretty easily sometimes. I didn’t even want to go there!

By this time we were approaching the house where I had left Sharon. Jerry had recognized the name “Snake” as being one of the town’s more unsavory characters and was carrying on about how he was going to call the police on those guys.

This really made me mad, there was no reason for him to do that. We had made the decision to go with them nobody forced us to go. I told him that he had no right to be doing anything like that, he was not in charge of taking care of either one of us. We were traveling on our own and if he didn’t like it we would find someplace else to stay. It didn’t matter to us and I told him as much.

Sharon got in the car giving me the strangest sidelong look I’d ever caught. I just kind of shrugged my shoulders and mouthed “later” to her. She got the message and off we went, Jerry still carrying on about us taking off with guys that we did not know. Several times in the five-mile drive back to town we told him that we had gone with them because we wanted to. We had been bored and looking for something to do. After all, he was the one who had asked us to leave the house in the first place. By the time we got back to the house it was probably close to 2:00 in the morning. We parked ourselves on the front porch of the house waiting for Jerry to go back inside to bed. He started to say something else and then changed his mind, closing the front door as he went in. We could hardly stifle our giggles as the door closed.

Sharon asked, “what was that all about?”

“I think that he thought that we had been
kidnapped or something and that I had managed to escape. He talked about calling the police all the way and I had one hell of a time convincing him that he was overreacting to the situation."

I spent the next half hour or so filling Sharon in on all of the details of my trip back to town. Then we decided that it was probably time to get some sleep.

The next day at lunch time we were still at the house trying to figure out what we were going to do in the next few days. Jerry showed up at home for lunch. He had been making not so discreet inquiries about our friends from the night before. Jerry worked for the post office delivering mail so he talked to lots of people every day. In a small town like that everybody knew everybody else’s business. He took what appeared to be great pleasure in informing us that the guys we had chosen to take a ride with the night before were all a bunch of dangerous thugs.

Snake was even an ex-convict, he said. He would not tell us what he had been in prison for. We did not need to know that. In his mind anyone who had been in prison was extremely dangerous, no matter what the crime had been.

We were suitably unimpressed with his announcements. We left to go have a chocolate coke at the corner drugstore downtown.

The next day Jerry asked us it we wanted to drive down to Houston with them. They were going to visit his parents. Sure why not? Neither one of us had ever been to Houston before. As we got ready to leave Jerry informed us that we were all going in their car. This did not sound like the fun trip we had envisioned, they had two kids and that would make the car really crowded. We did not like this idea at all, but allowed ourselves to be talked into going anyway. Not a good idea.

Just after dusk that night we rolled into the industrial side of the Dallas-Fort Worth area. It looked like something from a movie noir set out of the 1930’s. Everyone in the car was ready to eat and stretch their legs some. We had been squished up in the back seat with the two kids all day long.

We found a Kentucky Fried Chicken and pulled in to have dinner. Jerry wanted to get it to go and eat in the car. The rest of us vetoed that idea right away. We had just set down at the table when the outside lights at the restaurant came on. It was like a giant magnet had been activated, every bug within a one-hundred mile radius landed on the windows of the restaurant. Never had we ever seen bugs that big! Turned out that most of them were flying roaches, ugh! Suddenly we were not hungry any more. You just did not see bugs like that in Denver!

The subsequent two days were absolutely nothing to be excited about. We could have been that bored back in Seminole. In addition, we felt terribly uncomfortable at Jerry’s parents house.

It was obvious that we were not really welcome there. It occurred to me that Jerry hadn’t bothered to ask them if it was alright to bring along extra company. We tried to stay outside as much as possible. On the third day we were going to Galveston Island. Now this was exciting, neither one of us had ever seen the ocean in any way. Galveston Bay would do nicely. We figured that we would get to spend the entire day frolicking in the water and warm sand. One of the kids had a Styrofoam surfboard that we took out into the water and tried over and over again to be able to straddle the darn thing and at least pretend to ride a wave. We must have swallowed a gallon of salt water that day.

Sharon and I took turns with the surfboard while the other one manned the camera, we wanted a record of our very first trip to the ocean.

Those pictures turned out to have more scenes of the oil barges going by than of us and the surfboard.

We had been at the beach for about an hour and a half when Jerry showed up on the edge of the water shouting that it was time to leave. What? We had planned on staying most of the day. His kids didn’t like this any better than we did, but he didn’t care. He would not even give us a chance to get cleaned up, in the car we went sandy feet, damp towels and all. It was one long trip back to Seminole, Jerry was in a foul mood all the way back. We could not wait to get out of that car.

Later that night, we decided that it was time to be moving on. We had just about had it with Jerry and all of his crap. Besides, we were just about out of money and needed to be making some decisions about what we were going to do next.

We had enough to get back to Denver, if that was where we wanted to go. What that heck, Denver was home after all and we had gotten rid of the rotten roommate situation by leaving in the first place. The thought of going back to school in the fall had actually crossed our minds, but that is another story.

The next day we spent making everything ready for the next leg of our adventure. We were ready, the thought of being on the road again with the top down (our sunburns had long since healed and peeled) with our hair flying in the wind was intoxicating. The last of our stuff was loaded back into the trunk of the corvair. In the morning, it was blast off time again.

This time we decided that we would drive down to Amarillo, Texas and up through New Mexico and back to Denver. Just to be different, to see some new tumbleweeds and cow pastures! We drove that entire day and really didn’t see anything that was very different or spectacular.

Amarillo turned out to be just another dusty, windy place in Texas.

That night after dark we were crossing a very desolate area of New Mexico. I mean it was dark out there, just about as dark as it was up at Sharon’s grandfather’s place in Westcliffe. Which is just where we were headed. We had called ahead and let him know that we were coming, but didn’t know exactly what time, sometime after dark.

Riding along minding our own business, we were suddenly joined by a car that had pulled up along side of us, from out of nowhere, neither one of us had seen them coming. The car was loaded both front and back seat with guys and they seemed to be having one great time. No one had been behind us for miles and miles except for the big truck we had noticed a little while back. The truck was still a ways back, but this car was practically right on top of us cruising the wrong direction in the other lane. They were getting closer and closer to my side of the car.

Sharon and I eyed each other warily and I kept on driving. Neither one of us voiced what we were both thinking. This was not a good thing, to have this car running so close to us and not showing any signs of backing off. The other car kept getting closer and closer to the left side of the car. We could see the occupants waving their arms and carrying on. I picked up the speed a little more and so did the car that was now obviously following and trying to catch us.

Suddenly, the blast of an air horn sounded and scared us right out of our skin! The truck’s bright light illuminated the inside of both cars. It was the eighteen-wheeler that had been coming up behind us a few minutes before. That trucker kept on that air horn and got so close to that car on the left of us that he could have been pushing them with the front bumper of his rig.

I backed off of the accelerator and slowed down some. That truck kept right on the rear of that car until it pulled over into the correct lane.

Then he fell in right behind them again and continued to ride their bumper on into the night. They had no choice but to keep moving, if they had tried to stop that truck would have drove right over the top of their car! Truck driver’s truly are the white knights of the open road.

Sharon and I looked at each other just now fully realizing what had just happened out there in the middle of nowhere. It was now obvious that what these guys had in mind was not coffee at the next truck stop.

We had just been rescued from a horrible fate by an angel in the night. We kept right on going and did not stop until we pulled into the front yard of her grandfather’s place in Westcliffe, Colorado.

The next morning after a huge breakfast of pancakes, bacon and coffee we headed out for a walk in the woods surrounding his house.

Reflecting on the events of the last week or so we realized that someone had truly been watching out for us, this pair of half-grown young women who knew just enough about life to be dangerous.

Guardian angels don’t always have halos and harps, sometimes they come with Peterbilt trucks and air horns! To this day we have not figured out who the angel was that night out in Bowlegs when that old truck broke down, but there was one there to be sure. I just know it. Thinking about it all even now makes a little shiver run up and down my spine. I wonder sometimes why we are still here, this is not the only silly thing we ever did!

We never told our kids about our wild adventure, not wanting to give them any more ideas than they would get all on their own. And I find myself wondering, “what will they be telling their children thirty years from now?”