Thumbing Around: Robert W. Norris Writes
Morning was a peaceful calm: grey clouds breaking up with traces of sunlight shimmering through them. They proceeded through the Wasatch Mountains, the road slick with snow and ice, across the Continental Divide, and on to the plateaus of Wyoming. A carpet of snow covered the land. The road seemed to continue forever. Occasionally a jackrabbit bounded across the road. Here and there a distant elk would lift its head to scan their movement. At Cheyanne the woman and her two children turned south. It had been a good ride covering two days and three states.
Sticking to hitchhiking as his main mode of travel but once in a while riding a bus when he was stuck too long in one place, John passed across the Great Plains of Nebraska, out of the snow now and through farming towns with red-brick buildings and dirty main-street sidewalks where old folks sat languorously on benches watching the movement of the world. He stopped in Omaha, where he spent two days reading in a public library and walking the streets. He slept in a cheap room one night and the bus depot the next to save a few dollars.
On and on now, another 600 miles to Peoria, Illinois. A rainy night. A three-dollar motel room with plaster walls and a rattling steam heater. A saggy mattress. A six-pack of cheap beer. A newspaper with stories about returning prisoners of war and Watergate. Morning and a bus ticket to Gary, Indiana, where he took a skid-row room for one night. Across the expanse of Indiana, where squares of long, furrowed fields, ready for seed, stretched in all directions. Another ride to Cleveland.
Thoughts of the Kent State shootings filled John's head as he passed through Ohio into Pennsylvania and on toward Buffalo, New York. He spent one night sleeping in a wooded field off the shore of Lake Erie. Early the next morning he walked along the beach, then stopped to watch the whitecaps form. The lake was an immense ocean that disappeared beyond the horizon. Grey clouds covered the sky. The sun struggled to break through. He continued another three miles through pollution, dilapidated ghetto buildings, broken glass, and abandoned cars to downtown Buffalo. He found the bus station and bought a ticket to New York City.
At last there he was: bounding through the door of the Port Authority Bus Terminal. His first impression of New York was an endless forest of skyscrapers that seemed to make the redwoods pale in comparison.
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