Garish Youth

What lured the boy into a state of mind where what he most wanted was to get lost? He had come of age in a swaddling of privilege in safe old Canada. Nineteen years old, white, collegiate, child of parents with confident expectations, he certainly trusted the world to keep on providing most of what he wanted.
Fascinated by borders, rivers, crossings, he felt the Canada/US border separating him from life’s mainstream. There seemed to be a faster river flowing through The States, where some people capsized and drowned. He imagined that by traveling through that country alone, with an orange nylon backpack and hitch-hiker’s thumb, he would be staking his claim to a larger life.

His parents knew better than he did. They were Irish–Canadian and Irish–European. Wartime people. They knew ruins and what ruins are like: caustic, smoky, ferocious. They understood how easy it is to be consumed by the past. An Irish grandfather made and lost several rough fortunes in the Canadian West. 

The boy’s father had quit Germany in 1934, returned to visit his parents in the summer of 1939 then left in a hurry, with his German name and British passport, a couple of hours before England's declaration of war. 

An uncle serving in the Royal Canadian Air Force took sick in Gambia and was sent home to die, in the middle the war. 

Other uncles served in infantry battalions--the Black Watch, the régiment de Maisonneuve, the Royal Montreal Regiment—and survived the sharpest end of the war.

One carried home a German pistol, another an SS dagger in a black and silver sheath. The boy’s mother and her sisters sang sea-shanties taught to them by sailor boys gone down with  their flimsy destroyers in the Gulf of St Lawrence, the Strait of Belle Isle, the North Atlantic, the Western Approaches. 

Family stories rattled in a cup without the boy ever realizing how they had already, partly, made him. His father had seen Germany torn to pieces by wild animals.  Hitchhiking across America alone was dangerous, but danger in a calibrated dose. And what was a hitchhiking trip compared to fighting in Normandy in the summer of '44?

He slept in the anonymous interstices of the country. Patches of woodland isolated between entrance roads and interstates. An acre or two of abandoned forest encircled by a lazy loop of concrete, but still wild despite the traffic hum. In there, he could spread out a groundsheet and sleeping bag. Next morning before there was light in the sky and he was back on the highway shoulder with his thumb out. If there was a Dennys he would go there first, for a cup coffee.

Five hundred dollars and two months, that was his budget. Montreal to Maine to New Orleans to Los Angeles to Banff to Montreal, that was his route.

What does it mean, to be authentic? Hardship self-inflicted is very close to being another privilege. Travelling by thumb and alone required the sort of courage he no longer owns but it is difficult to separate that sort of courage from innocence and the innocence from ignorance. He just didn't know how much the world was composed of violence, bad luck and hazard.

Hitch-hiking was risky whether he understood that or not. The hazard of those days was authentic. The first time anyone seriously tried to harm him was on the outskirts of Abilene, Texas just after he left a roadside diner, sensing a buzz of hostility. Sensing he was just too much of a stranger there. A half-mile down the highway, he stuck out his thumb and the third or the fourth pickup truck approaching swerved wildly enough to scare him into a ditch and run over his backpack. Maybe his appearance--bedraggled, unshaven, a simulacrum of poverty—had been taken for an insult in the cafe. Or maybe they made him as what he was a college boy and hated him for wearing rough clothes that mimicked the clothes of working men.

He hitchhiked across Los Angeles, from Whittier Blvd. in East LA to the California Incline in Santa Monica where he thumbed a ride with a dentist/fisherman heading to San Luis Obispo.

Western Montana, weeks later. The Flathead Valley. The ride north was an old Valiant, odd and squat, a car that looked like a turtle. The driver was a housepainter, already drunk. It was ten o’clock in the morning. The car was crowded with stepladders, scaffolding, paint brushes, rollers, and cans of house paint. Heading north the housepainter stopped in at most of the roadside bars. The bartenders all knew him, they called him “Swede”, warned that his wife had been phoning ahead, asking them not to serve him, he was on his way to a job. They served him anyway. Mugs of beer, shots of whisky. The boy refused the drinks offered and after Kalispell took over the wheel. Swede was asleep so the boy kept driving north. He had no idea where Swede was actually heading. When the boy left the Valiant parked diagonally on the main street of Eureka, Swede was unconscious in the passenger seat, and the boy walked out of the town and hitched a ride the last few miles north to the British Columbia border. 

The entrance to the interstate is a place, the way every place is, but it is experienced mostly as a process. The process is acceleration, to join the main stream of highway traffic without interrupting the flow, but if you stand on the entrance ramp or road, trying to hitch a ride, it becomes a place after a while.

Garish Youth (part I)