01-Apr-2009
Falling In Love As A Boy
Jeans, T-shirt, desert boots, and a big duffle bag – I was ready. I think I also had about five-hundred dollars in cash and that seemed a good enough stake for a trek across country. The goal: Seattle, and from there on to Alaska.
I tossed the duffle in the back seat of my best friend Mike’s Studebaker Lark convertible (his parent’s car), and we took off south on Route 23 for the intersection of U.S. Route 30, about twelve miles away.
It was early summer after my freshman year in college and I’d already decided I wouldn’t be going back to school. My problem was that I’d gone from a pre-freshman state of being totally convinced I didn’t have what it took for college, to a situation where I’d had a very good first year and was now asking, What’s the point of all this? No answer.
With a family scene that was less than optimal, too, and a girlfriend who’d used all sorts of sweet and loving words to send me packing, it seemed time to move along, time to get an itch out of my feet and see if the general crankiness of life might ebb somewhere beyond the Rockies.
It was June 7, 1963 and that night I wrote: “Right now I’m at the Mayfair Hotel in Sioux City, Iowa…. I think I’ve traveled about 450 miles so far which isn’t too bad for hitchhiking.”
The next night I was in Lusk, Wyoming, having endured a long wait on the side of the road in Valentine, Nebraska. A nice old fellow finally picked me up and we headed toward Wyoming. He got tired and asked me if I’d mind driving so I did, and then, out of gratitude, he even bought me supper in Wyoming before continuing his trip. I checked into the Ranger Hotel for the night.
There was nothing but loneliness in that part of Wyoming so it took a long time for me to get out of town the next day. I finally caught a ride in a brand new Oldsmobile with a man who said he was a dignitary with the Shriners. He had Shriner paraphernalia in the car so I didn’t doubt who he was, nor did I doubt his name: Ethan Allen. I’d been planning on going to Gillette but he said he was headed for Casper. My itinerary was written on tissue paper so Casper it was.
After three or four days the rides, towns, motels, detours, funky diners – all of it begins to run together, all of it simply motion, and motion becomes the thing, the life. Destinations don’t seem all that important when you’re stuck on a mountain road and the air is thin and you’re not used to that, or when you’re sitting on your duffle on the shoulder of a road so visibly long you can see the future. Eventually I just went with whoever would pick me up, a bit of serendipity that brought me to the first love (there would be a second) of that trip: Jackson Hole, Wyoming.
What impressed me most about Jackson Hole was that it was the first of the many small towns I’d passed through that seemed actually busy. Tourists, of course. This was Rockefeller country and home of the upstart Grand Teton mountain range. The place was also busy because they were filming scenes at the airport for the movie, “Spencer’s Mountain” starring Henry Fonda and Maureen O’Hara. That movie would later transform itself into the television series “The Waltons.”
Time to leave Jackson Hole and the Anvil Motel. Rather than risk being marooned in the true wilderness of the Tetons and Yellowstone, I decided to take a bus to Missoula, Montana.
Her name was Sharon and Greyhound brought us together. She was from Jackson Hole, had graduated from Fresno State, and was going to Missoula to look for a job.
By this time a good bit of loneliness was setting in, along with a need for some talk that didn’t always end with “thanks for the ride.”
We talked the way two people talk who know that, if destiny has brought them together, it’s not necessarily for any discernible purpose. She was twenty-four, I was nineteen. We talked about that. We talked about how I was on my way to Seattle and from there to Alaska where I hoped to find work. Sharon’s degree was in education so we talked about teaching. We talked and we smoked (you could do that on buses back then), we held hands, we kissed when it got dark. We parted in Missoula late at night.
After a few days in Seattle and some serious work investigating how I might get to Alaska and what I might do when I got there, I finally admitted that I was smitten. I had to do something about Sharon. Though we’d only been together a few hours, that time had revealed a kinship of heart and soul I’d felt only once before. Time to head back to Jackson Hole to see if she’d gone back home and to see as well if I could even find her.
In talking with Sharon I’d learned that her father ran the airport in Jackson Hole. My first day back in town then I went out there, mentioned that I’d shared a bus ride with his daughter, and ended up with a job. Just like that. I’d manage his scenic flight business in town in the morning, then work at the airport in the afternoon.
Better still, he invited me over to his house for dinner that night (after explaining my rather purposeful/purposeless mission, I think he felt sorry for me). He wanted me to meet his family and, yes, Sharon was back in town and would probably get a kick out of seeing me again.
His house was beautiful, his family lovely, the food great, and Sharon was as charming as ever, as was her fiancé.
Well, I thought, you build a house of straw and sometimes it blows away. Instead of filling my life with a great love, I filled airplanes with fuel and rented cars for Avis. Their slogan at the time was, We Try Harder.
I decided I needed to do that.
G. K. Wuori © 2009
Photoillustration by the author
