across my paradise, what we call the Rockies, and what the earliest white men who saw them called the Shining Mountains. At school, I drew maps, both accurate and fictional ones, of that country of the heart, hiding my work behind a bent head close to a propped-up schoolbook. I memorized the illustrations in the Encyclopedia Britannica that chronicled the westward march of Manifest Destiny.
I roamed, with my Daisy Red Ryder Carbine BB-gun, the shrinking woods and weeded lots of my suburban town, shooting (I blush to say) robins and squirrels, seeing in my mind’s eye the tall grass prairie and the bison, the mountain forests and the elk. By twelve or thirteen, I had prevailed upon my father to purchase for me three antiques: a 45 caliber Sharps buffalo gun, an 1874 Springfield military carbine, and an old Stevens pump 22. All were non-functional, at least to everyone but me. They rested in a rack on my bedroom wall, and every night, just before sleep, I would take them down one by one, check that they were cleaned and oiled (they always were), and aim them at the invisible targets of my imagination: loaded, cocked, sighted-in, and trigger-pulled.
In my nineteenth year I was a sophomore at an excellent college: a “grind” pre-med in a decade when the one phrase defined the other. I was a pretty good, and very aggressive, athlete, an A-student with little fundamental comprehension of the relevance and significance of what I was learning, and, not by choice, a virgin (my knowledge of detailed female anatomy and physiology mostly gleaned from what was then known as “heavy petting” and, upon rare occasions, reciprocal digital stimulation).
Most importantly, I felt the world closing in upon me, rather than opening out before me. I could see a clear road ahead, but narrowing, narrowing. As has perhaps been true forever for young males who don’t quite feel that they fit, I yearned to break free, to measure myself by my own, rather than others’, benchmarks, to seek a frontier not yet closed.
I spent hours haunting the library of the Anthropology Department, voraciously reading the accounts of the early students of the Plains Indians, of the Northwest Coast, of the Arctic peoples. And then, one wet, cold Boston March afternoon, I came upon a hand-written 3x5 file card tacked to the library bulletin board:
“Wanted: Riders to share expenses and driving to California.
Leave early June. Call Gene at 824-9787.”
So, perhaps, riding with Gene part-way to California wouldn’t exactly be crossing the Cumberland Gap with Boone, but it could be a first leg to Alaska.
Alaska seemed to me to be what was left of all I had dreamed of. It was expected that Alaskan statehood would take place in either 1958 or 1959, truly closing the American frontier. If I could get there before that fact, while it was still the Alaska Territory, I could have a taste of what my heroes had felt in the Dakota Territory, in Montana in the early days, in Arizona and New Mexico before 1912. If not, it might be all gone, forever, and something might also go out of my young life with it, something I would never know, but always regret the absence of.
And so, in the second week of June, Gene, Allan, and I piled into a creaky Chevy, and pulled out of Cambridge, headed, as the best dreams on this continent have always been directed, West. My plan was to ride the Lincoln Highway with them as far as Rock Springs, Wyoming, there to leave them and then strike out alone north through Yellowstone to Montana, and up across the Canadian border to the Alaskan Highway. That road was scarcely 15 years old, four years younger than myself, pushed through the muskeg and mountains as the AlCan Highway by military engineers, to forge a land route from the Lower 48 to Alaska, and thus to pre-empt a possible Japanese invasion through the Aleutian Islands. The Road West, and the Road North, were fused in my mind.
Family and friends were aghast. But knowing my stubbornness and eccentricities, no one raised much of a fuss; my folks kissed me good-bye over the phone, and my friends just shook their heads.
After much thought, and some experimentation, here is what I took with me. On my back (below a 1950s ‘crew-cut’ so short as to preclude the need for repetition by a licensed barber for some time to come): a short denim Wrangler jacket, the one with the metal buttons, washed soft and supple. A cotton work shirt. A nondescript Bulova watch with leather band. Denim jeans (we called them “dungarees” or “Levi’s” then, and you never, ever, turned up the cuffs unless you were a girl, or a city guy). Cotton ‘sweat socks’, and a pair of poorly broken-in Red Wing work boots. A broad plain leather belt, from which hung a four-inch leather case enclosing a bone-handled pocket knife with four blades: long and short cutting, a slot screwdriver/bottle-opener, and an awl. No hat, no sunglasses, both of which were then considered to be affectations.
In my hand: a weathered Gladstone bag, the kind that opens from a top zipper to offer broad and square access. Inside the bag: three extra shirts (one a warm flannel), three ‘T-shirts’, all the same plain white (no funny illustrations or double-entendre slogans, no designer logos in those days), three pairs of Jockey shorts (the fourth I wore under my Levi’s), the other three pairs of sweat socks, two extra handkerchiefs and a red-checked bandanna, a spare pair of Levi’s, a pair of white Converse ‘Hi-Top’ sneakers, a shaving kit (toothbrush and paste, a Gillette ‘safety’ razor and packet of individually-wrapped double-edged ‘Blueblades’, a small plastic soap case for washing and shaving, a travel shaving brush, a small metal mirror, and a few Band-Aids), a hand towel, a half-roll of toilet paper crushed flat, wooden kitchen ‘Strike Anywhere’ matches and a small candle, a small flashlight with the old grey, blue, and red ‘Every Ready’ batteries, and a hundred feet of parachute cord.
Strapped to the top of the Gladstone, between its handles: a light cotton sleeping bag, protectively wrapped inside a rubberized Army surplus rain poncho.
In my pockets: no keys at all—surely the sign of the liberated road traveler. A wallet with my identification (including my draft card), pictures of my mom and dad, brother, and dog, and a rolled-up condom. The latter had rested hopefully, but unsuccessfully, in the wallet for so long it had created a permanent circled ridge in the leather; Planned Parenthood should be grateful that I, like many American boys, never got the chance to use that particular dried and aged device. But I was ever hopeful, and, as the Tom Lehrer song of that era advised, was prepared to “Be Prepared.” I had about one hundred and twenty dollars, some in my wallet, some in the Gladstone, and the majority tucked in a plastic bag under the sole of my left foot in the Red Wing boots.
Gene and Allan were neither scintillating nor sympathetic companions, being graduate students at the Business School, and thus intolerant of both my callowness and my adventuresome idealism. But I was a full-share paying passenger, didn’t fill the Chevy with heavy luggage, and thus was, in their view, a reasonable cost/benefit addition. We didn’t talk much, the radio filling the silence with Chubby Checkers, Fats Domino, and The King. The miles rolled by: Boston down through old Routes 16 and 30 to Connecticut and the Wilbur Cross Parkway, through Hartford where the gas wars always allowed you to fill up at an economical thirty-two cents per gallon, into the New York suburbs and across the George Washington bridge, struggling down the Jersey Turnpike until we reached the old Pennsy Turnpike, one of the country’s earliest-built, controlled-access, long-distance roads.
Somewhere in western Pennsylvania, we stopped for the first night. Gene and Allan looked for a motel in the farm town along the pike, but I was counting dollars for the miles ahead, and determined to lie up in the woods, where they would retrieve me the following morning. I rolled my bag out in a low and sheltered spot as dusk approached, lulled by the sound of a distant tractor, using the last of the Daylight Savings Time light to cultivate a few more rows. Soon the closer-in whine of mosquitoes drowned out the tractor, and I was faced with an uncomfortable choice, one that would often recur that summer. You either put the rubberized poncho over your face, neck, and hands, and sweltered, or hunched over as close as you could at the top of the short bag, and bled. Alaska seemed very far away, and I felt
