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Looking for Love in America. Part 2: North CAL Road Trip. [1]
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Date: 2023-06-04
After a particularly grueling ten months spent in The Gambia, my company put me on standby for a while since there were no projects that required my skills. When I say grueling, I don’t mean just hard work, although it was that. I dealt with a tourist heart attack, a tourist with the DTs, had awful malaria, and so on. But those things are other stories.
Winter, 1980: I wasn’t going to mess with Texas again, as they like to put it. They could keep their underage Texas blondies. I was older now, I had more money and more sense. Only the first of these was true.
I hopped a flight to San Francisco on December 1st, 1980, found a cheap motel near the bridge, and in a matter of days, bought a 1972 Ford Mustang, the one with the anemic 6-cyl motor.
I was less prone to US culture shock now. Even so, I chuckled at some of the news I saw on breakfast TV: The Church of Satan was opening a new branch. Women were joining a ‘Chastity Club’; its symbol was a cartoon mouse saying “NO!”
On the flight, I met an ‘interesting’ person, a lawyer, who introduced me to some of the original Flower Power ‘beats’. By day I drove out to the Napa Valley, where I helped out with community TV plans and visited other ‘interesting’ characters, including a famous artist who had planted large metal sculptures here and there. By night I played pool in the Bus Stop Bar, on Union Street.
On December 8, all that changed. I glanced up from my game and read the news bulletin scrolling across the bar TV. My jaw dropped. John Lennon had been murdered. Distraught, I checked out of my motel and drove north, in the night, up Route 1. On the way I found a stranded logger and gave him a ride. He sold me a lid of purple weed. Driving twisty-turny Route 1 through the high forest while high.
I stopped at Garberville, the marijuana capital of California. As I parked, an unpleasant scene unfolded: the local sheriff abusing a Black man, dressed in a suit and driving a Mercedes.
“Where didya get those oranges? HUH?” Pointing at a bag of oranges in the back seat.
- The grocery store.
“Do ya have a RECEIPT?” Spittle flying.
I wanted to take photos but since I was still high, decided not to risk it. Instead I went into a bar on the hippie side of the street and began to practice pool.
Garberville, as my logger friend explained, was (may still be!) divided by an invisible line that ran down the centre of Main Street. The right side was occupied by rednecks and timber men, while the left was the haunt of the hippies and weed growers.
It didn’t take long before a couple of locals came into the bar and offered to play me. Being high, I agreed only on the basis of no money involved. I bent over the table to take the break and all over the green baize, lines of interaction appeared. The purple weed! It became far too easy and I proceeded to put everything and the eight down in one break.
I looked up and a small crowd had gathered. More people wanted to play me. I glanced back at the table and the luminous lines and angles had vanished. “Another time, thanks.”
The next stop on my route was Reedsport. I stashed the weed, filled up the Mustang, and got back into the road trip.
[END]
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