Further Adventures in the Blue Dodge 1968-69

Off to college!  After returning in mid-september after three months in Alaska, it was strange to to be home at my parents’ house in Tucson.  My high school friends had scattered, to jobs and colleges.  I missed seeing them and could probably have connected with some of them, but I only had a week or so before leaving myself.  It was great to see my parents and sisters of course, and they were very supportive.  Still, I remember being turned outward, thinking more about adventures to come.  I was determined to enjoy college life and not take the academic side too seriously.  I figured that would come later when it was time for graduate school, and why burden four years of relative freedom with unnecessary work?   I also thought it might be possible for me to play varsity basketball, though that was not part of my scholarship.

In late September I left for Palo Alto, California in the blue dodge – yes the same blue dodge that went to Alaska the summer before.  I stopped at my sister Margaret’s house in Sun Valley (a suburb north of Los Angeles).  Her husband Val gave me his high school auto shop textbook to use as a repair manual, since a lot of the repair examples came straight from mid-fifties automobiles including my dodge. I used that book quite a bit on the old car.  Margaret made me and her daughter Lesli drink some “yuck”, actually a protein shake with brewer’s yeast, fruits and walnuts.  Meg always seemed to be on the cutting edge of whatever health fads were happening. (Or so it seemed to me: maybe it is just that Tucson was sort of a backwater as compared with Los Angeles.)  Lesli was in to playing card and board games (age 3 or so?) so we did that, but she cheated shamelessly.  Rules were for her opponent but not for her!

The next day I took off heading north from LA.  At the bottom of the grapevine (a steep section of highway, always challenging for the old dodge) I turned left on the new interstate highway I5.  I had never been this way before, but I had a pretty good road map.  The map showed how to cut across the inner coast ranges to San Jose via Mt. Hamilton.  After freeway driving all afternoon I found the Mt. Hamilton exit and headed west. I figured I should get to Stanford after dinner but not too late. 

After a while the pavement ended.  I wondered if I was on the right road, but kept going to find out.  Then the dirt road narrowed and started climbing up the Mt. Hamilton range.  By then I was pretty sure I was on the right road, so figured I might as well stay with it.  Then I came to a closed gate I had to open and shut behind me (rancher’s rule: “always leave the gate the way you found it”).  By now it was dark, so I figured I’d better find a place to camp.  I found a flat place to park the car, and slept in the back seat.  I awoke at 4am.  After winding through the beautiful hills and opening/shutting another gate or two, I came to the Mt. Hamilton “Lick Observatory,” and pavement!  From there it was an easy drive down to Stanford.  I arrived to Roble Hall, my assigned dorm, a little before dawn.  I had to wait an hour or two for someone to let me in.  The cooks were really nice, though, and gave me an early breakfast.  I signed in, got my keys, and went upstairs to my room on the third floor. 

Roble Dorm  I met my new room mate right away.  His name was Jared Hess.  Jared was, I think, a faculty brat from Palo Alto, had fairly long hair and a beard, and liked BB and Albert King blues music.  I felt lucky to have a “local” roomate who knew his way around, and who thought my Mt. Hamilton adventure was great.  Our dorm (of maybe 300 students?) had a great kitchen and dining hall, and everyone ate together for three meals.  I soon met Iris and Wendy.  Iris, another faculty brat, was vivaceous with a loud laugh, direct and honest as anyone could be.  We became good friends, listening to music, burning incense, talking about our travels.  Iris’ parents were Belgian, and she had a home in Brussels and a cabin in Santa Cruz. Her dad was on the Stanford Engineering Faculty.  Wendy was petite and pretty, and loved to play catch with the baseball.  So that’s what we did, play catch and volleyball in the dorm courtyard.  Her boyfriend was a tackle on the football team, as big as she was small.  I don’t remember his name (Steve?), but his team won the Rose Bowl two years later.  We also played touch football a couple of times.  Some of the players wore cleated football shoes, giving them such a big advantage that it took away the fun.

Our dorm was co-ed, meaning that men and women students shared the building.  There was gender segregation by hallway.  The room below mine on the second floor was occupied by a piano player who had moved his enormous piano into the dorm room (through the window?).  He practiced for hours and hours each day, but it didn’t bother me. It probably reminded me of being home in Tucson, listening to my sisters practice. There was also a student who looked like Jesus, and he would assume a crucifixion pose in the lobby.  I never learned his name, but seemed very cool. Sometimes I would take my basketball and go shoot around on the outdoor courts.  I met some of the Stanford ballplayers and talked about what it was like to be on the team.  Their level of commitment was way beyond anything I was prepared to give (talk about unnecessary work!), and I gave up the idea of trying out for the team.  

There was quite a bit of pot smoking in the dorm.  People went to some trouble to keep the smell out of the halls where it might cause problems, like stuffing towels under the door.  My friends and I weren’t much into that, but we would smoke “socially” and get high sometimes.  We also would buy a bottle of wine or cheap liquor like southern comfort, and get high that way.  It required a trip into Palo Alto, though.  There were no bars, restaurants or stores selling alcohol within a mile of campus.  We blamed this inconvenience on Jane Stanford.  Jared and I also went to a frat party, and it was rumored that the punch was spiked with LSD.  We tried it but nothing happened.

Jane and her husband Leland founded Stanford in the late 1800’s, and Jane was frequently joked about.  The official name “Leland Stanford Junior University” (what is a “junior university?”) was attributed to her honoring her deceased son Leland Stanford Junior, as was the posting of a huge sign in the quad with his name on it.  But really we should have been kinder to this founding mother of our university, who probably had reason to be a little unhinged.  I was surprised to learn that she was later murdered by an unknown assassin, the crime never solved!

The weather was fortunate that year for a desert boy who likes to see green: it rained a lot.  That caused the artificial lake “Lagunita” behind Roble to fill up. I used to swim in the lake.  There also was a boathouse and dock you could sit on and enjoy the weather.  There was usually someone drumming across the lake and it felt very spiritual.  The levee forming one side of the lake was lined with old spreading oak trees that we could climb.  I remember sitting up in one of the trees drinking red wine and listening to the pulse of the lake.

One of the reasons I wanted to go to Stanford or Berkeley was that they were in the San Francisco Bay area.  A couple of years before I had travelled there with my family, and really liked the natural environment.  The green rolling hills and forested ridges appealed to me.  After moving into the dorm I started exploring the Stanford hills just south of the campus.  The hills were fenced off and cattle grazed there in winter and spring, but there were some styles and gates inviting walkers in.  I doubt they guessed how far I would go after entering the property, but I would explore the hills and valleys for miles.  I found the radio telescope dishes, the future right of way for the 280 freeway, and the private ranches and roads on the far side of the hills.  One time the owner Mr. Webb came out to see what I was doing on his property and I apologized, saying I didn’t know I was trespassing.  But I treasured those walks.

Jobs  My budget was a little tight that first year.  My parents contributed a few hundred dollars each quarter, and I had my earnings from the previous summer, but I needed a part time job.  I got a work-study job in Paul Ehrlich’s butterfly ecology lab doing electrophoresis on checkerspot butterflies.  Electrophoresis was then a fairly new technique for identifying genes and looking for genetic patterns, and the idea was to see differences within and between populations of butterfies.  I worked with a post-doctoral researcher named Maureen Donelly(?), a tall beautiful woman with long dark hair.  We had the most frustrating time.  My gels would come out with murky bands that were impossible to interpret.   We worked for a couple of years but made poor progress.  I later heard that the unusual serpentine soils and mineral balance where the butterfies lived were messing up the gels’ electrophoretic properties.  The best thing about working in the Ehrlich lab is that I met two Ehrlich graduate students: Larry Gilbert and Mike Singer.  But that was later in my time at Stanford.

I soon began looking for another job in addition to work study in Paul Ehrlich’s lab.  On the student union job board was a request for someone with a car to do house work up Old La Honda Road a few miles from campus.  I called Helen Trimpi, and she told me to come on up the next Saturday.  Helen and Wesley lived in a beautiful house in the woods maybe 2-3 miles up a single-lane paved road, one of the original routes over the Santa Cruz Mountains. I liked the place immediately, and decided to do the best possible job.  I cleaned the house with the vacuum, wiped things down with a rag and furniture polish, and then worked outside in the yard.  Helen Trimpi asked me to come back the next Saturday so I figure I did OK.

Helen had pollen and mould allergies and needed the house to be super clean.  This was hard to do because it was an old house with lots of windows and french doors, and outside were old oak trees and redwoods.  Inside there was a lot of valuable furniture, art and magnificent Persian rugs.  I found that Wesley was the heir to the Trimpi Umbrella Frame fortune (they didn’t use the word fortune; that is my addition), enabling then to own this beautiful home.  The previous house cleaner was a japanese american student, and Helen told me she was very sorry to see him go.  I guess I didn’t live up to his standards because when I came the next Saturday they put me working in the yard and got someone else to do the cleaning!  The yard was also huge and old, so there was always plenty to do.  I worked there Saturdays for 3 years, and enjoyed every minute.  I especially liked having lunch with Helen and her two daughters, Erica and Allison (ages maybe 16 and 10, just guessing).  Just being in that beautiful environment made me very happy.

Activities My classes were fairly interesting, though I did have trouble staying awake.  I was fairly lame about reading assignments (actually extremely lame) and that took something away from the interest of the lectures.  I did like the Biology core classes, which were fairly traditional: Zoology, Botany and Microbiology?, but did not enjoy the humanities breadth requirement class “history of western civilization,” nor did I like the English literature requirement.  My brain was just not in a place to appreciate the finer things in life.  I wrote an awful essay on Moby Dick, even though I really enjoyed reading the book.  I also took two quarters of Russian language, and a couple of math classes “Infinite Series” and something like linear equations.  Those were pretty interesting and at least I learned something useful.  Quarter long classes are shockingly quick and I felt like midterms and finals came in a rush.  I really had to cram to pass the courses.  It didn't help that I took "mescaline" (actually LSD I think) just before my final exam in history. My grade transcript was nothing to be proud of!  I found that while it was quite difficult to get an "A" in class, I was unlikely to fail, and I didn't.

Just before Thanksgiving I tried to start the blue dodge so I could drive to Tucson, and all the water poured out of the engine on to the ground!  I found the problem, a large hole in the side of the engine block.  I looked in my trusty auto mechanics textbook and found out that some engines have “freeze plugs.”  These are designed to blow out if the water in the engine block freezes.  In my case one just failed, falling out on the ground by itself.  I walked to the auto parts store in Portola Valley, installed the replacement, and drove to Tucson.

I don’t remember Christmas that first year, so I probably drove home to Tucson.  On one of my trips that year I arrived at my sister’s house in Sun Valley, heading north, but very tired.  Margaret was worried about me driving tired so she gave me one of her diet pills.  This was pure dexedrine I think and the pill really worked!  I remember driving late at night, trying to puff on a cigar while driving the blue dodge up highway 101.  I arrived to Roble in the early morning, and felt pretty good the next day, going to classes and staying awake.  The trouble happened the next night.  I couldn’t close my eyes.  The following day I began to come down and was basically wasted for the next few days.  I decided speed was not for me.

Jared took me to San Francisco a few times.  We took the train.  Once we went to Winterland and saw Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention.  We also saw Sir Douglas Quintet, another rock band that dressed up in Elizabethan style clothes but played good music. Another time we went to an opera “Lucia de Lamermoor” a classic “fat lady sings” opera.  After Christmas I paid Jared back by taking him and his girlfriend Melissa to the Grand Canyon in winter.  We drove all day and hiked down at night.  About midnight it began to snow pretty hard.  Jared and Melissa had a sleeping bag, but I just brought a blanket since I “knew” it would be warm down at the bottom.  I huddled sitting and shivering under my blanket until dawn, when we could continue the hike.  It was actually very nice down at the bottom and we luxuriated in the warm sand the next day or two. 

I think I stayed at Stanford over spring break, because I remember taking Iris, our friend Merlyn Paine, and her friend Larry on a spring outing.  We piled in the dodge with sleeping bags and stove, and drove south through Hollister and up the San Benito Valley  toward Pinnacles.  It started getting late in the day so we looked for a place along the roadside where we could camp.  We found a small turnout where we could drive off the road, and began setting up camp.  In a few minutes a young rancher came by and told us we shouldn’t camp there since the owners wouldn’t like it, but would we like to sleep in his barn?  We thought “how cool?” and we followed him down the road aways and did exactly that!  Iris and I were up in the hayloft and there were mouse rustlings and barn owls coming and going all night.  We didn’t sleep very well.  The next day we drove to Pinnacles and spent another night more conventionally, on mats and sleeping bags.

That year there were a lot of anti-Vienam-war protests.  One time Jared and I walked across campus and past the Stanford Mall with several hundred other students and headed up the street toward the Stanford Research Institute.We believed that SRI was making important contributions to the war effort (“part of the military-industrial complex”) and wanted them to stop.  The front doors of SRI were guarded by a line of riot police, and when we got maybe a block away, they charged at the students.  We ran!  Fast!  Some people got arrested.

Roble had a fairly big lounge area by the front doors, and sometimes there were parties or other gatherings down there.  One of the residents, a stocky black-bearded physics student named Pat, recruited me, Jim Lange and Al Fanning to help build some giant speakers for the lounge.  Al was a tall dark-haired guy that reminded me of Abe Lincoln and Jim reminded me of a blond surfer dude.  In the blue dodge we brought home some heavy plywood, a bunch of 2x4’s and 2 quarts of elmer’s white glue. We cut and glued according to Pat’s design and had those speakers running by the end of the day.   The sound quality turned out to be OK, though I think I was expecting more.  When I came back from Alaska the next fall the speakers were gone – I never found out what happened to them.

Call of the wild During spring quarter the Cook Inlet currents and smoking Alaska Range volcanoes were calling me back to Alaska.  Also the need to earn more money.  I had taken a Russian language class so was ready to speak with my former landlady Nadia Oskolkoff, and had written Del at the cannery to see if he wanted me back that summer.  I asked around for people who wanted to come along for the adventure and soon had a carload, including my boyhood friend Mark Brown.  Mark grew up with me in Tucson and was my main hiking and play companion between ages 5-15.  In summer 1967 he moved back to Tucson and lived with me in my parents’ house for part of a year.  That summer (1967) we drove the blue dodge to Colorado  and had a great time camping and hiking..  So although we hadn’t seen each other in a couple of years we knew each other well.  The others who wanted to come were none other than Pat and Al and Jim Lange.  

As soon as finals were over Mark showed up with a giant pure white Samoyed puppy named Missy.  We all crowded in the blue dodge and took off.  Good thing that car has a big trunk!  We were so crowded that we decided to drive straight through, driving in shifts.  We did stop in Seattle to go to the original REI warehouse and buy down bags off a plywood shelf.  But then we kept going.  The next day we were rolling along a newly paved stretch of the Alaska Highway and came to a very pretty spot with a view of the far northern Rocky Mountains.  

We got out to stretch and make a sandwich I think.  All of a sudden I heard Mark cussing out Missy.  She had gotten into some fresh liquid tar, and was an impossible mess!  We all groaned at this inconvenience as we had been holding this huge dog in our laps the whole way.  I handed Mark the gallon of white gas we had brought for the cook stove.  He stripped off his clothes so as not to get tar all over them, and started washing the dog.  The tar was so thick he needed scissors to cut out the worst part.  We laughed at first but lost interest after a while.  Mark was working diligently and had almost finished when Missy decided she had enough of this indignity.  She broke away from Mark and started running south down the highway!  And Mark took off after her!  Naked, holding the scissors like a demented swordsman!  We watched this scene in disbelief until they both ran out of sight.  

When we stopped laughing we gathered up our things and got in the car.  We soon met a carload with a family, looking very wide-eyed.  Then we caught up with Mark and gave him his clothes.  Then finally we caught up with the dog.  Mark did a little more work on tar removal, and we turned around and headed back north.  In a half hour or so we were flagged down by a Canadian Mountie, who told us of the bizarre story related by a family of tourists!  We told him what had happened and he had to believe us since car reeked of gasoline and tar.  The Mountie laughed and, I think, asked us not to do it again (at least that’s what he should have said!).

Just shy of the Alaska border Al asked me to pull over.  He proceeded to take out the film cannister from his 35mm camera and stash some pills inside.  I was a little peeved because we had agreed not to bring any drugs across the border.  But it was a good thing he hid them because the border guard searched the car and our personal stuff fairly thoroughly!  I guess they figured 5 young guys from California must be carrying something!  But we showed our letter from Del showing that we had employment, and they let us through.

Another time we left Missy in the car for a few hours, and she tore up the seats and the ceiling.  Thanks, Missy!  Much later I put in a new ceiling and asked my sister Maureen to paint it.  She painted the sky and all the zodiac signs!  From then on passengers would always ask me about astrology!

We kept our non-stop pace, driving past Tok and then heading down to Anchorage.  I think we dropped Jim and Pat off in Anchorage.  Al, Mark, the dog and I then drove to Ninilchik!  I think the total time was something like 4-5 days. (maybe first night, northern california-washington, second night northern rockies, third night yukon, fourth night anchorage? Wish I had some notes or something – I remember some scribbles in my notebook )

Back in the cannery The three of us walked over to the office trailer and signed up for work.  We then set up camp out on the sand spit several hundred yards south of the cannery.  It was a nice flat place to camp and we could park the car nearby.  We put up the tent behind a log that gave some protection from wave splash at high tide, spread out our sleeping bags and set the camp stove on the log.  We were set!

I started work right away, flash-freezing silver salmon (aka chinook) for the japanese market.  These fish were treated gingerly because they had to look perfect, but this wasn’t easy because the refrigerated shelves had ridges where the coolant passes through.  I had to lay them down very carefully.  We then packed them in boxes.  I had to write “Sumitomo Shoji Kaishuhed” on each box.  I had neat printing then so enjoyed this bit of academic effort, but boss Del came by and said not print so neatly; it would like we had nothing better to do. Our freezer boss Leo Steik was the same boss I had the previous summer, always wearing coveralls and yellow sunglasses.  I still thought he looked like Groucho Marx.

Some of the same people were working in the cannery.  Tall skinny Doug was there, I think Paul Smith from Big Sur and several Russian Old Believers.  I found that Valter, my swastika-drawing friend from last summer,  was working on a fishing boat. I worked with Anasim, a tall, older man, and Pavel, a young 20-something.  I tried out my Russian on them, though they spoke better English.  They also spoke Portuguese because they had recently imigrated from Brazil.  Anasim taught me some phrases like “Le gusta pacheta?”  (I won’t translate).  Anasim had a long dark gray beard and Pavel a short blond one; they never shaved.  Pavel was newly married and his wife worked in the cannery.  She was shy and seemed very young, even to nineteen-year-old me! Like the men, she wore colorful traditional dress.  The Old Believers were living in tents but had bought land and were building a small town called “Nikolaevsk” near Anchor Point a few miles south of Ninilchik. These people had left their homes in Russia and gone into exile in Siberia nearly 500 years ago!  They had fled Russia during the Bolshevik revolution, for China, then fled China for Brazil.  Now they were in Alaska!

This year was very different from 1968.  In 1969 new Alaska Fish and Game controls were enforced, and open salmon fishing days were rare.  Many of the Ninilchik fishermen switched to fishing halibut.  There was a problem, though.  Regulations dictated that halibut under a certain size could not be accepted by the cannery, but many were caught.  The undersized fish were just thrown on the dock.  Naturally we stepped up and took some home with us every night.  Living on fresh wild caught halibut – what could be better?  The fishermen did bring in large halibut.  One was huge – over 400 pounds, and it took four of us to get it up on a table in the freezer.  I loved loading the freezer truck with halibut and salmon.  We were supposed to stack it full, and I crammed fish into every corner, using my elbows as a hammer.  I wonder what the people on the other end thought when they opened the back of the truck!

There were many days when there were no fish to process.  The management found some work for us to do, but we also knew that we needed to look busy. Trying to look busy when you’re not is exhausting!  We also tried the other option and made a small loft high up among the boxed of canned fish.  We would hide up there for an hour or two when things got exceptionally slow.  One reason for the slowdown was told to us: the cannery had been purchased by Grace Lines and was supposed to operate at a loss for tax purposes.

One time Mark and I both came down with food poisoning.  We got high fever and chills and lay in our sleeping bags shivering for several hours.  We thought it was a bad can of something – maybe beef stew.  Mark worked on the fish cutting line.  Al moved out to his own place after a few days. 

Just like the previous summer, I would hang out after work at the Inlet View Café and Bar.  We met a girl whose named Sue.  One time Mark, Sue and I went for a drive in someone else’s car.   She was kind of all over me in the car.  I gently let her know I didn’t want her attentions and so she switched to Mark!  They developed a friendship.  Sue and her 16-year-old sister were spending the summer in their parents’ cabin near the beach north of Ninilchik, while her father fished for salmon using gill nets.  Mark asked me to drive him to her house one weekend day when we weren’t working, and I got to hang out with little sister.  She was a sweet kid and I think was learning lessons watching her older sister.  Sure enough 9 months later Mark was a daddy!  Sue gave up the baby for adoption.  Years later Mark went up to Alaska and visited with Sue and met the child I believe.  Also maybe she took Missy the dog, for a while?  Ay! My memory fails me sometimes!

Fire! This big news that summer was forest fires all across Alaska because of a drought.  Cannery work was slow.  After a few weeks we heard from Al that the forest fire crews were hiring and we explained to Del that we wanted to go hire out.  As there was little cannery work he told us  “go” and we hitched a ride up to Kenai, leaving the blue dodge and our camp on the sand spit.  I’m sure everyone thought they would get washed away during high tides, but we planned to be back before the fall “spring” tides.  

Mark and I arrived at the fire camp (“Strawberry Camp”) and met our foreman, a young guy named Rick? who seemed very cool and easy to work with. He provided us with military-style down sleeping bags and some other gear.  We ate in a central area.  Rick asked for volunteers to join the “camp crew.”  Some other hippie looking guys advised us to volunteer (“its way easier than putting out fires”).  Our job then becomes camp clean-up, helping in the kitchen, errands in town and anything else that needs doing.  There really isn’t that much to do.

The first night there was a big commotion just down the highway.  Someone had parked in the highway to talk to someone else, and another truck came along and smashed into the first one.  There was blood all over the crash site and we heard that someone died.

We soon moved to a big camp nearby, full of fire crews.  There were quite a few Indian crews and I noticed how small the Indians were as well as how quiet they were.  The story went around that the Indians had started the fires in order to make work.

Another person on the camp crew was named Dave I think.  He had a moustache  and wore a headband that said  “Acid Head” on it.  Soon after we moved camp, Dave got a package from home full of psychedelic pills.  He started sharing around.  I took some acid and a little later found myself trying to work, with colors and beautiful patterns swirling around my feet.  I remember having to dig a trench for some wires, and being really worried that I might forget what I was doing or otherwise screw up.  I doggedly kept at it and I suppose I finished the job!  Drugs always did make me paranoid, but I did like the visual effects.

One day there was nothing for us to do so Rick sent us off with one of the hot spot clean-up crews.  We walked in some unknown direction for about an hour when the fire began to flare up.  I found it nearly impossible of keep track of direction in the taiga.  The sun is always low in the sky and it rolls around the horizon depending on the time of day.  On the other hand the days are so long that your sense of time get ruined.  End result: you think east is west.  We spent hours fighting the fire, mainly creating fire breaks by moving downed logs and brush.  It was fun and I thought maybe I shouldn’t have gotten on the camp crew. I like this physical work!  We got really hungry and since no one came to tell us where to go or what to do we walked over to the highway and hitched a ride to town.  We pigged out on hamburgers and charged it all to the fire!  Everyone in Kenai thought the fire was an economic bonanza for the town and everyone took advantage.

About then some army (reserve?) guys showed up to help with the fire.  Their job was to drive the crews around in their APC armored personnel carriers.  They would load us up, and then drive straight thru the forest trampling what ever was in their path including small trees (the forest there had no large trees because of the waterlogged soil.).  They were well supplied with beer and pot, and that was what they talked about, getting more beer and pot.

Once or twice I got sent out to get firewood.  I was handed a chainsaw, fuel and oil and pointed in the right direction.  That’s how I learned to use a chainsaw!  

We soon met up with Al Fanning, who had used his “math skills” to get a job in the fire camp accounting office.  We shared some of Dave’s pills with Al and he returned the favor by bumping our pay grade to “experienced.”  This got our pay up to over $5.75 per hour…well over the amount we got at the cannery.  We were also getting emergency pay and 12 hours per day, so we felt like we had struck it rich!  For years after I would get US Forest Service mailings offering jobs based on my "fire experience.”

Another time Rick volunteered me to help out a “heli-tac” crew.  We showed up in the morning and got in this fairly large helicopter.  We flew around all day, looking for smokes, landing, breaking up the fuel, and taking off.  We went pretty far toward the mountains and got to see some pretty country.  The interior of the Kenai Peninsula is a beautiful mountain range covered with glaciers and lakes, and full of wild bighorn sheep.

Back to College After about a month, we got laid off the fire and collected our paychecks from Al.  We decided to keep our sleeping bags, so we hid them in the bushes.  I think maybe Mark kept a jacket too.   We then hitched a ride back to Ninilchik.  This might have been the time this lady picked us up.  She reeked of alcohol.  I convinced her to let me drive.  It was a good thing, too because, a while later some idiot comes barreling towards us in our lane.  I swerved over to the right and we avoided a head-on collision.  Whew!

After the fire we decided not to go back to work in the cannery, as there was still very little work to do.  Also the tides were rising and water was splashing on the blue dodge  and tent!  We replaced the battery and drove north, with Doug I believe.  We picked up our sleeping bags & jacket hidden near the fire camp & drove to Anchorage. In Anchorage Mark bought a fancy rabbit coat for $500.  I liked it but was too cheap to buy one.  We drove down to the docks and tenderly put the blue dodge on a ship for Seattle, and flew home to Tucson.  I think I brought home about $3000 in cash from that summer, enough for 2 years on my budget!

Some expenses from a piece of paper I found:
Food $29.19
13.5 gal gas $5.00
springs, grease, headlight $30.00

I picked up the blue dodge in early October or so, driving up north with Jim Lange.  On the way Jim’s car skidded and we hit the guard rail – I think Jim may have drowsed off but he thought it was ice.  I banged my shoulder pretty hard on the skis Jim was carrying between the seats.  We went to the Seattle docks and I picked up my car (jump starting the dead battery).  On the way back I stopped by Lewis and Clark college and visited Regan, my friend from Tucson.

Nancy Kays That fall I met Nancy Kays.  I first noticed her hand made paisley patterned jeans cuffs as she walked around in Roble.  Later we became friends at dinner, along with Iris.  She had recently done an overseas abroad program in Florence, Italy.  In Italy she has had a brief fling with Jim Lange!  Small world! We decided to go to some campus classic movies (part of a class) including “La Strada”, Casablanca and one of the Chaplin movies.  I was thrilled to have her company!  We spent more and more time together and over Christmas I decided not to go home to Tucson but to house sit Michael Trimpi’s house next door to where I worked.  Nancy joined me, and we basically, on and off, lived together as a couple after that.

One reason for house sitting was that Michael Trimpi had a pet squirrel monkey, a cute hyperactive creature.  It was difficult to control unless it wanted a banana that you had in your hand – then it would let you lure it back in its cage.  We were afraid it would get outside.  Once I let it out of the cage in the living room, and it bounded into the kitchen, peeled a banana, and ate half of it before I could race in and take the banana away.  Very quick!

Another reason for staying in Palo Alto that Christmas was to spend the time with Nancy’s family, who lived next to campus (her Dad was an engineering prof). I immediately met younger sisters Wizzy and Meg, and later Leslie, and Nancy’s elegant mother Alma.  I liked all of them immediately!  I soon learned that Meg was the one who stirred things up and met with much of the sisterly disapproval, that Leslie was sweet and accommodating but sometimes went her own way in spite of parental disapproval, and Wizzy was outgoing and smart and seemed to have a charm that made everyone get along with her.  Nancy was the enthusiast, who lived for and planned the next event, one who got them together and made sure things got done.  Dad Bill was (still is, 45 years later!) a super logical, super  rational guy who likes to tell stories and who was, I think, very entertained by his wife and daughters!  Alma was always very classy and elegant, and though she had some problems with depression she was always kind and generous to me.

We decided to drive to the Grand Canyon and brought Meg along.  I remember she turned yellow from eating nothing but carrots.  She had a tendancy toward anorexia.  We also brought Jared Hess and his girlfriend Melissa.  Poor Nancy twisted her ankle hiking down in the dark, so we slept by the trail.  Second trip in a row for sleeping on the trail!   I remember driving through Las Vegas and being appalled by the bright lights.  I also remember buying the cheapest oil possible and stopping every hour or so to add another quart.  Poor blue dodge.  The leak was getting worse!

That second year of college I took a whole new set of bio core classes.  I  also decided to go to Italy that summer, so I started in winter taking Italian.  I took more math classes too, differential equations, abstract algebra.  The last really got me – my strategy of doing the minimal amount of work earned me a “D” for the quarter.  I had to choose – actually do the homework or stop taking hard math classes.  I stopped.  I couldn’t think of a good reason to learn that much math!

(Written about 2016)