My Journey Out West

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

In the thread on “What’s the most interesting thing you’ve EVER done,” the OP asked if I would tell my story about hitchhiking from Ontario to British Columbia and back. Get some popcorn, pull up a chair. Here goes.

I left a desperately unhappy home for good in early 1976, to go and play keyboards in a soul group. When we could not continue for lack of opportunities and rent / food money, I returned home, except the house was locked up for the first time in my life. So I hitchhiked back to the city of Hamilton, to my grandmother’s house, and it was all locked up, too, for days on end. I was seventeen years old, and couldn’t find my family. What can I do now? I know: I’ll hitchhike to California. Why not? People did that kind of thing. Well, with no actual destination nor contact in the US, they wouldn’t let me across the border at Windsor. So I figured I’d try it at Niagara Falls. Same deal. All right, so I’ll go to Vancouver. There must be work out there. Maybe I’ll have better luck there than here.

I started out from the Falls, with my sleeping bag and some clothes. I hitched through Hamilton, past Toronto and wound up in Barrie, where they didn’t have any services for poor people or itinerant travelers. A minister and his wife put me up for the night. The next day I continued north, and got one ride from Barrie to Sault Ste. Marie. There, I met a guy named Pete, who was on his own journey, so we commiserated. I remember that we slept in the back yard of the public library, by a huge rock that was part of the landscape design. The next day, it was north again. Everyone said, “Don’t get stuck in Wawa!” I heard a story about a guy who got stuck in Wawa and couldn’t get a ride out for so long that he developed a relationship with a waitress at a café and stayed there. Of course, I got stuck in Wawa. It was only overnight, though.
The next day, I got a ride with a guy who was going to Winnipeg. All right! There was a lot of driving and laughing and endless rocks and trees and water, and only one source of entertainment: Donovan’s album, “7-Tease” on the 8-track. Man, that was a terrible record. My driver had family in Kenora, so when we got there, we drove out into the wilderness to where his mom and dad and some other family were staying at their cabin in the woods. This was not your average cabin. It was a multimillion-dollar home in the woods, with electricity and a guest house, and a boat. His parents welcomed us, fed us, took us for a ride on the boat, had a campfire, the whole nine yards. His mom did my laundry and washed my sleeping bag. The next morning, she made a huge breakfast for us, fed us until we couldn’t move, and we were off again. I got off in Winnipeg and looked for the Trans-Canada Highway.

There, I was picked up by a man and a woman and their kid. They were going to Regina! They were willing to take me all the way. I came to find out that this couple were previously married and divorced, and were now getting back together to remarry. They argued all the way. Not viciously, though, but carping at each other. Somewhere in Saskatchewan, they stopped at a motel, and said I was welcome to sleep in the car. Next day, it was off to Regina. I have relatives in Saskatoon. If I was going to be in the province, and I had nowhere else to go, why shouldn’t I stop in and say hello? So I started north. It took several rides to get to Saskatoon, it being a very long way. Actually, it was a very long way between outposts of civilization. I remember standing in the middle of the prairie, with nothing but flat land from horizon to horizon. You could see cars coming when they were little dots at the periphery of your vision. It’d take forever for them to get to you, and they’d keep going.

Eventually, I made it to Saskatoon, and I looked up my aunt and uncle. I was able to stay there for a bit. My cousin was able to get me a job through the parents of one of her friends. So I started working for this small-time moving and delivery service. We moved furniture, collected beer bottles from hotels and delivered them to a central warehouse. We wrestled a washing machine half-full of water up basement stairs with 1/16-inch clearance on either side. One morning, I was on the bus to work, and there was a guy across from me who looked familiar. How could he be familiar? I’m a thousand miles from home. I don’t know anybody. So I told him that he looked very familiar to me, for some reason, and asked him if we had ever met somewhere. As it turns out, he was also on his own personal journey. We had met, in fact, getting washed up in the bathroom of the Salvation Army hostel in Windsor, Ontario. He was also in Saskatoon, going to his own sustenance job. What on earth are the odds?

Well, my aunt and uncle were alcoholics, and things weren’t going too well there, so I ended up staying with my newfound comrade, Pete, in a hotel room in downtown Saskatoon. One night, we were sitting in the lobby after closing time, having some beers with the night clerk. We ran out of beer, but I said, “Wait, we still have some up in the room.” So I started bounding up the stairs. I absent-mindedly (and half-drunkenly) flung my arm out and hit the wall, instantly breaking three of the fingers on my right hand. It wasn’t a party anymore. I had to go to the emergency room. I came to find out that my Ontario health insurance card was no good in Saskatchewan, but they treated me as a charity case, and put a cast on my arm because I needed it. That put an end to my moving job. Oh, they also gave me some pills for the pain.

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This is where the story gets fuzzy, and you can probably see what’s coming. Pete and I were eating painkillers and drinking beer (bad decision). The next thing I know, we are being kicked off a coach bus, and all I know is that we have to wait for another one. I have no idea where it was, but we were stranded in some little town, completely wasted on pills, in fact, barely coherent. I remember the RCMP officer who searched our bags, finding only an empty bottle of prescription painkillers. I was just lucid enough to know that I had to keep Pete from falling asleep or surrendering to the drugs, or I’d never be able to wake him up for the bus. I don’t have any memories of the bus coming, or getting on it. In fact, I have no memories of us deciding to leave Saskatoon, or packing up our stuff, or going to the bus terminal, or buying tickets, or leaving there.

I woke up in a dingy hotel room, with faded, peeling wallpaper, and a copy of Time magazine, in Chinese. Pete was on the bed next to where I slept. I looked out the window, and the signs were all in Chinese. There were Asians walking on the sidewalk. Omigod, what happened to us? Where the hell are we? I left the room, and walked downstairs, through the lobby, which was manned by Asians, and went outside to find a newspaper box. We were in Vancouver. I had no memory of arriving there, nor getting off the bus, nor going to Chinatown, nor finding the Lotus Hotel and renting a room there, nor passing out on the bed next to Pete. He must have been the lucid one by the time it came to do all that stuff. I was out of it. When Pete woke up, we tried to piece the events of the last…however many days it was… together, and he couldn’t remember them, either. Don’t take pills, folks, they are bad for you.

So, here we are in Vancouver. The land of opportunity. Wrong. What I found out was, there were hundreds of other people from far-flung places in Canada who had the same idea, and we were all there at the same time, looking for the same thing. None of us was having any luck finding it. It’s fairly difficult to just go to Vancouver and receive welfare to sustain yourself. I remember they had to call my family to see why they wouldn’t support me. I could only give them my grandmother’s number, and they found my mother through her. She told them that no, she couldn’t support me. So I was given some money to pay for rent at the Lotus Hotel, and meal tickets to eat at this one cafeteria downtown. Pete did the same. We ended up staying in Vancouver for all of September. At some point, I got really tired of wearing my cast, so I soaked it in the sink and got rid of it, probably before my fingers were healed properly.

We did all kinds of interesting things while we were there. We took the bus to the public library in Burnaby. We went to the CBC television facility and sat in for two tapings of “The Wolfman Jack Show.” His guest on one was David Cassidy. He lip-synched to a couple of songs, with some guys playing keyboards with no cords coming out, perched on bar stools behind him. It was laughable. At the end of each show, Wolfman came up into the audience bleachers to shake hands. They must have been scripted, blocked movements, because both times, he shook my hand. We had been getting dimes of hash from a guy at a bar downtown, and one day he didn’t have any hash, but he had mushrooms. I had never tripped on anything before, so Pete and I went on the inner voyage of a lifetime. We ate WAY too many mushrooms. We should have eaten three, or maybe five, max. We ate a whole bag. We didn’t know any better. Due to the position of the administrators of this board regarding the subject of illicit drugs, I am not going to describe the experience or try to glorify it. To say the very least, it was an eye-opener. I will remember it until my dying day. I don’t think I have ever laughed as hard as I did that day, nor have I been as awestruck.

The end of September was coming up, and we still had no prospects. It was becoming clear that our only option was to leave. And leave we did, on October 1st, my eighteenth birthday. Not too far out from Vancouver, Pete decided he was going to stay in BC and get back into god. That trip had really affected him. So he left me somewhere in the middle of the province, I think it may have been at Salmon Arm.

On one of my rides through British Columbia, I was sitting in the back of a truck, taking in the magnificence of the mountain scenery. We came to a particularly scenic place, and the driver stopped so we could get out and have a look. A waterfall came from the clouds, down the side of the mountain, under the road and continued down into a valley that was so far down you couldn’t see its bottom. We climbed up the side of the mountain, to see if we could see where the water was coming from. We made it up to the cloud layer, and through there, we could see that what must have been a mile up the side there was a ledge. The water was falling off the ledge, having come from even higher up, the top of the mountain obscured by yet another cloud layer. It was one of the most awesome things I have ever seen.

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Somewhere in BC, I hooked up with another guy who was going to Ontario. His name was…wait for it… Pete. We were somewhere outside a little town, not getting a ride, and it started to rain. We were about to give up and seek shelter, when a car stopped. A man picked us up. He said he’d been by there several times with his wife, but she didn’t want to pick up any hitchhikers. But he said we weren’t going to get a ride. It was getting dark, and raining, so we could go to his place. He took us home and made us welcome. His wife made us a huge dinner. They let us shower and shave, and gave us clothes to wear while his wife did our laundry. He had pot and beer and guitars, and we had a jam session in his living room. The next morning, his wife made us breakfast, and we got in his car. He drove us about 40 miles out on the highway, and before he left us, he pressed $40 into each of our hands. We thanked him profusely. He wished us well and went on his way.

I don’t really remember much of how we got from there through the prairies. I know we were in Calgary at the end of the Calgary Stampede, and the decorations and signs were still up. By the time we got to Winnipeg, it was getting mighty cold. I had only a spring jacket, and it was so cold and windy that I was going numb. I do remember that at a place where the highway splits and goes to the US, we saw a car pull over on the turnoff, and the driver got out and ran over to us. He said “I’m going to the States, and I can’t take this with me. Do you guys want it?” He pulled out an ounce of pot, and just laid it on us for free. Wow, what good fortune we had been having. It was getting to be about dusk, and we weren’t having much luck getting a ride. I was sitting on the side of the road, using our bags as a wind shield, rolling a joint, when an RCMP car came up to us. Oh no! I tossed it in the bag, and held it down by my sock while I limped over to the car, and threw the bag under the cop car. They were very nice. They just wanted to tell us to be careful. Then they drove away, with the 20-foot shadow of the bag of pot on the road as they disappeared into the evening.

Our next ride was to Kenora, Ontario. It was there that Pete got the brilliant idea to hop a freight train. We still had some money. We’d bought tobacco and cheese and bread, and went to the freight yard in the evening. Pete scoped out a train that had three engines. It was being driven from the back engine. As it pulled away, we hopped onto the front engine, and climbed, with our stuff, into the cab. Hey, we’re on a train! We rode that train to Thunder Bay, where we changed trains, and did the same thing. It was quite an adventure! We’re out in the middle of nowhere, with only rocks and trees and water, smoking a joint and eating bread and cheese, taking in the scenery. I’m sure that we were so far from civilization that if we’d got off the train, we may never have found our way back to anywhere.

We worked out a routine to hide from the train cops, because they would certainly kick you off the train and maybe worse, we didn’t know for sure. We didn’t want to find out. We could have all our stuff gathered up and be inside the engine compartment, hiding behind part of the motor inside of 10 seconds. This came in handy a couple of times. Pete and I slept in shifts, on the floor of the driver’s cab. One night, on my watch, the train came to a stop. I heard footsteps, and saw a flashlight, and they were coming our way. Pete and I scrambled into the engine compartment and got behind a huge iron tank of some kind, just as people entered the cabin. With the train stopped and the engines shut down, we were sure they could hear our hearts pounding. A voice said, “There’s nobody here!” and they left again. We waited until the train started up once more, and when we figured it was safe, we came back out into the cab, to find that someone had left us a couple of cans of water. They looked like soda cans, but were silver and had the CN Rail logo on them. The railroad had its own canned water! Well, they knew we were there, but they didn’t seem to mind. I think we must have talked to one of the crew at some point, because we discovered the train was going to Toronto. As it pulled into the city, the engineer slowed down enough so that we could jump off the train. We waved to each other. This is where Pete and I went our separate ways. He walked about a thousand feet and got on a streetcar to go home. I walked over to the highway and hitchhiked back to Hamilton. It was October 7th, 1976.

And that’s what I did on my summer vacation.

Epilogue

I found out later that the reason why I couldn’t find my family is because my mother had gathered up the kids and escaped from my abusive, alcoholic father, too, while I was away playing with that soul group. I couldn’t find them at my grandmother’s house, because they had all piled into the car and driven through the States, to Mexico, and back. We were each doing the same kind of thing at the same time, without knowing it.

I never did get to see those episodes of the Wolfman Jack Show, because my mother wouldn’t let me watch it when it was on. The show was cancelled after only a few episodes, and is now lost to the tape vault at the CBC, probably never to be seen by anyone.

4

Ah. Now I understand why you’re estranged from your family. :wink:

Great story. I too hitchiked from my family to the West, in 1978. My story is not as grand as yours, tho. Thanks for sharing.

5

Thanks for sharing – I love stories like this.

I’m left wondering how you (and everyone else with hitchhiking stories in the other thread) managed to get so many rides from strangers. Different times, I guess? I can only imagine it would be much harder to do today, but perhaps I’m wrong.

6

What a great story!

7

Lots of memories - sounds like some good ones.

8

I think hitchhiking is illegal most places now. I certainly wouldn’t recommend it these days.

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Fishbicycle, great story! And a great adventure. Thanks for posting it.

And by the way, you didn’t miss anything by not seeing the Wolfman Jack show broadcast. I remember seeing a couple of episodes–it was pretty sad.

10

Cite please.

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I’m not sure where Quiddity is coming from, but here in the US pedestrians are prohibited from using the Interstate Highway System. That doesn’t stop hitchikers from thumbing on the on-ramp. Perhaps things are different in Canadialand. :wink:

12

Great story. I posted a broader topic in IMHO querying about longest hitchhiking experiences.

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Thanks for the comments, everyone. I’m glad you found my story entertaining. I left out some things, and forgot some others until today, after having thought about it some more. There was the ride we got with some drunken Indians in the wilds of Northern Ontario. Three guys out driving and drinking a case of beer, who stopped to pick us up, and insisted we join them in having some beer. That was scary. It was one of the few times I have ever feared for my life. Nothing came of it, but boy, were we ever glad to get out of that car! I should note that on the rest of that trip, and in all my other hitchhiking, I was never picked up by a weirdo.

How did we manage to get so many rides from strangers? I think it was the times. The world felt less dangerous then. That’s the only explanation I can think of that makes sense. People seem to have a heightened sense of fear of other people nowadays. It may not be a more dangerous world now, but people perceive it to be that way, so the reality is, that it is a more scary place for many because they are afraid.

I did find that the further I got away from big, cosmopolitan cities, the friendlier people were, witness the folks in BC who put us up overnight and gave us money. I can’t see that happening in Toronto. At no time did I ever get the feeling that I might not make it back alive from any of the rides I hitched for years, except for the one I mentioned above.

It’s nice to see that my thread has spawned another thread. Go and tell your story over there!

14

Hitchhiking is illegal in Singapore and various areas of US, Canada, and Australia. Seems to be A-OK everywhere else listed.

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I don’t think there is such a thing as a “hitchhiking across Canada” story that doesn’t involve drunken Indians in northern Ontario. My Dad certainly has a few from his hitchhiking days.

Those were indeed different times. When I was small, and my Dad and I were driving somewhere, Dad would stop to pick up hitchhikers. He said people had done it for him, and he was just paying somebody back for the kindness. But I was old enough to notice that it was never when my Mom was with us! :wink:

16

The last time I hitched in northern Ontario was after our truck bogged down up to the doors about 50km up the Black Sturgeon Road.

We expected that it might take a day before another vehicle came by, but much to our amazement, after only a short wait along came three young attractive female triplets in a van, who drove us to our door in Thunder Bay.

(That was the good part. The bad part was that a D8 bulldozer had to be floated in to winch out the truck later that week.)

Folk up here tend to be quite friendly to travellers. A couple of years ago a friend and I were putting-in for a paddle on Superior out of Coldwell Harbour when a elderly couple on an ATV took us in for the night.

Several years back, a person drove me over a hundred kilometers out of her way after my car broke down on a bush road.

A lot of people hitch, bike or walk across Canada, so they end up passing through here, and kids working on fire crews often hitch along the highway if their crew busses are not heading where they want to go or if they have missed their bus.

17

When I lived in the NWT, I never, ever worried about breaking down on the highway because I knew the next car along would stop. Once I had pulled over to the side of the road so my son could pee, and someone stopped to see if we were okay. That’s just the way it works in those remote places.

I used to hitchhike between Calgary and Lake Louise in the late 80s/early 90s, without fear. I also used to pick up hitchhikers whenever I was heading in to Calgary from Canmore. Things are pretty safe along the Bow Valley Corridor; generally it’s just kids working in the parks heading to their jobs or in to the city for their days off.