Another Roadside Attraction

[Today's poster boy for good health: the guy on the motorcycle at morning rush hour wearing a flu mask, driving the wrong way on a one-way street. Salud!]

Recently we took a few weeks to get to know Ecuador a little. At one point our family was standing on the coastal highway, our baggage at the edge of the road, and I was catapulted back 40 years to my original South American hitchhiking odyssey. C,'est plus change... Here I was with my wife and two children, still waiting for a lift. But of course, some things had changed. We had two suitcases and three backpacks now, were riding busses, not hitching and were staying in decent hotels this time around.

Ecuador has its splendors, a long Pacific coast with some great beaches, and amazing hot springs, some of the most delightful I've seen, set high in the misty mountains only a couple of hours out of Quito. Quito and its suburbs sprawl across several high Andean valleys, about ten thousand feet up beneath snow-covered peaks, almost precisely on the Equator. It's kind of like being in the middle of the planet and the middle of nowhere at the same time.

Despite its many attractions, only a few of which we had time to sample, Ecuador suffers from dollarization. In 1999 the country switched from its own currency, the Sucre, to the U.S. dollar, presumably at the behest of IMF/World Bank folk worried about Ecuador's rate of inflation. But a more stable currency has not helped the many millions of marginal folks for whom the dollar standard has meant increased hardship. Of course after Bolivia, almost everyplace seems expensive. But President Correa has also introduced a substantial import tax, which makes Chilean wine, for instance, about double what it is in Cochabamba. That's hitting us where we live!

Back in 1969, when I hitched down to Chile on chump change, I had to cope with the Selective Service, since I was registered with the military draft. I walked into the Peace Corps office in Santiago offering to sign up. But they told me I had to go back to the USA and fill out lots of forms and go through official channels. They weren't hiring off the street. Then I applied for a job as an English teacher at an exclusive private girls' school. These girls had studied English since first grade, so they were reading Shakespeare and other serious formal literature. I had to borrow an old man suit (dark brown, pinstripes) and have it altered to go for my interview there. The girls were all in uniform and all giggling at me - a gangly bearded gringo only a few years older than they were. Looked like fun. The school must have been desperate because they hired me. I sent a letter to my draft board, enclosed inside another envelope I sent to a friend to be mailed from inside the U.S., as if I were still in Pennsylvania, but had been hired for this teaching gig abroad. There were some Americans on the school board. On that tenuous basis, I requested a teaching deferment, which was of course denied.

In Santiago I was hanging out with a couple of Chilean guys whose families had connections with the government. They told me I could become a Chilean citizen if I wanted. I thought about it, but didn't like the idea of cutting myself off from my country, family and friends. (And it's a lucky thing I didn't take that route. The centrist Christian Democratic President Eduardo Frei was followed into office by the socialist Salvador Allende, whom the neo-Nazi psychopaths Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon decided to depose violently, ushering in the terrorist reign of Augusto Pinochet. Opting to become a Chilean at that point might have been a fatal move). So having exhausted my options (having long since exhausted my meager funds), I asked my parents to sponsor my trip home. My mother, who was worried sick that I might reach the end of the map and fall off, quickly sent the money.

My flight - a puddle jumper - seemed magical to me, taking off before sunrise from Santiago, landing in Lima in the bright red dawn, then on to Guayaquil and Bogota before Miami. What had taken me more than six months of travel overland I was able to do in one day, landing in Miami that same afternoon. Only when my plane was landing and I saw the barbed wire and all the uniformed customs officials did I realize I had made a terrible mistake. I had stuffed several small film cans full of cleaned marijuana to share with my friends. The stupidity of this move hit me hard. I was a long-haired bearded hippie, dressed in rags, with a worn-out backpack: a living, breathing cliche, painfully obvious, ripe for the picking. The customs guy looked at me with disgust, then glanced up at the clock on the wall. My eyes followed his: it was ten minutes to five. And I think that's what saved me. He didn't want to stay over his shift, wasting his time with the likes of me, bust or no bust. He waved me onward and I almost dissolved in a puddle of relief when I got past the gate.

When I arrived home it was the first week of August. I spoke with friends on the east coast who told me I should come and meet them at this rock concert that was going to happen on the weekend. My mother, still glad to see me in spite of my appearance and my continued lack of direction, decided to lend me her brand-new Chryslter Imperial for the drive to Boston and New York. So there I was, a scarecrow behind the wheel of a shiny monster machine. I saw friends in Boston and New York, where I was up all night on Friday in Greenwich Village, but bought a ticket to the rock concert - the Woodstock Music & Arts Fair - from a stranger on the street for 7 dollars. After breakfast Saturday morning I took off out of the city for Woodstock. On the way I picked up a hitchhiker, which was fortunate, because as we neared the exits to the concert, state police had blocked them off, one after another, for miles. Luckily, my rider told me he'd grown up around here and knew the back roads, so we got off when we could and doubled back on country byways. We still had to park a mile or more from the concert site, but that wasn't as bad a trek as it might have been.

It was instantly clear that meeting anyone at this overpopulated fiasco was not very likely. We came up behind an enormous crowd. The stage was visible in the distance. I skirted alongside the crowd, a wild bunch of young people in various stages of undress and drug-addled euphoric muddiness. It was hot summer but also rainy. There was no one to take my ticket. The fences had long since been torn down. I kept seeing people who looked familiar but not actually anyone I knew. What had been a year before a rather clandestine, secretive fraternity of freaks had suddenly gone mass-market mainstream. Although my fellow druggies and I had always thought, as Dylan had sung that "everybody must get stoned," now that everybody had apparently done that, it was just a little on the scary side.

I finally got to an area behind the stage. The stage itself and the crowd before it were behind one chain-link fence. There was a space to walk between that fence and another one parallel to it, perhaps separated by twenty feet. Behind the other fence was the performers's area. An overhead walkway linked the two zones. There was a helipad on the performers' waiting side for acts to take off and land, and a huge tent, like a circus tent. Dazed from lack of sleep, culture shock and the monstrous, overamped crowd, I was wandering between the two fences when I heard someone call my name. When I located the voice in the hubbub, it turned out to be my friend, Keith, his long curly blonde locks shaking as he laughed at me from behind the performers' area. It was astounding of course, but in those days the astounding was Cosmic and the Cosmic was ordained. Keith slipped me a press pass and told me where to go to get in and join him.

Once I got into the privileged zone, I noticed that he had some kind of walkie-talkie. "I'm talking to the Whale. He's up there, backstage." Whale was another college friend who had seen The Light. Turned out my two former schoolmates were helping to co-ordinate the acts who were getting ready to go on next. But they weren't just doing physical logistics. They were also helping the musicians get whatever they felt they needed to prep for their gigs. As my eyes adjusted to the scene, I noticed one guy whose only job seemed to be pulling bottles of champagne our of a barrel full of ice, opening them and handing them out. It looked like a full-time job. I recognized some people from album covers: Janis Joplin was walking around in full battle gear with a bottle in her hand. Wowsah.

Then Keith said to me, "You don't happen to have any weed on you, do you?" I felt around in my pockets and realized I did still have a film can or two from my South American trip just for emergencies. "Yeah, I do." "Well, could you roll up a couple of joints? These guys over here want to smoke before they go on..." He pointed to several guys sitting on the grassy hill. I recognized Jerry Garcia. These guys were the Grateful Dead. I told them I had some Chilean weed they could try. "Far out," said Garcia. "Don't think I've ever had Chilean weed before." So I sat down to try to roll up some joints. From our vantage point, we could look out beyond the stage to the entire meadow full of humanity. Even Garcia seemed stunned by the size of the crowd. "They say we're the third largest city in New York right now..." "Far out, man..."

After we smoked I wandered away, to leave the performers' area and look for my friends, though finding them didn't seem likely. Somehow the day had passed and night had fallen. I joined a small group (several hundred)away from the main crowd who had gathered around Joan Baez. She was doing a kind of alternative concert for people who couldn't get within decent visual distance of the main stage. Hers was the only act I heard clearly. I had to go see the movie several years later to catch any of the performers on the stage. Toward dawn on Sunday I started trying to leave. After a second night without sleep, despite the crazy high energy, I was in very shaky condition. I finally found my mother's car and slowly made my way on back roads towards the Thruway. What I should have done was lie down and sleep for a few hours. Instead, I started driving directly back to my parents' house, at the western end of the state.

Somewhere out on the New York Thruway - going full-tilt boogie - I fell asleep at the wheel. The guard rails saved my life. I woke up startled to a thundering, smashing barrage. I got the car stopped. The entire passenger side of my mother's new Chrysler was raked and ruined. The adrenalin woke me up and I drove the rest of the way home. My mother was justifiably furious, of course. I'd been home only a few days from South American trip when I took her car to Woodstock (a strange half-naked riot scene she saw on the TV news)and then wrecked it. Of course I felt terrible, as did my mother. Sorry, mom. Irresponsible hippie madness from the college grad. Kind of a bumpy re-entry. My heat shield incinerated. Hate it when that happens...