Alaska Beginnings

by Patricia Perkins

Nobody remembers anymore what it was like to be hitchhiking in America in the 'sixties and 'seventies. Newspaper stories of rapes and murders, the lost children who never came home, the fears of our mothers echoed louder and louder as we got older. Hitchhiking disappeared more slowly in Europe, perhaps because the Europeans weren't so easily convinced that safety and comfort, in that order, were the ultimate values in life. They held on just a little longer to the idea of risk as a kind of refining fire.

Hitchhiking always was a dangerous sport, like white water rafting or rock climbing. You threw yourself against the force of blind nature. Hitchhiking, you threw your instincts about people against whatever they might turn out to be. You read people, people's eyes, and the way they shift in their seats, how they make eye contact. How their hands rested on the steering wheel. The risks we allow ourselves nowadays test the quality of our equipment, the tungsten bike frames, the special foam for our jackets and gloves.

Hitchhiking takes us out to the edge, pushes us against the limits of our ordinary lives, whistles softly to us a siren's song. Crunch, crunch, the sound of boots on the side of the road, the whine of a vehicle coming, passing, going, the feel of the wind of the passage, the faint smell of exhaust that lingers, eddies over the road—the song says, "Hey. If you don't die, you KNOW you aren't dead. And you know WHO isn't dead; it's you. You did that wild and crazy thing, and YOU are still alive and hitching."

The first time I ever hitchhiked was the summer of 1970. I got a ride for the day on a crab boat out of Homer, Alaska. In Alaska, people hitch rides on airplanes. I'd gone to Alaska from my teaching job in Green Bay, Wisconsin because Bob LeResche?, my on-again-off-again lover, called me from the Salty Dawg Saloon and begged.

When I met LeResche? in Baltimore, he was getting a PhD? in animal behavior from Johns Hopkins. He blew through town twice a year: in the fall on his way to Antarctica to study Adele penguins and then in the spring on his way home to his hand-hewn cabin in the Alaskan woods. The Antarctic and Alaska. I've always been a sucker for a man with that much romanticism rolled into the bare facts of his life. Still, when he first asked me to spend the summer with him, I refused. I already knew the sting of his "off-again" moods.

"You don't want a woman up there," I wrote to him. He called as soon as he got my letter.

"You gotta come up here," he urged. "You can see the water of Kachemak Bay through the floorboards of this bar." I could hear the smoky laughter of the saloon, too, even 3,700 thousand miles away. "Grandma Kenshaw's 82, but she can still high kick the orange float hanging from the ceiling. You gotta see this to believe it. Really."

"You're a solitary," I told him. "You don't want a woman up there."

"I want you up here."

I went. A summer in a log cabin he'd built himself within earshot of loons crying on the lake sounded good. The on-agains had been so good that I forgot about the off-agains, to my regret.

The summer went sour sooner than I ever thought possible. LeResche? stopped speaking to me halfway through our first grilled salmon dinner. He took me out to his cabin, assigned me a bunk with the summer employees of the Fish and Game Dept., and began seriously pretending I didn't exist. My suitcase had silk pantsuits my mother had made me for the unexpected dress-up occasion. I was unprepared for Alaska.

"I could have gone to Europe this summer instead of coming here," I complained. "You never did want a woman up here."

"Europe?" He laughed at me. Coldly. "You'd never go to Europe by yourself. The original clinging vine in Europe? You're too dependent to go to the grocery store by yourself."

Too dependent? Too bloody fucking dependent? I had driven the back roads of Wisconsin up to my eyeballs in snow drifts all winter. I'd gone from podunk county school to podunk county school, teaching the sons and daughters of potato farmers and junk car dealers. Even before that, I'd hauled myself off to boarding school, college and then graduate school miles from home, miles from anybody I knew every time.

And here LeResche? was saying I wasn't man enough for Alaska. I'd show him.

I took the next vehicle out to Anchorage and checked into a sporting goods store for about a week. I got a tent, a backpack, a sleeping bag, hiking boots, a cook kit, a little Primus stove and a box of waterproof matches. I tried out my hitching skills on the crab boat, spending a day hauling the long-legged Kings out of the bay. I graduated to highways on the Kenai Peninsula.

That fall, I went to Europe, still showing LeResche? and his Fish and Game cronies what I was made of, still feeding on the energy of my anger at being called "too dependent." I spent the first night in a youth hostel in Luxembourg and came face to face with my people, my soul mates, the phalanx of backpacking, hitchhiking travelers who met at the hostels and traveled the world.

Hitching was like being at a high school dance, a college mixer, only for once I wasn't a wallflower. Hitching was hoping to be asked to dance and dancing itself to the song of the road. I stood there, hopeful, partners passing, judging, passing and sometimes stopping for me. It was a glance off the unknown so intense you can get giddy with it, just the smell of chance, the flip of the coin, the possibility of something new, something that would make everything else pale.