hitched across Canada three times, up to the Yukon, and down in to Mexico, back up to Boston and once from Miami to L.A.
To be honest I hardly know where to start writing about it - it was a vast, sprawling adventure, and one that has stood me in good stead ever since. I hacked my way through jungle with a machete for five days, but that was as nothing to being taken across from Tennessee to Texas in a night, being passed from truck to truck, having been left beside in the dark beside small roads by truckers who had arranged matters over CB radio. And lying in a frozen ditch in Ontario for eighteen hours before being picked up by a man who had been driving a truck for almost a week, babbling like a maniac, fuelled by pills. Or the woman who stopped, let me in, and then produced a gun from the dash, telling me that I shouldn't make any moves. Standing on 4th street in Los Angeles for most of the night, watching the cops watching me. Trying to walk across the border from British Columbia in to Washington State. Getting picked up by a hugely fat cop outside of Dallas, all tilt steering wheel and dark glasses, and then going to sort out a truck-hijacking at 90mph, while he told me he'd spent time in Liverpool 'Mrs Thompson, y'all know her?' 'Know 'er guvnor, I should say so, she's like a muvver to me'. The co-ed student from Knoxville whose name I really should remember. Standing beside the Tropic of Capricorn monument in the desert and being approached by a hunched figure selling drugs while tumbleweed did what tumbleweed does best - and then figuring out at the barricade two miles down the road that it was a police sting (we'd turned him down). Lying in the back of a pick-up truck flying across Louisiana with two girls from Quebec watching the rain going straight over the back of the pick-up, passing the trucks we could only see in outline, each pushing a huge bow-wave of water. Being given the wheel in Palm Springs by a man who'd jumped bail in Lake Charles Louisiana and had vowed not to stop until he got to Los Angeles - and driving, completely untutored, at 85 miles an hour across the Arizona desert. Getting a lift from a woman in a motor-home who offered to marry me (for immigration purposes, you understand), read me her poetry as I steered the thing, really not knowing what I was doing, and then driving me 200 miles out of her way to Vancouver. Long, long hours across Saskatchewan with not a change in the scenery for hours, but joining in a cardriving rifle-toting gopher-popping hunt with boys who lived in a tiny town with two time zones (they wore watches with two hour hands) and spent their time souping up cars that would do 140mph on roads that went straight for fifty miles at a time. Arriving at Guatemalan customs to be interrogated by a nine-year old under a slowly revolving fan while the Border Police sat on chairs chewing bits of cactus. Running north of Veracruz across a road traversed by millions of giant worms, making the tyres go chckchkchkchkchk......
And getting sexually assaulted twice in an evening. And getting in to a car with six teenagers zonked on mandys and finding out that the trunk was full of guns. Strapping my rucsack to the petrol tank of a truck and not knowing if I'd ever see it again (it stayed on).
The good stuff outweighed the bad by a long way, though. And, as I said, it stays with you.