On the Road - Monterey

Later that transitional summer after high school (see On the Road - Arrowhead), I traveled to California again. This time I drove as far as Santa Barbara with the mother of a friend from school. She had a wonderful muscle car, a recent year Pontiac LeMans...

...that was an absolute joy to drive. I did most of the driving across the desert and LA Basin and then up the coast. If I'd known I would never get another chance to drive a beast like that I would have never given up the wheel. It was still early morning when we arrived in Santa Barbara where we had breakfast before I continued hitchhiking north. 

With beginners luck, I got a ride all the way to Watsonville in a nice Mercedes Benz. I could have gone even further but I was planning to camp at Sunset State Beach just west of Watsonville on Monterey Bay.

This beach was just north of Pajaro Dunes and only a couple miles north of Moss Landing, two places that will reappear in my story in the 1990s.

For a night or two I slept right on the beach, which was illegal but amazing. I would wake-up in the night to find the fog so thick I could see neither the cliff to the east nor the surf just to the west. I seem to recall running around naked in the foggy night (remember I had just left the 110 degree Arizona heat) until I got too cold and had to return to my sleeping bag.

Finally I moved into the actual campground and during the day hitched north to Capitola (and walked all the way back on the beach) or east back to Watsonville where I joined the picket line for the UFW grape strike/boycott. 

We walked up and down carrying signs in front of a packing plant or something while locals in pickups would drive past yelling at us and waving guns in a threatening manner. At lunch time a truck would come by and we were given bunches of grapes (the only grapes I was able to eat at the time because of the boycott) and these wonderful burritos made by the farm worker women.

The movie Bandits has a lot going for it, but for me one of the big attractions is the beautifully filmed scenes in coastal California that remind me so much of this time in my life (in particular the scenes around the car/truck accident in the movie).

When I was running out of money I started hitching back home, but I had fond memories of eating abalone in Morro Bay when traveling with my parents, so I decided to make a special side trip there. This was stupid. When you are hitching you never leave the main highway (101, good old El Camina Real again) on a whim. As it turned out, I managed to get a pleasant ride with a hippie chick in a classic Volkswagen minibus into Morro Bay and to the little campground on the south side of town. But it turned out that, while abalone steaks were still available in 1970, they cost more money than I had. Since I had already sinned (as a vegetarian) in my mind, I went into the touristy part of town down by the docks and bought fish and chips, which was about all I could afford. That was the last time I bought meat.

Getting back to 101 turned out to be harder than coming over had been. I eventually made it back to Santa Barbara, or Isla Vista, where I stayed at another camp ground and saw the still charred remains of a Bank of America branch that had been torched during student unrest associated with the chaos that had swept college campuses across the country that spring -- even including ASU (see Power 2 the Pupils).

I don’t recall many details of the rest of the trip hitching back to Arizona. Mostly it was long periods of time standing with my thumb out on one on-ramp after another across coastal and southern California. It was not much fun but it did eventually get me where I wanted to go.

At the end of the summer I hopped on my ten-speed and rode off to college.