Years on and Other Travel Essays

By Lawrence F. Lihosit

"A Moritz Thomsen-like path less traveled, a Pete Hessler-esque possession of language and culture...that best and rarest of ex-pats: the Yankee gone native." Tony D'Souza, author of Whiteman. Where you headed? asked the man in a pick-up. Lihosit should have answered, High adventure. The author of South of the Frontera; A Peace Corps Memoir describes how he hitchhiked along bleak Arizona highways, hacked a path through Honduran mountains in search of water, avoided caiman while riding bulls across flooded Bolivian savannah and grizzlies as he hunted caribou in bush Alaska, ran for his life after getting embroiled in Mexico City politics and more. These are uncommon tales and fascinating reading.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: May 11, 2011
• ISBN: 9781462008056

Lawrence F. Lihosit

The Author was born in the southern suburbs of Chicago, Illinois in 1951. His family later moved to Arizona where he graduated from grade school, high school and Arizona State University. He reluctantly served in the U.S. Army Reserves during the closing years of the Vietnam War and enthusiastically volunteered for the Peace Corps. His travels and work have taken him from the salmon spawning Nushagak River Basin in southwestern Alaska to the fertile Argentine Pampas. His continuing studies have included master’s coursework in urban planning at la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Mexico City, art and creative writing at Skyline College in San Bruno, California and education at California State University Fresno. He has earned his living as an urban planner for many years, working in Honduras, Mexico, Alaska, Arizona and California. As a younger man, he picked salmon from set nets in bush Alaska, fought a plague of mosquitoes in Canada, crawled through burial tombs in Peru, rode bulls in Bolivia, relaxed in Ecuadorian volcanic hot springs alongside Indians, hung out with an Uruguayan acting troupe, drank mate with Argentine lawyers, listened to tales of Chilean torture in a peña, floated alongside a pelican on the Sea of Cortes, danced to reggae while sipping cane liquor on Honduran sands, cheated border guards in Guatemala, ate pupusas in El Salvador and went underground in Mexico City after becoming embroiled in local politics. His travels outside the (lower) 48 states lasted for seven and one half years.

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Years On

and Other Travel Essays

Lawrence F. Lihosit

iUniverse, Inc.

Bloomington

Years On and Other Travel Essays

Copyright © 2011 by Lawrence F. Lihosit

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-4620-0804-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4620-0805-6 (ebook)

Printed in the United States of America

iUniverse rev. date: 5/3/2011

Special Thanks to

language high priest & priestess- Will James & Starley Talbott

language altar boy - Tony Gschwend

cover design- Dra. L. Margarita Solis Kitsu de Lihosit

I’m an American, I said as we shook hands.

We’re all Americans, the Honduran replied.

Contents

HITCHHIKING

BRAD & THE CHICAGO BOYS

CHECK THE WATER

CHAMPION SPRINTER

ROADS & LIGHT-RAIL

YEARS ON

CARNIVAL

PERUVIAN FOLK TALE

BOLIVIAN CATTLE RANCH

ANDEAN MUSIC

BUSH ALASKA

DATING LESSON

BIBLIOGRAPHIC NOTE

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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America

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HITCHHIKING

On the day of departure, I packed and dressed before five o’clock in the morning. The sun rose as I sat at my wooden telephone wire spool table, rocking on my used metal folding chair that had the letters P.T.A. stenciled on the backrest. My corncob pipe tobacco glowed orange, casting light on my outstretched right hand which lay atop two paperback books, On the Road and Tropic of Cancer.

Books? A wishbone ain’t no substitute for a backbone. I stood up. At twenty-four years of age, sporting my first respectable beard, dressed in the off-white cowboy shirt purchased in Puerto Peñasco, fresh blue jeans and old white imitation leather tennis shoes, I lumbered under the weight of the giant suitcase in one hand, the side bag over one shoulder and the rolled-up sleeping bag in the other hand. I walked out onto Hayden Road. The sun was up, reflecting off nearby cyclone fencing in streams of light.

A rusted and once red, now a weather beaten pink, huge automobile passed me. At least ten minutes went by before a green pickup truck slowed and my heart pumped fast as the driver put on his right turn signal light and drove to the shoulder. I grabbed a bag in each hand and ran, just reaching his bumper as the truck’s tires spun, throwing rocks all over me while the driver held up his middle finger.

Within minutes another car slowed and the driver pointed up ahead as he passed which meant, I’m only going up the road a piece. Several more cars passed before one stopped right beside me. The driver rolled down the passenger window and asked, Where you headed? Cinders flew once he heard Mexico. A familiar expensive imported sedan pulled up, driven by a friend’s wife who was surprised to see me hitchhiking and wondered aloud if I might be leaving town in disgust after the lay-off. Given the last reaction to my admission of Mexico bound, I faltered. She drove, checked her rear view mirror and told her daughter to sit up straight in the back seat. After a mile or so she asked me directly. I mumbled, Tempe. She continued driving and told me how she had heard all about our trip to Puerto Peñasco so I finally told her that the freeway entrance in Tempe was only my first step towards Mexico.

Well, she liked the sound of that and smiled as she said, You’re crossing the Sonoran Desert to visit a woman you’ve only met once, who lives in a town you’ve never seen and whose family doesn’t speak English, and immediately volunteered to take me all the way to the freeway entrance, through commute traffic, precisely to the southbound freeway on-ramp.

Eight hitchhikers with shoulder length hair and dressed in ragged dirty clothing stared at the imported fancy car as it pulled over near the on-ramp. After waving and saying "Adios, amiga" to my friend’s wife, I lugged the bags up the inclined shoulder. The group was very experienced and some carried signs marked with their destination. They informed me right off that I could just mosey up the road since nobody would stop for such a large group. A half mile later, my shirt was soaked with perspiration and my arms and shoulders ached. I set the bags down and stretched. For over an hour, caught up in the newness of hitchhiking, I experimented with styles. I tried the nonchalant thumb in the air, rapid fire pumping and graduated to the imploring look. Soon, I just sat down on the shoulder using my bags as a backrest and held out my thumb in exhaustion under a searing, hot desert sun.

It must have been past eleven o’clock in the morning when a dented, old, smoking van with weird paintings all over the sides pulled up and from every window, the freeway on-ramp group of hitchhikers hung out, laughing, waving and smiling while the sliding side door creaked open and hands appeared to help me load my bags inside.

The driver wore a long pony tail and a wild beard and he talked while he drove, looking around at us instead of the highway as he passed a small bag to one of the three seated up front. He took out marijuana and rolled one cigarette after another, passing them out and matches appeared and the van filled with sweet smelling smoke. The driver shifted into fourth gear as we toked and the others all talked about destinations, what waited for them in cities like Tucson and San Diego and what had happened to them on the road. Out the window, cactus shadows seemed smaller and although the van picked up speed, something was happening. Everything seemed to slow down even though the van’s speedometer read otherwise. Some of the conversations became unintelligible.

I pulled out a small canteen and shared with a guy next to me. Once the water was gone, a bottle of cheap wine appeared, then salted crackers and the conversations became one, each telling of strange adventures. My companions by chance were all young men under thirty years of age who had spent long stretches working at low paying, humiliating, odd jobs. With small caches of money, they impulsively set out to travel somewhere else and begin again. My background sounded so tame, so easy compared to their tales of hunger and bad luck that I just couldn’t talk about losing a well paid job and instead, reminisced about Puerto Peñasco.

The forty mile journey to the intersection of Interstate 10 (which led to Tucson) and Interstate 8 (which led to San Diego) passed quickly. My only inkling of time was the changing of music tapes, a product of the mixture of marijuana and cheap wine. The van pulled over to the shoulder only yards before a concrete freeway overpass which the driver explained was the highway which led west to Yuma and on to San Diego. Four of us climbed out. Without the van’s open windows, we were reminded that the air temperature was over one hundred degrees. We waved as the van drove off towards the overpass embankment, our path. To get to Mexicali, I needed to travel to the outskirts of Yuma where a tiny two lane highway headed due south. Once standing alongside the hot pavement, we recognized that our situation was exactly the same as it had been before. One of the three mentioned that very few vans driven by long hairs carrying bags of marijuana happened along Arizona highways. Another young man volunteered to walk ahead, up the highway that stretched one hundred seventy miles before us while I made the lame excuse of wanting to use a bathroom at the gasoline station a mile back but visible. The two who stayed warned us that the highway patrol was unforgiving on this section of road: hitchhiking on a freeway was illegal in Arizona.

There were several barbed wire fences, one of which snagged Bob Petit’s sleeping bag, ripping a good sized hole and leaving a trail of white feathers before I pinched it shut, stopped and pulled some safety pins from a bag. A noon sun glinted off the gasoline station’s metal window frames. This was a full service truck stop with restaurant and bathrooms. A cold blast of air whooshed out as I opened the door. All the tables were filled. A uniformed highway patrolman seated at the counter on a revolving stool sipped coffee and stared at the sleeping bag. I sat down at a booth farthest from the highway patrolman even as the busboy wiped. The menu hid my face. Within seconds the policeman sat down opposite me and took off his sunglasses deliberately.

Hitchhiking gets jail time, he said flatly.

After my nervous comments about meeting a friend at this truck stop, the patrolman smiled and told me that his zone included a few miles on each of the crossing interstates. He went back to the counter. A waitress took my order as the policeman watched me, slurping his coffee. He paid his bill without ever turning in my direction and strutted out the door.

The two long hairs were not on the highway after my meal. Who knows if they found a ride or had met the patrolman? Within minutes, the squad car passed going in the opposite direction and the patrolman saw me too. A half mile down the flat desert road he made a u-turn across the divider, raising dust as I grabbed my bags and ran for the underpass, knowing that this would complicate the chase. While I ran down the embankment, I heard his car skid to a halt, his car door slam and him yelling behind me, Jail time, hippie! I took refuge wedged between the concrete overpass and the concrete apron underneath which sloped forty feet down to the highway. This ended up a good spot since there was a narrow ledge of concrete like a stair where I laid in a shadow, invisible to anyone below. Sweating like an overworked horse, I wondered whether the patrolman would follow me down. A dry wind whistled through. Dozens of messages were scrawled in pen, pencil and chalk on the concrete wall. The dates covered five years but they were all similar: Thirty hours stuck in this hell!

The highway patrol car drove underneath, headed back towards Phoenix and I grabbed my bags and climbed back up to the highway to Yuma and San Diego, hoping that someone might pick me up before the police returned. Cars and trucks raced past, creating hot blasts of air that blew my collar up.

The patrolman did return, not once, but every hour and a half. I became expert at dodging him all afternoon and into the evening. Of course, nobody would see me in the dark, standing next to a pile of bags with my thumb out. I hid my bags in a dry palo verde shrouded wash at the foot of a steep, down sloping highway shoulder. I walked back towards the truck stop along the shoulder which was occasionally lit by passing cars and trucks. The patrol car passed. I immediately jumped over a barbed wire fence and ran full speed into the unlit, black desert. While I sat under a large saguaro cactus, the patrol car headlights veered off, floated over the desert center divider and tires squealed as they grabbed black top. The policeman’s boots crunched gravel and the outline of his uniform and pistol silhouetted against his headlights as he urinated, looked out at a black desert landscape, reboarded and drove off.

Later and down the road apiece, chilidog sauce dripped from my chin at the truck stop before his now familiar car pulled up next to a gasoline pump.

Without bags, I was mobile and left money by the cash register and ran before the patrolman had parked. Behind the restaurant, I hid in the bathroom for a spell and put on my thin blue plastic windbreaker, turning up the hood to cover my head. The patrolman drank coffee facing the same window that I walked by, head bowed. He didn’t move. Only a hundred yards down the highway, the squad car pulled up fast behind me and braked, kicking up gravel and the policeman had his passenger door open and pistol leveled at me.

Get in hippie.

In the car, he did not lower his pistol but demanded identification. I handed him my Arizona driver’s license and voter’s registration card. His eyes narrowed. Next, he radioed in my driver’s license number and name so that the radio dispatcher could run a background check for outstanding warrants. A few minutes later his radio crackled. The radio dispatcher reported that there were no outstanding warrants and he sighed, glanced at his watch and holstered his pistol.

My shift is up in twenty minutes, just long enough to drive into the station. Booking you for vagrancy would take another thirty. Get lost. There’ll be another car out here in a half hour and that patrolman will be looking for you.

For once, I kept my big mouth shut and moved, fast. This was exactly the same stretch of road where Kerouac had been harassed by the Arizona Highway Patrol twenty years earlier. Minutes later in the shrouded wash, I unrolled the sleeping bag and lay down. A semi-truck and trailer stopped on the shoulder, just ten yards from me and a gruff voice swore. Soon, a thin, hippie-dippie longhaired teenager with a daypack came running down the wash as the truck pulled away. With the truck gone, it was black again under a star lit desert night. The hippie explained that the trucker had gotten queer with him and he was scared but swore nothing really happened. Still, he was glad to be out of the truck cab, he said, as he lay down without a sleeping bag a few feet from me.

Sometime later when the wind rattled the palo verde tree’s branches, a car door slammed up the wash, just above my bag, which woke me. I moved groggily while two men talked in loud voices. Something splashed near my head and I yelled out, Hey! Up above a voice shouted, Hell! Someone’s down there, Bill, and the car door slammed and pebbles rained down the wash as the tires spun.

At daybreak four other long hairs stood on the highway’s shoulder only this time nobody told me to move on. One guy with extra long greasy hair that fell around his shoulders in strings of shiny black, out from under a faded blue Greek sailor’s cap with a hat band stained dark brown, played a strange looking box with strings and explained in a southern accent that this was a folk instrument in his home state of Kentucky while another of the hitchhikers showed me card tricks, a third juggled oranges and the teenager who did nothing except stand erect with his thumb stuck out. They listened to my stories about the notes under the interchange, the patrolman, the hundreds of cars that hadn’t stopped before I began to walk towards Yuma, kicking gravel along the way, mad, but the morning was cool and walking woke me up. A few hundred yards down the highway, a red pickup truck passed the long hairs and as I stuck out my thumb, it slowed. The driver pulled over just ahead of me as I lumbered under the weight of the bags. The driver wore a cowboy shirt like mine and told me to throw my gear in the bed. The cowboy didn’t seem to mind my silence as he drove, listening to his citizens band radio. Each time we passed a trucker going in the opposite direction, he grabbed the dashboard mounted grey plastic microphone and yelled, Breaker, breaker, breaker, big brother. This is Little Red. Any smokeys? meaning highway patrolmen and the truckers always responded giving intricate directions to speed traps set along the highway up ahead where highway patrolmen hid their cars behind large signs or garages near the highway while they focused their radar.

When the cowboy asked my destination, I told him Yuma. The cowboy was only going to some dirt turnoff still shy of Yuma but promised to drop me off at a gasoline station and sandwich shop next to the highway where he thought it easy to score another ride and he was right because within minutes of touching ground, an old car pulled up driven by a fat bald dude dressed in tan cotton trousers, white shirt and tie skewed off to one side. He smacked chewing gum and said, Get in. Get in. Where ya goin’? Yuma? Sure. I wish I would’ve had company for the last four hundred miles. Desert’s boring. For the next thirty minutes he talked nonstop about his wife and kids and house and in-laws and his job until the memory of the cowboy and his citizens band radio faded but then, his car overheated short of the city limits. The sun was high now and my forehead beaded up and the air had that dry feel that makes your nose hairs stand out like porcupine quills. After walking miles, I cursed myself for not buying a pair of boots because my arches hurt and my feet sweat inside of the imitation leather shoes. Worse yet, my pinky toe kept squeezing out of a hole and a blister began to form.

Yuma was still west of me as the sun moved lower on an orange sky. Tired, dirty, sweaty, hungry and disgusted with broken blisters, I was also anxious since my host had expected me the day before. At a fork in the road, I hobbled towards a low stucco motel. According to folks in the restaurant, the next bus to Mexicali did not leave until nine that night which would have meant a very late border crossing in an unknown city. Another night sleeping alongside a road wouldn’t make it. I rented a room where the tiled floor cooled my feet on my way to the shower. A mass of huge cockroaches scurried when the cold water splashed (there was no hot water). The sound of a truck’s air brakes filtered through an open window and the entire building quivered each time a train passed. I silently vowed never to hitchhike again as I bandaged my feet.

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BRAD & THE CHICAGO BOYS

The Mexican customs agents smiled at my tourist visa good for sixty days which was signed by the Mexican Counsel in Phoenix. Next to me a young man with long unwashed curly black hair that hung over his eyes, searched through his soiled red daypack for identification. He mumbled in English about a card as one agent stopped smiling. To cross the frontera one needed a driver’s license, voter registration card, birth certificate or passport. Without thinking, I told the agent that we were traveling together. To my surprise, the agent smiled again and motioned for us to enter Meheeko. In an instant we stood alongside a large intersection with streets at strange angles that led to a vehicular paved circle around a monument–a glorieta. My thumbs were jammed behind my belt buckle when Brad introduced himself and thanked me all in one quick breath before asking, Where you headed?

He asked if we could share a taxi to the train depot so we got into a broken down car that smelled of exhaust fumes. Brad was a cross country hitchhiker missing three bottom teeth who had decided to