A tale of two western trips

 

As young men, both my grandfather and I took off on short notice to head out West, with no more than we could easily carry, seeking adventure, supporting ourselves with the manual labor we knew best: ranch & farmwork for my grandfather; millwork & logging for me — 

and not returning for a full year.  My grandfather's trip is described in a blank verse narrative poem, "Al Appenheimer's Sight-seeing Tour of the Vanishing West," from my Stark County Poems, and opens thus:

In 1912, when he turned twenty-one,

because he had always wanted to see

the Old West of legend before it was gone,

Al Appenheimer packed a canvas bag

with a change of clothes, wished the folks so long,

and walked off into the sunset.  Apart

from his bag and hat, all he had was a pair

of five dollar bills in his shirt pocket. 

It was all he needed.  Whenever he

was down to a dollar, he just stopped off

at the nearest ranch and got taken on

as a seasoned hand for however long

       it took to replace the pair of fives,

       and then hit the road.  In this way he tramped

       all the way from Illinois to Texas

       and down into Mexico and then up

       the coast to Washington State just in time

       for the start of the harvest season where he

       was hired to drive a 30-mule-hitch

       combine across an ocean of wheat.  . . . 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

My own Western trip is chronicled in my memoir:  Three Years on the Nowhere Road, and begins as follows:

 In November of 1972, at the age of 22, married less than a year, and having lost my job as a tree-trimmer with the Rockford Park District in Illinois due to being on the losing side of a labor strike, with winter coming on and no prospect of comparable work before spring, I made a drastic decision. I packed my uncle's WWII seabag with a change of clothes, a blanket and some books, took five dollars from our rapidly-dwindling nest egg, and announced my intention to hitch-hike out to the coast of Washington state where there was said to be a logging boom in progress and work to be had by anyone who could handle a chainsaw.

            Two days later my wife Vickie drove me out to the west side of town shortly after sunrise and dropped me off beside the road. Before I closed the door, she leaned across to give me a warm kiss good-bye. Then she U-turned the car in the road and drove off back into town. It was the last time I would ever see her. Some sixteen or seventeen hours later, sometime after midnight, I found myself beside a deserted highway a few miles west of Omaha, in a cold wind, fantasizing about a warm bed and wondering what the hell I had gotten myself into..

I lived rough for that entire year, camping in crude shelters above the Calawah and Hoh rivers on Washington's Olympic Peninsula, working in cedar shake mills and salvaging cedar logs for the mills on the steep, cut-over slopes of the Hoh valley and elsewhere.

When I returned to Illinois after my year in the woods, I drove down to Toulon in Stark County to visit my grandfather and we compared notes about our respective Western trips.

We each left with a change of clothes and a blanket.  I was 22 and he was 21.  We both supported ourselves with heavy outdoor work and we were both gone for an entire year, 60 years apart.  He left in 1912;  I left in 1972.   He left with $10 and returned a year later, still with $10.  I left with $5 and returned a year later with nothing.