Among the forests, bears, paint pots, boiling pools and gushing geysers of Yellowstone. Traffic was getting mighty scarce. Picked up and then left at a side road in the Idaho Panhandle, I walked all afternoon, all evening, all through the night, along the deserted highway, through a dark forest in the high country, and heard a cougar scream. I stopped once and slept for a while in a deep, dry, grassy ditch until the cold drove me up and onward.

In the morning a rancher picked me up, took me along for another fifty miles. He offered me a job for the summer, said he’d teach me to be a cowboy. My God, but I was tempted; yet the westering urge was too strong in me. I thought I couldn’t wait to see the Pacific Ocean and declined his offer. A mistake.

Seattle was just another big city. All cities tend to look pretty much alike from the hitchhiker’s point of view. I didn’t even see the ocean. Going south to Portland, I got a ride with a long, lean fellow from Oklahoma, who said his name was Fern. He was a hard, tough, rambling hombre, and he looked like Gary Cooper; I liked him at once, especially when he stopped in the woods and let me fire his revolver at some whiskey bottles. He said he was a wounded veteran, not a draft dodger. He showed me his tattoos: on his left arm a mermaid, on his right the motto Semper Fidelis.

He had no money; I bought the food and was also privileged to stand guard at night while Fern, with his rubber hose (Okie credit card), siphoned gas from cars parked on dark streets in small Oregon towns.

One evening I sat alone in the car for half an hour, on a side street, while Fern went off with his gun to see a friend, he said. He came back in a hurry, breathing heavily, giggling, and we roared into the night, out of that town. Driving south, he pulled a bottle from a brown paper sack, opened it, drank, offered me a swig. My first taste of hard liquor. After another drink, grinning, he showed me a wad of greenbacks. I was scared, but impressed. He said he was going to get him a big fat woman that night. And he did….

Next day we drove into northern California, to Sacramento. We stopped at a gas station, where I went to the toilet; when I came back outside, Fern and his car were gone. With him went my coat, my hat, my satchel containing everything else I possessed except the shirt, pants and shoes I was wearing. My wallet and some twenty dollars were also gone, since Fern had advised me to keep my money and papers locked in the glove compartment of the car. Safer, he’d explained.

I had ten cents in my pocket and a jackknife. I was hungry. The first thing I did was put to good use one of the few useful things Fern had taught me: how to make a meal from a cup of coffee. Entering a drugstore and taking a counter stool, I ordered one cup of coffee and pulled the cream pitcher and the sugar bowl close. As I slowly drank the coffee, I kept adding as much sugar and cream as the mug would hold, making a thick, sweet sludge, highly nourishing, which I scooped up with the spoon. Fortified, I walked out. And I still had a nickel in my pocket.