Safe in the Greyhound bus depot, I took off my shoe and bought a ticket straight through to Pennsylvania.

How It Was

THE FIRST TIME I had a glimpse of the canyon country was in the summer of 1944. I was a punk kid then, scared and skinny, hitchhiking around the United States. At Needles, California, bound home for Pennsylvania, I stood all day by the side of the highway, thumb out. Nobody stopped. In fact, what with the war and gasoline rationing, almost nobody drove by. Squatting in the shade of a tree, I stared across the river at the porphyritic peaks of Arizona, crazy ruins of volcanic rock floating on heat waves. Purple crags, lavender cliffs, long blue slopes of cholla and agave—I had never before even dreamed of such things.

In the evening an old black man with white whiskers crept out of the brush and bummed enough money from me for his supper. Then he showed me how to climb aboard an open boxcar when a long freight train pulled slowly out of the yards, rumbling through the twilight, eastward bound. For half the night we climbed the long grade into Arizona. At Flagstaff, half frozen, I crawled off the train and into town looking for warmth and hospitality. I was locked up for vagrancy, kicked out of jail the next morning and ordered to stay away from the Santa Fe Railway. And no hitchhiking, neither. And don’t never come back.

From Slickrock: The Canyon Country of Southeast Utah (1971)

Humbly I walked to the city limits and a step or two beyond, held out my thumb and waited. Nobody came. A little after lunch I hopped another freight, all by myself this time, and made myself at home in a big comfortable empty side-door Pullman, with the doors open on the north. I found myself on a friendly train, in no hurry for anywhere, which stopped at every yard along the line to let more important trains roar past. At Holbrook the brakemen showed me where to fill my canteen and gave me time to buy a couple of sandwiches before we moved on.

From Flag to Winslow to Holbrook; and then through strange, sad, desolate little places called Adamana and Navajo and Chambers and Sanders and Houck and Lupton—all the way to Albuquerque, which we reached at sundown. I left that train when two rough-looking customers came aboard my boxcar; one of them began paring his fingernails with a switchblade knife while the other stared at me with somber interest. I had forty dollars hidden in my shoe. Not to mention other treasures. I slipped out of there quick. Suddenly homesick I went the rest of the way by bus, nonstop, about twenty-five hundred miles, the ideal ordeal of travel, second only to a seasick troopship.

But I had seen the southern fringe of the canyon country. And did not forget it. For the next two years, through all the misery and tedium, humiliation, brutality and ugliness of my share of the war and the military, I kept bright in my remembrance, as the very picture of things that are free, decent, sane, clean and true, what I had seen and felt—yes, and even smelled—on that one blazing afternoon on a freight train rolling across the Southwest.