A businessman traveling between cities in his car stops and picks up a hitch-hiking hippy. Before he pulls back out onto the highway he asks the hippy, “Is there anything coming the other way?” The hippy replies, “No man, just a big dog.” The businessman pulls out and is promptly broadsided by a bus. Both the businessman and the hippy wake up in the ambulance on the way to the emergency room. The man looked over at the hippy and said, “You told me nothing was coming but a big dog!” The hippy replies, “Yeah, man, but that big dog was a Greyhound.”

The city buses of my early teen years were my gateway drug to the traveling I’ve done my entire adult life. They were cheap so I rode city buses everywhere I could, sometimes to the end of the line just to see what was there. When I was 17 and fresh from quitting high school for the first time, I naturally decided the bus would be my ride from Newport, Kentucky, to Irving, Texas, where I decided I would live as I struck out on my own. It wouldn’t be city bus but a Greyhound instead. Planes would be way too expensive, and I hadn’t ridden a train since I was an infant. Besides, I wasn’t even sure the train went to Texas. It would be the first time I had ever been truly on my own, with no family to fall back on and how better to get there than on a bus?

I chose Irving because I discovered that my best fifth-grade friend Denny Cramer, was living there. We were inseparable as kids. He was either at my house or I was at his. When his mother and father split up, his sister stayed with their mother and he with his father. They moved to a place in the woods a few miles east of Newport. After that, Denny would come in on the weekends and spend Friday and Saturday nights at my house or I would go out there and spend the weekend. We would build forts in the woods or collect terrapins and paint the date we found them on their shell before we let them go, fully believing we would find them again years later. In Newport we would do all the things city boys do – climb the bridge trusses over the Ohio River and watch the towboats pushing barges pass below, climb to the top of a disused radio tower to look down on Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky, normal, if semi-suicidal, boy things.

Then one day, Denny and his father were just gone, no goodbye or forwarding address. Denny’s mom lived a couple blocks from my house, but she had no idea where they went, nor did she care. In desperation to find my friend I tried calling telephone information in different cities where I thought they might have moved but had no success. Then, a year later out of the blue I got a letter from Denny. They had moved to Irving, a city between Dallas and Fort Worth. When Denny turned 17, he had had quite enough of his dad and moved out. He now had a one-bedroom apartment in The Riverside Apartments, a rundown complex right there in Irving, and invited me out to see him if I was ever in the neighborhood.

Remember what I said about moving out to Texas on my own with no family to fall back on? Well, that wasn’t quite true. My paternal grandmother, Mimmie Curtis, lived in Davis, Oklahoma, about 130 miles north of Irving. My father had planned a family trip out there to visit her and a couple crazy aunts in Custer City, Oklahoma, so I suggested we take a side trip to Irving while we were visiting Davis. My father loved a trip in a car more than anything, so 130 miles each way was nothing to him and a few weeks later, there we were, visiting Denny in Irving. Denny, too, had dropped out of high school and had come up with a laborer’s job that paid enough for him to afford the apartment rent, but only just. Food and clothing were apparently not part of his life plan, so my family took him out for a big breakfast of eggs and Texas toast. After some conversation about how easy it was to find a job in that area, I made up my mind to move out there too as soon as I could. Texas! A great place to start on my own!

When we were back in Kentucky, I wrote to Denny to tell him I would be coming back to stay in a couple months. Then I told the manager at the restaurant where I worked that I wanted to work all the overtime he could give me. He happily put me to work 12 hours a day, six days a week and eight hours on the seventh. Other than paying board to my parents, I stopped spending any money and saved every cent I could. It took six weeks to save $250 plus the $45 bus fare. I figured $250 would let me pay my share of the rent for a month and buy food until I could find a job and make more.

When I hit the $250 mark, I was ready to go, and so, with a goodbye to my mother and sister and brother, I was off. My mother gave me no advice only saying, “Always let me know where you are.” I promised I would and, carrying everything in a single small suitcase and a GI AWOL bag (absent without leave – a sort of military gym bag), I boarded the familiar city bus in front of our house to Cincinnati and the Greyhound terminal.

As I watched the Ohio River pass beneath me as the bus crossed the Central Bridge from Newport to Cincinnati, I wondered how long it would be before I saw it again, if ever. I took the escalator up from the diesel smelling darkness of the bus drop off point in the basement of Dixie Terminal and walked to the Greyhound station, all the while looking up at the tall buildings of downtown Cincinnati like a tourist, even though I had lived there for years. I soon had my one-way ticket and boarded a Greyhound headed for Indianapolis, where I would change for Dallas. When I walked up the steps in that bus I was on my way to adulthood, not just Texas. The bus may have smelled musty and stale but mostly it smelled of freedom. The bus was only half full, so I took a seat toward the front. I knew that I wanted to be away from the restroom at the far back.

Greyhound buses ran everywhere in 1966. You didn’t even need to be at a station to catch one, just stand at the side of the road where one passed and flag it down. Buy your ticket and the country was wide open to you. My bus to Indianapolis stopped twice before we even left Ohio to pick up men standing by the side of the road next to a suitcase.

As the bus headed west, I was glued to the window. I was traveling a long distance by myself for the first time and wanted to see everything. That’s never changed. Even now I find it hard to read on a train or bus because I might miss something, something that was just waiting for me to see it. By the time we reached Indianapolis it was dark, so my view was gone. Whatever was waiting for me would have to wait until I passed this way again. I wasn’t sleepy and I realized that I had forgotten to bring anything to read. While waiting in the station in Indianapolis I bought a copy of Alan King’s book, “Help! I’m a prisoner in a Chinese Bakery” to pass the time.

Back on the bus a man who looked a lot like he might be a farmer took the open seat on the aisle next to me. He said nothing, just gave me a nod, tilted his seat back as far as it would go and closed his eyes. He appeared to be asleep in seconds. I was still far too excited at being on the road, even if it had only been for five hours, to sleep, so I turned on the reading light and opened my new book.

Ever have a seatmate who annoyed you so much that you had to find another seat before you became violent? I became one of the annoying ones. While I had heard of Alan King, I had no idea how funny his writing was. Three pages in and I couldn’t help myself – I laughed out loud. My farmer seat mate sat up startled and glared at me. “Sorry” I said and went back to reading. Within five minutes I had done it twice more. That was it, my seat mate moved, leaving me with more room and free reign to keep on reading. That didn’t last, though, because the fourth time I laughed out loud there were rumblings from the people around me and I decided that I had better give Mr. King a rest for a while, least I get chucked off the bus by my fellow passengers.

To get to Irving from Cincinnati you must pass through Mimmie Curtis’ town. Not only did you pass through her town, but you also actually passed her house. She lived above a former gas station, right on the main street, her living room perched over where the gas pumps used to be. It wouldn’t have been proper to pass a few feet away and not say hello, and since Greyhound didn’t mind if you interrupted your trip, I got off to visit. When I got ready to leave the next day, she said to come back any time. I would take her up on that sooner than either of us planned.

Sometimes freedom isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Many adventures and six weeks later I figured out that I didn’t want to be a laborer all my life and without education, I would be. I was ready to give up being a Texan and return to being a Kentuckian. The problem was the money I had saved up before I came out was long gone. In fact, I had exactly $2.00 to my name. I sold a pair of sunglasses for 35 cents, bringing my total fortune to $2.35. Greyhound out of the question, so I spent the $2 on a GI haircut and with 35 cents in my pocket I started hitchhiking. My first stop would be Davis to say goodbye to Mimmie Curtis before I hit the road to Kentucky. It took only two rides to reach Davis, a good omen for the longer trip east. The first question both drivers asked were, “Are you in the Army?” The haircut and AWOL bag worked perfectly to snag rides in 1966 while the Vietnam War was still popular.

Mimmie had moved into a little two-bedroom stone house by then, leaving the former gas station behind. Her father, Granddad Brown, took advantage of the larger living area and moved in with her. According to my dad he was as mean as a snake when he was younger and gone half the time, no one knew where. He was now 86 years old, and the meanness was gone, as was wandering too far away to parts unknown, not that slowed him down. Skinny, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes one after another, he was a man in perpetual motion. He would talk for a little while then it was off to the local domino parlor, then back again half an hour later. He finally slowed down enough to talk to me for a bit.

“Where you goin’, boy?” he asked.

“Back to Kentucky”, I replied.

“How you gettin’ there?”

“Well, Granddad, I’m hitchhiking.”

“Oh, don’t do that. Hitchhiking is dangerous”, he advised.

“But, Granddad, I don’t have any money to take a bus” I said.

“Well, boy, hop a freight train then”, he said.

I was taken aback for a moment. “But, Granddad, how do you know where a freight train is going?” I asked.

He looked into the middle distance, quiet and still for once. Finally, he said, “It don’t really matter.”

With that sage advice I continued my “shank’s mare”, as my grandfather called it and hit the road. It took another 20 hours to hitchhike back to my parents’ house in Newport, with no incidents along the way. Well, except for standing for three hours at the Oklahoma/Missouri border waiting for a ride. It might have taken so long because there was sign saying “State Prison Next Exit” right behind me. When I finally got a ride, I had to sit on a toolbox instead of the passenger seat since the seat was missing. It was in an old work van driven by a crazy woman who drove at 40 miles an hour for three hours down the expressway while her three rowdy kids played in the back behind a wire screen separating them from us. I was waiting for the work van to be run over by a semi because we were going so slow, but it didn’t happen.

The next time I rode the Dog it was three years later and in the other direction, that time from Texas to Kentucky for Christmas leave when I was in the Army, but that’s another story.

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