Memoir / Hopping Freight Trains / Part One

August 5, 1982
 
Drawing Tablet
Wood drawing compress
Fishing line on a stick and hook
Oil Pastels
Pick up Levi’s at Jay’s house 
Canvas Rucksack 
Find Rick in Santa Cruz 

      Left this morning with a headache. Left home to experience… (unreadable) the walk that leads away…to know the beginning…I feel sort of out of place, different. On the side of the road I stand… outstanding among them. I don’t know why I’m going on this trip- I might be trying to cap off some time zone, school, etc… but this is on the skip of the beat… It seems right but…and it also has some realness to it… vivid, scary, and awesome… It is not a dream… I am here now and I am very aware…I want very much to paint or use my pastels on this trip… all types of compositions and feelings are to be experienced. I want the paintings to be thick and globular on the surface…Rich and solid they will be…living landscape portraits. I am excited to loosen up. I feel very tense. My jaw is tight and my breath forced. I need to mold into this new style of living… it seems so strange, this close to home…. almost phony. Am I for real? Is this just some experiment or is it a true course…need I do this? Is this true? 

      I’m very hungry now and it has only been about 5 hours since I’ve eaten. This will be good discipline. Hitchhiking is a listening, observing experience. One is contemplative…people sure like to talk to me while I’m in their cars.

 July 2011

     These words were written on the worn and torn pages from the journal I kept for the first five hours of my adventure in the summer of 1982, the year Gandhi died, the year the word “internet” was first used. I left my parent’s house in suburban Los Angeles and walked the four miles to the 101 freeway onramp heading north. , I wrote those words while I sat there on a hot cement curb under the obligatory Oleander, “Santa Cruz” sign perched at my feet. They were the only words I wrote for three months, other than the birch- bark postcards I sent periodically to friends and family. I know why I stopped writing in the journal. Although I loved to write at that time, and still do, I felt it was dishonest to document each experience, each feeling as it was happening. I wanted to free myself from taking photographs, writing, even talking about what was unfolding. The point was to live each moment to it’s fullest not, in essence, to make a simultaneous documentary. I didn’t come to this monk-like conclusion all by myself. Although I have always been a purist, believing that if you are going to do something, it is important to give it your all, concentrate, focus and do the best you can. It’s a dichotomy because I’m very rigid about this, almost judgmental in my zeal for Zen. And that goes for everything… from making a sandwich, listening to music, hopping a freight train. Why just go through the motions? I tried to express myself through my doings. But when it came to living in the moment, I was a neophyte compared to my college roommate Rick.

      I had never met anyone like Rick, before or since. Every moment was an opportunity for adventure and not just for adventure’s sake but a search for the “truth”, the true course. He looked at the world through different lenses, obscuring the norm, focusing on an intense childlike curiosity. He was tall and lanky and strikingly handsome. He looked like Gary Cooper if Gary Cooper were a beautifully tanned existential surfing beatnik. He had an omnipresent smile that when focused on you, seemed to affirm what you were thinking. He had dark brown eyes and a gaze that would attract many followers… and lovers. And, contrary to my wife’s beliefs, Rick and I were not lovers but he was the first person I had ever truly fallen in love with.

By Joseph Wahl, 2012