Journeys Afoot in North America
Part I, Early Walks
When school let out in December I stored a few belongings in the basement of Chicago's International House and entrained for Colorado to climb Culebra, the southernmost fourteener, on the way to California to see my children. From Pueblo I walked as I did in those days, not asking for rides but accepting if they were offered.
Up a silent farming valley west of Culebra I trudged, not even a hand raised to greet me, until in the early evening I was stopped by a young man and a stripling. Out in the road they stood, the young man's hand trembling over a gun strapped to his waist. I said as calmly as I could that if he didn't stop being so nervous he wouldn't have to shoot me, he'd scare me to death.
He steadied some saying he'd been sent to arrest me because the farmers had had a barn burned lately by two Kansans, but maybe if I waited back at a white house for the high sheriff to examine me I wouldn't have to be locked up. By moonlight I looked for that white house but never found it, and got very anxious walking up and down the road.
Finally the high sheriff came, big booming man like a redneck sheriff in a southern movie. I showed him papers to prove I wasn't a barn burner and he laughed. "I wish I could put you in jail," he said, "I'm taking this correspondence course in physics and the physics I get OK, but the math is killing me." He said if I'd stay back in the town's little hotel, they'd return me to the mountain next day.
In the morning I went over to the jail for my ride. The jailer's sister gave a second breakfast of freshmade tortillas and a stack for the climb. Getting up Culebra late I slipped on hard snow near the summit, but stopped my slide with an ice axe. You stab in with the pick, not too deep at first, and pray.
Back down headed west few rides were offered. That and a foot I'd lamed in falling decided me at Cortez to give up, climb Mesa Verde, and rest in the park lodge on top. An Indian who didn't seem to speak either English or Spanish directed me by signs onto a high narrow ridge. It had a path that near the top of the mesa crossed a paved road, where I met two cars coming down. When those in the second wouldn't accept my refusal, giving me the news that the lodge was closed anyway, I asked where the fellow and his girl were going? Los Angeles. So I would see my kids for Christmas after all.
As soon as it was straightened out that I wasn't to call the couple my Christmas present (the girl had been born then and that's what her mother always called her), I noticed the steaming engine that signaled our first adventure. He stopped and found a freeze plug gone. A few yards more, and the engine of his personally rebuilt Cadillac would have seized. We were a long time getting a ride back to Cortez for a new plug; the man who finally took us claimed that the Utes thereabouts didn't even get along with other Indians.
Nothing more befell until Lake Mead when mad went the servo-system whose duty it was to make the engine last forever by automatically replenishing oil from a central reservoir. Every available container including my water bottle was required to hold the surplus oil pumped by that servo!
But it worked, and from Los Angeles I boarded a bus for San Diego, where my children lived. The fellow's mother had dropped me downtown. Hers was an honest astonishment that a peer like me even had a water bottle, to hold water or surplus oil. With that pack on his back and his mile-haunted eyes, what is the learned astronomer trying to prove? I had no words then to explain.