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Hippie Tales Two – First Trip West
By Fred Pruitt
(This story is a companion story to the first “Hippie Tales.” These events are from the same time and fill in more parts of the story. This trip west is prior to my trip with Cary, which came only a few weeks later and not anticipated at the time of the trip chronicled here. My chronologies may not be totally accurate – it’s pushing 40 years since these events occurred. But the gist of it all is true. I wrote this originally to our daughter, Jessica, for family history’s sake as well as to explain how and why I came to Jesus. I edited this from that original version, though I retained the “letter” quality of it.)
I think maybe I've told you this story, when the busload of youth from the Beth Eden Baptist Church gave your mother and I a ride from a rest stop in Kansas to Denver, CO, in late June, 1972. We were trying to get to the first Rainbow Festival being held in the Arapaho Mountains on the other side of the Rockies. Our friend Chris Johnson had told us about it back in Georgia, and though we had never hitchhiked anywhere before, we got a wild hair and decided to drop everything and just go.
Along the way we ran into people on the road who were also headed to the Festival – bunches of them! Somebody gave us a pamphlet telling about the event, and we learned that on July 4th at the site everyone was supposed to get together and chant “OM,” supposedly ushering in the Age of Aquarius. We surely we didn’t want to miss that!
Every ride every day was a different adventure in itself. We got a ride with two teenage girls ditching church outside Paducah KY. A later ride was in a semi-truck that bounced us through Illinois in the middle of the night, letting us off near the I-70 interchange, where we slept in some woods by a field.
The next day a lady who escorted “Wide Loads” on the highway took us in, and along the way also filled her car with other hitchhikers. She drove us all the way across Missouri and was pretty far into Kansas on the Turnpike when she saw an unescorted “Load” going the opposite direction. She CB’d the guy asking him if he needed an escort. When he said yes she whipped the car left through the median, turned around, and headed back to Kansas City, and let us off at the beginning of the turnpike.
Then somebody gave us a ride to Topeka and let us off at an exit in the middle of the city. We had our first police encounter there, as two officers rolled up and started questioning us, who we were, where we were headed, etc. When we told them we were going to a spiritual festival in Colorado, they had heard of it they said, one of them being a Pentecostal preacher on the side. He talked to us about Jesus a little bit while telling us hitchhiking on the Interstate was illegal in Kansas so we would have to get off the highway.
About that time another car pulled off a little ahead of us, and a young long-haired man jumped out and came walking over.
“Can I help, officers?” he asked in Kansan twang. “If they need a ride I’d be glad to take them.”
I think the policemen were as surprised as we were but it solved everybody’s problems so we got in the car with our rescuer and headed west into the depths of Kansas. It was approaching nightfall by that time so pretty soon we were driving in the dark.
“Hey, I’m Weeeelbrrr,” he said, putting his hand out to me.
“Thanks, Wilbur, I’m Fred and this is Janis. I really gotta thank you man.”
We spent a few hours in the car with Wilbur, hearing his story, and learning about Coors beer, which he had beside him on the front seat. He was sipping on them as he drove. This was pre-“Smoky and the Bandit” days, and we had never even seen the famed Coors before. Janis and I didn’t drink alcohol at the time so we declined his offer, but he was good company. But finally the dreaded moment came that happens to every hitchhiker – “this is as far as I can take you.”
We found ourselves at a gigantic truckstop in Salina, Kansas. By the time you get into middle Kansas, it is really starting to be The West. Everything is bigger and more expansive. I had never seen a truckstop so big or with so many trucks. I had never before seen double trailers being pulled, either. Almost everything was a new sight. Plus, we thought we had hit the ride jackpot, too, because this place was so busy we figured we would get a ride in no time. Along with the other bunch of hitchers waiting there, too.
Well, it didn’t take no time but instead took a lot of time, hours, before a guy in a 66 or so Chevrolet El Camino finally pulled up and said, “Who wants a ride?”
Your mom and I and one other guy threw our stuff in the back and situated ourselves so that we were looking at the road we had just been on, and with a singing chorus of stars above us, in a sky such as we had never seen, we drove and drove and drove and drove across the limitless stretch of western Kansas in the crisp June air. We sat and lay alternately awake and sleeping in the back of the El Camino, driving all night long across Kansas. Even in June it was frigid cold in the night air. We got out our sleeping bags but they were little help. The other guy who had piled into the back of the El Camino with us also slept fitfully alongside us as we sailed under the clear night sky of Kansas.
Jessica, you know the sky west of the Mississippi is different from our eastern sky, and you should drive out there again one day and see it. And it was Different Sky that night, our first experience of it. We tried to sleep and we would doze for a few minutes and then wake up freezing, and somehow try to find some warmth with each other and fall back to sleep for five or ten minutes. But everytime I would wake up there would be the sky and there would be the wind, and unpleasant though it was, nothing could have been any more exhilirating or more a calling to some ultimate adventure.
In the first rays of light we made it to our driver's destination, and he kindly let us clean up before we continued on. He took us to his house in a town called Oakley, in far western Kansas. We were as out there on the plains as you can get, because everywhere we looked we could see nothing but flatland and wheat, and wheat, and wheat, and wheat, as far as the eye could see in any direction. No wonder they call it an ocean of wheat! Our host graciously let us take showers (somehow he knew we needed them), and then dropped the three of us back at the entrance to the Interstate, still in the early morning hours.
At first we waited at the beginning of the on-ramp, obeying the local ordinances, but there was no traffic. Nobody was coming off the highway and nobody was getting on it. After waiting there quite a while, we all three decided to walk up the ramp to the main highway, at least a couple hundred yards, to hopefully coax some high-speed interstate drivers to pull over and pick us up. All three of us.
We weren’t there but a few minutes when a state police cruiser pulled up and stopped. It took little convincing from the troopers to motivate us to walk back down to the beginning of the ramp, where we waited dejectedly another good while, convinced we were going to be stuck there forever.
But then a “miracle” happened. The Interstate was a couple hundred yards or more above us, and most drivers were whizzing along at better than 80, and even they were few and far between. Suddenly out of the blue, a ratty green Ford Econoline van came putting slowly by on the highway above us. Our companion saw it and immediately got all excited, shouting, “Hey, that’s my buddy from DC.” He started jumping up and down and shouting and waving his arms. The driver had been looking straight ahead, but suddenly turned his head in our direction and saw our friend waving at him. Miraculously, he pulled right over and stopped!
With excited glee, we immediately grabbed all our gear and began running up the ramp. We got to the van and the buddy jumped right in and then asked his friend if we could ride, too. The man did not seem pleased, but he agreed and Janis and I hopped into the back, which was crammed full of all kinds of stuff. Apparently this guy had been traveling and living in his van a long time and it looked like it. There was stuff of all kinds everywhere.
We almost instantly felt there was something malevolent about our driver. It was palpable and he made us very uncomfortable from the beginning. Still, he was a ride and in our circumstances it was hard to be choosy just based on some vague feelings.
After we drove a while, less than an hour, we pulled over to a rest area where he said he was going to make some tea. He pulled out his tea-making apparatus while we stretched our legs. As his water was heating, he told us he felt his van was not going to make it with the extra load of two more people, so he was going to have to leave us at the rest area.
“C’mon, man, are you sure? We really need a ride. I don’t know what we’re going to do,” I explained.
He was adamant, though, and he looked around the rest stop which was fairly crowded with cars, and pointed toward a busload of well-scrubbed straight kids standing around a bus labeled, “Beth Eden Baptist Church, Denver, CO.”
“I’ll bet those guys will give you a ride if you ask them.”
My heart sank, but reluctantly (knowing I had no other choice) I walked over to the bus. A fellow standing in the door happened to be the one in charge. I asked him if we could catch a ride, and he said, “Sure, we can take you to Denver.” I was glad of that but at the same time it seemed like maybe he and the rest of them standing around licked their lips at the prospect of our being their fellow travelers. I had some idea of what we were going to be in for the next few hours to Denver.
We subsequently found out that those kids and their advisors had been on a three-week “witnessing” trip to the Bahamas. They had ridden their church bus from Denver to Miami, boarded a ship to the Bahamas, and “witnessed” (meaning they went around “preaching about Jesus”) the rest of the time to people in the Bahamas. When we met them, they were on their return trip, their last leg before they got home to Denver after being gone for 3 weeks.
Picture the difference. They were “straight,” well-groomed, clean – clean of body, mouth and attitude – and all well-dressed. They seemed to all believe to a “T” the same things, and lived to do nothing but tell about it. They were adolescent boys and girls and not a sexual innuendo among them (that I saw). We were their next-in-line of God-knows how many they had preached to on their trip. And we were going to be ALONE with them, some 50 or so of THEM, with just the 2 of us, on the bus together for a 250 mile ride.
We were SO dead tired from our previous night, wanting badly only to crash, and crash hard, but they were refreshed, raring and ready to go. There were any number of them ready to witness to us. It was like they in a queue behind whoever was the current witness, each with Bible and tracts in hand, waiting until one tired and their turn began.
I'm a polite soul, you know, so I let them do it. At first they sent their flunkies, but with each one they got more polished and knowledgable about their subject.
Still, I was such a hard sell, because we kept coming to an impasse. The impasse was that they kept quoting the Bible, chapter and verse, to prove their point, as if that would somehow settle it with me. As if I would say, “OK, well, you're right, the Bible does say that, so therefore it must be true.”
And there we always hit our snag. They would give their point to me, like Jesus dying for our sins, or how receiving Him I would become a “son of God,” and they would “prove it” by pointing out Bible verses as proof.
Well, like I said, I was a polite soul, and was being truthfully honest at the same time, and I told them each of them one by one. They sent their best witnessers one by one, and then finally the youth group leader himself, to find the chink in my armor, but their “proof,” which was proof enough for them, which was “what the scriptures say,” was not proof to me. It meant everythingl to them and was the finality of authority, but to me it was a book among books and I would politely and sincerely say to them, “You may be right, I don't know. I'm still seeking. But I have to admit the Bible doesn't mean to me what it seems to mean to you, so even though you quote it to me, I can't make it an authority in my life since I have no frame of reference to do so.”
(I probably didn't speak that eloquently at the age of 20, one month shy of 21, but that was the gist of what I meant and somehow tried to communicate. Here were these people to whom this “book” had somehow become some personified Deity, but it was outside my experience and my belief system, so there was our impasse which we never broke through on that bus ride.
Finally the head honcho, Don, a bright-eyed blue-eyed very pleasant fellow came and sat down in front of us. He was the last resort and the most mature among them. For an hour he gave his two cents and still we didn't budge. And then he gave up.
Finally everybody relaxed and we maybe got a little shut-eye before we arrived at their final destination, the Beth Eden Baptist Church parking lot in some section of Denver.
Even there it was a sight to behold. If it had been any of my friends and we had ridden for a week on the bus together, we would have probably said, “Catch you tomorrow, I'm going home to have a beer and crash, and tomorrow we'll get together and straighten everything out.”
But no, even though all these all-American, all-white, fresh-scrubbed kids from Beth Eden Baptist Church hadn't seen their parents for three weeks, still before they could leave they all had to participate in a full clean up of the bus. They had to take care of all their gear, packing their cars or stowing what had to be stowed in the church. Then they washed the bus inside and out!
Janis and I, still groggy from our all-night ride and five hour witness-aganza, watched in amazement as these kids and their advisors did all their chores without complaint. We were even more amazed when Don, the leader of the bunch, the one with the bright blue eyes, who also had not been home in at least three weeks, and had been the responsible party for FIFTY KIDS for three weeks, told us he would take us to the mountains. He put us in HIS car, let us stop at the grocery store for a few supplies, stopped by his house to pick up something, and then drove us from Denver to Boulder and on into the Rockies into Rocky Mountain National Park. There he dropped us at the first camp ground inside the gate.
Let me tell you, that is anybody's at least half-day drive, and we left at dusk. Don didn’t spend all that time witnessing to us, either. We just had a very pleasant and interesting long conversation as he traveled ONE WAY for hours just after arriving back from his three-week bus journey. We couldn’t believe then somebody would go that out of the way for strangers and I cannot believe it now! It was unheard of, a true “going the extra mile.”
When we arrived at the campsite, Don’s only request of us was that we would allow him to pray for us before he left. We were not into praying (meditation yes, but prayer no), but we figured that was the least we could do, considerin'. So he just laid his hands on us together and we all bowed our heads and Don prayed something like, “Lord Jesus, you have called these two to be yours and I believe right now in this moment that they are Yours and that You will reveal yourself to them. In Your Holy Name, Amen.”
And with that Don left and we have never seen nor heard from him again, though I have tried a few times to find him. But everything he said in his prayer has become more real to me than the stars in the sky and the earth around me and is certain beyond all consideration of physical, emotional and intellectual life.
I don’t remember giving Don’s prayer much thought that night, but I will remember that campsite and the mountains and stars of that night forever. We were camped by a mountain creek, so we heard the sounds of the flowing water all night. Above us were craggy peaks that we could clearly see in the moonshadow. We seemed so high in the sky that we were among the stars, that we could reach out and touch them. Those stars were clearer, crisper and more vivid than I have ever seen, and have remained the same in my memory all these years since. The moon rose above the craggy peaks across from us, and brightly lit the mountains up all around us. It was far from darkness. The moonlight brought everything out into plain view.
The next morning we awoke to ground squirrels darting here and there with the gentle sounds of the flowing creek. We had brought brown rice and cans of black-eyed peas (we were southern hippies) and made ourselves one of the best breakfasts ever over the campfire I built.
Finally we left the campsite and hiked up to the main park road, where it didn’t take long to get a ride in the back of an open jeep. It was a glorious ride, too! I don’t remember the people who gave us the ride, but we went higher and higher up into the Rockies, and at the Continental Divide – the place where on one side the waters flow east and the other they flow west, we stopped the jeep and got out and hiked into the woods. It was snow-covered, and the first thing I did was step through the snow into a cold brook. After that Janis and I had a snowball fight with each other – on July 1st! Then we hopped back into the rear of the jeep and rode over the mountains, amazed at the valleys, pastures, rivers and streams thousands of feet below us, and began our descent to the other side and the festival for which we had ridden so long to get to.
End of Part Two – To be continued
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