First Love, Part 4

The spring of 1969 was an unsettled time, to put it mildly. Although the great wave of the hippie movement was yet to crest at Woodstock, the Diggers had proclaimed the Death of the Hippie at the end of the summer of 1967, staging a funeral and burying a hippie effigy in the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park. Political polarization had reached a violent climax with the police riot at the Democratic Convention in Chicago in August of 1968, where the nascent Yippie Party of Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman had run a pig for President.

DeAnne was ill at ease in the dormitories of Goshen College, which were still strictly segregated by gender. When she moved into Coffman Hall she immediately put her mattress on the floor, which earned her a strict reproof from the residence authorities. We fantasized about starting a commune in the rambling old Spouter Inn over on College Avenue. I was gaga about her, adolescent passion having hit for the first time. Combined with my heady enthusiasm for a youth movement which I sensed was initiating a massive change of consciousness and the vibes of a peaceful revolution, this was first love with a vengeance. We went about stoned, dreamy, and in a trance.

For two weeks I was at the extreme of ecstasy. Soon, however, DeAnne found Goshen as completely wearisome as I did, and she began to fret for her friends back in the Haight. She scraped up the money for an air ticket back to San Francisco and made plans to return without her parents discovering and preventing it. Some other guy drove her up to the airport in Chicago.

I was crushed and desolated. Within days I had determined that I could not possibly stay in Goshen a moment longer. Leaving a note on the dining room table to the effect that I had hitchhiked to New York to become a hippie poet and telling my parents not to worry (I was still living at home at the time), I packed a small bag and a friend dropped me off at the rest area on the Interstate. My first ride came from a surprisingly friendly state trooper who pointed out that hitchhiking was prohibited on the highway itself. He dropped me off outside the toll booth entrance to the turnpike. Fortunately within minutes I had my first ride, a young guy driving a pickup to western New York State.

It was my first experience of hitchhiking, but at that time people were still casual about giving rides. It was part of the zeitgeist. I rode with a middle-aged black couple, a grizzled old trucker, and a Vietnam vet. By about 3 am I was at a truck stop in Breezewood, in central Pennsylvania. It was snowing lightly, and I discovered a Greyhound bus was leaving soon for New York. I had some money left and opted to ride the rest of the way in comfort, feeling that I had done my requisite time on the road. Arriving in the city, I made my way down to East 13th Street and crashed in the apartment of some friends, former Goshen students doing their I-W work at New York University Hospital.

-- Amos Stoltzfus (to be continued)