February 1976: We were at Kev’s parent’s house for the evening. Just the usual group of guys, hanging out, playing pool, having a few beers, getting high. We were marveling at the damage to the kitchen. Mike asked, “Kev, didn’t your mom just redo this?”
“Yeah, it sucks, but I bought a Harley Sportster yesterday. It’s freaking beautiful. It has a green teardrop tank, chrome fenders and chopper bars.” Kev raised his arms up as though he was gripping the handlebars.”
“Oh yeah,” Mike smiled, “but what are mom and dad going to say about this?”
Earlier in the day, Kev and his girl were heating oil on the stove to cook French fries when they started getting aroused. Before you knew it, they were down on the floor and things were getting hot, just like the oil. It was like “Oh Kev, oh Kev, oh, oh, … what’s that smell?”
Kev looked up. “Oh Shit! the kitchen’s on fire.” Kev jumped up, grabbed a fire extinguisher that luckily was handy and fought the blaze, but not before the wall above the stove was fried. They cleaned it up as best they could but it didn’t look good.
We gathered around the kitchen table. Don grabbed an album and opened the cover to roll some joints. Mike patted Kev on the shoulder and said with a laugh, “Kev when are your mom and dad expected home, because I don’t want to be here when they come in.”
“They’ll be home tomorrow evening.”
“Okay, then, let’s smoke some dubies.”
We talked about the ski trip Kev and I were planning to take in a few days. We were making one last pilgrimage to Vermont to ski Stowe before Kev moved to New York State. “We are going to get an afternoon start, drive into the night to get to Stowe, then catch a few hours of sleep in the car. We’ll ski there for three days, or maybe head up to Jay Peak for one of the days.”
Maybe 15 minutes later Kev’s parents come through the front door. “OH Shit.” We all tried to quickly clean up the evidence of weed. Don folded the album cover.
Kev’s parents walk in the kitchen. They looked at the burnt wall, they looked at us. “Hi Mr. and Mrs. J,” we all murmur as we get up and head downstairs. All except Don that is.
As we exit toward the pool room, we hear Kev’s dad ask, “What happened here?”
“A hot oil flash fire,” Kev said, before blurting out, “Mom, Dad, I bought a Harley! “
We were all cracking up as we headed down and started arranging the balls for a game of pool. “Don didn’t come down with us?” Mike asked.
“No, he’s stuck there with all that weed in the album cover,” I noted.
A few minutes later Don came down. Mr. J had turned toward him, leaned over a chair and given him such an intense stare that he finally got up and exited, clutching the album cover as tightly as possible as he hightailed it out of there. “I just couldn’t get up. I sat there straight faced. He is so screwed, his parents are going to kill him.”
We got a 3-person game of 9-ball going. We probably made one shot each when Kev came down the stairs to tell us we needed to leave. That should have been obvious, but as a bunch of stoned 18 years olds, we were in our own little world.
* * *
Two days later Kev and I are in a local grocery buying food for the trip. “We’re going to be gone for 3 days,” Kev says as he grabs a big jar of peanut butter, “We’re going to need a lot of peanut butter and jelly,” he says as he reaches for a jelly jar. Pistachio nuts were a must. Kev loved eating them as he drove and spitting the shells into the defrost vent to give the car a sweet aroma. “Should we buy some beans,” Kev asked, as he stood with his hand on a large can of baked beans.
“I mean, we could, but cold beans Kev? We don’t have a stove, a pot or utensils with us. We could get this stuff if we drove up the hill to my house.”
“Okay, forget it.” He took his hand off the beans, and we grabbed some pretzels and chips and a few other essential items, then headed to the liquor store for some beers. We packed everything into Kev’s maroon Dodge Dart and were off.
“This is a great car Kev.” The car was a hand me down from an Aunt of Kev’s brother-in-law, Big John, to Big John who didn’t need so he passed it to Kev. Cars were hard to come by at our age. It had been our ride for a few ski strips now and many other local adventures.
We headed for the New York State Thruway, drove that to Albany and then started cutting east to make our way to Route 100 in Vermont near Pico Peak and Killington. It was a beautiful moonlit night. Snow shimmered in the light of the full moon. The only snow free terrain was the two strips that car tires had worn free heading north on 100. When we came to a straight stretch of road, Kev switched off the lights. The world was as lit up as it was with the lights on. Only now everything had a soft glow about it. It was beautiful.
We sat quietly for a while just taking in the beauty of the scene we were moving through, quietly munching on pistachios and tossing the shells into the defrost vents. I asked Kev to tell me about the caboose he was going to rent. “Is it insulated?”
Kev snorted, “Let’s just say it needs some work to make it habitable, but it should be cool once I get it ready. I’ll be staying with Abby and Big John in Saratoga Springs for a few weeks while I get it prepared.”
“Excellent, I hope to crash there with you soon.”
Kev was going to pipefitting school in Albany and would be initiated into the Steamfitters Union when he finished his training. It was the first year after high school and we were all trying to find our way in the world. I was working a job at a factory. I’d been there about 6 months and I was trying to see myself making a career out of it. Mike was in school at Rutgers, and Don was headed to Alaska shortly to work on the pipeline—it was still incomplete back then. We each hoped to develop skills and find a career path. Kev’s plan seemed like a good one.
“What about you, are you staying at the job you’re at?”
“Good question. Sometimes I think so. It seems like a solid company. The work isn’t particularly hard, but sometimes I feel like a monkey could do what I do. It’s getting cold in here.” I put my hands in front of the vents. “Nothing seems to be coming out.”
Kev turned the fan up to max. “Still nothing.” But now we could hear the fan. It was loud, growling, and getting louder. Kev leaned his head toward the vents. His mouth hung open. He was listening. “Huh, I wonder…” Suddenly we were smacked in our faces by a blast of particles flying through the dashboard vents.
“What the hell?” Kev screamed as he slammed on the brakes. “Whoa!” We spun in circles. No one used seat belts in those days. He held tight to the steering wheel, I pressed my arms out to the back of the seat and the dashboard. We slid to a stop. Luckily we stayed on the road. We were freaked out. “What the Fuck was that?” was both our reactions.
Kev saw something dangling in his hair in front of his eyes. He reached up a grabbed it, gave it a sniff, and put it in his mouth. After rolling it around for a few seconds, he spit it back into the defrost vent. “Pistachio shells, … roasted,” he said, looking over at me with his devious child look while giving a nasal laughing snort.
It was about midnight. There was no one else out here. We sat spun sideways in the road laughing for a few minutes. Then I reached forward. “Heat’s working.” We laughed some more as Kev straightened the car out started moving us north.
We arrived in the parking lot at Stowe at about 2am. It had been snowing some and it was cold. We cranked up the heat while we got out our sleeping bags and moved our provisions to the floor. I laid down in the back seat, Kev was in the front. The cold seeped in as soon as he turned off the engine. Our bags were not great. They were lightweight summer fiberfill bags of the day. Our parents weren’t campers, so we had to scrounge together what money we could to buy equipment. Cheap. Poor Quality. These would have been appropriate labels for our gear.
Kev started the car once more as we tried to get warm in our bags, but it was no use. We couldn’t run the car all night. We had just enough money for lift tickets, gas for driving and two nights in the cheapest hotel we could find around Stowe.
I curled into a ball inside my bag and managed a few hours of fitful sleep. We awoke to the sound of car doors shutting as the first of the early morning crowd arrived. “Kev, start the car.” He obliged and we laid there in half slumber while the air in the car got tolerably warm.
We had parked on the edge of the parking lot farthest away from the ski area so as to be inconspicuous. We got up and peed right outside the car. “Wow it is cold out here!” I noted as I stood shivering and peeing. “Nearly freezing my dick off,” Kev added helpfully. The temp had to be near zero.
For each of us, our ski gear consisted of a wool union suit that went under jean coveralls, with sweaters and jackets on top. It wasn’t great, there was warmer gear to be had, but we were two young kids from New Jersey out on an adventure in the great outdoors. We made do. We made it happen.
It was time to eat. I grabbed the peanut butter jar. Tried to open it. It was frozen shut. We put it up near the heater. The jelly also needed some heat just to be opened. Once opened, we found they were both frozen solid. We tried sticking knives in. It was no use. “Dude, this is our breakfast, and our lunch and, What the FUCK. We need to eat,” I ranted. I could see the wheels turning in Kev’s head.
“Just get dressed and we’ll head up to the lodge.” We drove closer. We had left the peanut butter and jelly open on the back seat. We hadn’t noticed that the peanut butter had fallen over as we drove across the parking lot. Once we stopped, Kev reached into one of the bread bags before we headed off. “How many slices you want. I’m thinking I’ll eat four for breakfast, two more for lunch.”
“Sounds good,” I said. We shoved the bread slices in our pockets and walked to the cafeteria.
“Look for pats of butter,” Kev suggested. It was in the food court. There was no way out without going through a register.
“I think we need to buy something. How about we buy this one roll.” Kev agreed. We headed to the register, with one roll and about 20 pats of butter. The butter was free. The cashier looked at us. I shrugged my shoulders. “We like our buttered rolls with lots of butter.” We sat down. We pulled the bread out of our pockets. We feasted, but saved two buttered slices each for lunch.
There was no line when the lift started. It was cold, but Stowe provided blankets for sitting on the lifts on cold days back then. We checked the thermometer next to the lift 3 degrees Fahrenheit. My toes weren’t going to last but a few runs in these temps. I suffer from bad circulation in my toes. The first time I froze them was in a boy scout camp out where we slept in a lean-to when the temperature dipped to 4F. Freezing happened quickly. Thawing was slow and painful as I learned that first morning sitting in a ranger’s cabin in front of his fireplace. If the air didn’t warm up quickly, which luckily it did, I could count on at most 3 runs before I needed to head in to thaw out.
Kev and I were intermediate skiers, but we fancied ourselves to be better than that. I thought of myself as a sit-back freestyle skier. I had this one move that I thought was cool and I tried again and again to perfect. I would ski up a mogul and sit back on my tails to show a little style. Mostly it just caused me to lose control and either fall or ski wildly out-of-control until I stopped. But I thought it was cool, and I was 18 and determined. I also don’t think I understood back then that skiers were supposed to balance over the center of their skis.
We got a few runs in and Kev was ahead of me skiing up to the lift. There was a young woman there waiting for her friend. Kev skied up and said “Shall we,” she took one look at the devilishly handsome Kev and they hopped on the lift together. I hopped on with her friend. They were our age. Both were students at University of Vermont in Burlington out for a day of skiing. My lift partner’s name was Jane, she asked, “So what do you do?”
“I work in a factory in northern New Jersey.”
“Do you work with engineers or designers?”
“No, I just fill hoppers with poisonous chemicals.”
“And you’re going to keep doing this?”
“The pay’s not bad. If I stay there until I’m 30 I’ll be able to buy a new stereo set and a car. If I stay a lot longer, I’ll be able to afford a house.”
Jane looked down. Thinking back, if the chair wasn’t so high off the ground, I expect she would have jumped at this point. But, being stuck with me for a few more minutes she continued, “So, do you and your buddy live together?”
“No, we live with our parents, though Kev is moving out soon.”
“What about you, when are you moving out?”
“The way I have it figured, I should be out by the time I’m 30, 35 at the latest.”
She looked down again, thinking, maybe I can jump now, but no, still too risky. She switched subjects, “Do you ski a lot?”
This was my opening. I told her that I was a freestyle skier, that I loved riding my tails in mogul fields. This caught her curiosity. Maybe this guy wasn’t a total loser after all. When we got off the lift her friend wanted to ski an expert slope. Kev and I obliged. Jane wanted to see my freestyle skills so she hung back a little to watch me.
The fresh snow from the morning was mostly skied off at this point, and this expert run was a field of steep icy moguls. I did a sliding fall just arriving at the first mogul, but I got up quickly. I was determined that I had something to show her. I skied toward another mogul did my little trick, lost control and went flying across the slope and into the woods with my arms and poles flailing wildly in all directions, just desperately trying not to fall. My back was to the slope as I stood in the woods trying to work my way back to the slope. I could hear her as she skied by, “It was nice to meet you.”
With that they were gone. I made my way down to Kev. “I think we need to stick to intermediate slopes.”
He agreed, and asked, “Do you think you’ll ever get that move worked out, or is it time to give up on it?”
“It’s probably time to give it up, but I want to be able to do something that shows I have some style.”
“That may not be it.”
“I know,” and with that we skittered down the best we could until the slope eased up and we could ski it.
We got in a full day of skiing and headed back to the car. We were both hoping that the peanut butter had melted because we were all out of butter sandwiches. When we reached the car, we saw that the peanut butter jar had tipped over and that the midday sun had worked its magic. It had warmed up the inside of the car melting the peanut butter into a blob on the back seat. I freaked. “What are we going to eat now?” But Kev was already thinking about what we could do. He climbed in the seat next to the blob, and stood the jar up. Maybe 1/3 was still inside. “Okay, this is good.”
“But it’s not enough.”
“I know, just hand me a knife, some bread and some paper plates.” With that he got to work. The first slices of bread were almost exclusively peanut butter with a minimum of hair and other filth. “Heck those could be rat hairs from the processing plant,” Kev half joked, “This is good.”
The further down he got, the less likely it was that all he was slathering on the bread were a few rat hairs left over from processing. He took a bite, “See that’s good,” but then used his fingers to pull some nasty looking fur out of his mouth.
“Did Big John’s aunt have a dog?”
Kev just laughed. “Give me another few slices.” With that he got to work scraping the back seat resurrecting as much peanut butter as he could. The last few slices looked downright furry.” “I think this will answer your question,” Kev laughed as he showed me a slice, “Looks like German Shepard to me.”
We made a plan. We ordered the peanut butter slathered bread from top to bottom with the best, least furry slices, on top, and the worst ones on bottom. We would only eat those last few if we were absolutely desperate, or stoned enough that we couldn’t tell the difference. We threw the worst few on the shelf in front of the rear window. The others we matched with jelly slices and slid the sandwiches into the bread bags.
Time to find a place to sleep. We drove around to every rundown looking motel in town. It was mid-week so they weren’t full, and when one place gave us an offer of $21/night for 2 nights for a room with 2 twin beds we jumped. I was exuberant, “This is less than we were expecting to pay. More money for beer.” We got cleaned up an turned on the tv and sat down. There was one station, it was playing I Love Lucy. We looked at each other. “Let’s go.”
We headed out looking for a bar. The place we walked into had foosball, pool and a karaoke machine. Lots of toys, lots of distractions. I was thrilled. I sucked at meeting women in bars. It was often too loud, and I never knew what to say anyway. I could maybe get involved in a game or listen to amateur crooners trying out their voices. It was less likely that I would have to try and interact with a woman.
We got some beers and an order of fries with chili sauce. Oh my god, they were warm. They didn’t even taste like peanut butter, and they lacked any fur. We each wanted another order or two or three, but we held back.
Kev practices pool at home pretty regularly, so he kicks my butt every time we play, but the pool table was in use, while the foosball table, where we were more equal, was available. We jumped on it. Two other guys jumped up at the same time. “Want to play a foursome?” we offered. They agreed, so it was Kev and I against them. I was on fire. I play a little foosball, and I’m average at it, but not tonight. Kev and I took an early lead with well-aimed shots on goal. When high-fiving each other after one particularly dominant point I spied two young women standing behind us checking out us and our game. I turned around with my hand raised high and one of them returned the high-five.
After a few games we yielded the table and I had a thought. I’ve got to continue looking studly to this young babe. The karaoke stage was empty. I turned to her and said “follow me." She did. I went up on the stage, asked the controller to play “Wild Thing,” by the Troggs. He obliged.
I started singing,
[Chorus]
Wild thing You make my heart sing You make everything groovy Wild thing
I belted out the first verse with gusto.
[Verse 1] Wild thing, I think I love you But I wanna know for sure Come on, hold me tight! I love you
[Chorus]
I was in full voice and dancing to fit the music. The bar responded. Kev and the other young woman came over and danced. Others, stopped what they were doing for the moment and paid attention. I was on fire.
[Verse 2] Wild thing, I think you move me But I wanna know for sure So, come on, and hold me tight! You move me [Chorus] [Outro] Come on! Come on! Wild thing Shake it! Shake it! Wild thing I love you
Wild...
When it was over, I jumped down off the stage. The girl I had been high-fiving was eager to chat me up. We stood there smiling at each other for a few minutes. She yelled to me over the noise, “So where you from?”
I yelled back, “Northern New Jersey.”
She shook her head yes. “What do you do?”
“I work in a factory loading poisonous chemicals…” Maybe because I was yelling, I finally heard myself. That sentence was as good as any bottled female repellent. I could have been blasting out silent but deadly farts, I could have just eaten a whole bulb of raw garlic and been hovering right over her face.
She yelled again, “What did you say, poisonous chemicals? Are you studying to be a chemist?”
“No, I just work in a factory.”
“Oh,” she remained pleasant and shook her head yes, but she started looking around. After a few minutes of standing in virtual silence she yelled, “I need to find the ladies room.”
I shook my head yes. “Okay cool.” I watched her walk away. She saw someone she knew and walked over to them. She wasn’t coming back. I was studly, until I opened my mouth to speak. My sister Janet had begged me time and again to quit that stupid job. It was dangerous to my health and I could do so much better. For the first time tonight, I started to understand that she was right. I had to quit, I had to push myself to do better.
I headed over and watched the foosball action. Kev joined me a little while later. Seems he struck out as well. “She’s not interested in getting involved with someone who lives so far away,” he screamed in my ear.
“Want to go?”
He shook his head yes and we made our way out into the cold night air. Back at the room we got ready for bed and flipped on the tv. “They’re still playing I Love Lucy?” It’s our only channel and from what we could see, it was all I Love Lucy, all the time. “My mom would be thrilled. She loves this show,” I said. We passed out in a few minutes. I got up sometime during the night. I Love Lucy had stopped playing. The sign-off screen was showing. I turned it off.
We got up and started getting ready the next morning. Eating was Russian roulette. One didn’t know what each bite would yield. It would either be, “mmm, PB&J,” or picking out a few pieces of fur, or outright retching and aiming for the garbage pail we had placed between us. We’d each egg the other on when we saw the other’s face turn hesitant. “Swallow, Swallow…” Kev was better at this than me. He had a higher tolerance for undesirable foods than I. I’d seen evidence of this over the days and nights we worked in his garage restoring a 1960 Austin Healy Bug Eye Sprite. We’d have beers open while we were power sanding the body and getting dust everywhere. I tended to hide my beer the best I could. Kev just put it on the shelf and drank out of it. If we came back to finish the job the next day, he’d finish whatever dregs were left in the bottle. It was beer after all.
We were getting through most of the fur sandwiches, as we became fond of calling them, and we saw that we had enough good, fur free, peanut butter left in the jar that we could hold off eating anymore furry ones after we were done with this breakfast.
It was a bluebird day. No new snow, but bright sunshine and warm enough that we could eat lunch at the top of the ski area looking out over a pastoral Vermont scene blanketed in snow. I was filled with angst. I started, “Kev, I have to do something different.”
“We could ski a different run.”
“No I mean with my life. I can’t stay in this dead-end job. I have this pretty MG that I drive, but I drive it to this factory everyday where I sit and do stupid work. This is what I want. I want to have adventures,” and I splayed my arms out taking in the scene. “I want something more, but I have no idea how to get there.”
“What about going to college?”
“I don’t know if school is right for me. I mean, I did poorly in high school. I don’t know if college would be any different.”
“You’re good with your hands. I didn’t restore that Austin Healy on my own.”
“I know, and we never did finish it. Hopefully your dad does a great job finishing what we started. But it’s just like that Autin Healy. One day we both realized that working on cars and making it in our own town wasn’t for us. You are finding a way beyond that. I haven’t yet.”
“Chuck, you are good at thinking, you’ll figure this out.”
“I hope so. It’s my life. Hey, you want to ski Jay Peak tomorrow? It’s about a half hour north of here and it has a tram. I’ve never ridden a tram.”
“Sure, could be fun.”
“Oh, and it’s real close to the Canadian border, maybe we could drive over the border after skiing just to do it, before we turn south for home.”
“Smoke a bowl in Canada. Sure, I’m in.”
And with that we headed down the slope, and started an afternoon of fun skiing. Back at the hotel that evening we counted out our remaining funds. I calculated, “We need $40 for skiing Jay, $60 for gas for the ride home. We had $130 altogether. It’s burgers and beers! Let’s head to the bar we went to last night, maybe we can catch a game on the tv, anything but I Love Lucy.”
We were sitting at the bar savoring each bite of our non-furry non-peanut butter meals and beers watching a game on the tv, when two young women walked in and sat next to Kev. After a few minutes their conversation expanded to include us. They were here from Boston for a couple days of skiing. After yelling across to the one furthest from Kev for a few minutes, I motioned to her to come and take the empty seat next to me. She obliged. When we came around to the topic of what I do I said, “I’m working at a factory right now, but I’m starting school in the fall.”
“What are you going to study?”
“I’m not sure yet, but maybe architecture. I’m good at math and I like to draw, so maybe that’ll work. What about you?”
The conversation seemed to flow effortlessly. I wasn’t up on stage, I wasn’t the star, I was just someone with a future of possibility. I liked being that person, I didn’t know if I could make it happen, but at least I had to try. They had to leave after about an hour. They had to drive back to Boston early in the morning to make their afternoon classes. Before she left, Katie, gave me her number. “If you’re ever in Boston, look me up” she said with a smile.
“Thanks, I will.”
With that Kev and I finished watching the game for a while, then we too headed back to catch episodes of I Love Lucy and some shut eye.
Jay had about 6” of new snow when we arrived in the morning, and it kept coming down. Neither of us had much experience skiing powder. There was a lot of man-made snow in the east, which is ice not powder, and when snow did fall it was skied into moguls so quickly that we never had a chance to gain any expertise. Being mid-week and so far north, Jay was quiet today. We got our first chance to learn. We fell a lot. We were covered in snow. Our jean coveralls were frozen stiff, but we had a blast playing in the snow, if not exactly turning up the powder.
The sun was shining by the time we got back to the car at the end of the ski day. We threw all our wet stuff in the trunk, caught a buzz, cracked some beers and headed for the border. “It should only be about 15 or 20 minutes north,” I said to Kev while checking out the map as he drove us out of the parking lot.
We came to a small town that seemed likely to be the border outpost. Kev saw this cute young woman walking down the street, we both turned our heads away from the road for a few seconds to have a look, then kept driving. A few seconds later a cop was coming up behind us. We pulled over to let him pass, only he didn’t pass. He stopped behind us.
“Roll down the windows to get the smoke out of the car,” Kev said. “Yes officer,” when he came up to Kev’s window.
“Do you know that you just drove across the border without stopping at the customs station?”
“Huh, no. Sorry, we were just looking at that pretty girl over there,” and Kev craned his neck around and pointed to the girl now far in the distance. I guess we missed it.”
The officer was not impressed by the explanation. Turn around and follow me. With that he headed back to his car.
“Kev, where’s the weed.”
“It’s in my pocket.”
When we drove back to the station, we saw that you had to drive off the main road to get to it, but still, the big signs announcing “Customs Station” should have been a tipoff. We were taken into the station while the car was put in a garage and ripped apart. I was the first to be brought into a room separately from Kev.
“Empty your pockets and stand with your legs apart and arms out.”
I did as asked. I didn’t have anything on me. I was cleared and sent back out. It was Kev’s turn. I expect I was white as a ghost while he was in there. I was expecting at any minute to be handcuffed and dragged to a cell, but after a few minutes he came back out and sat next to me.
An officer came in with something from the car. He was grinning. He had us. “Look what I found. Some kind of cooked pot on bread.”
“No,” Kev said, “that’s not pot, that’s peanut butter and German Shepard.”
I shook my head in agreement. The officer looked confused. But he was determined, “Oh we got you boys. This is some strong fuzzy marijuana.”
“No, that’s the German Shepard from the seat. We kept that in case we got real hungry.”
Another officer came over for a closer look. He picked at some of the hairs in the bread. “This does look like dog hair.” He gave it a sniff, “It smells like peanut butter with dog hair mixed in.”
Wide eyed, with open mouths, we shook our heads, “Uh huh.”
He walked over to a garbage can. Flipped the lid open with his foot and dropped in the plate with fuzzy peanut butter covered bread into the trash. We were kind of glad to see it go. Now we wouldn’t have to contemplate eating it.
This officer now confronted us. All we found was a roach clip and a few seeds. It’s cost you $50 for running the customs station, and then you can go back into the states.
We had $75 left between us. $50 was going to leave us short of gas money. No matter, we paid it and got out of there.
We didn’t talk until we got south of the small border village. “Kev what happened? How did you not get busted?”
No one was watching me for a minute while you were being frisked, so I put the weed in armpit of my sweater. He didn’t feel it when he was frisking me.” Kev reached into his thick loose sweater and pulled out the much-diminished bag of weed. “Let’s catch a buzz.”
“What are we going to do about gas money?”
Kev looked at the fuel gauge, “We have a half tank, and the $25 we have left should be enough to get us to Saratoga Springs where Abby and Big John live. They’ll front us the money we need to get home.”
So we settled in for the long drive to Sarasota Springs as darkness settled on the Northeast Kingdom.
It was late when we knocked on Abby and Big John’s door. Big John answered. He let us in. We explained about the girl, and driving over the border, and the peanut butter with German Shepard in it, and the border cops taking our gas money. They were tired, I’m not sure they followed every detail. They offered to let us stay, but I had to work in the morning, so they loaned us $30 and sent us on our way.
We filled the tank for $15 and we figured we only needed $10 more to get home. We found a bar. Kev headed in to buy some beer. Kev was in the bar for longer than I expected. He came out with a six-pack and a puppy.
She was tiny and cute. We didn’t have any food for her in the car, but she gladly finished licking up the peanut butter in the back seat, and didn’t flinch at consuming a little German Shepard.
* * *
Kev, and Bridget, as he named his new puppy, didn’t move to New York State for long, and he never moved into the caboose, but he did move on. He got accepted to the Hobart Institute of Welding Technology in Ohio and started in the May class. By fall he had accepted a job in Washington State welding in nuclear power plants. He became skilled at the most demanding welding jobs there were.
I made it back to school that fall with an eye toward developing the skills I needed to become an architect. It didn’t take, but I finally started college in earnest in January 1980 in Bozeman, Montana. It was a place where I could both advance my studies and live an adventurous life. I didn’t stop attending school until I earned a PhD in Economics in summer 1989 from Duke University.
Kev and I are still buds to this day.
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