On The Road In The 1970's: Part 14

How I spent the remainder of the day in Albuquerque is now a completely faded memory, although, since I had been awake all night as the jeep in which I had been given a ride drove eastward, I probably found some deserted spot on the University of New Mexico's campus space, after using a bathroom in one of its campus buildings, and slept there for a few hours; and then blended into the campus scene and streets and neighborhood in the afternoon. And it could be that I spent the late afternoon and most of the evening browsing inside Albuquerque bookstores or checking out whether there was much of a visible 1970s freak counter-cultural off-campus or on-campus scene.

What I next remember is being approached by a  uniformed Albuquerque white cop or uniformed white campus cop in his late 20s or early 30s, in the late evening, as I was sitting on the University of Albuquerque lawn with my large knapsack (that I had used for overnight hikes during my years as a boy scout), preparing to sleep that night on the campus lawn, before waking up early the next morning and walking back downtown to hitch another ride and continue further east towards Indianapolis; where I had decided, by then, I had wanted to revisit, since I had lived there in the early 1960s and hadn't returned to in a decade, on my way back to New York City.

"Let me see your student I.D.!," the uniformed white cop ordered.

"I don't have a student I.D., but I've just been hanging around the campus," I replied.

"Well, let me see some other kind of I.D.," the white cop ordered.

After I handed him a copy of my New York Public Library borrowing card, the cop walked back to where he had parked his cop car, checked out my name with whatever data access system he used in his car to see if there was some kind of warrant for the arrest of me that might require him to stop me from being on the road. Then he walked back to me and warned me not to still be hanging out on the campus later in the night when he returned to patrol that part of the campus grounds again.

But right after the white cop again walked back to his patrol car, a hippie-looking, University of New Mexico white woman student who, while walking back to her dormitory had noticed that a hippie-looking guy with a large knapsack, like me, was being harassed by the cop, approached me, laughed and said to me:  "You can crash in my dorm room floor for the night, if you need to get away from that pig."

"That would be greatly appreciated," I replied with a smile.

"Then follow me. My dorm is over there."

By the 1970s, there were co-ed dorms on most state university campuses and it was no longer prohibited for women or men or to invite people of a different gender to their dorm rooms at night. And, in most hippie or freak youth student campus circles, the fear didn't then exist among most hippy women that if you invited a hippie or freak long-haired or bearded man in his 20s to crash in your apartment or dorm room, who was drifting around the country, that there was any particular risk that the guy would see it as some kind of rape opportunity, or automatically assume that he was being invited to your room or apartment for a sexual encounter.

So once we entered her dorm and walked up the stairs to her dorm room, she, matter-of-factly, pointed to some empty space on the floor and said, "You can sleep there" in a friendly way; not too long before she turned off the lights in her dorm room and stretched out alone on the sole single bed in the dorm room.

I don't remember now what we discussed on our short walk from the campus lawn where the cop had been harassing me to her dorm room. But, since I didn't feel any vibes from her which indicated that she was interested in me particularly on a sexual level and was just letting me crash in her dorm room for the night as an act of hippie kindness and freak solidarity, I probably mentioned to her that I would be going back on the road to continue hitching east early in the morning, before she woke up; and I probably said "goodbye" to her and thanked her again right before she turned of the lights for the night in her dorm room. And after awaking early the next morning, while she was still asleep, I quietly picked up my knapsack, after having slept in my clothes on the dorm room floor, quietly opened the dorm dorm room door, and quietly walked out of the dorm room to walk back to downtown Albuquerque and try to get another ride further east.

As I've noted previously, one thing you'll generally discover, if you hitchhike across the United States on the road from coast to coast with not much money in your pocket,  is that, although the political and corporate leaders of the U.S.A. might be a corrupt and selfish group of people, the vast majority of the people who live within the U.S.A. who aren't in positions of power are, individually, friendly and good-natured; and generally willing to help out other people most of the time.

Occasionally, you'll bump into drivers on the road who might have a cut-throat personality or who will try to exploit you in some way. And, occasionally, you might bump into someone who--unlike this University of New Mexico woman student in the 1970s--offers you a place to crash only in order to either push their religious beliefs on you or take advantage of you in some way. But, at least in the 1970s, whenever you might need a helping hand at any point on the road from one coast to the other, you usually would always find some friendly, kind soul in the U.S.A., like the University of New Mexico woman student who let me crash in her dorm room, to both help you and remind you why--despite the horrible political and economic system and corrupt elite rulers that exploit them--the majority of people living in the U.S.A. are friendly people who, individually, deserve your individual love whenever you relate to them.