On The Road In The 1970's: Part 9

As Abbie Hoffman once indicated in one of his late 1960's or early 1970's books, when a driver picked a hitchhiker up in the 1960's and 1970's (decades before the 21st-century "gig economy' era of cellphones, smartphones, Uber and Lyft, etc.), one reason might be that the driver just wished to acquire a temporary companion for part of his or her drive to converse with, in order to reduce the boredom of a long drive alone. And having acquired a lot of experience in speaking with a lot of different types of people spontaneously in the USA about their personal lives as a New Left activist/organizer in the 1960's, I found it fairly easy in the 1970's to get a good conversation started and kept going with most any driver who might pick me up when I was hitchhiking on the road in the 1970's.

In the 1970's, if you were still in your 20's and looked like a long-haired freak or hippy, whether bearded or not bearded, a  white man hitching alone could still hook-up with highway drivers who would not be reluctant--and who were often eager--to stop and invite him to "hop in." If the driver who offered you a ride in the 1970's was also a freak or hippy in his 20's like you were, then you would often be seen as a brother or a fellow member of an underground Woodstock nation of outlaws, that the culturally  straight local cops, local authorities, local establishments and "suits", who continued to dress straight and go to barbers who cut their hair shirt, were still trying to suppress around the United States.

And if the driver who offered you a ride in the 1970's wasn't a freak or hippy and looked like one of the culturally straight folks, you often sometimes felt that, in some ways, he or she saw you as a symbol of the freedom that he or she maybe once had or dreamed of having, but lacked now because of things like family economic support pressures and kid-raising or 9-to-5 job responsibilities.

Either type of drivers who picked you up on the road in the 1970's were usually personally generous and personally friendly. Although, if the driver who picked you up wasn't also a freak or hippy long-haired person, you usually had to be more cautious about what you said (especially about saying anything political or anything about religion) until you got a sense from the conversation in the car where he or she was coming from philosophically; and had determined whether he or she might be some kind of right-wing type person. But, of course, if you looked like a freak/hippy in the 1970's, most of the right-wing types who were still gung-ho about the System would generally not be willing to pick you up on the highway.

What you felt from hitching on the road in the 1970's, was that, however morally obnoxious were the businessmen, generals, politicians and super-rich white folks who ruled the USA, the vast majority of people in the United States who you met while on the road, regardless of which state you were traveling through, were still quite friendly, generous, good-natured, kind and often verbally witty and hip on a personal level in the 1970's; and many of the folks you met while on the road who picked you up in the 1970's were also still great and interesting oral storytellers when you conversed with them. You felt that the militaristic dog-eat-dog System and institutions that people who were born in the USA were supposed to accept passively and adjust to living under, while they were alive, did not really reflect the humanistic national character of most people who were born in the 20th-century in the USA or who then lived in the USA in the 1970's.

On The Road In The 1970's: Part 8

Back in Los Angeles in the late afternoon, after returning from Disneyland in Anaheim, I was ready to go on the road again. So, with less than $20 in my pocket, I began hitching back from the West Coast to the East Coast.

Strangely, I felt I was absolutely free on a certain level, having no job, no place inside where I was sure I would be able to sleep that night, practically no money left, and no one in the whole world whom I felt both loved the person I had become in the 1970's or cared whether I lived or died; and I, myself, on a certain level no longer cared whether I lived or died, given my conclusion, at this time, that for working-class people in the USA, in the 1970's, life after leaving college was a meaningless one of spiritual, intellectual, emotional, philosophical, political, moral, artistic and sexual death and economic enslavement, within a morally degenerate, imperialist economic system of corporate totalitarianism. I felt that I had made the good fight in the 1960's and early 1970's. But given how bleak the future looked for me personally, even if I didn't make it back East, I then felt I had already experienced the best of what life in the USA would ever offer a working-class person in the way of relative personal freedom, during my years as a college undergraduate; and I then felt post-college/post-campus life in "real world" would continue to be a downhill, deadening experience compared to what life had been like when in college, until the day I died.

But despite these kind of thoughts, I had never been much of a suicidal person, no matter how miserable I felt my personal economic life situation might be or how personally unloved or lonely I felt. Maybe because I had always been blessed and lucky in my personal physical health situation no matter how impoverished I had become in the 1970's. Or maybe because I had always been able to channel any of my personal blues feelings, that might have pushed me into a suicidal mindset, into a source of artistic inspiration for the folk song lyrics, poems, plays, stories and folk song tunes that I had always found it easy to write, since my teenage years in high school.

On The Road In The 1970's: Part 7

I no longer remember much about my night bus ride down the highway from `Frisco to L.A., probably because I must have fallen asleep on the bus and slept through much of the ride before the bus pulled into the Greyhound station in Los Angeles, just a few hours after sunrise, but an hour or two before the Monday morning commuter rush hour into Los Angeles had begun. I vaguely remember that the seat next to me on the bus had been occupied by a culturally straight-looking white guy in his 20's, who didn't seem particularly unfriendly or reactionary, but who, like me, had been more into trying to get some sleep on the bus during the trip to L.A., rather than having any kind of a long, spontaneous conversation between "fellow-travelers."

Inside the bus terminal in Los Angeles, I found an empty bus station locker to store my large knapsack bag for most of the day and then found out from the information desk which commuter bus would take me to where Disneyland was located in Anaheim and bought myself a round-trip ticket for the bus to and from Anaheim. Since I now had much less money in my pocket than the $100 I would need at that time to buy the Greyhound bus ticket that would take me back to New York City, I realized that I was now going to have to hitchhike back from the West Coast to the East Coast. But rather than spending a day checking out Hollywood, Santa Monica or Los Angeles' street life before heading back to New York City on the road, I somehow felt that before I headed back East I wanted to visit Disneyland.

As a child growing up in New York City, I had always wanted to visit Disneyland but had never done so. And, not knowing in the 1970's if I was going to survive economically or physically much longer, I somehow still felt that I wanted to see Disneyland before I died.

Arriving in Anaheim by an outgoing commuter bus later in the morning, I can recall walking down a road from the bus station to the Disneyland entrance and then spending much of my remaining money on the fee that was required in order to enter through the gates of Disneyland.

Once inside Disneyland, I was surprised to see that the rides and structures in Fantasyland, Frontierland, Adventureland, and Tomorrowland seemed much smaller than I had imagined them to be when, as a child, I watched film of them on the 1950s Disneyland tv show. And after maybe spending 2 or 3 hours walking around Disneyland and checking out the 1970s Disnelyand scene, I started to get bored. So I got on a commuter bus that was returning from Anaheim to Los Angeles.

On The Road In The 1970's: Part 6

Only a few hours before I was to leave Berkeley to catch the Alameda County bus that would take me back over the bridge to S.F., where I would then wait inside the Greyhound station until I could board the bus to L.A., a friendly blond-haired, blue-eyed, hip-looking white woman, looking like she was in her 20's, who had a California regional accent, suddenly approached me on the sidewalk of Telegraph Avenue, about three or four blocks away from the campus, while I was standing there with my large knapsack. The young white woman was someone that most men in the 1970's would likely have characterized as a "California beauty."

"Hi!  Did you just arrive here in Berkeley?" she asked, with a friendly smile.

"Actually, I'm planning to leave Berkeley tonight?"

"Why are you leaving?"

"I'm running out of money and I have to hitch back to New York City soon."

Continuing to smile in a friendly way, the young white woman then asked:  "Maybe you'd like to stay around for a few more days and visit the Ashram where I live?"

"You live in an Ashram?" I replied with surprise. And we then got into a 10-minute philosophical/political discussion in which I explained why I probably wouldn't fit in philosophically with the spiritual community that she had found now fulfilled her spiritual needs in the 1970's.

By the 1970's the liberal ideology that the U.S. Establishment's corporate mass media and U.S. public and private school educational/political indoctrination system disseminated did not provide an accurate explanation for why the Civil Rights and anti-war movement of the 1960's could not win its demands for racial equality in the USA and peace in Vietnam. Or why many young people in the USA were brutalized by U.S. police when they protested on campus and in the streets in the 1960's and early 1970's. So many young people in the USA became political radicalized and, for a while, felt that the New Left's neo-Marxist ideology propagated less myths about U.S. society than did the U.S. Establishment's corporate liberal ideology.

The Kent State and Jackson State massacres and U.S. government and local police harassment, imprisonment and even killings of Black Panther Party activists and other Movement activists convinced, however, many "stage-in-life" radical youths that changing the world by means of New Left movement political action was not possible; and the U.S. women's liberation movement of the late 1960's and early 1970's convinced large numbers of young U.S. women that the New Left political movement was too patriarchal and male chauvinist to ever create a new world in which all women were free and equal. As a result, large numbers of these dissident and politically alienated "stage-in-life" politically radical youth seemed to get into some form of New Age spiritualism, East Asian religions or some hippie variation of a religiously Christian sect, like "Children of God" or "Jews for Jesus."

Hence, even on a previously politicized campus like UC-Berkeley or on streets like Telegraph Avenue, by the 1970's you were just as likely to be handed a flyer that attempted to recruit you to some New Age, Eastern religious or hippie Christian sect as you were to be handed a flyer for some local protest, that would generally attract fewer supporters than the same political group's previous monthly demo.

Once the young white woman concluded that I was either too intellectual or still too philosophically New Leftist a street person/nomad to be a potential recruit for her Ashram, she soon lost interest in continuing our discussion on the street; and, still smiling and friendly, wished me well, before she headed back to eat her evening dinner at her Ashram. I then started walking down to Shattuck Avenue to catch the Alameda Country Transit bus that would take me into San Francisco; where I would then walk to the Greyhound bus station and wait there for the late evening bus that would take me down to Los Angeles.,

On The Road In The 1970's: Part 5

After spending the rest of my first day in California exploring the Berkeley campus and Telegraph Avenue, I spent the second day taking from Shattuck Avenue the bus that took you back into San Francisco and headed out to Golden Gate Park in San Francisco for the first time. When I got to Golden Gate Park in the 1970's, there were still a few groups of hippies handing out there on weekdays. But nobody walked over to share a joint with me or seemed interested in approaching strangers, like some hippies of the 1960's had often done. After getting bored with walking and then sitting on the ground in Golden Gate Park for a few hours, I eventually took a trolley to the beach to see the Pacific Ocean. And then, before heading back to Berkeley from the Bay Transit terminal, I went back downtown to explore the area near Fisherman's Wharf and afterwards, like more culturally straight tourists, took a ride on one of the San Francisco cable cars.

Starting to get bored with hanging out around Berkeley's campus by my third day in Berkeley, I decided to check out what the 1970's scene was like near Stanford University's campus in Palo Alto, California. Still being into protest folk songwriting in the 1970's, Palo Alto also interested me because that was where Joan Baez seemed to be living in the 1970's; and I probably subconsciously felt that, maybe if I spontaneously walked around Palo Alto, cosmic forces would cause me to bump into her and, as a result of this chance cosmic encounter, lead her to start singing cover versions of the non-commercial protest folk songs I had written, which her mother had liked.

But when I got to the Palo Alto bus station after taking a bus from Berkeley back into San Francisco, walking to the Greyhound bus station and buying a round trip ticket between SF and Palo Alto, I walked around a bit, couldn't find the way to get to the Stanford University campus from the Palo Alto Greyhound bus station, didn't bump into Joan Baez on the street, and decided I should just get on the next Greyhound bus going back to San Francisco, rather than hang around on the streets of Palo Alto.

The town of Palo Alto in the 1970's didn't seem to have enough of an interesting street scene for me to want to wait another 3 hours for the last night bus that would take me back to San Franciso's Greyhound bus terminal. So I ended up getting back to SF from Palo Alto by returning on an earlier bus. And once back in SF, I walked down Market Street again and into the still busy commuter bus terminal, where I then got on the Alameda County Transit bus that would again take me back over the Oakland-SF bridge and back to Berkeley.

After spending the rest of the week just hanging around the U. of California's campus, walking up and down Telegraph Avenue and Shattuck Avenue and streets like Dwight Way and in and out of bookstores and vinyl record stores a lot, I began to realize that I was not destined that week to then cosmically bump into either any old Movement friends from the 1960's, or any new 1970's Movement freaks who lived in California, on the campus or streets of Berkeley, during this trip to the West Coast.

So, despite my vague hope before I got on the road on the east coast that I would spontaneously stumble into some kind of housing situation in Berkeley that would make it unnecessary to quickly get back east to my Jamaica, Queens basement apartment, I concluded that I would spend most of the rest of my money on a ticket for a Greyhound bus that would leave San Francisco near midnight on Sunday; and then get me into the Los Angeles Greyhound bus terminal early the next morning on Monday. Taking the night bus also meant that I would not have to worry about finding a place to sleep for that night, since I could just try to doze off somewhat during the night, while the bus took the interstate highway southward, for the long drive down to Los Angeles.

(end of part 5)

On The Road In The 1970's:Part 4

Market Street in San Francisco looked interesting as I walked from the Greyhound Station to the Bay Transit Terminal during the morning rush hour, opposite to the way most of the commuting workers, who had come into San Francisco from across the Bay or from a MUNI trolley or cable car in a neighborhood elsewhere, were scurrying. But I was eager to first make my pilgrimage to Berkeley and walk down Telegraph Avenue and across the campus, before I did any exploring of San Francisco for the first time.

When I first visited Berkeley in the 1970s, the BART subway that connects Berkeley to San Francisco had not yet been completed. So the way people living in Berkeley and Oakland who wished to use mass transit to commute to a job in San Francisco did so was to take one of the Alameda County buses which drove across the Oakland-San Francisco bridge and into the Bay Area bus terminal. Hence, during the weekday morning rush hour, when I first walked into the Bay Area bus terminal and tried to figure out which bus I would have to hop on to reach Berkeley, the terminal was filled much more with morning commuters from the East Bay area than it would later be in the decades after the BART subway line was more completely built and more people began using BART to get to work, rather than taking a bus from Berkeley to SF.

I can't remember much about my bus ride from SF to Berkeley--from the same bridge that the Greyhound had taken me a few hours before, but in the opposite direction--except that I still found it interesting to look out of the window as the bus drove across the Oakland-SF bridge. What I do recall, though, is that I felt excited, when the bus reached its last stop on Shattuck Avenue in Downtown Berkeley, and I eagerly walked up the hill towards Telegraph Avenue, where I walked into the lobby of the first old building on Telegraph Avenue near the the campus that I noticed having a sign indicating it was some kind of hotel or SRO kind of place.

In the 1970s, you could still usually arrive in a town and walk into some kind of motel or hotel or SRO and, without having made a previous reservation, obtain a vacant room to rent for a week. So when I interrupted the book-reading of the dressed-up and bored-looking white woman in her 20's who was sitting behind the check-in desk of the small hotel lobby and asked if a vacant room for a week's stay was available, she coldly gave me the key to one of the vacant rooms, in exchange for me giving her a cash payment for a week's stay.

The room was very small, but it had a bed for me to sleep on. I no longer can recall whether or not it had its own bathroom or whether hotel guests had to share a bathroom in the hall with each other. Whether or not the room had its own bathroom likely mattered little to me, since, whenever I needed a john during the day or evening while in Berkeley that week, I usually just used the one in the campus student union building.

I spent very little time inside the hotel room during my week in the Bay area. Being bearded with long hair at that time in the 1970's, I didn't need to waste any time shaving in the morning; and, since the hotel room lacked a refrigerator or kitchen or hot plate, I fed myself on what I ate outside of where I was staying.

Each morning during my stay in Berkeley I would buy myself a freshly-squeezed glass of orange juice from the stand that was then set up at the entrance to the University of California campus at the top of Telegraph Avenue. Then I would usually buy a scrambled egg breakfast with toast in some local restaurant near the campus; and that would keep me from feeling hungry again until the evening.

Most of my first day in Berkeley was spent walking around the UC-Berkeley campus, sitting on the steps, ledges or benches near the plaza around Sproul Hall, where the large student rallies of the 1960's used to be held, and hanging out there for a few hours watching the students walk by; before later walking off campus and back towards Telegraph Avenue, where I spent the last few hours of sunlight browsing in bookstores and vinyl record shops.

Campus buildings like Sproul Hall and campus plazas like the one in front of Sproul Hall seemed much smaller in size in the 1970's than I had imagined then being in the 1960's after seeing photographs of the UC-Berkeley campus protests. I had hoped that, by just hanging out on the UC-Berkeley campus for a few hours each day during the week I visited, I would bump into some New Left activists in their 20's whom I had known in the 1960's who might be politically active underground or aboveground in the 1970's on the West Coast, still active 1970's New Left activists that I hadn't known in the 1960's, or 1970's students who were carrying on the 1960's tradition of Berkeley student protests in the 1970's. But nothing like that happened to me during the time I hung out on Berkeley's campus for the week.

By the 1970's Berkeley's campus seemed as dead--after the level of direct U.S. military intervention in Vietnam was reduced following the Nixon administration's massive "last gasp" Christmas bombings of civilian targets in North Vietnam in December 1972--as was Columbia's campus in the post-1972 period of the 1970's. Rows of Movement people standing behind tables and handing out leaflets or having political discussions near the campus entrance or around Sproul Hall plaza was no longer part of the Berkeley campus youth scene by this time in the 1970's.

I had hoped to also bump into some street musicians singing topical protest folk songs on or around the Berkeley campus or along Telegraph Avenue. But during the week I spent a lot of time hanging out in Berkeley, the street musicians who were playing the most near the campus and attracting the largest student audiences on the street were just then musicians who played bluegrass instrumental music in a skillful way. Browsing in the bookstores and vinyl record shops off-campus also didn't lead to any verbal encounters with any politically and/or culturally radical non-students in their 20's or current UC students during my stay in Berkeley. 

On The Road In The 1970's: Part 3

The Greyhound bus continuing on to San Francisco was now even more filled with passengers than before, because more new passengers had boarded the bus at Salt Lake City than had gotten off the bus there. Another continuing passenger had re-boarded the bus in Salt Lake City before  I did and moved into the seat on the bus seat where I had previously been sitting before arriving in Salt Lake City. So I  had taken one of the vacant seats across the aisle, near the window, for the remaining highway journey to the West Coast.

As more and more new passengers got on the bus, the vacant seats near the front of the bus began to completely fill up and the vacant aisle seat to my left near the back of the bus became one of the last remaining vacant seats that a new passenger could locate. So when a blond-haired white woman of average height in her 20's, wearing blue jeans and with a large backpack on her shoulders, who most men would likely consider physically beautiful, stepped on the bus, the vacant seat that was next to where I sat was to where she walked with her big backpack.

"Is anyone sitting here?" she then asked me, in a voice that reflected a German accent, as she stood in the aisle.

"No one's taken this seat yet. So it's O.K. for you to take this seat," I replied with a smile and in a friendly voice.

The young white woman passenger then took off her big backpack, placed it on the baggage rack above the seats, and sat down in the seat next to me.

"How far are you going?" I then asked.

:To San Francisco," she answered.

"Where are you from?"

"From West Germany."

"What brings you to the USA?" I asked with a smile.

"I  never was here before and I thought I would be able to see a lot of the the country with the pass I bought from Greyhound. But all I mostly get to see when I'm riding the bus is jut a lot of highway that looks the same everywhere."

I laughed and replied:  "Sounds like the capitalists that control Greyhound fooled you. That's what happens when the U.S. government doesn't run transportation companies in a non-profit way like they do in Europe."

With a look of surprise, the young West German woman said with a smile:  "You sound like you're a socialist."

"Of course, I am. Aren't you a socialist?" I asked.

"Yes. In West Germany every young person I know is usually a socialist, because our parents have always voted for the Social Democrats and brought us up to be socialists. But we're all told that in the United States "socialism" is considered a dirty word," she answered.

"It's still considered a dirty word. That's one reason the USA is more militarist now than your country is now," I replied.

Having grown up in the United States during the 1950's McCarthy Era, most people in their 20's and early 30's during the 1970s in the USA were--despite their anti-Vietnam War sentiments and the campus and off-campus activism of the New Left student movement and Black Liberation Movement of the 1960s in the USA--still generally both anti-socialist and anti-communist in their political views; and to the degree that some were anti-capitalist in their political views, they were were much more likely to define themselves in the 1970's as hippy-anarchists, rather than hip socialists or hip communists. Within the off-campus 9-to-5 straight work world in the 1970's, "coming out" of the political closet openly as either an anarchist, socialist or communist in front of other workers still generally caused other U.S. workers or U.S. supervisors at most workplaces to begin viewing you with suspicion and marked you, in their eyes, as being some kind of politically deviant, unpatriotic subversive.

But European youth in their 20s and early 30s who had grown up in Western Europe in the 1950's in contrast, besides being anti-war, were generally only anti-communist, but not anti-socialist in the 1970s. One reason may have been because the anti-communist Social Democratic parties' leaders often managed their economically advanced capitalist society's welfare state apparatus, on the basis of democratically-elected parliamentary majorities (as well as, sometimes, because of the covert funding of some of these anti-communist Social Democratic parties received from the CIA); and these Social Democratic parties still identified themselves as socialists in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.

So, not surprisingly, after a few minutes more of conversing with the white blond West Germany beauty sitting next to me on the Greyhound bus ride from Salt Lake City to the West Coast, I began to feel that she was both much more politically aware than nearly all the non-socialist or anti-communist U.S. white women in their 20s with whom I had conversed in the 9-to-5 world and post-1972 campus world in the 1970s, and closer to me, philosophically. And she struck me as someone I could easily fall in love with.

We spent most of the daytime on the bus moving west over the Rocky Mountains and into Nevada talking with each other to make the time go faster, and laughing together when some white Western men in cowboy hats and cowboy boots, who seemed kind of right-wing, though not dangerous, boarded the Greyhound bus at one of its stops in the middle of Nevada, off of Interstate 80. Much of our talk was about how U.S. militarism in Vietnam and elsewhere was continuing to threaten world peace.

She seemed to agree with my observation that because most people in the U.S.A. hadn't personally experienced the effects of World War II as had most people in Europe, this might be one reason why people in the U.S.A. were still less pacifist in their political sentiments than were most people now in West Germany and other Western European countries. We also discussed possible reasons why U.S. society seemed so much more crassly materialist and consumers in the 1970s than even West German society had become.

When the Greyhound bus finally arrived in Reno, Nevada in the early morning darkness, both the young West German woman and I looked out a side window of the bus more intently to get a better view of the blinking neon lights outside the Reno casinos that were nearest to the bus station; while the cowboys we had picked up in the middle of Nevada, with excitement, hurriedly exited the bus to, presumably, either gamble on the slot machines or at the tables in the casinos, that were open 24 hours each day, or to try to pick up women or prostitutes with whom to spend part of the day.

Both the West German woman tourist and I found the Reno part of our bus ride more interesting to view from the bus than the time on the Interstate 80 road. But the Greyhound bus stopped only for about ten minutes in Reno, just to drop off passengers and pick up the new passengers who were traveling from Reno to Sacramento and on to San Francisco. So there was no time available for the West German woman and me to get off the bus and explore Reno on foot.

By the time the Greyhound bus reached Sacramento, California later in the morning, the sun was shining and it was daylight. And by that time, the young West German woman seemed to feel that she was too tired to continue conversing since, like me, she had only slept on and off, in-between the conversations we had had on the ride from Utah and through Nevada. So when half of the passengers left the Greyhound bus in Sacramento and two empty bus seats behind the two we were sitting on became available, she stood up from the seat next to mine and went to stretch out on the now two empty available seats behind me' in order to try to get an extra few hours of sleep on the bus, before it finally pulled into San Francisco.

At the same time that she dozed off behind me, I also stretched out across the now-vacant seat next to me and was able to sleep a bit more until the bus reached the Greyhound bus station in Oakland and before it headed over the Oakland-Bay Bridge and into San Francisco later in the day.

I found it exciting to look out the window as the Greyhound bus headed over the Oakland-Bay Bridge and felt happy when I realized that, after first longing to see San Francisco and California in the early 1960's as a teenager, I was now finally able to satisfy this longing. But because the West German beauty had given me the vibe and impression before shifting to the seats behind me on the bus that, despite enjoying our conversation, she wasn't into either exploring San Francisco tourist sites with me during the next few days or exchanging names or addresses to remain in contact after our trips were over, I felt slightly disappointed when we said goodbye to each other after leaving the bus at the Market Street station and going our separate ways: she to some San Francisco hotel or hostel and I to the Bay Transit Terminal, in order to make my way to Berkeley for the first time.

Yet I also reminded myself that, if I hadn't been lucky enough to have had both the young African-American woman sit next to me in Omaha, Nebraska and the slightly older West German woman sit next to me in Salt Lake City, the whole bus ride from New York City to San Francisco might have been a much less interesting trip for me to experience--especially since the scenery outside the window on Interstate 80 eventually started to look the same for miles and miles and traveling via interstate roads--rather than on the old U.S. highways that went through Western town main streets and downtown districts-- provided bus riders with less of a sense of what the cities and towns you bypassed, rather than passed through, looked like.