Footloose in America: Dixie to New England (31 page)

Even if I had wanted to sit, I don’t know where I would have done it. Every piece of furniture had something on it. Clothing, newspapers, books and toys were everywhere.

“Thanks, but I’d rather stand. Look, if this is going to be a hassle we can–”

“It’s all right honey. The spigot for the hose is in the basement. We keep it locked so’s the boys don’t wander off with the tools or leave the water running. My daughter has got the key.”

The boy was running down the stairs as he said, “Mama says to get water out of the sink in the kitchen.”

Saliva spewed out of Grandma’s mouth. “What is she talking about? Even if there weren’t dirty dishes in it, there ain’t no way he can git a bucket in that sink.”

She handed the boy our flyer. “Now take this up and tell her we need that key.”

The boy dashed up the stairs as I said, “I think we’ll find some other–”

“You just wait right here,” Grandma said as she grabbed my arm with her sweaty palm. I felt violated. I wanted to leap out the door and run away. She smacked her gums together as she spoke. “I’ll get this straightened out.”

She waddled toward the stairs. “Now don’t go nowhere. I’ll be back with that key.” Ascending the steps she yelled, “Honey git out of that bed! Ya want to pet a mule?”

As soon as she was out of sight, I turned toward the door. Both Rottweiler’s were sniffing me as I steadily moved myself out onto the porch. When I closed the screen door, both dogs were still inside. I said, “Sit!”

They did. I was delighted.

I had just stepped down off the porch, when the younger boy appeared at the top of the stairs from the street. A mean pout was on his face. “That lady said I can’t have a ride!”

“We don’t give rides.”

“That’s what she said.” He stomped past me, up the porch steps and yelled, “That stinks! I’m just a kid. I ought to git to go for a ride!”

I was putting Della’s empty water bucket in the cart when Patricia said, “What was that all about? Who does that kid think he is?”

I held up my hand. “Let’s just go.”

On Shafer Run we came to a buff-brick ranch-style home with a nice yard. A twelve year old boy was in the garage rolling up a hose, so I asked, “Could we get some water?”

“Sure. Let me hook it back up.”

While I filled our jugs and Della’s bucket, I told him about our experience with the police. When I finished, he shook his head. “Sugar Creek Cops. They’re all rotten.”

After a mile or so, the road led out of a residential area into a forest. Woodlands laced with rusted pipes, old oil pumps and gray tanks stained from where black gold had spilled down them. Shafer’s Run was a gradual uphill route, in a narrow valley, with a clear tumbling brook running through it. It would have been a beautiful place if it hadn’t been littered with old oil-field machinery. We saw a couple of pumps working–the kind that look like grasshoppers bobbing their heads up and down. So oil was still being pulled out of the ground around there. But most of the equipment was idle pieces of metal and tangled coils of cable with tall weeds and saplings growing up through it. The property on both sides of the road was all fenced off with sagging, rusty barbed wire and locked gates.

The sun was low in the west when we finally we came to an open gate with no signs saying we couldn’t go in. So we did, and the drive led us back into a scruffy place with lots of brush and dead equipment, but there was enough room to tether out Della and pitch our tent. That night we fell asleep to the tap-tap-tapping of a distant pump pulling Old King Oil up to the surface.

Early the next afternoon, when we got to the top of Shafer’s Run, the woods gave way to a suburban neighborhood, where each house had at least an acre of ground. We were walking by a ranch-style home with ladders leaned against it, when the man on the roof yelled, “I read about you in the paper this morning. How do you like our local Gestapo?”

From behind me Patricia said, “I can’t wait to see what Jerry wrote.”

A couple of blocks further, a lady walked out her front door with a newspaper in her hand. “Could I have your autograph?”

I didn’t have my glasses on, so I couldn’t read the caption under the front page picture of me looming over Officer Ryan. When I handed the paper back to the woman she said, “I’m so sorry for the way the police treated you.”

And so it went throughout the rest of the afternoon. Person after person stopped to apologize. Many of them had us sign their newspapers. We had just turned right on Holiday Run when Patricia said, “What a difference a newspaper story can make. Yesterday, no one would even look at us. Today, it’s like we’re heroes.”

When we first got on Holiday Run, it wasn’t too bad. The traffic in both lanes was heavy, but there was room for us to get out of the way. That all changed when the road began its descent toward the Allegheny River. The shoulder disappeared, the pavement narrowed and we were out in the traffic lane as the highway twisted down the side of a ravine. To our immediate right was the rock face of the hill. Across the road was a guard rail and a drop off. Jerry was right, there wasn’t room to pass, but that didn’t stop people from doing it. They’d rev up their motors, tires would squeal, then a whoosh of steel, glass and exhaust would roar past us within inches of my body. I couldn’t tell you how many times that afternoon Patricia and I yelled, “Oh my God!” or “Oh Shit!” or “Son-of-a-bitch!” Of the two of us, Patricia was the most vocal–but Della just kept plodding along. The only vehicle that bothered her was the school bus.

After all the thousands of miles I’ve hiked along this nation’s roads, I’ve come to recognize the motor of a school bus. They all have a universal rattle in their motors, and in a blind curve I heard one rattle up behind us. I couldn’t see if anything was in the approaching lane, so the bus driver couldn’t either, but that didn’t matter. The horn blared as the long mass of yellow and black careened into that lane, and charged past us. When the bus swerved back into our lane, its tires spun grit up into mine and Della’s faces. Had I not side stepped into Della, the bus’s back bumper would have snatched my left thigh. Della reared back when I bumped against her. As the bus disappeared around the corner, my wife screamed from the cab, “Can you fucking believe that?”

With my arms wrapped around Della’s neck I prayed, “Lord, please help us get down this thing alive.”

A few minutes later, a police car from Oil City stopped in the uphill lane with its blue lights flashing. The driver and his partner looked to be in their mid-thirties, and both of their faces were beaming as the driver leaned out the window and said, “You want help getting across the highway at the bottom?”

I felt like I was pleading. “What we need is help getting down there!”

Patricia’s voice was frantic. “Could you follow us? These people are crazy!”

I said, “Someone needs to stop them from passing us on the curves.”

The officer behind the wheel saluted me. “We can do that. I’ll follow you the rest of the way down. See you at the bottom.”

While the patrol car pulled in behind us, I looked up to heaven and said, “Thanks.”

When we got across the highway at the bottom of the hill, I led Della onto a side street where we stopped beside the curb with the police cruiser behind us. After both officers got out, I said, “Thanks guys. It was scary up there.”

The driver shook my hand. “Glad we could help.”

His partner said, “Read about you in the paper.”

“Yeah, we had quite a day yesterday.”

“Sounds like it. They sure picked a rough way to get you here.”

“But hey,” The driver said. “Welcome to Oil City!”

From Oil City, Highway 62 climbed up into the Alleghenies and it was a ridge road for ten miles or so. Then it descended down to the bottom of the valley and became a river road all the way to Warren. For more than forty-five miles it twisted along the east shore with lush green slopes all around us.

The Allegheny is a National Recreational River all the way down to Pittsburgh. Everyone we talked to said the most scenic part of it was from
Oil City up to Warren. For thirty miles the river and the highway were in the National Forest–but we were not in a wilderness. Big homes, small trailers, rustic cabins and camp grounds were all along the route. It seemed like nearly every flat dry place had some kind of shelter on it. That could have posed a problem for us finding campsites, but it didn’t.

Socially, getting kicked off the highway at Reno was the best thing that could have happened to us. Because of it, our first day out of Oil City we were invited to a pot luck dinner and given a riverside campsite in Clark’s Campground at President, PA. They read about our scrape with the law, were outraged and eager to have us join the party. We stayed two nights.

In Tionesta, Mark and Paula Cook, who owned Eagle Rock Motel and Campground, also read about it. They invited us to stay in their campground on the river’s edge. They also ran a canoe and kayak service, and treated us to a seven mile float trip.

The Allegheny flows through the oldest river bed in America. It has a sheet of bedrock more that one hundred feet thick. Because it flows over rock instead of mud or sand, that part of the Allegheny is clear. On most of our kayak trip, I could see the bottom.

If you’ve never floated a big river in a kayak, you need to know it’s not always rapids and white water shooting you downstream. They all have places where the water relaxes in long sleepy pools–places where the current takes a nap and lets you take control.

Patricia and I were floating in just such a place, where the banks were at least a quarter of a mile apart. My wife was paddling toward the western shore to get a good shot of a bald eagle with our camera. He was perched high in a poplar tree that leaned out over the Allegheny. Carefully, she dipped the paddles in and out of the blue water trying not to scare the eagle away.

I kept my boat next to the opposite shore, and just watched this scene unfold. Here was this huge black bird with its brilliant white head and tail, roosting on one of the upper limbs of an ancient white barked tree that was decked out in the yellows of late September. Behind it rose a green Allegheny mountain whose rounded top looked like it was holding up the
baby blue sky. Below the tree was its reflection on a shimmering pool with my wife gliding across it in a little blue plastic boat.

In the midst of all that natural splendor, as I watched my wife get steadily closer to the eagle, I was suddenly struck by the irony of it all. Back in those hills, less than twenty miles from here, and less than a hundred and fifty years ago, Col. Drake’s well was the beginning of the demise of lots of places like this. Worldwide, many pristine waters and lush woodlands have been spoiled to harvest Old King Oil.

Patricia was almost under the eagle and was putting the camera to her face, when with two flaps of his wings he sprang up from the tree and soared down river. A long stream of white poured from under his tail and rained down into the Allegheny as he flew away.

My wife yelled, “Holy eagle shit! I’m glad I wasn’t any closer.”

The cops kicking us off the highway also garnered us an invitation to the 20
^th
Annual Johnson Barbeque. It was a clear, full moon night, and more than fifty people showed up for chicken cooked on spits over an open fire. Everyone brought a covered dish, and this potluck was one the lady folk took seriously. The food was tremendous and the camaraderie grand. They also had party games. Every man there, including me, tried to weasel out of the Newly Wed Game. But I was glad we played. Patricia and I won. Neither of us missed a question. First prize was a twenty-five-dollar gift certificate to Walmart.

But the highlight for me was talking to Cal–the hero in the family. He was a stock car driver, and they called him their “Rising Star.” To which he said, “Yeah, well, I’m NASCAR certified, but that don’t mean I’m going to Daytona anytime soon.”

He was strawberry blond, in his mid-twenties, with a daughter who was learning to walk. His thin little wife’s hair hung just below her shoulders and was the same color as his. She also had long pink fingernails and a face that looked like it belonged on the cover of
Seventeen
Magazine.
His little girl, Cally, stumbled around the living room in a tee-shirt with a color picture of him in his racing suit on the front of it. On the back was his race car.