It is a gorgeous day. The sun is shining and the leaves on the trees are a display board of natures handiwork. This morning was productive. Found, cleaned and installed the screens for all the windows. Split more kindling and rearranged the stacked firewood to make it easier to access. Blowed leaves to hopefully prevent car wheels spinning on the drive or more importantly, a fall. Plus the house is filled with the delicious smell from the pot of chili bubbling on the stove.

Off in the not to far distance I heard the whistle of the train. The train is a big calling card in Bryson City. It is not the train of a Johnny Cash song, full of forlorn and longing for freedom. Nor is it the train of a delta blues singer dreaming of places far away. It is the train of happy families riding the rails of long ago to see the mountains, lake and forest in the old fashion way. But the sound does invoke a long ago memory.

Funny how memories work, invisible strands passing through time and space, connections that can only be shared with words. I’m in the mountains now and hear a train whistle and start thinking of a time in the Rockies in Colorado. The memory is clear but it is hard to put a date to it. Letting my mind wander I remember that it was about six months before the Beatles release Abby Road. With this clue I look up the release date which was September 1969, so my memory is in the spring of that year. The memory is not only about mountains and trains but what lead up to it.

I had been staying in Colorado Springs for several months. I had left Kentucky with the intention of going to California, which at that time I believed to be the promised land. I was disillusioned with myself and my home. I hit town and fell into the lifestyle of a street hippie. There was a community of us, all helping each other survive while we “searched for ourselves.” While there I meet a guy we called Doc. He was stationed at the local military base and was scheduled to deploy to Vietnam soon. He was from California and wanted to go home to see his family before he left. He was seriously thinking of not following his deployment orders to go serve in the fighting. He had a brother killed in Vietnam and felt his family had made their contribution.

He invited me to go to California with him. I had an older Chevy Malibu and we took off. He had a little money and we made our way to the desert town where his family lived. We stayed there for a few days and then headed to San Francisco. After a few days in town I sold the Malibu and bought a 160cc Honda Scrambler. With the bike and a few bucks in hand we decided to stay in San Francisco, more specifically, the Haight Asbury area, for a while. We got a cheap room and started to get to know the city.

It was an interesting time and an interesting place. We meet people looking to shed themselves from the traditional lifestyles of the fifties and sixties. People re-examining the values they had been raised with in an unquestioning manner. People looking to be openminded and see life from a more accepting viewpoint. People who had little materialistically but had an open willingness to share what they had. We stayed for several weeks and by that time Doc had gone officially AWOL. It is not my intentions to make any political statement or judgement here, this is just a memory. He knew he had to go back to his home base in Colorado to turn himself in and deal with the consequences of his decision.

We left San Francisco on the bike with a change of clothes and a few bucks. We got through California without incident but when we hit Nevada we had a problem. I was pulled over by a state trooper because we were not wearing helmets. We were living off our wits, staying awake at night and sleeping on park benches for a few hours each day. We had no money for helmets. In the little town were I was pulled over we met a guy who said I could store the bike at his house and come back for it later. I accepted his offer and we started hitchhiking towards Colorado Springs. We had a number of adventures which are stories for another time, but we did ok until we hit the Colorado State line. Here we were picked up by the local sheriff.

He checked our ID’s and wanted to know why Doc was not where he should have been according to his papers. Doc spun a story about missing his transportation and deciding to head back to his last base. The sheriff bought the story but informed us that is was illegal to hitchhike in the state of Colorado and if we tried to do so in his town he would arrest us. We did not want to go to jail but did not see a solution to the problem, but it turned out the sheriff had one for us. He took us to the train tracks where the freight trains passed, pointed out the track for the train headed east, told us the time it would be there and told us to be on it.

It was a couple of hours until the train was due. We contemplated hitching out of town anyway but decided he was serious about the arrest thing, so we waited. He did drive back by after a while to check if we were still there. The train came around the time he said it would but it did not stop it only slowed down. We selected a freight car that looked empty and had an open door. We moved with the car until we were able to jump aboard.

We spent the next few hours traveling through the Rocky Mountains on a freight train. It was awesome. It was not a fast trip and with the door open we marveled at the evolving view. It reminded me of the songs of Woody Guthrie and the stories of John Steinbeck about the difficult lives and times of people struggling for survival or people longing for freedom. And of course, there was the wail of the train whistle as we moved through time. I’ve never figured out if the whistle was an announcement to others that the train was coming or a reminder of all the places yet to see. Either way I love the sound.

We did make it back to Colorado Springs and Doc went to the base and turned himself in to the authorities. I never saw him again but hope he did okay. I continued my street life and had a lot of different adventures and experiences that I am today, glad I had.

And yes, before I started writing, I did go put Abby Road on the iPod. It is one of my all time favorite albums from a time long ago. Another memory stretched through time like the silk thread of a spiders web.