OUR OWN PRIVATE WALDEN POND

June 1971. King and both Kennedys are dead, Nixon's in the White House, and the Beatles have broken up, anything and nothing seems possible. I’m leaving my old Kentucky home with my friend Stan, waiting beside the already warm blacktopped edge of I-64 with our thumbs pointing westward.

“Hitchhiking is illegal in Kentucky, Stan. Did you know that?”

“Only if you’re standing in the road. Standing on the side of the road is okay.”

“And you know this how?” I say, over the highway noise.

“Have faith, my brother.”

A half hour goes by with us still gazing at Louisville’s familiar skyline, and my faith tank is sitting close to empty. I ask myself why I let Stan talk me into this. The answer comes almost immediately in the form of a faded green Dodge van with Missouri plates. As it pulls over, I grab the rucksack containing my worldly possessions and rush toward the flashing taillights.

The driver, a bearded young guy like us with hair down to his shoulders, leans over to the passenger window. “Where you headed, man?”

“Haight-Ashbury,” I tell him.

“Far fucking out. Jump in. I can take you as far as St. Louis.”

The big heavy side door, which slides instead of opening on hinges, is stuck. I manage to screech it open but do not to heedlessly climb aboard. There are rules for hitchhiking, perhaps not written down, but rules just the same, and only fools ignore them. Rule number one is never set foot inside a strange vehicle without first checking out the driver and any passengers.

Apparently, Stan has never learned this rule because he immediately yells, “Shotgun,” and jumps into the front passenger side seat.

The van’s driver is alone, fortunately, which keeps the odds in our favor, and he looks okay, garbed like us in jeans and a tie-dye. Also, I can smell dope clinging to the carpeted floor. I pitch in my gear, duck down, and clamber aboard. There’s no back seat, so I just flop in an empty space between the bulging trash bags and cardboard boxes overflowing with clothing.

“Looks like you’re moving,” I say.

“I just flunked out of UNC Greensboro,” he says. “My deferment’s gone. I’m going home to find a job until I get drafted. What’s your name, man?”

“Pate Merwin,” I say.

“Stan Hicks,” says my pal.

“I’m Norm.”

“Thanks for picking us up, Norm.”

“Wish I was going with you guys.”

“What’s stopping you?” Stan asks.

“My lottery number is seventy-one, so I’m pretty sure my ass is gone. What about you?”

“I was in the Navy,” Stan says. “But I’m against the war.”

“Cool. What about you, Pate?” Norm peers at me in his rear-view mirror.

“Draft dodger.”

“No shit. How do you do that?”

“Lots of ways,” I say.

Norm surprises me by pulling out a joint. He lights it, passes it around, saying, “It’s a little harsh, but it’ll get you off.”

And indeed it does, as the rich sweet scent of burning pot fills the van. We’re already away from the city. The low wooded hills and farmlands of southern Indiana have never looked so green to me. I’m fascinated by how the road cuts through shelves of limestone, where rivulets of spring water drip from exposed ledges. Everything is so interesting.

Keeping our speed at a steady sixty-five, Norm says to me, “I don’t want to go to prison. And I can’t get C.O. status because I’m not religious. So, what else can I do?”

“Tell them you’re a Quaker,” I say, as the turbulence from an eighteen-wheeler throws us across the lane line.

“Or a fucking Jehovah’s Witness,” Stan adds.

“I’m not sure what I believe in anymore,” Norm says, “except maybe love.”

“All you need is love,” Stan says.

*

We’re in Missouri at a county fishing lake, which is deserted and has no facilities. It’s a small, irregularly shaped body of water sitting in a little valley of dusty pine, oak, and dogwood. The place is teeming with gnats and flies. When I dip my fingers into the lake, it’s cool and inviting.

Stan asks if I want to go for a swim.

“What if somebody comes?”

“Who’s going to come?”

We strip and dogpaddle around. “Think there’s any fish in here?” 

“Bluegill, I imagine. Maybe crappie. Want to catch our supper?”

When I ask how, he gives me a pitying look, climbs the rocky bank to get dressed, and thrashes off through the woods.

I linger in the water. Two days now, and I’m beginning to get a clearer picture of what life on the road with Stan will be like, even when things go smoothly. Sleeping in a cornfield with its attendant aches and pains and chigger bites. Being careful not to say things that might upset our rides. Dealing with surly people. Surviving on junk food and coffee. We’ve been lucky to find this place. Next time, who knows where we’ll wind up?

I’m dressed when Stan returns, flexing a long weeping willow branch he’s found. After testing its suppleness, he strips off the leaves. Then he rummages through his gear and pulls out a paper clip and a roll of monofilament, which he ties tightly around the thin end of the bare branch, leaving about six feet hanging off the tip. Bending the paper clip into a question mark, he sharpens it against a rock.  

“Now all we need is bait. Bluegill will bite on almost anything.”

Surrounded by Johnson grass and purple Iron Weed, I crouch, cupping my hands. I catch a brown mottled grasshopper and hand it over to Stan, who threads his primitive fishing hook between its eyes. Then he flicks the baited hook into the water along the edge of the lake.

“Wouldn’t we do better in deeper water?” I inquire.

“See the weed beds and brush piles? They give the fish cover.” He retrieves his line. “Why don’t you build a fire while I catch some fish.” He casts again, making rapid light movements with the pole.

I gather twigs and dead branches for kindling. When I have enough, I ask, “How are we going to cook the fish? Roast it on a spit?”

“No. Gather up some big rocks and make two stacks,” Stan says, all the while keeping his attention on the water. “Build the cooking fire between the stacked rocks. Then find a thin flat piece of rock and put it on top for a cooking surface. Unless you’d rather fish.”

“That’s okay. You’re doing fine.” I gather rocks. When he lands our first catch, I observe, “Not very big, are they.”

“Bluegill don't get big.”

Stan unhooks the writhing fish and puts it on the grass, where it flops helplessly. Watching its death throes, something grips my heart. Quickly, I snag another grasshopper. Stan re-baits his hook. By the time I have a decent fire going, he’s landed two more bluegills.

“Want to clean them?” He offers me his thin-bladed fillet knife.

I shake my head in admiration. “Fishing line, hook, knife. What don’t you have?” 

“‘Be prepared.’”

“That’s the Boy Scout motto. Were you a scout?”

“Son, I was an Eagle Scout. How about you?”

“Only a Cub.”

Stan slices the catch from gills to backbone, then all the way along the spine to the tail and pulls out the offal.

“Why’d you quit?”

“Why didn’t you?”

He puts our fillets on the hot rock. “It was fun. Tell me why you quit.”

“We moved.”

Stan pulls out a doobie.

“I didn’t know you were holding. Why didn’t you tell me?” I ask.

“I just had the one.” He lights it. By the time the joint’s half-smoked, the sun has dipped behind the trees, the horizon purple and gray. Tossing a pebble into the water, I hear a satisfying plunk. Bullfrogs croak. Crickets chirrup. Cicadas click.

“Ah,” Stan says, flipping our dinner over carefully with a stick, “the simple life. Think how much time people waste working jobs they hate to acquire things they don’t need. Ever seen a picture of Thoreau’s house? It was tiny—just ten by fifteen.”

“This is our own private Walden Pond.”

“Damn straight.”

“But what about the Summer of Love?” I ask.

“Hell, we’re already four years behind schedule.”

“Yeah, but Mark Twain might say that for Kentuckians, we’re ahead of schedule. According to him, everything happens there twenty years after it’s already happened everywhere else.”

“I read where he didn’t really say that.”

I shrug.

When the fish sizzle, our meal is ready. We eat it with our fingers. It smells and tastes wonderful. When we finish I put another branch on the fire, stirring up sparks and bits of white ash that rise and float away.

“We should be in Denver by tomorrow night,” I say. “My friends there might put us up. We could take a hot shower and sleep on a mattress instead of the ground. I could call.”

“Okay.” Stan passes the joint, tilts his head back, and says, “Look at all the stars.”

I shift my gaze. “I’ve never seen so many.” We sit quietly, smoking what’s left of the marijuana.

“Do you believe in God, Stan?”

“Yeah, I guess. I don’t really know. What about you?”

Poking a stick at the fire, I tell him about being dragged to a holy-roller church every Sunday, where the sermon was invariably hell fire and brimstone. “They were always collecting to send missionaries to Christianize Africans. But when the neighborhood turned black, they moved the church to the suburbs.”

I toss the stick into the flames and listen to the fire crackle.

After a while, Stan bends and twists until his legs look like a pretzel. He tells me it’s a half lotus. A chick named Carla showed him how to do it.

“It opens the central conduit so you can drink the nectar of your essence,” he says.

“Opens the what?”

“It’s supposed to be relaxing.”

“So you can drink what?”

“Shut up,” he says.

I obey, inhaling and holding onto the smoke before exhaling. “What happened to Carla?”

“Hell if I know.”

“Have you ever had a real girl friend for more than a week?”

“Once, back in high school.”

I’m expecting more baloney.  

“Cheerleader named Teresa. She had perfect skin and big green eyes. We dated my whole senior year and broke up on graduation night.” Stan explains that he had a basketball scholarship. The plan was for Teresa to go with him. “But I guess down deep she was a practical girl because after we walked across the stage and picked up our diplomas, she told me she’d decided to go to some out of state college on her own. When I asked her about us, she said, ‘Oh, Stan, these high school romances don’t last.’”

Untangling his legs, he picks up a twig and starts whittling. After a long silence, he says, “Thoreau believed we can’t begin to understand ourselves until we’re lost.”

“Thoreau? Again?”

“Thoreau’s the man.” Stan keeps whittling until that twig is nothing but scattered shavings.

© 2024 Rick Neumayer

“Our Own Private Walden Pond” was first published 2018 in Falling Star and also was a chapter in my 2020 novel JOURNEYMAN. It will appear in the forthcoming THREE FOGGY MORNINGS: Stories by Rick Neumayer. If you liked this one, I’d love to hear from you.