I had just completed my freshman year at UW-Oshkosh in 1971 and was eager to get back on the road hitchhiking. I didn’t care where. Anywhere. Just being on the road was all I wanted. My friend Don and I set out for a trek west to California but never got any further than Denver. Although many other students said they wanted to join me in my cross-country hitchhiking trips, Don was the first friend who actually showed up.

The second friend accompanied me on a hitchhiking trip into Canada years later. We ended up hopping a "hotshot" (Nonstop freight train) from Toronto to Montreal. I've never seen more beautiful scenery. The only problem with freight trains is that, because of the load, there is a constant forward and backward jerking movement which makes sleeping in an empty boxcar difficult. The next time you're near a moving freight train, listen closely and you'll hear that distinctive sound of the cars banging against each other. No passenger train makes that noise.

I learned the hard way you don’t want to pick an open car close to the locomotive. As the train goes through tunnels soot from the engine makes you look like a member of a minstrel troupe. With our legs dangling out of the open doors of the boxcar, we watched racoons playing in a stream, deer foraging in a clearing and people riding their horse drawn racing buggies. If you really want to enjoy the country side I highly recommend trains over driving or flying.

That trip to Denver was life-changing because I met Jessie on a cool night in Denver that summer. St. Andrew's church allowed the homeless to sleep on the church floor but the doors closed at 9:00 PM sharp. If you came in late you had only the abandoned VW van in the backyard. It still beat sleeping in the park. The Denver cops had a habit of waking anyone sleeping in the park by rapping the soles of your shoes with their nightstick. Don didn't have a sleeping bag so he brought this tattered, brown bear suit to wear at night. They never hit Don's feet. It probably had something to do with the bear suit.

I'll never forget the first time I set eyes on Jessie. Don and I were hungry and hanging out downtown when three teenagers approached us. As soon as they started pitching their Jesus schtick I turned away. I was too hungry to think about eternal damnation. Don was more receptive. My mood changed dramatically when they invited us back to their Teen Challenge headquarters for free cake and coffee. Praise the Lord Jesus! I was ready to be saved.

Now I'll bet all of you can probably look back at the moment you met the love of your life and recall the chemistry that percolated immediately. Jessie and I talked exclusively with each other at Teen Challenge that night and I was impressed by her intelligence, effervescent personality and that smile. After a few hours Jessie said she had to leave if she was going to catch the last bus home.

Although she was only 17 she had already spent a year at Grand Canyon University, a Christian college in Phoenix. She was spending the summer with her parents in Englewood, about four miles up Broadway from downtown. Her father, an ex-boxer and carpenter, had built a small house in the backyard for Jessie to live in. It was beautiful. The next summer we would spend our last summer together in that toy home.

It wasn't more than ten minutes before Jessie returned. She had missed the last bus and asked if I would walk her home. Of course I didn't realize how far Englewood was at the time but looking back it wouldn't have mattered. I wanted to be with Jessie from the moment I met her and would have jumped at the chance to spend time with her. I suspect Jessie missed that bus on purpose.

Sometimes it's a bit embarrassing to look back at what you did as a kid. Don and I were doing our laundry at a downtown hotel when an actual resident there walked in to do his laundry. I whispered to Don that we should stage a mock fistfight right in front of this guy just to see his reaction. As Don threw me back against a white wooden door my hand flew back and to our surprise we discovered that it was painted glass. The upper half of the door shattered and Don took off running.

I had to gather our clothes out of the dryer. On my way up the stairs I ran into the hotel manager. He asked me if I had seen anything and I told him two guys were still fighting in the laundromat. When he hurried down there I ran out of the hotel and for the rest of the night whenever I heard a police siren I was certain they were coming for me.

I didn't see Don for a couple of days. The next day I was crossing the street and asked a complete stranger in the middle of the crosswalk if he knew where I could get a job. He said they were hiring topographical mapmakers at the Federal Center. I took a bus out to U.S. Geological Survey and lied, telling them I had three years of Geology when, in fact, I had only one semester and topographical mapmaking was my weakness. So I crammed at the library for a few hours and barely passed the test a few days later. Within four days I was driving a pickup truck in the back hills of Buffalo, Wyoming.

It wasn't easy telling Jessie I was leaving Denver. She knew I needed a job but leaving someone that just ignited your life is never easy. She cried and I regretted ever asking about a job in the crosswalk. That night I met up with Don in the VW van at St. Andrews. He told me he had met a married couple in the park after running out of the hotel. They invited him home for dinner. They told him he could bring a friend back anytime. Imagine my surprise when the front door opened to their apartment and it was the same hotel manager that I had lied to after running from his laundromat. What are the odds of that happening?

Buffalo, Wyoming in 1971 was a cowboy's paradise. Maybe it still is. Many of the residents owned horses and it wasn’t unusual for people to ride their horses downtown. I was a hippie with long hair and never felt like I belonged there. One day I was going for a walk when I noticed four or five kids standing around a white horse in their huge front yard. They asked me if I wanted to ride their horse. I jumped at the chance even though it didn't have a saddle or reins to hold onto. The kids said when I wanted the horse to stop to just squeeze my legs. Now you horse-smart people know that squeezing your legs only makes the horse run faster. That was the joke on me. It's a shame cars can't stop as fast as horses. As the horse ran faster I squeezed harder with my legs. When we hit the end of the yard the horse planted its front hooves and I flew over its head and into the fence. I never thought those kids would stop laughing.

One day I returned from the rolling hills of Buffalo to find Jessie waiting for me in the rooming house I lived in. She had hitchhiked in the middle of the night from Denver to Buffalo! Jessie was fearless. Three days later I quit the best job I had and hitchhiked back to Denver with her. That's what true love is all about, isn't it? I wish now I had stayed in Buffalo because it could have meant a career with U.S. Geological Survey. 

Jessie transferred to my school in Wisconsin. Four months later we were married in Green Bay. The first summer I made the mistake of living with the in-laws in Denver. Jessie and I argued about where we were going to spend the summer. I wanted to go to California while she insisted on living with her parents. When I got home from finals she was gone. I jumped in the car and headed towards Denver, finally coming across her hitchhiking on Interstate 80 near Omaha, Nebraska. We spent that summer in the toy house her father built in his backyard. Less than a year later we were divorced.

In 1994 I was traveling from Wisconsin back to Los Angeles when I stopped by Denver to see how the old neighborhood looked. That entire section of Englewood was filled with boarded up houses. It looked like a ghost town. I didn't recognize any of the homes and after walking up and down the street I had to guess which one was once Jessie's. I knocked on the front door not really expecting anyone to answer.  Slowly my head turned to the house on the left and I could see what was once a beautiful toy home in the back yard. Seeing something from your past in such rotting condition makes you feel a thousand years old. I wished I had never stopped.

Two years ago I received an email from Jessie. I hadn’t heard from her in over 30 years but now she’s emailing me to say she had found my high school class ring. God bless the Internet. Of course I had lost my class ring long before meeting her but she had to have an excuse for writing after all those years. She had read some of my blogs and decided she would write a blog about us as well. Only after reading her blog did I learn that her father was dying of leukemia the entire time we dated and throughout our marriage. No one said a word to me. I learned she had flunked out of college in Arizona but she never said a word about that to me. What kind of relationship did we really have? What kind of marriage? Life is full of surprises.