My Life With Computers

First a little background.

I lived in dormitories during my freshman and sophomore years. But by then I was definitely tired of dormitory life, and my friend Roy and I found off-campus housing for the following fall. A family close to campus had converted their basement into housing for students, and Roy and I got a room with two twin beds. The basement also had four single rooms, and shared bathroom and kitchen facilities.

Roy and I had very little in common with the other four residents: two aggies, one jock and one hippie fresh from Haight-Ashbury. I did wind up striking up a friendship with the hippie and his group of friends, and became basically a hippie-wannabee for the next few years. Of course, I never met any other hippies that were into electrical engineering, but none of them ever put me down for that. It was live and let live in that crowd. Since I was a free spirit who was into peace and love and interested in things they were into like the I Ching, philosophy, acid rock, astrology, and witchcraft, I fit right into the group.

Well, a few of us decided that for what the six of us paid for those basement rooms we could have a very nice house. Three of us (Roy, Jack the jock, and me) found a little house in the country whose renters were leaving town for the winter and we could have the house just for winter quarter. We discovered why they left for the winter: the house was poorly insulated and poorly heated. And that was the year that we had three weeks of forty below weather. But we survived.

Roy tired of living with a hippie and a jock, and found a place of his own for spring quarter. I planned to do the same, but Jack found an unfurnished basement apartment and needed a roommate to be able to afford it so I agreed to move in there with him. There was one large room that was probably supposed to be a living room, a smaller room for a bedroom and a kitchen. Jack took the large room and I took the other one. We didn't have a stick of furniture and neither of us had the inclination to bother getting any since neither of us had any money, and neither of us spent much time at home anyway. He borrowed an army cot from a friend for me to sleep on, and for himself decided the raised floor in his closet made an ideal bed. We rarely saw each other, and that was fine by both of us.

One fine sunny morning in May, Jack and I were having breakfast. Out of the blue he suggested that we hit the road for Denver - he had some friends there and felt like bagging everything for awhile. Sounded good to me. We gathered up a few meager belongings and maybe $20 between us and headed for the edge of town. We figured we'd try to get a ride for an hour and if we didn't have one by then, we'd give up on the idea.

I suppose we made rather an odd couple out there by the side of the road: one clean-shaven, short-haired straight-arrow type of guy and one long-haired bearded hippie type. But before too long, a big black hearse pulled up and we had our first ride. Turned out to be an undertaker from the same small town near Billings where Jack had grown up. For the 150 mile trip in the hearse, the conversation went something like:

Undertaker:

Do you know so-and-so?

Jack:

Yeah, I know him.

Undertaker:

Yeah? I buried his brother last year.

Jack:

Oh. Well, do you know so-and-so?

Undertaker:

Oh, sure. I buried his mother a couple of years ago.

We arrived in Jack's home town, and the undertaker offered to drive us on into Billings - said the old car needed a little run (he couldn't take the "good" car - his wife had it). So we had to suffer and make do with the "old" car: a year-old Cadillac. He drove us through to the east end of town to the junction with the main highway going south and found us a good place to try to get a ride.

It didn't take long before we had our next ride. I don't remember much about this ride, we didn't converse much. He got us down to Crow Agency on the reservation.

There wasn't much traffic around and it was getting on towards evening, so we weren't too sure we'd find a ride. But a '56 Ford pulled up with five quite large Indians (that's what they called themselves then) inside. I was just a little leery of accepting a ride with these guys and didn't much like the idea of trying to squeeze in there with five big guys, but I figured a ride was a ride and it might be the only one we'd get. But Jack would have nothing to do with it, and told them we were headed to South Dakota. They told us we were on the wrong road and to go back half a mile and catch the road going east. We started walking that direction until they were out of sight.

We did get a ride with a woman and her son as far as Wyola, the last little town before the Wyoming border. By the time we got there it was nearly dark. We didn't want to waste six or eight dollars for a motel room in the only little motel in town, so we decided to try to get a ride anyway.

Well, we basically walked all night. We tried to lie down beside the road once to catch a little sleep, but it was too cold to get comfortable and we decided to move on when a skunk came up and started checking us out.

At one point, a car approached from the other direction - it was the '56 Ford full of Indians. When they saw us and started braking, we got a little nervous. But they apparently decided we weren't worth bothering with and kept on going.

Finally, morning came and brought with it a welcome-looking semi. The driver offered us a ride as far as Sheridan.

It took quite a while to get a ride out of Sheridan, but finally an ancient pickup truck loaded with chickens stopped and the driver told us we were welcome to ride in back if we wanted (we did - and we sure didn't want to ride in front with his three or four dirty kids anyway). Not a luxury ride, but it did get us to Casper.

At the edge of Capser, we were trying to hitch-hike in front of a diner. The town sheriff pulled up and asked what we were doing, so we told him we were waiting for a ride (hitch-hiking wasn't legal along there). He said, fine, no law against waiting for a ride all day if we wanted to. But he'd better not see a thumb. Then he went into the diner.

After the sheriff finally left, it wasn't long before we had a ride. This fellow was an inventor, and it seems we were looking at his various odd-looking inventions all the way in to Cheyenne. He dropped us off at a freeway ramp where we hoped we'd find a ride to take us on ino to Denver. But freeways at rush hour are not good locations for hitch-hikers. I was amazed how many people flipped the finger at us, and no one stopped for us. We finally went on into a nearby hotel and called his friend, who drove up from Denver and picked us up (pretty nice of him, considering he had no idea we were even coming).

Well, we enjoyed three days in Denver with Jack's friend and his two roommates. They had to work during the day, but offered us an Oldsmobile to drive around in while we were there and spent the evenings with us. We tooled around town a little but couldn't afford to do anything that cost money (with the exception of losing a little of our money at the dog track).

We didn't look forward much to hitch-hiking back, so we borrowed a little money and caught a stand-by flight back to Billings. Jack's dad picked us up there, and we spent the night at their home. The next day we tried to hitch a ride for a few hours, but finally just took a bus back to Bozeman.

So ended my only long-distance hitch-hiking experience.