Hitchhiking in Alzada
By Tim Wheeler
Amherst Class of 1964,
It was just my bad luck, Spring Break 1960 to be marooned in Alzada, Mont., with my roommate Hal Smith. We were trying to hitchhike home. An hour would pass. Hardly a car passed and none stopped.
We were kuniors at Amherst College where the lilacs were perfuming the air, the songbirds trilling. We were drunk with the warm bliss of a New England spring after months of bitter winds, ice and snow. Chronically homesick, I decided to hitchhike home---3,000 miles---to Sequim, Wash. Hal decided to go with me back to his home in Missoula, Mont.
We stuck our thumbs out on the road to Northampton, and the very first car that stopped was driven by a GI at Westover Air Force Base. He told us he had just been transferred to the SAC headquarters in Omaha, Neb., and was driving straight through. We thought we had died and gone to heaven. But when we reached Omaha, about 30 hours later, snow was falling and the wind was picking up. We caught a ride down to Lincoln, Neb., and by then, a raging blizzard was blowing. Dressed in every garment in our backpacks, we stood frozen by the side of the Lincoln Highway, our frostbitten thumbs stuck out hoping for a ride. After three hours, an empty, yellow school bus stopped. The driver told us he had been sent back from Denver to to pick up the school bus and was heading back to Mile High City. He said he would drop us off when he turned south. He had the heater turned on full blast. We thawed, stopped shivering. We were so exhausted, we laid down flat on the narrow seats and fell into a deep sleep as the bus trundled along.
Dropped by the side of the road in Julesburg, Neb., I went into a café, searching for somebody heading west. I was in luck. A young guy sipping coffee at the counter told me he is driving to Portland, Ore., and he welcomed company. His car was one of those rear-engine Renaults, the wheels so close together they didn’t fit down into the ruts of ice and snow so the car slip-slided as it careened across the state of frozen Nebraska. I would gladly have ridden all the way to Portland where my sister and her husband lived. But I couldn’t abandon Hal to hitchhike alone, due north to Missoula. We said goodbye and got out of the Renault in Cheyenne. Again I solicited rides in a diner. I found a cowboy driving due north on Highway 85 to Belle Fourche, S.D.
All the way, the cowboy lectured us on the perils of hitchhiking, that it was much safer to stick with a horse, even a wild bucking bronco.
He dropped us just outside Belle Fourche where Route 212 angles off to the northwest, across a corner of Wyoming into Montana. Again we waited on the roadside. It was early morning, blessedly mild, the sun rising in the east. A car stopped, filled with four young men. They were farmhands on their way to a cattle ranch near Alzada. All four were Lakota, Sioux, merry, joking cowhands. They looked us over with quiet amazement, and we must have been a sight to behold—bleery-eyed, exhausted, in serious need of a shower and a shave. “Are you sure you want to go with us?” the driver asked. “We’re only going as far as Alzada. We turn off there on a side road and head north. There isn’t much in Alzada.”
Hal and I were desperate. “Yes. Please! We will ride with you,” said Hal, who was a gifted concert pianist when not hitchhiking.
Sure enough, we crossed the border into Wyoming and, a few miles further west, crossed the border into Montana and arrived in Alzada, a combined general store/service station/post office and across the road an abandoned motel.
Hal and I stood for four hours hitchhiking. A total of three cars passed us. None stopped. Finally, I told Hal, “You keep on hitchhiking west. I’m going across the road and hitchhike east. Any car that stops headed east or west, we take.”
At 1 p.m., a cattle truck trundled down from the side road and pulled up to the gas pump. A tall man in a cowboy hat got out of the truck and started refueling. I ran across the road and walked up to him. “Excuse me,” I said. “Is there any chance you could give my friend and me a ride back to Belle Fourche?” The cowboy pushed back his hat and sized me up, looking like a forlorn, homeless, hungry hobo. “OK,” he said with a wry grin. That is the sum total of our conversation as we drove back to Belle Fourche. Another day later, after more adventures hitchhiking, we reached Billings, Mont. We were so exhausted, we could drop. We briefly considered trying to jump aboard a westbound freight train over the high Rockies. But we were too tired, too afraid of dying of hypothermia.
We checked the train schedule at the passenger depot and counted our money—barely enough to cover tickets to Missoula and Seattle, not a penny left. We boarded the westbound North Coast Limited and promptly fell into a deep sleep in our seats. The conductor shook us awake to punch our tickets. He looked us over in all our scruffiness, shaking his head as we recounted our odyssey. He reached in his wallet and handed us $2 each. “Go to the dining car and get yourselves some hamburgers,” he said.
When Hal got off the train in Missoula, we embraced. Hours later, the train pulled into Ellensberg, Wash. Alec Stewart, also our Amherst College classmate (class of 1962), boarded the train with a picnic basket filled with fried chicken, potato salad, apple pie prepared by his mom. Alec, a bit more affluent than Hal or I, had flown home on a jetliner. And at the bottom of the basket, I found a "Welcome Home" card with a$10 bill tucked in it. Hal had called ahead to alert Alec that I was headed his way. The $10 was exactly what I needed to cover the Geyhound bus ticket from Seattle home to Sequim, up on the Olympic Peninsula.
Finally I managed to make it back to Sequim. I walked up Bell Hill from the Greyhound depot. I had given my folks no advance notice I was coming. I opened the door of the house. For whatever reason, my mom was up on a step ladder sweeping cobwebs. “Hello, Mama,” I said. She nearly fell off the ladder.