Hal Smith Remembrance

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.

From The Olio

>Smith HAROLD JEFFREY SMITH
101 Agnes Avenue, Missoula, Montana
Prepared at Missoula County High School
English
Independent

Harold Jeffey Smith died '62, died July 29, 2002.
(view alumni profile - Log-in required)

From Our Reunion Book ---

Hal Smith was very quiet and low-profile at Amherst, yet later revealed himself to be one of the more interesting, enterprising, and productive members of the class. Writing about Hal's experience at Amherst, his wife says --

Hal appreciated many of his instructors and classes at Amherst. As a professional, he may have modeled himself in part on his Amherst professors.... As for his fellow students at Amherst, he felt somewhat isolated from many of them, maybe, in part, because many came from affluent families in the East, and he came from a family of modest means in Montana. The high-jinks of fraternity life had no appeal for him, and he had little interest in sports...Hal was very much in favor of admitting women to Amherst. He wasn't enthusiastic about the "men's club" atmosphere.

His response was apparently to go his own way, choosing to be Independent. He majored in English, but he had already developed a fascination with French, which he began learning as an AFS exchange student in high school. So he spent his Amherst junior year in France, under a program organized by Sweet Briar College.

After Amherst, he won a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to study Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. It is there that he met his wife, fellow grad student Stephani Pofahl. They were married in 1968, after which they spent a year in Paris on a Fulbright Fellowship, where Hal finished his dissertation.

At this point Hal was hired to teach French at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where they remained until 1976. Then, not long after Stephani finished her own dissertation, and only four months after having their first child, Elliot, they started an international adventure. They moved to Nigeria, where they taught French and the Francophone literature of other cultures, first spending one year at the University of Jos on the Jos plateau, then spending seven years at Bayero University in the predominantly Muslim area of Kano. Hal loved experiencing Nigerian culture, loved the literature, and it appears that the Nigerians returned the compliment. When the Muslim Brotherhood turned out to picket, shouting "Death to Americans", they bypassed Hal and Stephani, perhaps assuming they were French, and instead targeted the home of a plump, blond Englishman.

During this period they took their vacations in Europe and the U.S. While on one vacation in the U.S. in 1979, their second child, Jessica was born.

The next phase was to bring all this experience and enthusiasm back home, indeed back to the region where Hal grew up. In 1985 they began a thirteen year stint at Minot University in Minot, ND. They both taught French, and Hal was Foreign Language Coordinator. He added Japanese and Russian to the language offering. And of course he was a foreign student exchange promoter, expanding the exchange program to include students of all disciplines. He took advantage of the opportunity to shepherd exchange students to various destinations, including Europe, Japan, and Quebec, and spent time there himself.

By 1998 it was time for a change, and now Hal and Stephani chose to experience New Orleans, where Hal became Director of the International/intercultural Center at Xavier University. He once again promoted exchange ---sending students to Europe, South America, Quebec, and Africa. He held delightful "study abroad evenings" for returning students to give short talks and share their experiences. And of course--as if in a new foreign country--Hal and Stephani took to learning all they could about New Orleans history and culture, both black and white.

While engaged in all this cross-cultural adventure and outreach, Hal had always squeezed in time to pursue another lifetime interest--playing classical piano. He was very good. But soon after arriving in New Orleans, he discovered that his right hand could no longer do a trill. It was the first clear sign that he had MSA, a very rare, progressive neurological disorder. With Stephani providing transport, he was able to work until June of 2001. After that, his decline continued, and he died July 2002.

Stephani notes that throughout Hal's life--

He was a romantic intellectual. He thoroughly enjoyed studying literature, and he believed in the intrinsic value of connecting with creative minds. Instead of groaning at the work of preparing a different course, he jumped at the chance to study new texts... Hal loved traveling, meeting people from other countries, and learning about other cultures....He jokingly referred to French as "la langue des anges." [the language of the angels] We sometimes spoke it at home, and we taught it to our children.

The Amherst undergrad life of today would be more appealing to Hal. But even the undergrad life of our day might have been more appealing if the rest of us had reached out to learn more about our fellow classmates. It is a shame we missed our chance to know him.

---Craig Morgan '62 with Stephani Pofahl Smith

Hal Smith

Hal and Stephani
With Stephani

Hal and Jessica
With Jessica