If my thought dreams could be seen: May Day 1971 (Part Four)

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If my thought dreams could be seen: May Day 1971 (Part One)
If my thought dreams could be seen: May Day 1971 (Part Two)
If my thought dreams could be seen: May Day 1971 (Part Three)

And when the truck came to a complete stop then rolled backward, crashing into what had to be a police car, we were tossed against each other violently and the sense of panic really set in. We were near Richmond, Indiana at the Indiana/Ohio border and we were such losers that we had not even gotten out of our own state safely. In a few minutes the sliding door was rolled up, we were blinded by the head lights of numerous police cars and their flashing lights, and a cloud of marijuana smoke billowed out into the faces of half a dozen Indiana State troopers.

It was a flat, nondescript strip of Interstate that could have been anywhere. It was twilight and getting darker by the moment. Our doom seemed obvious. There was no way this could turn out well. The police cruisers were impressive stacked up behind us and the police themselves looked more impressive still, as the flashing lights atop the cars cycled across their faces.  For the sake of honesty, I will not exaggerate and tell you they had their guns drawn dramatically because they did not. They did not know what they were up against in this respective ship of fools we were, but they had thought we may be dangerous enough that they had arrived in force.

Amos had been driving the U-Haul so he had to deal with the police. Amos was a short, intelligent guy with long wavy hair who hailed from Israel. He had moved to England for several years then to West Lafayette, Indiana where his dad was a professor at Purdue. Amos' mom was very interesting. She was this small, unassuming Jewish mother who seemed like anyone else's mom only foreign. She had been born in Russia and had fled over the Ural Mountains to escape from the Nazis during the Second World War. She had spent two years in a British detention camp on Cyprus after trying to enter Palestine, something the British discouraged at the time. She had also been a member of the Irgun, a Zionist paramilitary group that operated in Palestine until 1948. I am certain she was the only mother of any of my friends who knew how to handle a Kalashnikov. She always offered us cookies when we came over for a visit.

With the harsh glare of the lights from the police cars trained upon us, the total darkness of the U-Haul's cargo area was dispelled in embarrassing fashion. The truck was a complete mess, as you would imagine, with all our gear haphazardly stored and pop bottles and food wrappers strewn about. We had sweated a fair bit so it probably didn't smell too sweet either. Putting our best foot forward always.

I could finally see Paul, who is now the director of research for a pharmaceutical firm, wearing his treasured jungle safari pith helmet to which he had affixed a red star. There was Maggie, with a red bandana tied around her neck, who became an activist-journalist covering the Intifada in the occupied territories of Palestine, and the Iraq War from the perspective of the Kurds. Maggie used to slip me free food at a grill just off the Purdue campus when she worked there, and she was for several years a professor who split her time between Cairo and the U.S. Maggie had raven dark hair and a light caramel complexion unlike anyone else in her family. She used to make jokes about her mother's one-night-stand with a tall dark stranger. And then there was Lucas, the slender hillbilly intellectual from West Virginia who sported a modified Ho Chi Minh beard and who hung posters of Marx, Engels, and Lenin in his room at school. Lucas and his farmer roommate--with the Budweiser posters--never really got along. Lucas later taught at Harvard and Duke. We also had four or five former Eagle Scouts with us as well as several former apostles of Ayn Rand. So we and all these others too numerous to mention had a front row seat as Amos and the officer in charge discussed our precarious situation.

"Do you know why we stopped you?" the trooper asked. "I have no idea," Amos answered innocently. "By the way, it's a bit smoky in there isn't it?" said the cop. "Oh, some people never took the Surgeon General's Report seriously, I guess," Amos panned. We all laughed. Oh, this was rich. Even though we were all going to jail we were loving this exchange.

"Well, we stopped you because you were gassing up in Richmond and someone at the gas station heard people talking in the back of the truck and someone else told them to be quiet." That would have been me. Damn, I suck, I thought. "So this 'someone' at the gas station gave us a call and we just had to check to see that you kids were all OK, and that no in this truck was here against their will," he said. "Oh, we're all peachy officer, and we're all here voluntarily aren't we folks?" Amos said laughing, turning around to address us. We roared with laughter again. "Things were just great until you stopped us," said Paul laughing. Paul always had the broadest smile and even when he was being a smart ass he was disarmingly charming about it. "Is that so," said the trooper, mostly to himself. "I bet you were." We were just waiting for the shit to hit the fan. Although we were laughing we were really, really scared.

"So where are you kids headed?" asked the officer. "We're going to a demonstration in Washington, DC," Amos told him, without artifice, without flinching, and with pride. "Renting this truck is the cheapest and easiest way to get there and it keeps us safe from the dangers of hitchhiking." The cop stood there for a moment and just seemed to be taking it in, deciding what action to take next. Car after car and truck after truck roared by loudly as we sat there breathless, waiting for the hammer to fall. 

"Well, I'll tell you what," said the trooper. "There's certainly no law against against exercising your constitutionally-protected rights, but there are laws against drugs." He paused, and you could feel our collective spirits sagging so much I thought the truck's springs might break. Here it came. The search, the hassle, the humiliation, and jail. I had never been to jail and I don't think anyone else had been to jail either. Damn, and this trip had seemed like such a good idea at the time... I could hear Three Dog Night in the background of my mind singing, "That ain't the way to have fun, son..." 

"So, I'll tell you what," he said, his face silhouetted against the spot lights and head lights and flashing lights of the cruisers parked behind him. " I know you kids have a lot of drugs in this truck. I can smell the marijuana but I'm sure you also have a lot of acid, and heroin and speed and other kinds of pills in this truck and if you all just pass it forward to me I'll put it in a big pile right here in front of us and destroy it, then I'll let you go."

You have got to be kidding, I thought. How could he think we were such hopeless drug addicts? We just had a couple joints on us. We didn't do all that other stuff, except for maybe the acid on occasion and we only used speed to help us study for finals and even frat boys with "Love it or Leave it" stickers on their cars did that. No one did heroin or popped pills. We had read the Readers Digest while waiting in doctor's offices all our lives and we knew this stuff was bad. And no one believed this trooper was just going to let us go. We were in a stand off, but there were 20 plus of us and a half dozen of them and they thought we were crazy drug addicts and revolutionary firebrands. 


"Well," Amos said, "there's none of that going on here. But if there were I don't think that by now anything would be left for you to discover." The officer just stood there looking at us amidst all his lights and cars and the impressive array of force he had at his disposal. He looked at us long and hard....


"I think you're right," he said. "Just get the hell out of here and do it quick." We were happy to oblige. We were astonished. We had won. I guess he did a quick cost/benefit analysis and gave it up as a lost cause, especially given our numbers and his fear regarding our response. Not that we would have done anything, but he didn't know that. People like us had been pretty well demonized in the minds of some and we had willingly fed that image too often. I'm not sure what happened about the truck rolling back into a police car and not being nailed for that, but we were too damn happy about the outcome as it were to ask. 


"Call the FBI and tell 'em the hippies are shipping 'em to Washington in U-Hauls," he yelled to another officer, as if there were some Command Central of the anti-war movement that ran everything with an amazing level of precision from top to bottom anytime it wished. 


Amos shut the door of the U-Haul, then hopped in the cab and slowly pulled back on to the Interstate, heading out of Indiana past the "Welcome to Ohio" sign which we saw had only been only a hundred or so feet in front of us before we had been intercepted. 

We took turns riding in the cab with the drivers--three abreast--and my turn came as we crawled through West Virginia. I fell asleep on the shoulder of Chook's friend Mary, and she didn't push me aside. The fragrance of her patchouli oil filled me with wonder. Her soft shoulder and that scent made me feel happy and safe in an unsafe world. A couple hours later I had to crawl back into the darkness of the U-Haul and slept there as well as I could with 20 other people crowding up every square inch of space. Mary's shoulder had seemed much more inviting.


A few hours later Scott, a long-haired engineering student who had taken over the driving duties, started shouting hoarsely from the cab in front, "We're here, we're here. I'll open up the back door so you can see this place when it's safe to pull off!" We shook ourselves awake and the excitement built. The truck was pretty stuffy and we stank. We passed around the remaining water and some of us splashed a little on our faces to freshen up.


Within twenty minutes we stopped and Scott opened the back door to the U-Haul. I could smell water immediately and hear flags cracking in the wind.  It was like going from black and white to color in the Wizard of Oz. Light, vibrant color, and the fragrant scents of spring flooded in, overwhelming the darkness and dread that had captured us for 15 hours or more. We were crossing the Potomac River and the bridge was decorated with red and black flags. Long hairs were everywhere, people had signs and banners, and joy had captured us all. We were driving into West Potomac Park, we had gotten to D.C.  safe and sound, it was morning in America, and we were going to make history.

TO BE CONTINUED