Bill Snowden's Blog

A true story from Route 66

   The death of a hippie march in November 1967 in the Haight Ashbury. 

Growing up on Cape Cod, the ocean has always been my spiritual connection. But in 1967 a road gave me my first taste of freedom.

When I was a kid, I hitchhiked to California on the old Route 66. It was 8:00 am, August 4th, 1967. I walked out of Horatio Hall, Tobler's barn in Chatham , where I'd lived and had my first acid trip that summer. I walked down to Main street, Chatham, pointed my body west and put my thumb out. I had forty dollars hidden in my underwear and a piece of paper in my pocket from a waiter at the Columns Restaurant of the name and address of a guy in San Diego who would sell me a kilo of grass for 20 bucks. I was gonna find him and turn around and hitch back home so me and my friends could smoke weed all winter. I had no clue what I was doing. Hitch hiking cross country based on some deep guidance. I was in the hands of fate and destiny. In life it helps to be young when we take risks that we don't even realize are risks.  I was going to hitch hike across America. I had just turned 19, the week before.

My journey to Rte 66 started on the Cape and wound thru the Midwest, going south all the way to Los Angeles. Rte 66; a two lane asphalt history lesson, all 2,000 miles, unwinding like an old black phonograph record track; scored, scarred and full of every dream, regret and sorrow America recorded on it's asphalt since the Great Depression.  Every mile I walked and rode on it felt like an old 78 rpm, hand cranked song, singing a feeling of wide openness, a time when there weren't so many of us. Every deserted gas station I saw from Oklahoma to Arizona sang of the Joads, hobos and Oakies, of Steinbeck and Woody Guthrie, of Jack Kerouac's, "On the Road" and Neil Cassidy, of nameless long dead mothers who lost their kids in childbirth, while pulled over on the grassy shoulder of Hope's Highway. Route 66 started somewhere for everyone who took it.  It was a wonderful old road, as long, endless and hopeful as the dreams of its travelers. But like all dreams hitting reality, it, too, came to a dead end sooner or later.

I was on that road three days in early August, 1967 and my dreams were mighty damn big.

Late the third day, into the fourth, I got to L.A. It was like 2 am, a pitch black, moonless night. I said to the truck driver that'd picked me up in Arizona,

"Just take me to the ocean and I'll know where I'm supposed to go."

He dropped me off in Malibu about 3:00 am, just north of where Route 66 ended and Coastal Route 1 began. Facing the Pacific was a weird experience. My Atlantic ocean left shoulder was used to facing north, everything here was reversed and I could feel it. Standing in the dark, smelling familiar salt air, hearing the waves in the Pacific night, something made me abandon the notion of scoring a kilo for me and my friends back on the Cape, and my life turned me North, up coastal route 1 toward San Francisco. Fourty years later, I still can't tell you why, but I'm grateful Life chose me to be on the bus even if I was just catching it leaving the psychedelic station.. A couple of groggy hours and one ride later, a Boeing factory worker on break between double shifts building bombers for Viet Nam let me out on a cliff over the dark Pacific somewhere near Big Sur. I could smell the heavy salt air and taste the spray from waves I could hear down below. There was a bent over street pole light up ahead on my side of the road. The fog created a yellowish beam, an angled lampshade line right down to the crushed cinders under my feet. My bomber building ride banged a u-e and screeched back south towards L.A. I'd barely straightened up to get my thumb out when a blue Ford Falcon station wagon came outa the night and pulled over, skidding in the ciders about 20 feet ahead of me. Its cracked windshield was half lit under the street lamp. I ran towards the car, and the Falcon's passenger door flew open but no one was sitting there. As I leaned in, the unseen driver's, slow,long voice said, "Where are the Snowdens' of yesteryear?" I peered in and said, "My name's Snowden, where're ya going?"

Just another chance meeting, another dream song, another dead child, another miracle birth, another chance robbery, anotherunexpected kindness of a generous stranger, another storydelivered from a trip on a dead end highway. Route 66.

That night, destiny sent me north and I spent the next 18 months in the Haight Ashbury, northern California and the jungles and beaches of Mexico. It was the summer of love, 1967. Quite the trip. The voice in the Falcon station wagon, Dwight Carson, became a life long, though troubled friend. That night, when he flung the passenger door open, he'd just finsihed reading "Catch 22" and he'd yelled out Yossarian's quote about the "Snowden's of yesteryear". Carson was random like that before random was cool or diagnosed treatable. What were the odds that a guy named Snowden would peer in your car after you blurt that out? If you think that was a flash; honestly, it was a minor ripple compared to the Psychic/Soul experiences waiting for me when I got to the Haight Ashbury. That was just the first door of perception to crash open. When you hear the phrase, ‘we are all one'. Well, it's one thing to hear it and something infinitely, indescribably else to "experience" oneness with All energy and space, with the Creative Intelligence of the Universe. After that, you absolutely are no longer in Kansas, Dorthy and clicking your heels twice will never make you come home. It was life changing, consciousness changing , dangerous, risky, firing line of life stuff. I wouldn't recommend my kids do it but I'm at peace now with my adventure and grateful for the Blessing that still lives in me as a result of being willing to cast my fate to the wind.

Rte 66 was replaced a few years later by a big Federal, impersonal Interstate Highway. All the towns along 66 began their death rattle as America made more and more of ourselves to fill in the spaces between the two coasts.

I had a chance to walk on Rte 66 in 1967, when I was 19 years old.  I Meet hobos and old people who didn't have anything to say. I got a chance to listen to accapella songs from an ancient fiddler who, after he got up from the seat next to me, literally disappeared on a moving train. I got  get rides from people I'd never see till Judgment Day. I was nineteen, incredibly alive and dangerously free. You know what the freedom was? From us. From all of us. From too many human beings. I got a chance to walk and ride, alone,  across a vast open land and on a Highway that hadn't seen so many lives that it couldn't hold the song of their individual memories in its long grooved track of a road. And I am so grateful that the year 1967 cranked that handle and played the feelings of those lives back to me.

What a sweet, sweet smell solitude is, served fresh on a long open road when you're young.

billy snowden

Haight Ashbury, Summer of 67'