A long, strange trip

It was the late summer of 1969, and I was a 21-year-old hippie from Southern California with shoulder-length hair, hitchiking east to Aspen to chase a girl I’d met that June. I drank to excess on occasions, but I was firmly planted in the hippie culture with all its medicinal remedies. Hopelessly trapped for hours on a remote freeway onramp, I took a chance, walked out onto the freeway shoulder and stuck out my thumb, a move that the California Highway Patrol would have immediately arrested me for. Swerving across three lanes and skidding to a halt was a shiny new red convertible with a clean-cut, clean-shaven smiling man in his mid-30s who seemed absolutely straight. He looked just like Bobby Darin. People who looked like him didn’t stop for hippies. “Hop in!” he said.