Danica Patrick Fan Club

I crossed the border into Canada on Friday the 13th, full moon, early summer of 1973. I told the border guards that I was going up for the weekend. Carrying my suitcase and sleeping bag, I searched in vain for the poor part of Vancouver. I heard of a youth hostel and spent a couple nights there. I was given a folder showing all the hostels in all the cities and towns across the country. The fee was fifty-cents per night and you got dinner and breakfast for another fifty-cents. My $200.oo American would go far as I searched for a cool town in which to spend my first winter north of the border.

It was a summer of exploration, pool, and partyin'. East to Hope--which I later recognized in the first Rambo movie--then I thumbed north up to Williams Lake. I cut west and traveled half way on a dirt road that went 300-miles to the coast and a hundred years back in time. I went dancing in Trail and Nelson, skinny-dippin' with the locals on the lake at Nakusp, bounced up and down the twisty Slocan Valley road a few times to meet people, partied for a week at the Kelowna Regatta, and sat with a bunch of folks at the bar in Vernon, where two marijuana growers were taking a break from their crop and selling big bags of leaf for $10.oo each, every other sale going for the next forty (40!) 25-cent glasses of beer for the group. This was at the height of the sexual revolution, and pretty girls who seemed to really like longhaired guys from California were waiting at every hostel, bar, and swimming hole. After deciding where I was gonna stay for the winter, I hitchhiked east across Alberta into Saskatchewan, and visited with a young couple and their two-year-old son I'd met in Vancouver. Then I went back to Vernon, B.C., and worked the winter at a rickety old sawmill on an Indian Reserve (Reservation) right on the very north end of 90-mile-long Okanagan Lake. At one point, a girlfriend and I advertised in the Vancouver Sunday Newspaper (which came out on Saturdays up there) for a cabin to caretake. We were offered a sturdy one on 200 mountain acres where the owner just wanted somebody living there to keep an eye on things, and we spent fifteen months living there, having to hitchhike home with supplies, so we got to know lots of the locals from surrounding towns. No electricity, carry the water, wood stove, shotguns. (I have picture slides of the whole time.) Anyway, I finally returned to The States in November of 1976, three-and-a-half years after going up.

After seventeen months in the Orange County Jail for being a hippie--right across from Timothy Leary for a while, also in for weed--my first winter on the road with no place to go was 1970-71. After a quick trip up from Los Angeles to the friendly little college town of Cotati in Sonoma County looking for a friend who turned out to be dead from a car wreck, I basically just hitchhiked up and down the Pacific Coast Highway between Long Beach and San Clemente making up for lost time. Thumbing up to Big Sur for Easter Week of '71, I met some folks heading to a hot springs in the mountains behind Santa Barbara and ended up spending Easter vacation with them. Visiting their house back in Long Beach, I met a girl they knew just out from Key West, and in June she and I took off thumbing north, and ended up spending five months camping in a pup tent at a nude swimming hole on the river at hippie-famous Takilma, Oregon. (Half the stores in the nearest town, Cave Junction, 12 miles away, sported signs: "We do not solicit hippie patronage.") Then up Highway 199, another forty miles or so, an easy thumb, was the much bigger Grants Pass (civilization) and I-5.

When I got back from Canada, I spent most of the next fifteen years thumbing back and forth between Portland and Santa Cruz, just seeing what presented itself, with an occasional trip to Los Angeles to be in an adult feature film. But with AIDS in the world, and my body (not me) getting older, in 1992, I decided to get off the road. I bought a one-way bus ticket from San Francisco to Nashville, where I spent the next three years, right downtown. Great place, lots of work and good people, but I couldn't handle the summer weather. In 1995, I took the bus back to California, via Portland.

Anyway, my point is, getting the economy back on track is not the answer. It doesn't take much to have a really good time. I've seen lots of lifestyles, hundreds of living situations, and talked with thousands of people. Lowering gas prices and getting the economy going again will only hasten our demise, not make anybody better off. Share the work, free up your time and have more fun. Relax. Enjoy. Have a toke. Smell the microwave popcorn.

Danica, I even love your commercials!