There are preposterous things that we do in our early thirties that seem normal then. Now they might seem, well, preposterous. One of these was our ten day swing to discover America.

My roommate when I moved to Philadelphia in the early 1970’s after leaving the ministry, after driving a catering truck and now working in a minimum security prison for gang kids, was Charlie Cunningham. We had been introduced by my girl friend, a Janis Joplin lookalike, or so I thought, and we formed a fast friendship that included working together at the prison, many weekend 35 to 70 mile canoe trips down the upper reaches of the Delaware River and now driving around the country in my white Jeepster Commando, “Molly”.

Charlie and I were co-counselors of a cottage of court adjudicated teenaged boys who had ended up at Neshaminy Youth Detention Center (YDC) in NE Philadelphia for all the usual reasons: Gang fights, theft, small time drug sales and the like. When you got to know them, they were for the most part a great group of young men who with luck survived adolescence and became men with our help. Somehow on our drives to Neshaminy prison from our third floor apartment in West Philly, we came up with the idea: “What if we drove around the country?” “How far could we get?” “How much time do we have?”

The answer to the last question was “not much!” We had less than ten days of vacation available to us from our jobs. The first half of August was already a memory. If we took the last week of August and traveled through Labor Day weekend, we could do it. We had just enough time to return to work Labor Day Tuesday still in the good graces of the Pennsylvania State government.

We tried to find companionship. We posted homemade flyers in the girl’s dorms at Penn and in various apartment buildings around West Philly imploring women to join us by advertising ourselves as “Knights under the Stars”. Nothing. Imagine! No takers. We were going to do this trip by ourselves. Our one companion would be Roddy, my little, beloved black with a white bib, curly haired 30 pound street dog from Yonkers. Roddy, full name Roderick Othello el Doggo von Hund Thomas, was a trooper who in another two years would travel with me 17,500 miles from New Rochelle NY to Circle City Alaska and back. This trip was to become his training run.

When getaway day arrived, we loaded the Jeep with as much food and camping gear as Molly would hold. We used whatever rope we could find to tie the Grumman aluminum canoe, newly painted green after hammering out the dents acquired on our last trip down the Delaware when the water was unusually low, to the Jeepster’s roof rack. We stuffed as much cash as we could into our pockets, inserted a newly acquired and first ever credit card into my wallet and headed to Neshaminy. We worked the morning shift, grabbed some food from the dining hall, raced to the car and headed west, our first destination: West Virginia.

“Bang!” “Bang!” The sound of rifle shots perforated the morning stillness around Charlie’s grandmother’s house deep in the hollers of West Virginia. We awakened with a start. Grandma was shooting squirrels out of the trees from her back stoop. Her aim was unerring. With each shot, a squirrel dropped. We gobbled down a West Virginia breakfast of biscuits, ham and eggs (no squirrel), pointed the Jeepster southwest and headed out of “Almost Heaven” into Tennessee and through Tennessee into Alabama. We drove through the night each of us taking turns sleeping while the other drove. If you were going to see America in less than ten days, trading off comfort for mileage was a fair trade.

We arrived in New Orleans in the early morning. We snaked our way off the main roads, over the levees and through the city to the French Quarter. Coffee and beignets were our target breakfast. We hesitated about leaving Molly and the canoe in street parking but the lure of hot beignets and hotter, strong coffee more than offset our hesitancy. We walked the French Quarter. This was our first time savoring the smells and sights of this fabulous city. We absorbed as much as we could but by early afternoon it was time to go. We had a new destination: Sante Fe.

We crossed steamy hot western Louisiana into Texas. Texas east of Dallas had so little that was remarkable about it that we stopped only long enough to fill up, eat up and push west. We drove around Dealey Plaza where less than 10 years earlier JFK was “blown away” (Billy Joel song). The place depressed us. But after Dallas as we got into the southwest Texas hill country (profiled so capably in the recent biography of LBJ since this was the country in which he grew up) our melancholy over the events in Dallas lifted. We were in glorious desert country. Cactus, rocks, hills and sagebrush covered the expanses on either side of Molly as she raced westward. Buildings were scarce. Occasionally we would come upon an oil rig. We paralleled the Rio Grande and after midnight headed northwest across the border into New Mexico.

Our arrival into Sante Fe where we would hole up for a couple of days was memorable. The sun was coming up as we reached Sante Fe’s outskirts. Prior to the trip I had installed an eight track tape player under Molly’s driver’s seat. I pushed in Janis Joplin’s amazing album, “Pearl”, and “Cry Baby” and “A Woman Left Lonely” blasted through the Jeep, out our windows and Janis’s pained, gutsy, bluesy music penetrated our souls.

Cash was beginning to run low. We headed toward Taos, stopped at a diner for a bite to eat, saw what we feared might be a kidnapping as two men from the area forced a woman into their car and sped away, and headed into the hills to camp overnight. We rode horses the next day through high desert mountain vistas that I would not see again for forty years until Parker, our son, and I returned to Philmont for our incomparable Boy Scout camping experience in these same Sangre de Cristo mountains.

We were getting short on time and lower on cash. We had three days to get to Colorado, cross the Plains and return home. Molly headed north through the remainder of New Mexico’s mountains and into Colorado’s steeps. We camped outside of Independence Pass and were reminded that our choice of campsites was not the best since several inches of snow covered our tent and campsite when we awoke shivering to make a morning fire before departure. Hot coffee warmed us enough to pack our gear, load Molly and head downslope to Aspen for a few hours before beginning our journey east along Interstate 70 to Denver.

Charlie had relatives in St Louis. Thank God! Money was almost gone. I was leery of my ability to pay a big credit card bill. We had some bucks for fuel (in those days it cost less than $.35 a gallon before spiking later in the decade). All we had to do was get there and we could get a loan and fuel up for the final push. After hours crossing the plains, we finally spotted the Arch from miles away and made it to Charlie’s relatives place for a nourishing meal, a loan and new resolve for the final push. We arrived in Philadelphia the next morning just in time for the afternoon shift at the YDC. Broke. On fumes. But OMG were we happy and satisfied.

What made this trip memorable? It is a story that I would tell and retell to my children, Colby, Merribeth and Parker when they were very young. Why memorable? Just this: Some of America’s best coming of age stories occur on the road. From Steinbeck to Kerouac to the “Easy riders” to Thomas and Cunningham, we all grew and experienced and learned as we discovered America. We learned that Americans were open hearted. We learned that Americans were trustworthy. We learned that Americans were kind. And we learned that Americans understood “Gotta run. Lots of miles to go until our next stop” and respected us for spending ten days discovering America.