Daniel Woodrell: In February of 1972 a snowstorm blew into Kansas City and I decided to hitchhike to California. The roads were icy, snowflakes howling, and nobody would drive me to the highway, so I humped through the snow and ice and caught a ride with a concerned cop to the Kansas Turnpike. I had my sea bag, a few shirts, socks, a sleeping bag, two notebooks I expected to fill with my observations of the world and the beatnik poetry (even high school dropouts think they can write beatnik poetry) that would spring from my observations. For sustenance I had $50 and a large jar of honey. The first night I stopped to visit a pal in Topeka who lived over a tavern, and the next day I had $28 and a large jar of honey. People were nicer to a hitchhiker in a snow-scape, plus my sea bag announced that I’d been in the military, and that attracted rides.

I was almost 19, out of the Corps for 60 days, and off on what felt like a mandatory hitchhiking trek to rejoin my generation. Three days later I hit Tijuana with an excited kid from Minnesota who’d never been anywhere famously nasty before. We lodged at Caesar’s on Avenida Revolución, because I’d stayed there many times while stationed at Camp Pendleton. The food was good (the salad was invented there) and the bar on the first floor had a lot of character. You were also unlikely to get rolled in your sleep at Caesar’s.

Next day I bought a few tacos from an old woman cooking on a brazier curbside, and as I chewed the first this bum comes up to me and says, “How’s Lassie taste?” He was American, a little too young to really qualify as a bum, maybe, but, man, the fucker was in sad shape. His stink stood out even among the stinks of Tijuana, and he seemed off in the eyes.

“But maybe it’s Ol’ Yeller today.”

“You want one, say so.”

“I want two.” He held up a paperback book, waved it before me. “I’ll trade you this for two.”

I wasn’t hungry anymore and took the deal. It was A Moveable Feast, by Ernest Hemingway. I’d never read him, famous as he was, and thought I might’ve just gotten screwed. “Is this a cookbook?”

“No. But it’ll make you hungry, man.”

Me and the kid from Minnesota parted ways after a few nights flopping at the Holy Order of Something-or-Other, in the Tenderloin of San Francisco. We ate supper with the Brown Brothers there, but lunched at St. Anthony’s. He had money coming to Wells Fargo and missed Minnesota and certainty. I got a job handing out flyers advertising soaps, vacuum cleaners, hair-care products, mostly around Union Square. The Holy Order had good soup and great dark bread but you had to sleep with your clothes wadded under your head if you wanted to put them on in the morning. We’d pool nickels and get jugs we shared, but guys from that crowd were always after me to give them a boost into open windows visible from an alley, any alley, or keep watch on the corner while they muscled a guy in the middle of the block, any block. It was free to flop there, but I had earned $25 on my own and spent $18 to book a week in a private sleeping room on Eddy Street.