Exits and Entrances: A Journey Through many Landscapes by Dave Jaffe Chapter Three, First Part

    Chapter Three


       No one would ever call the old Arts building at McGill University in the 1960"s, 'beautiful'. It wasn't. This old two story structure was drafty, and filled with crowded classrooms and sometimes shining floors. Yet I hung out in the building's basement where you could find the men's student room. Here, young men smoked, gossiped, drank endless cups of coffee and played cards between classes.
    Here, me and another former Northmount High School classmate of mine called Mel meet an older student. He tells us how he and a friend of his, hitchhiked to Mexico through the United States, the previous summer.
     We listen enthralled for over an hour to his tales. "We've got to do this," says Mel at the end of the man's talk. "Let's do it together next summer." Mel is a short, red haired, freckle-faced person. He scores high on exams but he's also a redneck who sounds, or tries to sound like Steve McQueen in the t.v.  series 'Wanted Dead Or Alive'. Years later I realize that Mel's views resemble those of U.S. President Ronald Reagan.
    But this doesn't bother  me back in 1962. "I'm apolitical," I tell people. I read books by Philip Roth, Aldous Huxley, Henry Miller and the original hitch hiker jack Kerouac. These aren't political writers.
     So in the summer of 1962, Mel and I travel across Canada and the United States. Before going, I play for days the records of Joan Baez, who at that time was my favourite singer. Over and over again in our living room I play her songs, listening to her high lilting voice sing 'Plaisir D'Amour' and "Barbara Allen'.
    The U.S. of A. and south western Ontario stand in stark contrast to Baez's gentle messages of peace, love and loss. Vast stretches of freeways barrel through southern Ontario, a land full of massive industrial plants and gleaming skyscrapers. We cross into the American Midwest whose factories and farms exude even more power and industrial might. "A country like this," I tell some one about the U.S., "can never go wrong." But this wasn't true. A bare six years later, America was bogged down in an unwinnable war, and asassins in the meantime killed off  President John F. Kennedy and many African American leaders like Martin Luther King Junior, Malcolm X and Medgar Evers.
       Yet I enjoyed myself, although the waiting for people to pick us up tested my anxious character. We spend just a week with my newly-married sister Sylvia and her husband Shelley Auerbach in their Los Angeles apartment. In San Francisco I find a dream city where there's no heat and no humidity. After thumbing north through Oregon we take a bus back into Canada. We end up at Vancouver at the University of British Columbia.
      Here we meet a professor who takes us in his car all the way east to Chicago. Along the way back, farms endless suburbs, massive forests, broiling deserts, waving wheat and cities stream full tilt past us. This first trip is etched in my memory and will be until the day I die - or at least until Alzheimer's or dementia attack my brain.  I had seen a big chunk of the U.S. but came back dissatisfied. I needed another journey and would soon take it.