My Story
It would be easy to blame this whole mess on my parents. But I have the controlling vote and I am skeptical.
My grandfather Charles Burstein, whom I am named after, fled the pogroms in Russia with his family in the 1890s. He died in the so-called Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918. So did Donald Trump’s father, so did lots of people. On March 6, 2020 Trump said the following at a press conference: “I didn’t know that people died of the flu.” But that’s another story. Dad was five months old at the time, and grew up fatherless in the Bronx alongside his older brother and sister. His first glimpse of the rest of the world occurred in World War II where he served in Algeria, Italy and post-war Germany. Those experiences must have given him a taste for travel.
My mother’s family were fortunate enough to fetch up in New York in 1939 when she was twelve. It was her third culture and language behind Berlin and Brussels, German and French. She was an ardent Francophile for her entire life. Almost her whole extended family disappeared into the maw of the camps, never to be heard of again.
The couple met at a midtown Manhattan advertising agency where he was a budding executive and she a secretary. They married in 1948 and I popped up almost exactly two years later. This was an era of conformity where people grasped for stability and material comfort following over twenty years of depression and war. On the surface they seemed like a conventional couple following the herd.
Yet fourteen months after my birth, they confounded their circle of family and friends by quitting their jobs and giving up their rent-controlled apartment. Defying hair-pulling, warnings of doom, threats of disinheritance, and general opprobrium, they bought a new Chevy, and with infant in tow, drove West, destination unknown. They wound up in Palo Alto, CA. My dad found a position at and worked his way up to vice president of an ad agency in San Francisco. He spent most of 1960 crisscrossing the country with RFK as point man on the Kennedy advertising campaign. After bringing my two new younger brothers up to school age, my mother resumed working as a secretary.
Conventional life-style reigned once again. They bought an expensive rambler in the fancy suburb of Woodside and a Jaguar. We had governesses. All seemed normal. But then my father got sick of such intense and high pressure work fueled with binges of drinking.
So they did it again! Selling the house and the car, which grieved my mother heavily, they bought a Ford station wagon, pulled us three boys out of school, and drove back across the country before boarding the Rotterdam cruise ship bound for Europe. We spent our next six months living in southern France and then the Costa del Sol near Torremolinos. In the latter venue, mom and dad fell into a heavy party life. At one point they were both away overnight, believing the other was home with the kids. Twelve year old me managed to hold down the fort, but it was pretty scary.
They were looking for a quieter life in Europe. Banking on Gil’s administrative skills and Alice’s three languages they nearly landed employment in a Swiss hotel. A last minute law against foreigners upset that plan. So they returned to California where my dad started a headhunting agency with a friend and mom found her usual secretarial work. They bought a more modest house in Menlo Park, and settled down once again. But of course they were not near finished. The moment Niles graduated high school, they sold the house and bought a Volkswagen van. They drove south through Mexico, Central and South America down to Chile and Argentina, then back up to Brazil. From there they shipped to Portugal. During the trip they skirted two revolutions in Chile and Portugal.Their last port of call before returning to the states following twenty-seven months on the road was Norway (no prize for guessing who was enlisted to take care of all their domestic paperwork and business affairs).
They continued to live in this manner well into the 1990s when health and age issues crashed the party. So you would be justified in believing that the urge to travel was passed on in my bloodline and experience. But I don’t see it that way. I have been traveling backpack-style incessantly for over fifty years since I graduated from the University of California in 1971. There was a pause from 1985 to 2003 when I was raising my daughter. We still traveled, naturally, but the preferred mode was car camping. Be that as it may, my preference is to own nothing but a light backpack.
So did I begin this life of travel in response to my parent’s example? Maybe, but in my mind it was more default than conscious choice. My first nine months on the road alone took me over and the fever has never really let me go.
I was probably raised to be a lawyer. From 1963 to 1967 I was a pint-sized, socially-retarded high school student in the cloistered mostly White suburbias of the San Francisco Peninsula. I had the requisite 3.8 GPA and extra-curricular activities.
My path forward seemed clear. But life in Father Knows Best/Leave It to Beaver America was changing rapidly. My surmise is that the Kennedy assassination was the most important precipitating event, the day the country lost its innocence.
My record earned me a highly-coveted spot in the newly minted University of California at Santa Cruz, one of the most beautiful academic situs in the entire world. Founder Dean McHenry envisioned this as an island of Oxford college serenity far above the stresses of the real world. Poor Dean McHenry. Who could know that a runaway train was blowing up American culture and that his sand castle would inevitably collapse into the hippiest of hippie schools?
I began school in September, 1967 barely over 17 and only a year into puberty. It seemed quiet at first, then the shocks began. 1968 was the most tumultuous year in American history since the end of World War II. The Tet Offensive inalterably changed the calculus of the Vietnam War. MLK was murdered. RFK was murdered. The Chicago Police went berserk at the Democratic Convention. Blood flowed in the streets. Richard Nixon eked out a win in a bitterly divided country. I was a tender 18. Here is what else was happening: A fast-growing anti-war movement raised the temperature past boiling point on both sides. The invention of the birth control pill lowered the worry of getting pregnant for young women. A sexual revolution came into being, ushering in the era of Free Love. Black Americans were energized in their campaign for Civil Rights. Not to be outdone, feminists were battling for the reorder of patriarchal society. Homosexuality was beginning to slip out of the closet. And if all that were not enough, clouds of marijuana smoke and Owsley LSD were infusing a movement toward psychedelic consciousness.
This was an awful lot for a “little” boy to handle. Besides smoking dope and barely doing enough work to pass my classes (consequences of losing a student deferment were severe), the only thing I truly cared about was playing bridge. Yet in early 1969 in quick succession I lost my virginity, took my first acid trip, and attended my first protest demonstration. Like I said, an awful lot. My last two years found me gaining an interest in the social sciences, counterbalancing my general stonedness and tendency to pass every possible free hour playing cards. I ran out of money midway during my Junior year. I was allowed to stay at my parent’s house and work during the summer, but my dad did not believe in paying for any of his son’s educations. It was clearly against his religion. After paying for tuition, I was close to broke. I spent most of my final year and a half sleeping in the woods. In the winter I rented a hayloft behind a hippie house for ten dollars a month. I read textbooks and wrote papers in the library, took showers and kept my meager possessions in a locker in the gym. I paid for food with my bridge winnings. All you can eat lunch cost a dollar. I gorged and walked out surreptitiously with a paper bag for later. Very occasionally that strategy failed. Without the dollar, I resorted to gleaning in the cafeterias, moving from one to another to avoid notice.
And so June, 1971 arrived and there I was. I had a university degree, but none of the standard accompaniments, no ideas, no ambition, no particular interest in finding a job, or in other words no clue. What was I supposed to do next? I did actually have one ambition, to become a championship level bridge tournament, but that was more of a dream than a life direction.
At first I kept living in the forest. My skills and luck had been improving and I had about $50. The beaches and redwood forest were gorgeous. I hiked around campus and hitchhiked to nearby beaches. By late July the money was gone. There was nothing to do but catch a ride to my parent’s house. Maybe they would have a plan. But no, they were as hands off as ever. One day I was wandering around the nearby Stanford campus and saw an ad for a prison experiment. I applied. It sounded interesting and $15 a day was $15 a day. And so by random chance I became a guard in the most controversial and infamous social science experiment of the era. As if I wasn’t alienated enough from conventional society, this experience, one of the most seminal of my life, solidified a distrust of authority that has persisted a lifetime.
During that year another potential problem was solved. The United States had a military draft and when I graduated from the university I had lost my deferment. In the nick of time the open draft ended and was replaced with a lottery based on one’s birthday. I fortunately pulled a 268, so that was the end of that.
With nothing else on the horizon, I decided that I would travel. I took a dishwashing job. By the following spring I had accumulated a little over a thousand dollars. I (over)packed my first backpack, bought a student flight to Amsterdam for a hundred dollars and left, no real plan or itinerary.
Trip one, April 1972 to January, 1973
In Amsterdam I located a hostel in the red light district where I spent ten nights. The rate was $3.25 a night including a good breakfast. After that I hit the road, heading for Argelès-Gazost in the French Pyrenees near Lourdes. I had a contact there, a high school teacher who had been friends with my mom when our family lived there in 1962. The trip lasted about a week. There were 48 rides, every single one who smoked. I mostly slept rough in fields, though once or twice was invited to crash. My diet consisted of bread, cheese, apples and the odd glass of red wine. My expenditures ran between one and two dollars.
When I arrived, Monsieur Daries had no clue as to what I was doing. I was invited for one night. Then he passed me on to a long-haired, bearded colleague. That colleague was more than happy to offer me floorspace for $15 a meal. We shared food and meals. While he taught I used a regional Michelin map to hike to every castle, ruin, lake or any other point of interest within a day’s round trip. I whiled away ten weeks very enjoyably in this manner, spending practically nothing. My benefactor suggested a summer in the Greek Islands.
At the end of June I shook his hand and headed east. Five days later, I grabbed a ferry from Bari to Corfu, my first transportation cost except for a couple of city bus rides. Corfu is beautiful. I ended up on a wild and peaceful beach with a small ragtag band of other hippies. A fair Aussie lass took me on with the proviso that she call me Charles. Chuck meant throwing up where she hailed from. She could call me anything she wanted. I was inexperienced and though never a bit shy about talking with girls, was very shy about coming on to them. No matter, this was the heyday of the Free Love era, and it was the girls calling the shots more often than not. A few blissful nights later she left and I took a train to Athens.
A couple of days later I took the ferry to Crete, a fascinating destination in those days. On the boat I met a beautiful New Zealand girl. She used me for a night in Chania, then perfidious maiden cast me out. I learned that finding a girl was relatively easy. But I wanted was a girlfriend to share adventures with, but that was anything but easy.
Someone suggested the lonely island of Karpathos, halfway between Crete and Rhodes. That is the way one found places to go. A small crowd of foreigners descended from the ferry there, replacing an equally small group departing. There was a little English on the island. Some residents had made there fortune in the United States, then returned to their paradise home to live out their lives. A couple was canvassing the arriving hippies. They offered a tiny farmhouse at the very top of the hill in the capital town of Pigadia. It had a mattress and an outhouse. They were asking $10 a month. I discovered that the only soap that foamed in salt water was coconut soap, which I used for my ablutions in the warm Aegean. I lived off of souvlaki, the richest of cold milk and yoghurt and Greek salads of cucumber, tomatoes and onions.
The scraggly group of five or six visitors met every evening at a taverna down on the water. We gorged on fresh fish and chips, washed down with far too much retsina and ouzo. The toilet was behind a wooden wall at the end of a pier which featured a hole where the fish gathered to harvest our leavings. Late in the evening, I staggered up the hill, collapsed on my mattress inside my sleeping bag, and watched the meteor shower fall around my addled head.
During the day I hiked all over the barely inhabited island, lying on pristine beaches and swimming in crystalline water. I read Kazantzakis and wrote bad short stories. In six weeks I spent about a hundred dollars. I thought I was the champion, but a young English couple eclipsed me with ease. They found a spacious five room beach cave about a mile out of town. They had spear guns and ate a lot of fish, trading some of it for other provisions. They told me that they had passed two months and spent a total of five dollars.
Towards the end of my stay on the island. They had just moved on from a Kibbutz and recommended it. It sounded good, lots of fresh air, plenty of pretty Israeli girls, and best of all an indefinite stay without the need to spend a shekel. I caught the next week’s ferry to Rhodes, hopped up to another barely known island, Nisyros. I had another quiet week exploring this volcanic rock without seeing another foreigner. Then I returned to Athens. It had been a great trip so far, some warmup in Amsterdam, springtime in the gorgeous French mountains, and a Greek summer to remember.
The cruise from Athens to Haifa was utterly serene over the dark blue waters. Almost everyone on board were of the young international backpacker cohort. We slept in our sleeping bags on the deck, each night treated to an intense celestial light show with no artificial interference to vitiate it. It was glorious. We shared a lot of bread, cheese, and retsina, along with our neighbor’s secret stashes of treats like raisins. The crossing cost $15. I remember it as one of the most pleasant three days of my life.
In Haifa I checked in with an agency and was soon on my way to Kibbutz Yasur about 18 miles to the north and somewhat inland. There I was to pass the next three and a half months. It was a large and prosperous place. In 1948 the nascent Israeli government had given the land to a group of Hungarians and another of Englishmen. This was the strategy for all their new citizens to learn Hebrew in order to communicate with each other. Twenty-four years later the strategy had succeeded somewhat. Everybody did speak Hebrew. But these so different groups had never grown together culturally. The young Hungarians spoke English. None of the English spoke Hungarian. In defense the latter is a very distinct and difficult language, and of no real use outside of the mother country.
Volunteers bunked in cabins. We worked six days of six hours each to earn our room and board. Most of the work was picking oranges, grapefruit, and avocados in the pardes, paradise. Occasionally there was something else. I spent ten days assisting the English surveyor. The meals were taken in shifts in the cafeteria. The food was hearty and unlimited. Working in the open air developed my appetite. I had graduated college weighing 110 pounds. Months of hard travel and general miserliness had cost me about five of them. Now with free food, I stuffed myself with avocados, yogurt, and dark bread and shot up to 125. That must be my natural weight, because I have maintained it almost constantly ever since.
There were plenty of distractions in our time off. We were allowed to work three eight hour shifts to accumulate an extra day off. Everything is close in Israel and hitchhiking was a breeze. I had excursions to the Sea of Galilee and Jerusalem. Some of the kids visited Bethlehem, but Jews were not allowed there. The movie A Clockwork Orange came to Haifa. We hitched there for street falafels, the tastiest food in the world, and were amazed by the show. I enjoyed the film so much that I went again a week later on my day off.
The best thing was that I soon met my first girlfriend. There was plenty of casual stuff at Santa Cruz, but I was too wrapped up with bridge and smoking weed to be a candidate for a relationship. The kibbutzniks were very socially liberal in this brave new world and the age of majority was 16. About a month into my stay I was hanging out with a beautiful and vivacious seventeen year-old girl named Estee (just for the record there were almost no girls my own age available. They left for the Army when they turned 18, and generally took off globetrotting after their service or soon came home and got married).
One item of interest is that my status as an American Jew put a bit of a target on my back. One group of particularly nationalistic young men spent their energy trying to get individuals like me to go Aliyah, which literally means going up. In other words, they wanted me to renounce my traitorous American roots and become Israeli. I thoroughly enjoyed my time in Israel and had many good things to say about it. But the society was far too militaristic for this anti-war hippie to have any interest in joining it.
All good things come to an end. I had bulked up, spent almost no money, met tons of interesting people and had a girlfriend. But sadly, Estee celebrated her eighteenth birthday and was gone. Desultory and a bit heartbroken, I stayed another week, then flew to London. After a few expensive nights there I returned to California. Of my original stake of $1,100 I had spent two-hundred fifty on plane tickets and about five hundred otherwise. Not bad for nine months and seven countries.
I learned a lot from this first long voyage. Pack light, very light, ready to jump at every opportunity. Going slow is the way to go. Nearly my entire trip was spent in the French Pyrenees, the Greek Islands, and the Kibbutz. It was a deep dive into new cultures and ways of life, and set me up to embrace that choice for most of my life. Slower is also cheaper, much cheaper. I probably don’t have to keep repeating that. Finally that type of road life gets into the blood. The sense of deep freedom and avoidance of the restrictions of a settled life is intoxicating. Whenever I travel, I carry that feeling with me. And at age 75, I am still going for it.
So I returned to the States in early 1973, months before my 23rd birthday, still facing the same uncertainties that I had been avoiding. At least I knew that there were two things I wanted to do, play tournament bridge and do more budget travel. The question was hot to fund this irregular lifestyle. I stayed with my folks briefly and managed to pick up a temporary assignment with the Stanford Research Institute working on, get this, a study of disparate American lifestyles. And one of them was titled Voluntary Simplicity which immediately resonated with me and has informed most of my life. Then the US Postal Service announced one of their periodic employment exams and I aced it. I was fourth out of five hundred applicants, but the two top scorers were veterans given a ten point handicap. Post office jobs were coveted among us fringe types.
Finances arranged for the moment, I moved into a group house in downtown Palo Alto organized by one of my bridge partners. There were five small bedrooms and an attic space, and everyone’s share came to $50 a month. This must sound like a typo with the rarefied contemporary prices, but it was what it was. Tom’s house became a perfect port in the storm for me, even when I relinquished my room a year and a half later. I was always allowed to crash in the living room after returning from trips until I arranged something else.
My monthly expenses were the $50, food costs, and entries to local bridge duplicate tournaments. Getting around by bicycle was a breeze. I was making the princely sum of six dollars+, more than twice what I had ever earned before. I enjoyed the working, mostly walking down the street with plenty of opportunity to chat. The Mediterranean climate was a great boon. And like picking fruit, I could see and feel a sense of accomplishment at the end of the day after completing a route, unlike many jobs.
I stayed at the job for a year and a half which is notable. After that I have never had a job that lasted longer than four months. For 36 years I worked as a tax preparer for eleven weeks each February 1 to April 15. My second source of income was wearing some different hats as a professional bridge player and teacher, but is that really work? I also did some freelance writing and had a brief career as a substitute teacher when my daughter was in high school.
By April 1975 I had saved over six thousand dollars. I did like delivering mail, but chafed at long hours, obligatory overtime, and no chance to travel. The Mexicans have a “dicho,” a saying. Americans live to work, but Mexicans work to live. I have always been in the second category. So I left with some regrets and anxiety, but have never looked back. That summer I hitched around the western parts of the US and Canada, visiting travel friends. Then when the cool weather of autumn descended, I left on my second nine month of adventure travel.
Trip 2: November, 1975 through July, 1976
I started with Mexico, easily accessible and completely mysterious as I soon discovered. I cut my hair and got rid of my facial hair, good advice for young male foreign travelers in those days to keep a low profile with foreign authorities who were no fonder of the hippie movement than their American peers. Hitching to the border, I got on a train heading to Mazatlan, a place I had heard good things about. Mexican trains were very cheap and very slow. But for a vagabond like me, time was definitely not money. The thousand mile voyage cost me 36 hours and $6. I carried a light backpack as I always have since my first trip. Tucked away were a English-Spanish dictionary and a grammar book. I fell deeply in love with Mazatlan at first sight, an affair that has lasted fifty years. In this crazy, mixed-up world, Mazatlan is the one place I feel truly at home.
I spent a month at the Mar Rosa Trailer Park, paying a dollar a night to put my sleeping bag on the sand. Most people had tents, but I preferred sleeping under the stars as I had been for much of the prior six years. I didn’t worry about my meager possessions which included pretty much nothing worth stealing. I picked up an important hack for concealing important items like passports and cash. Find an out-of-the-way nook, put the valuables inside a plastic bag, dig a hole making sure nobody is walking, and mark it with a rock or shell or whatever. As usual, I was loving on less than three dollars a day. I spent a lot of time on the beach trying to learn Spanish from vendors and other friendly young people. My rode to fluency has been a long and tortured one, but in the end I have finally arrived.
After Mazatlan I followed a standard backpack traveler’s route down the Pacific Coast, Yelapa, Melaque, Zihuatanejo, Puerto Excondido and Puerto Angel with a detour to Oaxaca. I did more of the same through Guatemala, Lake Panajacjel and Atitlan, Chichicastenango, Antigua (where I later returned twice for language school), and Tikal. Ten days after I left Guatemala, the devastating earthquake of 1976 hit. I was sleeping rough outside of Chetumal in Mexico, not so far north and I felt the ground shaking. After this fortunate escape, i spent a week in Belize, then up the eastern side of Mexico visiting other hot spots like Palenque, Xilitla, and Cuetzalan. From there it was bus rides back to the border in Texas. Then hitchhiking to Miami where I had an economy ticket to Luxembourg on Icelandic Airlines. The lowlight of this segment was a night in the Florida Panhandle with the temperature in the low 30s. Wearing all my clothes inside the sleeping bag did not protect me from a miserable and mostly sleepless shivery night. I was not prepared for winter. I swear by packing light, but once in a while it has bitten me in the butt.
Landing in Europe, I hopped a train to Barcelona where I wound up spending two delightful months. This was back in the day when prices were dirt cheap and the city was not overwhelmed by tourists. I found a bed in a pension, sharing a room with a Moroccan laborer. We had only a handful of words in common, but it hardly mattered as he worked nights and slept days, so we seldom saw each other. The rent was $20 a month. I spent a ton of time at the university having a rollicking social life and meeting lots of girls. My Spanish was improving apace.
After that I headed south to Morocco. I spent over three months there and had a slew of exciting adventures, enough for another novel, if I ever decide to go for it. What a super-friendly and exotic culture! My intention was to travel overland through northern Africa, then join the hippie version of the Silk Road to India. But a couple of serious blows ended that particular daydream. When I arrived in Oujda on the Algerian border, I discovered that the land route was closed off. Instead I would have to go back to Spain and go the long way around to Turkey.
More upsetting was my visit to Poste Restante, General Delivery where I received six letters from friends. Every one of them carried the grim tidings that my first real bridge mentor Dick, a middle-aged man, had crashed his private plane in a storm while attempting to return to the Bay Area from a tournament in Reno. Heartsick and suddenly feeling very lonely, I decided to get off the road and go home to California. It was not until 1989 that I finally fulfilled my dream of visiting India. I have a deep and abiding love for that country, significant warts and all, and have altogether spent a total of five backpacking trips covering not quite a years worth of time there. And I wrote my first novel Full Moon on the Ganga, inspired by it all.
I spent the next two years living off and on in Palo Alto, playing lots of bridge and almost daily throwing frisbees with my landlord, occasional bridge partner and close friend Tom. Occasionally I dabbled in some temp work. I spent two more winters kicking around Mexico, falling deeply in love with the country. In the spring of 1978, my best friend from school in Santa Cruz, another Tom, was beginning his career as a university professor in Boston. His mother was offering him a car she no longer needed. In return he offered to cover all my expenses to drive it across the country. I stayed with him for a few weeks, then headed north spending two months hitchhiking around the maritime provinces of Canada. It was a wonderful time to be young and alive. The countryside was beautiful, the hostels party central. The era of free live was alive and flourishing, still before the dark storm clouds of HIV and AIDS crashed the party in the early 80s.
Returning to Boston I decided to touch up my finances before heading for another winter in Mexico. I spent a month picking Macintosh apples on a farm west of the city. The proprietor was skeptical of hiring an American, relying on itinerant French Acadians from New Brunswick. But he was willing to give me a chance. I completed my month contract with hard work and no complaints, so it all turned out fine.
Weeks later walking down a street in a small town in southern Mexico, I encountered a three year-old girl dressed in Sunday finery walking with her mother. Out of the blue, I broke into tears. I wanted one of those. I had been corresponding with Barbara, a woman five years my senior who I met in 1976 when she was still living with my most regular bridge partner Bob. We had all lived through a tempestuous, up and down and topsy-turvy three way relationship for some time. I have recently told the whole story in a long autobiographical piece called California in the Seventies or How I Met My Wife.
Barbara was a secretary who dreamed of travel. I had been a cute, fun favorite of the girls for many years, but none of them took me seriously as relationship material. No money, no car, no job. No practical woman was about to walk down that road.
Barbara was different. From the moment we met, she fell deeply in love with me, that is except when she was furious with me for slights real or imagined. And all of this was complicated by the three way nature of our ins and outs involving my best male friend. But by late 1978 he had finally moved on and gotten married. She was ready to begin realizing her dreams also. Quitting her job, she bought a ticket to Guatemala where we agreed to meet at a language school in Antigua. It would be, at age 33, her first foreign adventure. We spent a month at language school, then headed north, wending our way slowly through Mexico for two more.
Back in Palo Alto I stayed with my folks for a few days, soon realizing that I wanted to be with her. In July we took a hitchhiking trip to Seattle to visit her best friend, who also happened to be her former mother-in-law (those were the days, my friends). We wound up eloping, getting hitched at the King County Courthouse. I loved her, but I also knew all too well that she was an emotional volcano. I knew she would probably be too much from me and that our backgrounds were separated by an unbridgeable chasm. So why did I do it? The short answer is that there had been no other takers and I desperately wanted a little girl. That may be a lousy reason for getting married, but looking back at a lifetime of experience, I’m not quite sure that there are any better ones. Kathy and I have so far enjoyed twenty-five years of unwedded bliss and that is more than good enough for me.
Returned to Palo Alto all our friends were laughing at us. “You guys can’t get married, neither of you wants to work.” They made a pool, guessing at how long we would last. The longest entry was five years. Somehow we survived for twenty-one. By that time the money was long forgotten.
Trip 3, December, 1979 through May, 1980
Five months later we were ready to hit the road. We had both been working temp jobs, commuting by bicycle. We gave notice at her apartment, dumping most of our few possessions at a yard sale while storing a select few with a friend. We wanted to travel around South America. Plan A was to fly to Santiago, Chile and begin there. Sadly nobody was willing to sell us a one way ticket, and there was no way that we were willing to constrain ourselves by buying a round trip flight. It’s a shame. Four months and some change later we finally made it to Chile and Barbara was exhausted both physically and emotionally. Travel with almost no information can be trying at times. You just have to be willing to accept the bad with the good, which I always have. After a while it became too rough for her, especially after some Andean bouts with “soroche,”altitude sickness which attacked her at far lower levels than most people. Having bags ripped off three times didn’t help any. The trip,was magnificent and remarkable, but as I said, you have to take the good with the bad. We never made it to Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay, Argentina and Brazil. And forty-five years later I still haven’t. So many places to see, so little time to see them. And time is dwindling. Also now a bit older, I tend to keep going back to places I love more often than visiting new ones.
We went through Mexico and Central America on numerous buses faster than I preferred. The only non-bus stint was a flight from San Jose, Costa Rica to Cartagena, Colombia. Unlike today’s desperate refugees, crossing the Darien Gap was not on our itinerary. We spent time in Colombia and Ecuador, but the lion’s share was passed in Peru. So many stories! Peru was also the place we suffered the ripoffs. In those days they had schools specializing in teaching students how to steal from young backpackers. Believe me, they were more than creative. For all I know, they are still at it. Throughout we never encountered any violence and traveled without fear. Most people we met were remarkably friendly, gracious and hospitable. Our average hotel rent was one or two dollars and food was also dirt cheap. It was also tasteless far too often once we left Mexico until we arrived in coastal Peru. You haven’t lived until you have enjoyed Andean night market food, roasted “cuy,” guinea pig roasted on a skewer. It was very greasy and tasted absolutely nothing like chicken.
Barbara celebrated her 35th birthday in Cusco, I my 30th in Santiago. A month later back in the states we moved to Seattle, as I fulfilled a promise to try it out. I was prepared for a rainy winter, but not for a chilly and cloudy summer. But 1980 was the year of Mt. St. Helens. It wasn’t until much later that I understood that summer is quite lovely in the Pacific Northwest. But not that year. Back in California she got a secretarial gig.
A couple of years earlier one of my “groupie” bridge partners (yes, even top expert bridge players can have groupies) was studying for her CPA. She suggested that I learn how to do taxes. I had the perfect mind for it and the work was seasonal. Now looking for a bit more stability, I took a twelve week course from H & R Block. The rest is history. I worked my first season in 1981, earning more money on commission in eleven weeks than I had earned in a full year in my one good job at the post office. I spent five seasons with Block before moving up to a private CPA where I was able to make more money than I could have ever imagined. Thank you so much, Laurie. I have a knack for fast detailed work and careful organization that has served me well, and she was able to recognize it.
Working a short if hectic and exhausting season, freed up our lives. Barbara brought some seed money into our marriage, her share of the profits that she and Bob had owned in San Jose. With it we bought a cottage in the poorest district of Ashland, Oregon, free and clear. Once you have the major headache of housing costs under control, it is easy to arrange the rest of your life at almost any level of income. One of the strengths of our marriage was a shared sense of frugality and a disdain for gratuitous materialism. That, at least, always served us well.
Trip 4 - May, 1983 - August, 1983
For three years there were no long trips, but we were hardly sedentary. I learned and embarked on what became my career as a tax preparer. Barbara insisted that we leave the Bay Area, the only home base I had ever known. She said that we would never own a house if we stayed and she was right. We bought a cottage way out in the hills of Northern California in Humboldt County, but it was not a long term fit. After spending two summers, we sold it. Finally we settled on Ashland, Oregon, the only place I have really loved besides Santa Cruz and Mazatlan. At the time we finally left the Bay Area, the cheapest houses in the poorer section of East Palo Alto were going for $175K. Imstead we found the cheapest place in Ashland and grabbed it for $32K cash. And it served us well as I wrote above. In the middle of all that we spent two months each in Mazatlan for two winters running.
Settled in Ashland and with my work and income arranged, we planned a summer in Portugal, Spain, Morocco with a short foray into France to visit my old stomping grounds in Argelès. I had been in most of the places we intended to visit before, but never with a companion. Our trip to South America had been a voyage of discovery for both of us. We seldom knew where we were going in advance, nor what we would find when we got there.
This was different. None of the places we visited were particularly unknown. They had been tromped over by hordes of visitors for quite some time. And Europe was quickly getting expensive by our subterranean budget standards. In fact 1983 was to be the last time I went there until 2005, years after our divorce and towards the end of my stint as a single parent. Don’t get me wrong. We had a lot of fun and saw plenty of beautiful places. Looking back in hindsight, always a dubious perspective, and having read a copy of Barbara’s journal of the trip, I can see how some tentacles of unease growing. What she wanted from travel as opposed to what I did, were beginning to separate. The same could have been said of our marriage. I have no simple responses to any of this. We have all been there. The fact is that I have been traveling now for significant parts of 53 years, the great majority of that solo. The only fair conclusion is that solo travel is my preference
Life always intrudes. Our path to parenthood was anything but smooth. My poor wife put up a valiant struggle, but she was not meant to have a biological child. We did not have an easy time getting pregnant and she had even less success in bringing a baby to term. The final straw was when she nearly died of an ectopic pregnancy on Valentine’s Day of 1984. As in common in those cases, she didn’t even know she was pregnant. She was 39 and I 34, and we were forced to raccept that our only road to parenthood was adoption. This too was a harrowing procedure that lasted sixteen long months, with more than our share of pitfalls and obstacles. The sad fact is that an axe murderer has an easier time having a child than a nice, but clearly unconventional couple like we were. Often we felt like germs under a microscope. But at the end of a long, hard, in September of 1985, we traveled to Colombia and brought home our treasure, Marisol Elena, the little Hispanic girl I had long yearned for. Wanting a girl was a big advantage. There are always more of them.
Unfortunately Barbara’s health was badly compromised by all this. Physically she could no longer even pretend to keep up with me. Once a valiant and adventurous traveler, she became worried and anxious. And most of her joy, the part that had first attracted her to me, washed a way also. Still we tried. Before Marisol reached school age, we drove around the back country of Mexico. In the summer it was the western US and Canada. But she got sadder, our daughter got older and more social, and the travel stopped. We grew apart as so many couples do, then she ended it. By the time she left for the second time, Mari had had enough. She was thirteen and she was long past trying to deal with her mom’s mood swings. And so I became a single parent. The years of her adolescence were a delight.
For me there was only one fly in the ointment. I was stuck, tied down like I never had been before. In 2003 she graduated from high school. In September I took her to her dorm room at Central Washington University, helped her unpack, and kissed her goodbye. Three days later I was in India. And since then during a fairly equal portion of each year’s passage, the siren song of the road has claimed my soul.
