It was almost dark when me and Petrosky reached the main road. We ran a few hundred yards down, around a curve and out of view of any possible kids or teachers who might be coming or going from the South Meadow. This wasn’t for show. We weren’t packing our bedroll, writing a note, then going out to sleep in the tree house. We were leaving for real and were ripped on brisk air and rebellion. We put our mitten’d thumbs out and waited for whatever was next.
One thing working in our favor was that we had taken off right before evening chores, so it would be over an hour before everyone would notice two empty chairs in the circular dining room where this strange collection of live-away kids sat in fleece-lined pullovers, eating home-sourced beef or whatever was being served for dinner that night. And just to make sure that you never forgot that you had been banished to another world and lost all control of your life there was no white sugar allowed at North Country. It was considered contraband and a Hershey bar might as well have been a bag of heroin. Harry Knapp and his throng were onto the white sugar/radical mood swing connection early on, and even a small pleasure like dessert was corrupted. The only sweeteners allowed were honey and our sacred maple syrup, which we produced ourselves and sold to the public in tins of various sizes.
It is hard to overstate how big a deal maple syrup was at North Country School. The syrup operation was run and managed by “crazy” John Morgan. “Crazy” John was an overall-wearing cat in his mid 20s with a plop of dirty-blonde curls, uncared-for teeth, and some serious winter-bitten rosy cheeks. He was a unique character, and if he didn’t keep an alfalfa stalk in his mouth at all times, he should have. John lived over at Meadow House with Harry, but he wasn’t a teacher. He was more a general fix-it man and tractor-whisperer, but his most sacred duties were as lord and overseer of our sugar maple kingdom. (An interesting side note about crazy John was that he was either the great-great grandson or great-great-great grandson of J.P. Morgan, robber baron banker extraordinaire, so, he must have really loved it up there, because he sure as hell wasn’t making syrup for the dough.)
So, maple syrup goes like this. You got your sugar maples, and they make sap. You need a whole lot of sap to make a little maple syrup. And the sap’s not always flowing because it’s all based on the weather and some years are better than others. Maple syrup season is late winter/early spring and conditions are best when it is cold in the morning and warm in the day. The expression the sugar-makers stand by is, “as long as there is snow on the ground, it’s still syrup weather.” On a good year we would produce 300 gallons or so. Now, it’s about 35-some-odd gallons of sap to one gallon of syrup, so you got to collect a lot. You boil it down in this big vaporizer, which is like a giant sheet metal pool-table-sized cauldron. My last year there we had a brand-new vaporizer and crazy John was in charge of it. That vaporizer was his baby, and he doted on it like it was a ’65 Mustang. North Country had started to modernize its collection techniques, partially converting to a tubing system (the sap flowing right from the taps to holding tanks in the sugar shed), but my first year it was old school, and every tree had a long metal bucket hanging on it with a little roof over it to keep debris out.
What could be better for a young suburban lad then spending a late-winter afternoon collecting sap in the clean, crisp Adirondack air. It was a combination of forced labor and paradise, and you’d get a certain thrill when the buckets were full and heavy and you carried them over to the large collection tank that was mounted on a big sled hooked to a beat-up tractor, crazy John sitting astride it like a sugar chariot.
The whole thing was just hardcore pioneer beautiful, and when “pancake day” finally came, the one day of the year where you could eat as many pancakes as you wanted, the syrup was pure and plentiful, a sugary, viscous, amber tit of love.
And Jon Amsterdam, who was very, very tall, and possessed an oddly sinister, pituitary mustache, ate 43 pancakes to set a “pancake day” school record. He had employed the eat a huge dinner the night before to stretch your stomach technique as opposed to the don’t eat either lunch or dinner the day before starvation method, and came away with a stunning victory, annihilating the field, and leaving Eyre Baldwin, scion of Virginia and lacrosse enthusiast, searching for answers. Eyre had also gone with a huge dinner the night before, but by pancake 19 he was ready to be wrapped in the Confederate flag that flew on his dorm room wall and shipped back to Richmond. As for devotees of the starvation method, they all found themselves bewildered and puking by pancake 10.
I don’t know if it was the very first car that stopped for us, but it was for sure one of the first five, and it wasn’t a car it was a van. How perfect is that? Two 13-year-old boys, hitchhiking on a lonely stretch of mountain road, get into a strange van as the last gasps of daylight turn to night. The PSA version ends with “and they were never heard from again, so remember, DON’T HITCHHIKE!” But this wasn’t a PSA, this was 1975, and hitchhiking, though not quite as prevalent as it had been back in the ‘60s, was still, in our minds, a national sport and viable means of transportation.
“Where you two going?”
“New York City.” I blurted out.
“Get in.”
The sliding side door opened with a creaking rumble and we were overcome with the pungent scent of pine.
I have no recollection of the names or faces of the two dudes who picked us up, for it was dark by then. They were pretty much just voices and outlines, flickers of long hair and scruffy beards in the light of oncoming traffic. I want to say they were wearing flannel shirts and ski hats, but they had to be wearing winter jackets, because there was no heat in that van, that’s for damn sure. The reason everything smelled liked pine was ‘cause the van was filled to bursting with fresh-cut Christmas trees. Their plan was to drive straight through to South Florida, stopping only for gas and selling the trees for a mighty profit, then staying down there ‘til the money ran out. They were so serious about their mission, they weren’t even stopping for food, and instead had purchased a giant circular party-tray of diner-made club sandwiches, cut into quarters, each with a toothpick stuck in it, the entire tray covered in yellow-tinted cellophane.
“You guys can break into the sandwiches if you’re hungry, we got a lot.”
I could make out the one riding shotgun, album cover on his lap, sloppily rolling a joint. They had brought the trees, the sandwiches, and an album cover for joint rolling. Clearly, they knew what they were doing.
“How old are you two?”
“Thirteen.”
“We’re twenty-two. Well, he’s twenty-three,” he said, pointing to the driver.
“Cool.”
“You guys smoke weed?”
“Yeah.”
We both said it at the same time.
“Cool.”
Then, the driver leaned over to the one riding shotgun, and they had a lengthy whispered conversation.
“We’re gonna smoke some weed right now but we’re not gonna give you any ‘cause you guys are too young and we need to be responsible. But go ahead, break the sandwiches open if you want. They’re good.”
Petrosky broke the seal on the sandwiches and handed me one. They had forgotten to tell them not to toast the bread, and it was already cold and hard as was the bacon, but it almost made them better.
After a while, the driver finally spoke up. It had been the joint roller doing the talking before that.
“You guys are going to New York?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, we’re going to Florida. We were gonna drop you in Albany, but you two seem cool, so we’ll take you the whole way.”
And there it was. Six hours ago, Harry Knapp had humiliated me in a most unsubtle and physical way. Feeling desperate and disgraced, I weighed all my options un-carefully, making a decision to take matters into my own hands. I then approached comrade Petrosky, proposing adventure. A quick pact was made and off we went, literally walking out of school and onto the open highway. In less than five minutes we had been picked up by two stoned-out Christmas tree dealers in a shit brown van headed for Miami. It was that simple, that meant to be. All we had to do was turn the knob on the door marked “runaway” and walk on through.
I chewed my club sandwich and sat in the rolling dark. The sporadic light of oncoming traffic was like a movie projector and the sap-wet smell of the trees had me super-alert. Somewhere between Glenn Falls and Saratoga Springs I started thinking about Homer.
Scott Homer was a violin prodigy. Today he’d be on the spectrum, but back then he was just eccentric. Homer always wore the same thing. An ill-fitting black suit, white shirt and scuffed, black, old man shoes. He had a head of mad-professor Christopher Lloyd hair before there even was a Christopher Lloyd. With his great musical talent, huge IQ, and no social skills whatsoever, he was on a path to either the New York Philharmonic or the nut house.
Every spare moment Scoot Homer had was spent practicing in the music room, which was basically a small converted storage room off the Quonset Hut. I had heard him playing what he would later tell me was a Tchaikovsky violin concerto when I went to enlist Petrosky, and it was so goddamn sad I felt like my bowels were going to fall out. And now, as I sat in the cold, dark, pine-reeking van it was in my head. Not the melody, but the feeling of it. Homer played with a lot of feeling and it stuck with you. There was another feeling I would always get whenever I heard him playing. A feeling like dread or some terrible truth and I couldn’t understand how he could spend all that time alone, and the whole idea caused a loneliness in me, but somewhere deep down I knew that Scott Homer had something I wanted. He had a purpose. A faith. A practice. To him the music room was his shrine and place of devotion. To me it was the one safe spot to take girls for mid-winter acts of carnality, and one time he was kind enough to clear out mid-Mozart when I knocked on his door with a young and willing shicksa in tow.
About an hour in I whispered to Petrosky, “Maybe we should go all the way to Florida with them?” “Yeah, I got an aunt in Miami Beach. She’s cool.” “Okay, I’ll ask. But after another twenty miles of reality I started getting second thoughts. “Maybe we shouldn’t go all the way Florida.” “Okay, I don’t think my aunt is there right now anyway.” We rode on silence. Then Petrosky said, “We did it.” “Yeah, I said. “We did.” And those were the last words spoken ‘til we got to New York.
Can’t wait to read part three!!!
“I chewed my club sandwich and sat in the rolling dark. The sporadic light of oncoming traffic was like a movie projector and the sap-wet smell of the trees had me super-alert.”
I love the way your writing pulls me into a scene.
And, man, I wish hitch-hiking wasn’t so rife with potential dangers. I’ve done it a few times back when I was young and foolhardy. And it’s a hellavun interesting way to travel—both as hitcher and … what would we call the driver? … hitched to?