Getting rides on the road to Seattle was fairly easy. At night I slept under bridges and for my meals, dined at service stations from a limited menu of candy bars and nuts. I didn't want to go too far from the road so I took what I could get. Unfortunately I couldn't get much. My route was I-40 to Barstow where I caught the road to Bakersfield. There I picked up 99 heading north and made it to up through Fresno to Sacramento. I caught I-5 there and was well on my way through Eugene and Salem Oregon. It was a clear shot up to Seattle. When I to Portland I was let off at an inopportune entry ramp.
The trip so far took four or five days and until I got to Portland everything went well. There were a few strange rides that in retrospect I would have preferred not to have had, but that's always the case when you throw your lot to chance. I'd had worse, but of course I'd also had much better as well. All in all though, the trip wasn't too bad, until Portland.
I was standing on the ramp when I started feeling a little light headed. I wasn't too concerned (thinking that my candy bar and sunflower seed diet was catching up to me), until I started sweating and feeling achy. Within an hour I knew I was really sick and hadn't gotten a ride anywhere. I started feeling delirious and a little panicky which was amplified under the circumstances. Finally a car stopped to pick me up and all I could say was "please take me to a hospital."
The driver, a very nice middle aged, middle class man wasted no time at all and in a few minutes he let me out at the hospital door. He asked if there was anything else he could do and I said "no", thanked him profusely and went inside to the emergency room. Once in the waiting room I threw myself at their mercy. I'm sure that there was a bit of drama in my performance because not only was I feeling very sick, but I was also somewhat scared. I didn't care; I was feeling so ill and vulnerable. I had never before been sick on the road and I didn't really know what to do even when I was thinking which didn't come easily.
The doctor did some checking and said that I had the flu and it was a particularly powerful strain. He gave me some medication that would help the symptoms, but that it was going to get worse and last about a week. I was hoping he was just saying that as some kind of moral lesson about young men being footloose gypsies who needed to take responsibility for their lives, etc., etc. I'd certainly heard that a few times in my travels and was hoping he was exaggerating from some deep seated bias. Certainly I'd feel good in a little while, I hoped. It turns out that he was being straight with me.
Luckily, he advised that I call a cab and go stay at the YMCA for a night and I took him up on it. I was worried about money, but how poorly I was feeling took precedence. The "Y" cost five dollars a night and I got my own room. I went up to it and collapsed in the bed. I stayed there for the next five days as if it was one long bad hallucination that would never end. Every afternoon a young man would knock on the door for my five dollars and wait until I got it for him. I then had to wait until he gave me a receipt. That wasn't my idea, I wanted to go collapse again but he insisted. I'm sure that he thought that I was using the place to go cold turkey from a junk addiction rather than something as common as the flu, but I could not have cared less about what he thought.
For five days, my routine was sleep, bathroom and soda from the machine in the hall. Time was endless and I was as uncomfortable as I had ever been. It was hell, and I don't mean figuratively. I was in hell and it was located in Portland at a YMCA. Steer clear is my advice. It's not worth it.
On the sixth morning I was suddenly ok. The aches were gone, the sweats, the chills, the demons feasting on my bones and stomach, all gone. I felt hungry for the first time in a week and it felt as if I had invented hunger. I was even feeling a little evangelistic about it as if I was founding a new religion based on the acknowledgement of hunger. Fortuitously I looked horrible, so no one wanted to talk to me about hunger or anything else. That saved both me and my potential victims from stupid sermons. Suffice it to say that I was ravenous.
It was impressive that I had gone from such sick state to being ok, and I mean just ok, and yet it was everything. I realized that I had spent a good bit of time thinking that I was going to die. In my delirium I thought of all the people that I cared about, that I would never see again; that they might never know what befell me and for some reason that really made me anxious. Until then I had always felt invincible and suddenly I didn't any longer. Even now when the subject of mortality comes up I would say that I developed a real sense of it in Portland, Oregon, fall 1972. I was twenty three.
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