I was 19. It was an abandoned quarry. I was in the cab of a semi truck, one guy at the wheel, the other in the sleeper. I had been asleep, exhausted, since just outside of Reno, and woke up to the screech of breaks and an abandoned quarry in the dim morning light. In the second before the driver turned to me, I knew it all. There was only one thing two guys did with a 19 year old girl in an abandoned quarry and it was not good. I hoped to survive.

I was as restless then as I am now. I didn’t know that then, didn’t know that it was a facet of my personality. In fact, I had no idea that it mattered what your temperament, your abilities, your likes and dislikes were when you made decisions, if you made them at all, about how you were going to live. To my working class Latino family, it was all about getting a good job, which at the time meant teacher, nurse or secretary.

So, left alone to figure out what I was good at, with the unappealing goal of getting a good job with benefits, I did what came naturally. I failed. I did, once in a while, land a clerical job, but I sucked, totally and apparently irremediably, at clerical work. It was only years later that I found out I had ADD, but by then I’d learned, in desperation, to work around my jumpy attention span. In those early years, the feedback the world was giving me told me that I was unemployable. I thought about going to college, though the idea of filling in the application form was daunting. I had some hellacious ADD back then. I still labor over forms like they were doctoral dissertations. My mind doesn’t track right. At the time, my life seemed to have a big “No Outlet” sign on it, so I partied a lot, took drugs and fucked a lot of guys and a few girls. Now there was something I was good at.

When I was nineteen, I had not gone to college, much less teacher school or law school. I was still a high school drop out. In fact, I am still a high school drop out, high school being a diploma I never got. At nineteen, I was a serious mess. A restless, underachieving, curious teenaged mess, resembling nothing more than those feral cats I would later rescue, scared but wanting that treat, risking it all for that treat. I was terminally shy as a child, and overcame shyness because the kind of stimulation I needed, emotional, intellectual, and physical, was available only from other people. I learned to talk to them, even pretended to be one of them.

Those were still the hippie years and hippies traveled. I’d already been on a couple of hitchhiking trips to Mendocino, where friends had a cabin. I’d even hitchhiked alone one time, and had a memorable trip through the twisty roads on the back of a motorcycle, freezing, scared, exhilarated. When my friend Diane suggested that we visit her family outside of Boulder, Colorado, where they had some property and took in a bunch of foster kids and always welcomed another hand, I was there.

As was typical back then, we decided to go one morning, and by early afternoon, we were at the freeway on-ramp where people stuck out their thumbs to go east. Lots of people. We should have been dismayed. Politely standing behind earlier hitchhikers, we would have a long wait until at least ten other people or parties got picked up. We started to get hungry. A hippie we were hanging out with had a baggie full of sprouts. People ate sprouts back then. Bean sprouts, may they burn in everlasting hell. We ate the sprouts, and belched sprout gas for hours. We counted our money. Between the two of us, we had $3.00. We decided to live a little and invested part of that in a bag of chips.

We got as far as Folsom that day, and Diane said she had a grandmother somewhere in the area, she thought in an apartment complex in Roseville. We made our way there but we never found the grandmother. We were sitting dejectedly by the complex’s pool, rationing our chips, when a resident walked by and asked who we were. We explained that we had lost Diane’s grandmother and had nowhere to stay. He gave us some advice and left. A few minutes later, he was back. His wife had chewed him out for leaving two kids on their own outdoors. She fed us, gave us blankets, and in the morning, dropped us off at a good hitchhiking spot. It was the first of many kindnesses I experienced.

We got a ride through Nevada, both of us sitting on the front bench seat with the driver. Diane and I started discussing how far we could get on our money, which was down to two dollars and change. It was completely innocent, that time. When the guy dropped us off, he handed us a ten-dollar bill, which bought about the same amount of groceries as a hundred would today. He said he wanted us to eat. We were stunned, thanked him profusely, and learned a new trick. We arrived in Colorado with nearly twenty bucks. Pretty good for a couple of teenage idiots. In our defense, we still felt like kids, and saw nothing wrong with getting adults to take care of us.

I had a wonderful month or so with Diane’s family, bonding with one little boy in particular, the first and last time I’m actually lusted after motherhood. I tried to follow the rules and give all the kids equal attention and I was careful not to make any promises to the child, but me and that broken Latino six year old had a magnetic attraction for each other. Fortunately for him, I was not his primary caretaker, or my leaving would have been tragic. It was hard to say good bye to Roger but I had to go home and try to reconcile my rebellious restlessness with the necessity of growing up. Since Diane was home, she stayed in Boulder.

I still had some of our earnings from the trip out, having worked for my keep in Boulder and not having had to spend much. Besides, minor league con-child that I was on that trip, I knew how to get more -- just let a nice middle-aged driver know I was hungry. I had excellent adventures on the way home to San Francisco. I caught a ride with a hippie in a beat up car from the 30s, like something from a gangster movie. He had picked up a motley collection of hitchhikers and we got along great. We took a side trip to go wading in the Great Salt Lake. We ill-advisedly spent the night on the ground in the mountains, woke up soaked with dew and freezing, and retreated to the car, where we huddled together until morning. Somewhere before Reno, Nevada, I called my boyfriend and told him I was going to be home the next day. That’s how the final adventure began.

He said, I’ll meet you in Reno and take you home. If that had happened, it would have been perfect. Riding from Reno to San Francisco on the back of a motorcycle would have been a memorable combination of pain and pleasure and a lifelong memory. But it was 1971, before cell phones. Neither of us knew Reno, so he came up with a strategy that might have worked in some other town -- I was to wait for him by the first off-ramp in Reno. I was dubious but agreed, not yet having outgrown the reflex obedience to boys. I regretfully said good bye to the car-full of hippies whom I’d ridden with for the last day or so. They left me at what they figured to be the last off-ramp out of Reno as they made their way to Sacramento, and I managed to cross the freeway on an overpass that was not getting much traffic to what appeared to be the first off ramp into Reno.

I stood there in the cold from around 8:00 in the evening until around 11:00, when a cop car pulled up. Shit. I had already been hauled off to jail once for illegal hitchhiking, and I had no idea if what I was doing was against the law in Nevada. Fortunately for me, the was very little law in Nevada. The cop merely asked what I was doing, having seen me before and wondering why I hadn’t gotten a ride yet. I explained the situation, and he said, “Oh, if you want the first off-ramp in Reno, this isn’t it. I’ll take you, hop in.” I have no idea of it was well-meant or he just wanted the grubby hippie chick out of his jurisdiction. In any case, he drove me a couple of miles down the road and left me.

I stood in the spot I was taken to and after a while, watched my boyfriend ride past on his motorcycle. I knew no amount of screaming and jumping was going to get the man’s attention over the roar of the motorcycle and other traffic, but I screamed myself hoarse. Then I waited for him to come back, as I assumed he’d try other off-ramps when he didn’t find me where he expected to find me. He never came back. He chose to search for me on the streets of Reno, thinking I had gotten the urge to sightsee in the middle of the night. After an hour, I decided I needed to get my own self back to the City. I saw a truck stop on the other side of the freeway and made my way to it on another overpass. This time, trucks missed me by what seemed, and probably was, inches.

I don’t know how different the truck stops were then, as I was at that age when you’re both worldly and unbelievably naive. I know that there is prostitution at truck stops today and that it is dangerous for the women who do it. I have no idea whether the guys who saw me at the truck stop assumed that I was a prostitute or whether there were any prostitutes working the place. It never occurred to me to wonder, or I might have been discouraged from looking for a ride there.

Before I needed a ride, I needed a coffee and donut, and I had a buck or so left after buying breakfast for my road buddies ages ago. I was sitting at the counter when a kind-looking middle-aged guy asked me where I was going. I told him the story. He seemed to take me at face value, and said that if his partner agreed, they could take me as far as Oakland.

Oakland! I could almost walk home from there, if it wasn’t for the pesky bay. I could certainly call any of a number of people to come get me. Oakland! I would take it.

The partner showed up and I had my first twinge of doubt. He was the type who fancied himself a ladies’ man, flirting in that tedious way the unhip had, guaranteed to earn you a rejection from a hippie chick. The gentlemanly one reassured me: he had daughters, I was safe. All he wanted was someone to talk with him, help him stay awake. I have always had good instincts, even when I didn’t deserve to, and I decided the guy was cool.

I was tired, but I felt joy climbing into the cab of a big truck. For a hippie of the time, a ride in a semi was the stuff of legend, and I’d never met a girl who had done it. We took off and rode in easy companionship, me seated between the men. Curious and excited, I asked them about their travels. The guys entertained me with stories of driving across the country and getting off the highway in Chicago, where they knew these sweet-natured whores who always welcomed and took care of them. I was happy to know that they had recently gotten their satisfaction; that took the pressure off me. The need to fend off guys was always present back then.

My first alarm came when we approached the Nevada/California border. The ladies’ man said in a jocular, leering way that I should get into the sleeping compartment at the back of the cab. I said stubbornly that no way was I doing that. The gentleman explained that they had to hide me, because it was illegal for them to pick up hitchhikers. Seeing the sense of that and not wanting to get them in trouble, I crouched in the sleeper as we went through the border routine. As the truck picked up speed past the border, I dove out of the sleeper, not wanting to spend one more minute there than absolutely necessary. Even the gentlemanly driver laughed at my determination not to be placed in a vulnerable position. Lover boy asked one last time for form’s sake if I would join him in the sleeper, then, giving up gracefully, said good night and climbed in by himself.

I’m not sure how many words I said to the driver who I was supposed to entertain with my conversation before passing out. It was 2:00 a.m. when we left the truck stop and I was trashed. The driver let me sleep. I didn’t wake up until I heard the brakes and felt the bouncing as we drove into the quarry.

I knew it was a quarry, though I was a city kid, because there was a working quarry near my aunt’s house in Pacifica. I had certainly read about quarries. Kids drowned in them. They were scenes of crimes. There was absolutely nothing that two men in a truck with a 19 year old girl could possibly want in a quarry that didn’t involve me being hurt really, really badly. I checked the horizon, where the sun was rising over the quarry walls. Nothing. No traffic, no people, no huts, no way out.

The driver turned to me. “We gotta connect the speed governor. We disconnect it back east so we can make time on the road, get ahead of schedule. That way we can party with our friends in Chicago and we still get in on time. They check the governor at the station, though, so we gotta reconnect it before we drive into Oakland. You should’a seen your face! Guess this place scared you, huh?”’

I smiled weakly. I was not dead at 19. I’m still not dead. It’s about time to risk my life again, before it’s too late.