Peace Corps Chronicles

We came to Wyoming most because it was west, and the west was what we made our dream of. This dream began in Chile, while we were still Peace Corps, and was developed for 12,000 miles while we were on our motorcycle, on our way home.

If there had been no West where—in we might have our reveries of a small farm and a log cabin, if there had been no alternatives to our homes Chicago and Indianapolis, we might have settled for we might never have left Chol Chol, Chile. But there was an alternative, and we talked about it as we walked at night, avoiding the protests of the hundreds of dogs who felt the night-time world belonged to them alone. They were mostly moon watchers. The lack of electricity in the tiny town meant the moon was our only light. It never rose, nor slid free of a cloud, nor set, without being bayed at by the insomniac hounds.

Tar Paper Shack

After we were married we talked about it in our little wooden shack by the river. It had so proudly been built out of scrap wood and tar paper. We talked in candlelight, sipping our coffee and muddy water fetched from the river. More often than not, the Chilean winter poured rain down on our tar paper roof, and we huddled close to our charcoal until the flickering candle told us it was time to go to sleep on our straw bed and stop dreaming.

The next morning we would wake up with the same job to do as 43 other Peace Corps Volunteers who were scattered throughout Chile. There were home economists, nurses, a dental hygienist, liberal arts graduates, mechanics, carpenters, and agriculturalists. Some were teaching in capacitation centers; others, like ourselves, were trying to help develop small communities. All of us would wake up to face the sometimes confusing, sometimes satisfying task of trying to somehow help the Chilean farmer.

We had all been strangers to each other when we were chosen by the Peace Corps to participate in the training program at the University of Notre Dame, but we got to know each other well in the following eight weeks while we struggled through ten hours of classes a day. A few dropped out and a few were rejected, but 45 of the 51 who had been selected for training left on the ship from New York.

Most Peace Corps groups work with an organization native to the country where they are located. We worked with the privately financed Chilean Institute of Rural Education. They have 13 capacitation centers for rural youth throughout the country. The boys and girls from the country who appear to be potential leaders are selected to attend four-month courses at these centers. Upon completion of this course the majority return home, while a few are sent on to a six-month course at a center near Santiago, the capital of Chile. They eventually go to work for the Institute in community development.

When these “delegates” go out to work, the first people they look for are the “ex-alumnos” who returned home after the four-month course. This provides the delegate with an immediate opening into the community.

Sent to Chol Chol

Some Peace Corps Volunteers were sent to teach in the capacitation centers and others were sent to work with the delegates in the rural areas. I was among the latter. I was sent to Chol Chol, a small village in a zone of Araucanian Indians in southern Chile, with a boy from Casper. We began working in cooperatives, credit programs, reforestation, and community projects. Soon we were involved in every aspect of their lives.

A little more than a year later we were married, and I met my wife, Terry Fitzgerald, who had been teaching in a center in the north, and was sent to work in Chol Chol. That’s when all this dreaming about Wyoming began.

Idea on Wheels

Several months later—still before we were married—an idea infected one us during an afternoon that seemed even more important and more urgent than going west. Terry had a scheduled vaccination in a rural school and there was neither jeep nor horse for her to use to get there. We tried out the small motorbike I had just purchased from another Peace Corps Volunteer for thirty dollars. It carried her so nicely on the back fender that we became convinced that there was nowhere that that motorbike couldn’t carry us.

Counting the minutes that we had to wait for the old wooden barge to come and ferry us across the river, we covered the fifteen miles of dirt road to the Indian village of Collimo in just a little over an hour.

The school in Collimo is a one-room shack that covers grades one through three. Forty Araucanian children sit three to a bench-type desk. Most of them can speak and understand Spanish by the time they have finished their three years. No one from Collimo has ever gone beyond the third grade; many never attend school at all. These are called “fences” by the other children because they must stay home to watch the sheep.

Unfortunately, the teacher—a rather scatter-brained girl with only a seventh-grade education herself—had forgotten to tell the children to tell their families about the vaccination, so the only children there were the forty that had come to school. Terry vaccinated them and sent them home to get their brothers and sisters and neighbors. Three hours later over 200 Araucanians were immunized to diphtheria and whooping cough.

Afterwards, our amazing bike took us over the hill and down to the ferry. It is true that we ran out of gas on the other side of the river, and that we had to walk the last six miles pushing it. But the blame was ours, not the machine’s. We arrived in our dark, candle-and-kerosene town fancying the worlds we would see on our tiny motorbike.

We never gave up that fancy, but we were forced to alter it shortly afterwards when a brand-new road finished that particular motorbike. This only built us more sensible, for by the time our wedding day arrived, we were thinking in terms of bigger and better vehicles.

About three days before we were married our first wedding presents arrived with Don Pedro Zuniga Catuqueo by horse. He brought us three chickens and five heads of lettuce from the village of Euisco, the poorest of all the people with whom we worked. All that day and the next gifts came in until our wood shed sounded a little like Old MacDonald’s farm.

The day of our wedding it stopped raining and the sun came out for the first time in three days. Our Peace Corps friends maneuvered their jeeps over the sloppy twenty-five mile road to town, and all arrived safely. The streets of town were a mess and many newly shined shoes were sloshed that day.

I think our two-vehicle town was severely shocked to see six jeeps roll in in one day. The Indians were fascinated by the three Peace Corps Negro girls who had come. There are almost no Negroes in Chile, but for an occasional visitor to the capital, Santiago. Certainly no one in Chol Chol had ever seen a colored person before. The Indians are very much discriminated against because of the darkness of their skin. I think they were surprised to see three fancily dressed gringoes with a darker skin than their own.

Our strange mixture of guests filled the tiny church while we swore, “forever”. Our get-a-way was delayed when our poor, overworked, jeep wouldn’t start.

I made the mistake of looking at a make called “BMW”. This make of motorcycle had been whispered to us by people who knew something about it when we had hinted that we might be taking a long trip. It is an indestructible German machine, completely protected for all types of roads. It was, of course, entirely too expensive. It remained so only until I saw it in a store window, and its sturdy appearance and shiny chrome took unfair advantage of me. There is an irresistible argument about a well-made product (with shiny chrome), that precludes all financial considerations.

The next day we bought a used edition of the same machine from a Chilean who didn’t seem to believe in taking a motorcycle outside of Santiago. I asked him if it would make it to the United States. “Of course not.” “We’re going to try it — either on your motorcycle or on someone else’s.”

Dire Prediction

“Then you’ll kill yourselves.” He laughed to himself, either pleased with his own wit, or amused at our approaching suicide.

The next afternoon he became genuinely worried. We had used up all our vacation time and had to leave that night for Chol Chol on the motorcycle. It is 500 miles from Santiago to Chol Chol over a road that is not all paved. Winter was beginning, and it was cold at night, and I had never driven a real motorcycle before. He became so concerned that he took me to a deserted park to try and teach me to handle it. Everytime he saw me turn a corner, he thought of some new reason why we shouldn’t try to drive it to Chol Chol.

“How was I that time?”

“You cannot go tonight; you don’t have helmets; they will put you in jail.”

He warned me of bandits in the night, and of the freezing wind that would penetrate the best of gloves. After one especially poor turn, he told me there was no road to Temuco. I honestly think that he liked us.

When we were finally ready to leave, it was 10 p.m. It was not going to be any colder at 11 than it was at 10, so we went to a restaurant for a steak. (Chileans eat supper very late.)

False Start

I don’t know whether that man had made me nervous with all his worrying, or whether it just had too many levers for me; but when we finally got around to the motorcycle I couldn’t get it to start. We had it parked on a main street, a very poor place for our initiation, so we pushed it three blocks to a deserted side street.

There, under a streetlight at midnight, we had our first confrontation with our motorcycle. It was impossible for us to imagine the things the three of us would experience in the next six months and 12,000 miles between that limp post and Tucson, Arizona.

My wife read the owners manual, “How to start the motorcycle.” We discovered that we had neglected a gadget with the descriptive name of “carburetor tickler”. We tickled everything in sight until we finally hit upon it. When the engine was primed, I kicked the starter pedal two more times and the engine was idling.

A moment later we were weaving down the street, my wife sitting behind me, and the suitcase strapped on behind her. Every intersection, every pedestrian, every headlight, was an adventure and a hazard.

Hundred Adventures

Luckily the hour was late, and there was little traffic. We were soon clear of the city. One of our friend’s predictions came true — our gloves and jackets gave us little protection against the biting wind. I think I gripped the handles so tightly, that I cut off the circulation to my hands.

Cold and discouraged, we stopped in a small town 30 miles outside of Santiago. We roused the owner of a small inn, and for $3.25 we obtained a straw bed and four adobe walls. Neither of us had the courage to wash with the icy water we would have had to draw from the well, so we went to bed unwashed.

The next two days the sun shone on us all the way. We arrived in Chol Chol little weary of dusty roads, but very proud of ourselves.

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It was time to leave Chol Chol. We had spent the day gathering and packing, filling, emptying, and refilling trunks, suitcases, and boxes. Far into the evening there were last visits and goodbyes: Senora Emma and Don Cienfanos, perhaps the town’s only “hippies,” who always had hot goat’s milk and fried bread to share with you as you waited for calls to go through on the crank phone; Senora Rodriguez, who had cooked and cleaned and watched over us and the Chilean delegates before we were married; Father Jaime, the American missionary priest; Ladi and Jennie, the Dutch horticulturist and doctor; Juan Troqua, our compadre — and then more packing.

It was 2 a.m. before we sat on the lid of the last trunk and [text obscured/cut off in the scan]

Home — only a tiny shack made of scraps of wood and tarpaper, but Jim had built it for us in a secret spot along the river before we were married. The loneliness of an empty house was not there that night. Within its cracked and crooked walls it enclosed two months of unbounded joy. I could not help smiling again as I crossed the spot where Jim’s chair had been, remembering the several times he had inched it too close to the table and it took close to the table; the back legs had settled firmly into the five inch space between the floor boards.

The food shelf still had a smattering of oats and blue powder where I had so gleefully prepared special rat-poison dinners for our persistent night guests. The curtains were still at the windows; I could not bear to take them down.

[A short phrase is missing here where the scan drops text at the column break.] But you cannot abandon your home with open door, to become a plaything to the wind. Resolutely, I jammed the lock into my jacket pocket, and fastened the door latch with a stick. We did not look at each other.

The creek had risen a little more during the night. The bridge had been gone for several days, and our method of crossing was a two stage jump from the far bank to a willow tree in the middle, and then onto a steep embankment on the other side.

I made the first lap without incident, but on the second jump the swift current caught the toe of my left foot, and dragged that leg in, to above the knee. No time to stop and empty my high gum-rubber boot; we sloshed into the morning streets of Chol Chol.

My very cold wet foot distracted me only occasionally from the familiarity of the bus ride, which had so much special meaning on this particular morning. The bus moaned and groaned as we lurched along the water logged gravel road. At each stop there were from five to fifteen people waiting and the bus became quickly crowded.

Everyone laughed good-naturedly at the quips of the “hustler” as he turned people this way and that to squeeze in yet one more traveler. The dampness of the woolen hats and shawls was everywhere. The quiet morning voices and laughter blended so easily with the cackle of the chickens or the louder more distant call of the geese riding on top with our trunks. This was what you missed on the re-

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Riverton (Wyo.) Ranger II — Friday, April 10, 1964

It was difficult to hold to the slippery, muddy road as it slanted and twisted on a descent as gradual as possible. Our deflated tire aggravated the situation. Jim could not keep his glasses free of frost—no matter, since you could not see more than five feet ahead. Hands began to scream with pain at such abuse. Then they were numbed, and when frost covered, as well as eyebrows and lashes. Would then cloud over and a quick tap would turn on the emergency gas tank—only a few miles of fuel left. It was about 6 p.m. when we hit the valley floor.

Tarija, where we stopped, was two miles out of the city close to where it was the only place where we could hope to find shelter and gas. The city itself was in a valley at about 6,000 feet above sea level. Our road, though, was at 12,000 feet. Jim’s lips were blue and he was shivering uncontrollably. The altitude sickness and lack of oxygen were obvious. We stopped the motorcycle and found where the valley should be. Somewhere above us, shrouded in the fog, was the city of Tarija.

We arrived there after dark, cold and exhausted. With no street lights, the city continued to climb and then the road fell away into silence. We were thinking of just trudging in utter weariness. Suddenly, from the gloom of the road behind us, a group of bicyclists appeared and began to help us push. They were planning to go the remaining three miles right to the door of a modest hotel. The Indian proprietress carefully pulled over her shawl to keep out the night air. She pointed to the culprit in any number of diseases and showed us our room. We were too numb to care.

We were brought a candle she gave us when we came to supper—a delightful variety of strange soups and stews. Is there a city closer to Paradise in all the world?

Learning the Road

In Bolivia the road was often no road at all. It was a track carved through mountains and valleys, sometimes gravel, sometimes bare rock, sometimes mud. We learned quickly that distance was measured not in miles but in hours. Progress was unpredictable. The motorcycle, loaded with baggage, could only be coaxed along at times.

When the road turned to sand or stone, we learned to lean and trust. When it turned to mud, we learned to walk. We learned to lift the motorcycle, to push it, to rest, and then to try again. There were days when we made only a few miles, and others when the miles slipped by with ease.

There were times when the motorcycle was more burden than blessing, but it was always our link to the road ahead. When it failed, we repaired it. When it could not go on, we carried it. When it succeeded, it carried us into places we would never have reached otherwise.

People of the Road

Everywhere we went, people helped us. In villages, men came from fields to push or guide us. Women brought food, sometimes nothing more than bread or potatoes, but given with generosity. Children followed us, laughing and curious. Often we shared our supper with strangers who became friends for a night.

The road taught us patience and humility. It taught us how little we needed, and how much we depended on others. It taught us that progress was not always forward, and that sometimes the only way on was to stop.

We learned that the motorcycle could take us far, but it was the people along the road who carried us the rest of the way.

Riverton (Wyo.) Ranger, Monday, April 13, 1964

The day we left Tarija, three flat tires exceeded the two tires we had in supply and we were forced to stay out the next night while we waited for a shipment to come along. When we finally reached the next town with a helpful trucker’s spare tire, we ate for the first time in more than 48 hours.

By the time we reached Potosi (elevation 14,500 feet), three days later, our motorcycle wouldn’t go faster than 20 m.p.h. We couldn’t get it fixed there so we took advantage of the fact that we had reached an area covered by the Bolivian railroad system.

Our 3rd-class ticket to La Paz, the capital of Bolivia, seemed like a bargain when we left that night at 9 p.m. Third class was just a cattle car with wooden benches and sliding doors, but it was packed with Indians who kept things warm. The Indians all turned out to the local people however, and as the train climbed to an altitude of more than 15,000 feet we were practically alone in a very refrigerated cattle car.

Finally we took up our sleeping bags and silently stole away [a few words are unclear in the scan] in the heated first classcar and pulled our covers over our heads. The [text unclear] German couple [text unclear] sitting in front of us [text unclear] that the conductor had passed through during the night and mistaken the lumpy sleeping bags for someone's shopping baggage.

The 398 mile trip took 22 hours.

A Bolivian mechanic got us running smoothly again, and we crossed the border into Peru on the 15th of August, 1963, less than a month after we had departed from Chile. On the 19th of August we arrived in Puno, Peru, where we were given work by a Maryknoll missionary priest with a soft spot for lunatics.

Puno is a town of 10,000 inhabitants that lies at an altitude of 12,500 ft. on the shore of Lake Titicaca. The great Inca Indian civilization believed that out of the waters of this lake rose Manco Capac and Mama Oclo, children of the sun and progenitors of the Inca ruling class. According to Inca history, they were given a golden wedge and told to take up residence where ever it would sink into the ground without effort. Three hundred miles away in the Cuzco valley the sacred emblem disappeared into the ground and they began to build their empire.

The Incas had good reason to believe that their ancestors had come from Lake Titicaca, as southern shores are dotted by pre-Inca ruins that are back to the year 600 A.D. One Sunday we drove over a very bad dirt road to see some pre-Inca funeral towers on a cliff over-looking a small lake. The civilization that built these towers seems to have ended abruptly around 900 A.D. when the Incas of Cuzco conquered the area around 1200 A.D. They found the Aymara Indians living among ruins they could not explain.

We saw about forty of these towers in various states of collapse. The stone blocks were expertly squared and the towers have fought well with time, despite the fact that the blocks have no adhesive between them. I felt that I could see those unknown Indians trying to make some sense out of what was around them—using squares and circles to express and immortalize themselves. Where and when did the Inca civilization really begin? How many hundreds of years went into its development? The Spaniards destroyed it with a few hundred men when they killed Atahualpa, the Inca ruler whom the Incas believed to be a descendant of their god, the sun.

When the Spaniards first arrived it was punishable by death according to Inca law to lie or steal, and the Spaniards described them as a most honorable race. Today many of their cultureless descendants begin in the streets and steal whatever they can. The Peruvian government has not been able to integrate them into the national way of life. It probably is possible to destroy a people’s culture and dignity, impose upon them a culture to which they make no contribution; but it appears as though it will take hundreds of years to do it.

When we were in Puno, the Maryknoll priest put my wife to work teaching first grade, and he gave me a carpentry job in the tower of the church. While I was working, the Ind-

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We enjoyed our time in Puno but at the end of a month we were anxious to get under way again. Our finances were in better shape and not far ahead lay the thousand miles of paved road, something we had not seen since Argentina.

Mile after mile we watched the ocean waves roll into Peru’s misty shore.

We stopped in a town called Talara, where Peru’s huge petroleum industry is based. It is owned by an American company, and is an American company town in Peru. There is no poverty there; the workers have their own brick homes with yards. Some work shifts in the petroleum industry, not because the American company doesn’t have every legal right, and not because the Peruvians are being cheated or mistreated. When the Americans go the industry will be run less efficiently, the workers will receive less and the economy of the country will suffer seriously. But the majority of the Peruvians are willing to make that sacrifice so that their most important industry, which is based on Peruvian natural resources, may be truly a Peruvian industry.

Peru's paved highway treated us well, and when we crossed the Ecuadorian border on the 30th of September our log book shows that we were averaging 62 miles a day since we left Chile.

Ecuador has three kinds of roads: dirt roads in the southern part, paved roads in the central section up to Quito, the capital, and stone roads in the northern border. Quito is a Spanish-built city of cobblestone construction. Up until fifty miles outside of Quito we stayed at sea level, cold or tropical and humid. Bananas are the chief export of the country and we passed enormous plantations.

After about an hour at this altitude, we began to dive down into the Chota Valley, and the potatoes cultivated on the hill sides gave way to bananas. It suddenly became very tropical again. The people of the Chota Valley are all Negroes — descendants of slaves brought from Africa in the 17th century to work the plantations.

Within a half hour we began to climb, and we were once again in the chilly climate of the mountains. The Indians there were all black, including wide-brimmed black hats. Of all the countries of South America, we feared none so much as Colombia. Throughout Ecuador, people had warned us of bandits that formed gangs and roamed the countryside and sometimes killed for no reason.

Colombia had a civil war that began in 1948 and did not really end until 1957. In the back country the fighting did not stop until long after that. The estimates of the fatalities range from 200,000 to 600,000. During the long slaughter, the masses of population ran from pure Negro, to pure Caucasian, to pure Indian, to any mixture of the three races, learned how to settle their squabbles with guns. Some are living with them.

In one case, shortly before our arrival in Colombia, we read about a bus that was stopped on the highway, and the forty-two passengers forced to get out. More than half of them were led a short distance away and murdered. As soon as we entered the country, we asked the people who should know — the truck drivers — of the dangers we might face. We found that they never traveled anywhere without their own firearms and that they carried no valuables. Nevertheless, they warned us never to stop on the open highway in anyone’s presence, no matter what the apparent emergency.

I don’t know whether we would have helped us any, but we had at least one pistol.

I had bought it a rusted old cylinder gun for $7 in Chol Chol, mostly just to scare away drunks in the night. We had bullets for it, and we used it for target practice in the woods near our home in Chile. I can honestly say that we never aimed it at anyone. We never fired it except at night.

With a real sense of banditry, we had successfully smuggled it across every border, usually in Terry’s boots. When we reached Colombia, Terry decided she wasn’t going to take any chances. She loaded the gun and rode with it clutched in her hand, always ready to shoot any simple Indian who might turn out to be a Colombian Jesse James. As we snapped up and down over the gravel roads that ridged a fantastic mass of chasms, I watched apprehensively for a bullet in the back.

But she didn’t shoot me and we never met the bandits. We had no horrible day when we both got so sick that we had to go to a hotel and spend a day in bed. Nevertheless, when we sighted the ocean at Buenaventura, we thought that Colombia had turned out fairly well.

The south of Panama and the north of Colombia are all jungle and there is no road whatsoever. The last place from which you can sail to the Panama Canal from Colombia is the port of Buenaventura. It rained on us alternately during the last city miles to town, and we saw at least 100 waterfalls. One of them cascaded directly onto the road. We were already soaked by then, so we drove directly through it.

Buenaventura had no hotels, little in the way of agencies, bars, and restaurants. Our hotel was a flophouse with thin mattresses, bare floors, and a single light bulb. “Sleep here,” the proprietor said. The humidity of the night never let us sleep. The air was drowned out by the blare of the jukebox in the all-night bar down below. There was never even the slightest breeze to rustle the night air.

We were just about crazy when we found out that many ships leaving Buenaventura passed through the Panama Canal, one of them had cargo to load there. Since the docking is very high at the Canal, it would have been economical for us to stop just to unload two passengers. There wasn’t a ship to dock with cargo for Panama for two weeks. We were in no hurry, so we decided to wait and swim with the motorcycle between days two weeks in Buenaventura, fighting the boredom, humidity, and sleeplessness. Luckily a ship appeared in only three days. It was a Grace Line luxury liner, and they wanted $98 a piece for the one day trip.

We would have liked to take the motorcycle for only $36, so we let it go along by itself. We took a train back to Cali, the large industrial inland city, and took a plane to Panama.

We arrived in Panama City on the 2nd of October, the second anniversary of our landing in Chile. Once in Central America we felt that we were almost home.

The countries whizzed by so quickly that it is now difficult to remember which was which. This is not to say that they were all alike: stately Panama is different from Costa Rica as the U.S. is from Mexico. During the two days we waited for the motorcycle we watched each ship arrive, inspect the products of the world, take on cargo, and leave. We were so duty free — German cameras, Africa ivory, Irish linen, from Spain; we were delighted with the flood of language, and anxious to help and to talk to it. It didn’t seem possible that this was the same country that had once stifled our voices.

Many Panamanians, especially if they have are completely bilingual. They speak Spanish. There is no third language. English is well as the Americans who work there, which is a consolation of the other two.

The segregation there makes the South look mild by comparison. The Americans live in the best area, very “country club” sort of living. They have their own stores, movies, restaurants, and schools, too. They are completely segregated.

The motorcycle arrived in good condition from its luxury cruise, and we started out for a ride in our department. It rained on us almost constantly in Costa Rica. The dirt and gravel road of the southern half had been recently completed but it already was deeply rutted and had huge holes filled with water. At one point we were held up for three hours by a landslide. The people, however, who had been waiting two days, sleeping in their cars and eating out of cans, everyone seems to travel prepared, had a much greater cause for complaint than we did.

On one mountain pass of Nicaragua we drove through fields of coffee and cattle raising on large slopes of the highway in large baskets and the horses looked as though they might pick up the baskets and walk away. We crossed Honduras on El Salvador’s only day, on a paved highway. In Guatemala we met perhaps the friendliest people we ever encountered in any trip. Wherever we went, they were anxious to help and to talk to us. It didn’t seem possible that this was the same country that had once stifled our voices.

We made the last 150 land miles riding without incident, and crossed over into Mexico, where we hugged the Atlantic coast like a timid high altitude.

The hours taxi broke down and we had to marry his passenger. I stopped at a small station for water. Inside the store was a man with a leaky radiator and a bottle of vinegar to stop the leak. Then there was trouble: we learned so much from our mistakes.

For two years many of the Chileans had called the Peace Corps volunteers “Meat for Kennedys.” However much better known to them. He (had) been president. He wasn’t only in the United States to be like most Peace Corps volunteers; are a product of their culture, motivated by idealism, feeling that they will help and that sacrifice and idealistic movement. He had somehow made idealism practical—workable.

We bought a car radio from a junk yard and the next day we slapped it in. Then a television set. We left without any, and heard enough news about it, it might have begun to make sense. The more we saw the less sense it made.

We wanted to do nothing but get home. From the top of Denver our clothes and our gear went out and we began to be weary of listening and the radiator leaked at a steep stream. We stopped at the “T” at the Greyhound bus terminal. We had been practically alone travelers — how many people travel all day thinking, “Day in 1,200 miles,” and prepared to have our things giving dinner. Holding back a tear, we came home. The next day, when we reached Indianapolis, we had 41 cents. We were proud to stop. We had a job, money, but with tax it turned out to be 42 cents. There was an unpleasant man in very old clothes sitting next to us; he pulled a crumpled dollar bill out of his pocket. There! We have broke ourselves. We returned to Indianapolis and then we got to Indianapolis at 3 a.m., there was only the one dime to make the call.

Terry’s parents live ten miles outside of town, so they were our only hope of transportation. I was so afraid we would dial the wrong number. Carefully she stripped the dime in the box and slowly dialed the number she hadn’t used in over two years. We both waited tensely.

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