Jim and I left home as soon as we were able; for me, it was when I graduated, at the not-so-subtle urging of my father. It went something like this. “I have had enough of your smartass mouth Walter Stephen; let’s see how tough you really are.” This was accompanied by dad peeling off his shirt. I just thought I was tough; my father was a killer in the strictest sense, looking for missile silos over Russia in an unmarked plane for the Navy, FBI self-defense instructor; he was that kind of tough. He knew it; I had taught with him during my teen years, so I also knew. Today was not a good day to die, I reasoned, so I ran into the woods and hid in a tree. Mom and dad got a good laugh, loaded up, and went out for supper. I came down after dark, snuck in, grabbed some clothes, and with my tail between my legs, lit out to see the world; and survive.

Jim immediately ran off when he found out, and we headed for Colorado via St. Louis, where we saw Arlo Guthrie in concert. We swung back west with seventeen dollars, four gas cans, and a siphon hose. Freedom was ours. The top didn’t go back up on my convertible for days at a time. After siphoning our way across Kansas at night, we blew a tire just inside Colorado, and there went fourteen of our seventeen dollars. A traveling rock band gave us a lift to the first town inside Wyoming; I had the siphon hose wrapped around my stomach and an empty can; before I could even try for free gas, the sheriff showed up. He watched me put my last three dollars in the can and called Missouri; Missouri didn’t want us, so he gave us a ride back to the car, at eighty miles an hour, in the back of a pickup at three in the morning on a June Wyoming night.

Before I thawed good and proper, he had me pop the trunk, which contained contraband. I threw a sleeping bag over most of it, but he only saw three lined-up gas cans. “Arkansas credit cards,” he yelled, “you two got till daylight to get out of Wyoming!” We crossed back into Colorado with the sun coming up in our eyes, on empty once more. At a sleeping ranch, we were helping ourselves at the big fuel tank when blam, blam, two shots broke the quiet. “You little bastards;” I saw a head sticking out of an upstairs window yelling as I threw a half-full gas can in the back seat of my convertible. Choking on fumes, we roared into the dawn; later that day, we picked up a hitch-hiker who showed us how to pan-handle and then let us in on an agricultural deal that would change our lives; but that’s another story.