CHAPTER 5. LIFE AT HARD LABOR—REFUSAL TO PAY INCOME TAX 76
I journeyed through the long dreary stretches of Nebraska and over the exact spot where Crazy Horse had put blankets on the hoofs of horses and escaped the U.S. military patrol, over half a century before. A returned soldier who drove like mad brought me into neon-lit Cheyenne, Wyoming at 9 p.m. The Salvation Army and hotels were full up so I slept in the jail that night. Going south the next morning toward Denver a middle-aged man picked me up. He asked my destination and why I was hiking. He soon said after looking closely at my Gandhi headgear, "I don't like such people as you. You seem to be smart but have no ambition. Going around the country like this and living on charity in a jail. I never took a dime from anybody. I'm going to leave you right here in the desert although I could take you to Denver if I liked." Knowing it was little use to discuss life and its problems with this Babbitt, and wondering how he ever detoured from his bourgeois mentality to pick anyone up, I thanked him for the ride, walked on a mile and a half and got a ride with a jolly U.S. Marshall to Denver by noon.
Here I visited with my old friend Helen Ford, who had a small printing press and who had printed my tax refusal statement. Charles Salmon was studying for the priesthood, but I was unable to locate him. I hiked south and slept one very cold night under a bridge three miles south of Walsenburg, Col. When I awoke two inches of snow covered me. I had not been cold during the night but my fingers were nearly frozen by the time I had tied up my pack. After I had walked a few miles, a man gave me a ride, and I still remember the fine breakfast that I had at the Globe Hotel. Now it warmed up and I was soon over Raton pass and down into New Mexico. Another day, after walking twenty-one miles over dreary roads, I arrived after dark at a small settlement. All of the stores were closed. Going to the house with the brightest lights, I was greeted at the door by a Mexican who worked on the section gang. His wife was away and he invited me in giving me supper and breakfast, refusing any money from "my amigo." I guess he appreciated the fact that I was walking. I gave him my last CW.
An ex-soldier going west to college stopped and asked me to get in. He thought I was an Indian and picked me up because of the pack I was carrying. We arrived in Albuquerque at dark. I phoned my employer to tell him that I had at last come home. A smoldering fire in the fireplace greeted me from my roommate Hovey, the ex-soldier who worked on the farm. I had walked 490 miles and had ridden 3,582, a total mileage of 4,072.
Glad to get back to this land of sunshine I reviewed the result of my trip. I had acquired a sympathetic feeling toward ex-soldiers. It seems that their difficulties had made them kinder than the civilians.
I remembered one evening in Iowa where I had asked half a dozen farmers for permission to lay my sleeping bag in a sheltered end of a building but had been chased away. Later that evening one farmer came to the restaurant where I was eating and slipped a half a dollar in my pocket and said sheepishly, "I am ashamed because I turned you away."
I felt happy with the memory of my family and friends. Carmen and Sharon were continuing their music in Evanston. When a Sophomore in high school
