First off, the statute of limitations on my crime has surely expired and one little inter-state move of a ‘quantity for sale’ of marijuana probably doesn’t matter as much now as it sure as hell did in 1970. Second, jail is weird space. If you haven’t been in, there’s no way to get it. Time, logic, reality, and the very meaning of innocence is altered there. This is the story of how one hippie first learned about the weirdness.
This is July 1970. The kid with me in the van knew about the dope I was carrying too, which could well have been a problem. When I met him he was hitchhiking on I-80 outside of Salt Lake, headed west to Berkeley, part of the pulse of young folks toward California. God bless them. I picked him up. He was a runaway, 16 I think, from Michigan. We talked and smoked some of the dope and drove my green hippie van west, toward Berkeley, toward Reno.
Now at that time — you have to imagine — the Interstate did not detour around every city and town it came to. It went thru them on Main Street. In 1970 the Interstate had intersections and cross traffic and stop lights. This story I’m telling surely would not have happened in later times. Because these days I would rocket right around Reno at Interstate speed. Because nowadays I would not really ever have been in Reno, driving on the street. Because these days I would have dropped the kid at a freeway ramp and just gone on my small-time way down 395 toward Lee Vining and the back way to Yosemite. Because it was the Reno cop who had seen the bulletin about the armed robbery in South Lake Tahoe and it was he who, reasonably it turned out, figured that I and the kid were probably the armed robbers he was looking for and followed us down the street in the middle of Reno.
