The 60s were an off-kilter adventure (much of which actually happened in the 70s). Imagine yourself back then, in South Bend, Indiana, in January. (Sorry.) You're nearly broke. You've just met Carol, who's as intelligent as she is attractive. Still, sometime around 2:30 in the morning, the two of you come up with the moronic idea of hitchhiking to the Grand Canyon. In January. Drugs may have been involved.

If you have any sense, with the clear, frozen light of day, you abandon this idiocy and invite Carol to do something that doesn't cost money and doesn't involve possibly becoming corpsicles. If you have any sense.

Carol and I spent the first night of the trip trying to sleep on the heated floor of a men's room on an Iowa interstate. Tell me I didn't know how to impress a woman. By mid-morning, we reached Omaha, where a man in a tangerine-colored business suit was driving around, apparently looking for a long-hair to hit with a raw egg. Unfortunately for me, his aim was superior to his fashion sense. Worse, that would pretty much be the highlight of my day.

Our next ride was from an outgoing young waitress. Seeing how beat we were, she took us to her place to crash, as people did in those days. Then Mom happened to visit. One look at us, and she explained that a blizzard was coming, "So you better get going." As if the blizzard was an event we wouldn't want to miss, like Dylan or The Dead in concert. Suddenly, almost magically, Dad was there too, leaving his business of — I assume — torturing kittens and puppies, to make certain we hurried on our merry, snow-covered way.

Back to hitchhiking, we were nowhere near anywhere — Nebraska, remember — when the blinding snow killed the traffic. Soon, Carol was icy white, and I couldn't feel my feet or any other high-value appendage. We never saw the police car until their loudspeaker boomed, "You know we could arrest you for hitchhiking."

"Please," I called. I'd have confessed to anything from littering to the Lincoln assassination or committed any crime short of exposing myself — not in seven-degree weather. But they weren't getting out of there without us.

The lumpy sofa in the police rec room was more uncomfortable than the Iowa rest room floor. It even smelled worse. Still, on an annualized basis, smelly sofas kill significantly fewer people than blizzards. You can look it up.

The next morning dawned clear and cold. The cops told us the best place to hitchhike, and within minutes, we were picked up by a friendly semi driver. At least he was friendly to Carol, whom he immediately dubbed "Sunshine." He was so friendly that as soon as he got me out of the truck — theoretically getting us coffee — he took off with her!

It's astonishing how testy I can get after a couple of nights of sleep deprivation — sprinting, screaming, cursing, leaping up onto the moving truck like some deranged, underachieving superhero. And then, somehow, without getting killed, working the upper half of my body back into the cab. Our friendly driver and I exchanged a few pleasantries about each other's sexual proclivities, and he dumped us off at the next exit. "Incidentally, morons," he yelled. "The Grand Canyon's closed."

That wasn't nearly as funny when we discovered it was true. The roads to the North Rim — our destination — were closed for the winter. But South Bend in January? We kept moving west. And our luck — a function of our superb planning — held. Unfriendly cops — "get-out-of-town, and no hitchhiking" — in both Laramie and East Cow Flop (I could be wrong about that name). More snow. Monsoons. A bit of jail. An earthquake. A little pestilence but no famine or locust. And ultimately, wondrously, we were walking barefoot on the beach in beautiful Santa Barbara — in January.

"The right destination is worth the journey." I think Baba Ram Das said that. Or maybe it was a fortune cookie. In any case, within days, I realized I was home.

You can contact speaker, author, Barry Maher or sign up for his Slightly Off-Kilter newsletter at www.barrymaher.com.

To find out more about Barry Maher and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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