Artifacts: Pulling It All Together

In the mid-1970s, when I was but a grom, I spent part of a summer in West Virginia on an Outward Bound-style trip, where cold splashes of New River whitewater were the shower that washed off our fear and sweat. Our leader was a longhair who wore a navy bandanna and taught us the words of the Grateful Dead’s “Truckin’” and reminded us again and again by means of encouragement that he really wasn’t that much older than we were.

On the last night before returning, now wild and empowered, to swim team and tennis lessons and our pathetically suburban friends, we sorta-slept in the dust on the concrete platform of a rural train station as long freights carrying coal grumbled past, squishing the pennies we’d placed on the rails. In the morning I was awakened by the refrain of “…Truckin’, I’m a goin’ home. Whoa whoa baby, back where I belong…” When I cracked open a groggy eye, I saw, a