How to Survive in the Wild, in Five Easy Steps

1. Embrace the wanderlust but make a plan.

It’s the fall of 1979 and I am twenty-one and feeling flush. After working all summer off the books in downtown Albany, I have a housepainter’s sunburn and no particular plans. Suddenly I am struck by a fierce case of wanderlust. White-line fever. Itchy feet. I don’t know why, exactly. Maybe it’s because I really haven’t done much travelling in my life so far. Growing up on Staten Island, my idea of a big getaway was a family road trip to Asbury Park. As a sullen teenager, I have taken two major vacations with my parents, one to Bermuda and one to California. But we weren’t exactly seasoned travellers. In L.A., we somehow managed to show up at Disneyland when it was closed. Then my father drove my mother and me around in the rental car all afternoon because we couldn’t think of anything else to do.

Now, however, with that house-painting cash lining the pockets of my overalls, it occurs to me that I am free to roam America unencumbered. I have a few friends and relatives in various states across the country, so I can limit my expenses by crashing with them whether they know I’m coming or not. I decide that San Francisco is my ultimate destination, even if I have to zig-zag to get there. Take the scenic route, I tell myself. It’ll be great. At the Albany bus station by the Interstate and the defunct Albany docks, I find out that I can get a Greyhound pass for seventy-five bucks. The pass will allow me to travel at will for two weeks, wherever Greyhound goes. I buy one immediately, house-painting cash on the barrel.

2. Be cautious when things are going too well.

Later on, I realize that while Greyhound goes a lot of places, it mainly follows the main highways from city to city. I definitely want to get off the Interstates and onto the blue highways so I will have to supplement my Greyhounding with a fair amount of hitchhiking. Go ahead, I tell myself. It’ll be fun. My On the Road moment. I leave in late September with plans to vagabond for about a month, and my zig-zagging gets under way. It is everything that I expected. I endure the long bus connections from New York to West Virginia to Arkansas to Oklahoma, but I truly enjoy hitching rides away from the main roads. Everyone I meet is friendly and generous – though I imagine that the subset of drivers willing to accommodate a rumpled, bushy-bearded, pseudo hippie like me must be a self-selecting group of kindred spirits.

One recently married couple picks me up in Missouri and takes me all the way to Colorado. They’re just a few years older than me but I feel like their kid, sitting in the back seat and munching on crackers and slabs of pepper-jack cheese that the pretty wife slices with a hunting knife and hands to me over the bucket seat. In fact, they do have a kid of their own, a year-old girl who is staying with the grandparents, and this is the first time they’ve been away from her. They both talk about how much they miss the baby. We part ways with hugs and handshakes in Denver and wish each other luck. The next stop on my rough itinerary is Rocky Mountain National Park, a couple of hours to the north. Greyhound doesn’t go there, of course, so the next morning I am out on the road early. I almost immediately catch a ride from a woman named Stacey. Coincidentally, in yet another stroke of the luck that tells me my cross-country sojourn is surely charmed, she too is on her way to the park. After chatting amiably and a little flirtatiously for a while, we decide to make a day of it.

3. Accept all reasonable offers.

I learn that Stacey is thirty (an older woman!) and works for the Ringling Brothers circus as an accountant or bookkeeper of some sort. I am a little disappointed that she is not a trapeze artist or a lion tamer, but I try to conceal it. Regardless of her exoticism or lack thereof, she is extremely pleasant. We share a fine sunny day driving through the park, stopping for a picnic lunch of peanut butter and honey sandwiches, which Stacey provides, and parking at overlooks to take in spectacular mountain vistas. Even though the October afternoon sun is warm on the back of my neck, I notice that the peaks are covered with quite a bit of snow.

At the end of the day, Stacey invites me sotto voce to return to Denver with her so that we can really get to know each other. I’m torn. It’s not as though I get such invitations every day, but I have this overwhelming urge to keep moving and not get sidetracked. It might be different if she were actually a lion tamer. Keep going, young man, I tell myself. See what’s around the next bend. I politely decline Stacey’s offer, and she doesn’t seem offended. We even make out for a few minutes before she drops me off at a small campground just outside one of the park exits. Although the campground is below the tree line, it is still high up. In fact, I later find out that the elevation is more than seven thousand feet above sea level. I don’t think about this in the moment, though. Nor do I particularly take notice that nobody else is camping here tonight. Enjoy your splendid isolation, I tell myself. This is what the journey is all about.

4. Know what you don’t know.

As night falls and a Milky Way light show fills the vast Western sky, my sense of euphoria is overpowering. I build a fire with logs from a plentiful stack of split wood on the far side of the campground, cook up some mac and cheese, and smoke a joint. The weed makes me horny and I fantasize about what might have been with Stacey but I have no regrets. I don’t know when I have ever felt so alive, I tell myself. Then I slip into my bargain-basement sleeping bag and zip it up, still warmed by the campfire whose flames are now waning slightly. Still feeling high and exhilarated by my surroundings, I drift into satisfied sleep. Although I do not have a tent, I’m not concerned. The night is crystalline and I am sure there is no chance of rough weather. I am wrong.

An hour or two later – it’s hard to say how long – I am awakened by the sound of my own chattering teeth. It takes me a few seconds to focus, at which point I understand that the fire has burned itself out and my flimsy sleeping bag is no match for the night-time temperature, which seems to have plunged to freezing or below. Just get the fire going again, I tell myself. Everything will be fine. I jump up and run as fast as I can to gather fresh kindling from the pile across the campground. By the time I return to my campsite, I am hyperventilating, not because I am panicking, though I am, but because I have not acclimated to the altitude and my forty-yard dash has left me utterly, painfully out of breath. I do my best to stack the wood for a fresh fire, only to discover that my hands are shaking too hard for me to light a match. Gasping for oxygen, I dive back into the sleeping bag and shove all my clothing and dirty laundry inside with me for insulation. For the next several hours, I maintain a fetal curl and try not to freeze to death. It takes hours, as well, before I stop having to gasp for oxygen. I dare not sleep. I am terrified.

5. Get a room.

At daybreak, the Rockies emerge in achingly gorgeous silhouette against a cloudless ochre firmament. I am alive. I try but fail to suppress a ridiculous sense of accomplishment for having survived my own idiocy. Don’t stop now, I tell myself. Get back out there. I build a fire with the wood I almost died while fetching, burn some cowboy coffee, pack up my things. As I stroll down a gravel path to the main road where I will try to catch my next ride, a small swatch of bright orange catches my eye. The unnatural color seems out of place between some tree branches swaying in the distance. That’s strange, I think, but it is a fleeting thought and I continue on my way to the spot where Stacey dropped me off last night. No cars are passing, so I start walking down the road while mentally calculating how long it will take me to reach California from here. After a very short walk, less than a minute, there is a bend in the road. I round the curve and there, just to my right, I see it: the bright orange and blue façade of a motel for visitors to the national park. The lot out front is filled with the cars of tourists starting their day with breakfast at the motel restaurant. As the scent of pancake batter and frying bacon registers in my olfactory cortex, I notice the sign on a small marquee outside the motel office.

“Vacancy,” it says.