"That the one road we traveled would ever shatter and split”*

Photo credit: The Open Road Free Stock

Bob Dylan was prescient in “Bob Dylan’s Dream.” It’s talent and intelligence that sees such profound issues in human relationships at such a young age. Maybe it’s genius.

It’s been 54 years since Judy, Joe, Dawn, and I packed Dawn’s green ’67 Mustang in Glastonbury, Connecticut, and headed out on the road for a bona fide road trip at the end of the decade, full of dreams, or at least close to the end of that era. Joe was my best friend in college and graduate school. I felt like we were brothers. Judy was his significant other at the time, and they seemed inseparable. By chance, Dawn and a friend had traveled from Long Island and walked into Judy’s dormitory, Weinstein Hall, on the campus of New York University on University Place in Greenwich Village. That day we met was at the end of March, a cold, rainy night, and we scoured the Village for things to do that evening, ending up at the Ninth Circle.

The weather was perfect at the beginning of July in 1971, as we headed out onto the limitless highway beginning with the Mass Pike. North of Albany, New York, probably near Lake George, we stopped at a restaurant for dinner in a small town beside the Northway, Route 87. We sat in a booth a few feet beyond the row of stools that were placed in front of the restaurant’s Formica counter. One of the people at the counter began haranguing Joe about his long hair… I also had long hair… and the hateful interchange saw us soon leave town with a police escort that ended at the on-ramp for the highway. A few years ago, Judy told me she couldn’t remember much about our trip, but she recalled the police escort. She later denigrated my commentary of the trip, “The Road Trip,” a response that hurt at a very basic level. “We were kids,” was a recurring observation Judy made about those days. Her life led her on a path much different from the values she had held.

We spent the night just beyond the Saint Lawrence River south of Ottawa. In the darkness of the night, we did not realize how close the motel was to the river, but we woke up in the middle of the night soaked in humidity and had to retrieve our sleeping bags, which we placed on top of our bedding, to stay dry through the remainder of the night into the early morning.

We traveled another 100 miles or so, or perhaps a bit longer than that, and arrived at Eganville, just beyond the town of Renfrew, in Ontario, Canada, at the site of a house my family’s friend Donny was in the process of building. The first-floor deck of the house was completed along with the kitchen, and that night we slept on the deck until a massive mosquito attack drove us into the back of a van one of Donny’s friends owned, a person who was helping Donny build his house.

The time we spent in Canada with Donny was magical, with visits to a neighbor and the now-famous teeth-brushing incident in the Bonnechere River. Something happened on one of the days of our trip between Dawn and Joe that upset Dawn, but she would never speak about the details. Our relationship was problematic, and whatever happened in Canada was but one issue that marked the end of the relationship.

Donny had come to Canada as an expat, and I considered the same action. A real estate agent met with Dawn and me on Donny’s land and outlined the cost of buying land and erecting an A-frame on similar nearby property. The real estate agent told of his time in the German army under Hitler, the Wehrmacht, and defended himself with his observation, “What was I going to do? They would have shot me,” speaking defensively about his actions decades ago. I was in the middle of a battle with the government about the Vietnam War, and my relationship with Dawn would soon end. We were young, and like many others, decisions and actions were foisted on us during those times, decisions often beyond our years.

All of these many decades later, I think with great sadness on the dissolution of all of the relationships between the four friends who set out with great and high hopes and the dreams of youth and returned with soon-to-be-shattered relationships. Judy died in 2022, and I had only communicated with her by way of the Internet for years, and our communication was of the most superficial kind. Still, I can see our group on that road trip in so many scenes and situations that it makes it impossible to let go of those memories.