Father Remembers Hippies and Bikers
It was a hot July in 1977, especially for a pregnant woman riding in a 1961 VW bus with no AC. That model VW didn’t have AC and the heaters only half-way worked in the winter – air cooled engines in the rear. After her water broke, on the way to the hospital, we were both drenched in sweat.
The bus stank. My wife and I had driven across country on a hippie camping trip a couple of years before she had gotten pregnant. It was our honeymoon and our trip had been planned for months. One thing that we hadn’t planned on was our cat getting pregnant. The choice was simple – take the mother cat and five kittens to California from West Virginia, or cancel the trip. That bus, regardless of efforts to clean it, smelled of cat urine almost from the moment we had gotten on the interstate to start the trip in 1973 to the demise of the vehicle in 1986.
It was our first child – mutual panic attacks. The anxiety soon turned to boredom. My wife stopped dilating a few minutes after we got to the hospital. In the maternity ward with a few other expectant mothers, she read, talked on the phone, and napped. I sat and sat and sat…paced every time my butt went numb, and waited, waited, and waited some more. Other expectant fathers in the room came and went as their partners were pushed to the delivery room. I was the only guy in the room with really long hair, the Vietnam War controversy was fever pitched, so there wasn’t much to talk about with those fellows.
A nurse came in and recommended that I go home to get some sleep. At first I declined, but a couple of hours later I acquiesced. On my way out of the hospital, a bead of sweat had been born, instead of my child, and dripped onto the sidewalk a few steps toward the 1961 VW bus. Now, it wasn’t really my fault, not really because that bus didn’t have a gas gauge. Instead, and “they” say Germans are smart, it was manufactured with an auxiliary gas tank in case of emergency. The knob for that tank was stuck. As far as I know, it had not turned once since it left the assembly line.
The hospital was only about three miles from our house. There’s a bridge. On the way up, I ran out of gas, coasted to the top, and then to the bottom. My panic returned – not a gas station in the area. But, I got lucky! There was a hippie across the street. He and I pushed the bus to a parking lot for a bar. Maybe it was good karma, but I got even luckier. There was a Biker hanging out in the parking lot, a kindred spirit in those days of Peter Fonda’s Easy Rider and its theme song: “Don’t Bogart that Joint, My Friend.”
A couple minutes later, my panic had subsided. I could think straight. I saw an extra large paper soda cup on the ground of the parking lot (Burger Chef – one of the predecessors of McDonalds). Using a plastic hose that the Biker had, we siphoned two cups full from the motorcycle and I was back on the road. It was enough gas to get me to an all-night service station.
I got back to the hospital in time. Six weeks of Lamaze classes had not been wasted. Afterward, I felt like I could sleep for weeks. Of course, I didn’t get much more than a couple of winks of sleep for the next year. I’m sure that my son would agree, the world would be a better place if there were more hippies and bikers as its inhabitants.
By
Robert Eggleton
