When Cathy and I left for Mexico in February 1972, we crossed the border at Tijuana, and took a bus to Mexicali, where we boarded a train for Guadalajara. On the way home, though, we crossed the border at Nogales, Mexico, approximately 600 kilometres east of Mexicali — which meant that when we entered into the United States, we landed in Nogales, Arizona rather than San Ysidro, California.
Whatever the case, we were happy to be heading home.
Once in Nogales, Arizona, we stopped in at a popular local diner for breakfast (it was approximately 8 a.m.), after which we headed over to the highway, where we stuck our thumbs out, hoping for an 85-mile ride to Tuscon, Arizona, all dusty and laden with backpacks, of course.
A kind young man picked Cathy and I up just outside of Nogales, and as luck would have it, he was on his way to Tuscon. Once we’d loaded our backpacks into the back seat, and were comfortably ensconced in his late model Ford sedan, as we barrelled down the I-91 highway heading north, he turned the radio on. After two months away, the song that follows just below is the first song we heard on American radio, a song that would soon rise to #1 on the charts, and which Cathy and I remember to this day as signalling the first jaunt of our journey home, to Los Angeles initially, and then to our home atop Burnaby Mountain, at SFU’s Louis Riel House.
Somehow a song about the desert as we trundled our way through southern Arizona on a warm, breezy, dusty sun dappled Tuesday morning seemed entirely fitting — Cathy and I just looked at one another & smiled.
Once in Tuscon, we once again put our thumbs out at the side of the highway, and soon found ourselves on the second, 113-mile leg of our journey home, this time to Phoenix, and afterwards on the last leg of our route back to our friend’s home in East LA, a 372-mile ride to from Phoenix to Los Angeles. We made it back to Los Angeles around 8:30 p.m.
In fact, we arrived in the Westwood neighbourhood of Los Angeles, where our friend Bachi (Manuel Vittorio Esquivel) was kind enough take the 22-minute drive from East L.A. to pick us up, and bring us back to his home. We stayed a couple of days, and then jumped into our Datsun 510 — a wedding present, as it happens, and a vehicle that Bachi had serviced in our absence, all in prep for our 1277-mile leisurely sojourn to Vancouver.
