“A masterwork of American road literature that captures a specific moment (summer 1973) and makes it eternal. Saint Phalle’s prose is deceptively simple—clear sentences, vivid details, dialogue that breathes. But beneath that clarity runs a current of poetry.”
Read The Book
Subscribe · PDF · Kindle · Paperback
1. Thumb Out — 8 min — Westchester estate to the open road
2. Turn On Your Lovelight — 10 min — A Grateful Dead concert that changed everything
3. The Kindness of Strangers — 14 min — The people who stop for you
4. The Price of Paradise — 9 min — Everything costs too much
5. The Frequency of Freedom — 16 min — Mini Woodstock in the Rockies
6. Solitary Push — 7 min — Wyoming alone, California ahead
7. Chicken Coop Days — 10 min — A friend coming apart in Santa Rosa
8. Sasha Among the Giants — 13 min — Peyote and redwoods
9. Target Practice — 7 min — When friendship turns dangerous
10. Let the Guitar Decide — 14 min — Jerry Garcia, a guitar, and Highway 1
11. ZIP! — 7 min — Something impossible above Big Sur
12. Love Through Stone — 12 min — Prophetic dreams
13. The Ocean Don’t Lie — 6 min — A sailor’s wisdom in the Mojave heat
14. Out in the West Texas Town of El Paso — 9 min — Steve on the am news
15. The Descending Dark — 9 min — Into Big Bend carrying everything
16. Phantom Ships — 10 min — Vision quest — roads become water
That summer I was twenty-one and everything was collapsing. My aunt was Niki de Saint Phalle, the world-famous artist who'd accused my grandfather—her father, the Wall Street banker—of things families don't survive.
My parents were divorcing after twenty-two years. The 1865 farmhouse on twenty-five acres was being sold. I’d dropped out of college, been disinherited, and was facing Vietnam with empty pockets and nowhere left to run except the road itself.
I grabbed my old guitar and my backpack and stuck out my thumb.
Four thousand miles later, I'd shared peyote with a woman named Stephanie who talked to trees, had Jerry Garcia play my guitar and tell me to let it guide me, watched UFOs off Big Sur, lost a friend to his own dark prophecy, and received a vision in a desert canyon that changed everything.
“Raw, unflinching 1973 hitchhiking memoir blending family trauma, Vietnam-era tension, Grateful Dead mysticism, and vivid road encounters. Strong voice, evocative prose, no filler—reads like Kerouac raised on acid and Allman Brothers.”
Behind The Book
Subscribe to read · Download PDF