Vice, Vagabonds, and VD

Walrus Online Exclusive: To view photos by Joan Latchford, click here. See also snippets of quotes from the 1970s on these “modern nomads.” The black, 1967 Ford station wagon pulled over to the shoulder of Highway 27, just before the Woodbine racetrack, and two wiry, clean-cut boys stepped out. Seventeen-year-old Art Adams and his friend Tom Croner slung their backpacks over their shoulders and waved to Art’s father as he drove away. Then they stuck out their thumbs to catch the first of many rides that would carry them to Mecca. It was July 1971, and it was outasight.

They joined 50,000–80,000 high school and university students, drop-outs, draft dodgers, freaks, heads, and hippies thumbing their way across the country that summer. Hitchhiking’s popularity among Canadian teenagers skyrocketed in the late sixties and early seventies. “More and more Canadians becoming wanderers,” warned a Toronto Star headline on the “modern nomads” in 1969. In Vancouver, teenagers rolled out sleeping bags in Stanley Park, English Bay, and Long Beach. In Banff, tourists complained to the rcmp about hippies sleeping in picnic shelters. One driver counted sixty young hitchhikers along the stretch from Sudbury to Sault Ste. Marie on a hot day that July.

By July 1970, there were so many teenagers on the road that Secretary of State Gerard Pelletier announced an emergency measure to turn thirteen Canadian armories into youth hostels for the 50,000 or more travelers on the road. In 1971, the year Art and Tom hit the road, Pelletier announced the transient youth phenomenon had reached epic proportions and launched a National Hostel Program. Part of the Trudeau Government’s effort to engage young radicals, more than $500,000 was doled out to youth groups and municipalities to open 116 makeshift hostels from Newfoundland to the Yukon. The program lasted until 1976 with up to 100,000 young things traveling each summer. From a set of old railway cars in Port-aux-Basques to a sixty-bed outfit in Whitehorse, transients ate and slept for “fifty cents a day or whatever they could afford.”

When the two boys got to Wawa a couple days later, Tom went on alone — he was in a rush to get back home to Vancouver. But for Art, the road was the thing. He took his time getting to Vancouver — a whole ten days — climbing into cars and trucks with a mailman, a housewife and her two young children, a truck driver and a Vietnam vet. He slept in a tent city in Wawa, a hockey rink in Thunder Bay, and a ditch outside Winnipeg. He shared a tin of sardines with a hobo and politely rejected advances from a trucker. He made it to Vancouver without spending a dime. It was the summer he grew his hair long. He kept it that way for the next twenty years.

It was the beginning of escape-en-masse and it was subsidized by the Canadian government. The country was fascinated, horrified, awestruck. In Prince Edward Island, where sixty percent of the population lived below the poverty line, resentment was ripe against “youth… bumming around on my tax money.” In June 1971, a group of Charlottetown residents locked elbows forming a human chain to block the RCMP from bringing tents and equipment to a proposed site for a tent hostel. In Montreal, Harry Chalratsiotis, who owned a restaurant next to a popular Montreal youth hostel, Habitat Durocher, threw cold buckets of water to scatter the hippies who hung out on his doorstep and scared off paying customers. Halifax Mayor Hedley Ivany readied to defend his city from free love: “I’m not anxious to see Point Pleasant Park, Victoria Park and the public gardens turned into a bedroom — and they won’t be,” he swore. In Vancouver, an army of denim-clad “street nurses” roamed youth hotspots “to try to arrest the tide of venereal disease, primarily gonorrhea” being spread by transient youth.

But the highlight of Art Adams’ trip wasn’t sex, pot, or rock n’ roll. “When I left Thunder Bay, I met a real, live hobo on the road,” he told me in a recent interview:

“He sorta’ took me under his wing, we shared a can of sardines and walked about thirty-two kilometres from Thunder Bay to Kakabeka Falls because we couldn’t get a ride. The sun was going down and the bum told me to go ahead and he went further down the road. He said it was the only way we were going to get along here, and if I got a ride, could I ask the driver to pick him up too? I got a ride in a Canada Post truck but he didn’t have room for anybody else, I asked him to stop the truck and I gave the hobo my can of sardines and the bread. He had nothing and he made a sacrifice for me. I had so much more than him.”

They were high on Kerouacian dreams. If these middle-class teenagers weren’t lucky enough to find authentic bums, they became them — dropping out and drifting — if just for a summer.

Sixteen-year-old Clifford J. Larabie, who hitchhiked from Cobalt, Ontario, to Alaska, advised Maclean’s readers, “Cheapness is… a factor but teenagers rarely thumb simply because they cannot afford some other means of transport. The experience is the thing. The weary, hu