WC’s sophomore spring break was filled with all of the kind of stupid ideas you’d expect. The first was the idea of hitchhiking from Florence, Oregon down U.S. Highway 101 to San Diego, California to visit a friend. WC was accompanied in this folly by his roommate, Bill (now a professor of anthropology). Highway 101, while quite scenic, isn’t the kind of road that attracts drivers willing to carry college students. Or, at least in the early 1970s, even very many cars.
Bill Taking Harmonica Practice Between Cars
Getting in the car with the drunk playing with his camera while driving on the freeway was dumb. Playing with the rattlesnake a stupid idea. Free-climbing the crumbling sandstone cliff was a bad idea. But the stupidest idea was cutting off WC’s jeans, turning them into shorts, and then walking a trail trending northwest all day in Cuyamaca Rancho State Park. As a means of keeping a bit cooler, it was moderately successful.
But at the end of a long, hot day, under a cloudless sky, the backs of WC’s legs were badly sunburnt, with blisters at the backs of his knees. And the following morning, about 6:30 AM, WC boarded a packed Greyhound bus for the long ride up Interstate 5 back to Eugene, Oregon.
Riding long distances in a bus is brutal to begin with. Jack Kerouac famously wrote:
There’s hardly anything in the world, or at least in America, more miserable than a transcontinental bus trip with limited means. More than three days and three nights wearing the same clothes, bouncing around into town after town; even at three in the morning, when you’ve finally fallen asleep, there you are being bounced over the railroad tracks of a town, and all the lights are turned on bright to reveal your raggedness and weariness in the seat.
(The rest of the essay is very good. Recommended.) But to spend that time sitting, squeezed between a morbidly obese woman with three screaming kids and a gin-soaked old geezer who keeps telling you he needs to puke; well, if it isn’t purgatory, it should be.
Have you ever badly sunburnt the back of your knees? Walking, sitting and any bending of your legs is pretty uncomfortable. Rubbing the back of your knees on the rough texture of a bus seat for 22 hours is counter-indicated. There’s no stretching out your legs in a Greyhound bus. There’s no slouching down to hold the back of your legs away from the seat edge; your knees are already pressed against the seat ahead of you. Every motion of the bus scraped WC’s blistered legs against that seat fabric; a long detour around road construction south of the Oregon border was especially excruciating.
The bus finally arrived in Eugene at 4:30 AM. As WC got off the bus, some guy said, “Hey, mister, your legs are bleeding.” It was mostly pus, actually. It was a mile and a half walk from the bus station in downtown Eugene to the second floor apartment Bill and WC shared north of campus. WC’s route took him past the the emergency room entrance to Sacred Heart Hospital. Despite being dead flat broke, WC stopped in. They were very kind. And gentle. Armed with antibiotic cream and, more importantly, topical analgesic cream, WC staggered home.
Despite the unseasonably cold and rainy spring, WC perforce wore shorts the next two weeks. The touch of cloth on the back of his legs was unbearable. So WC’s folly was on display to all the world.
Effective sunscreens weren’t available then, not that WC would likely have had any along. But any excuse from 1971 no longer applies. Don’t make WC’s mistake.
Wickersham's Conscience 
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