Rebel Without a Clue: Magical Thinking, a Motorcycle Journey, and The Great Teenage Diaspora

This is the story of a kid who bootstrapped his education out of abject fear of mediocrity, refused his high school diploma, then went directly to college. I refer to the sinister affair involving a small metal die, about a gazillion books, the war in Vietnam, and the moral compass of a generation brought up on Rocky & Bullwinkle.

In 1970, I was owlishly staring down five years in federal prison, but I wanted to see the world first-or our part of it. So I took a motorcycle trip with a good friend and traveled the blue-gray ribbons of America carrying little more than a toothbrush, some clean socks, and a nervous grin.

Whenever I tell what happened during our two months on the road, I wave my arms about and laugh and tell a colorful tale. People laugh along when I describe popping a frantic wheelie to avoid a herd of bison, how my friend Tom and I landed in a Wisconsin jail, or how we joined a search party for a missing girl in Connecticut. We rode every kind of dirt road, paved road, metal bridge, and freeway, and hammered our way through 9,847 miles of sun-shine, rain, snow, hail, wind, and mud.

Most people have an experience at some point in their lives when they go beyond their normal abilities to achieve some-thing improbable. It's interesting what happens next. Do they learn from it, or just think of it as an exciting part of their history?

This portmanteau of history, narrative, and observation is inextricably linked to how I learned to recognize injustice and wend my way past arbitrary rules. It is the tale of a motorcycle trip and what I learned from it-a homemade education in ethics and socioeconomics. Fasten your seat belt, it's a bumpy ride.