I woke near the side of the highway on the northern end of Colorado Springs. I had made my mind up that I would visit with a friend in Illinois before deciding whether to return to school. I had all of about six days before registration, so the side trip would tighten my schedule should I determine to return to school.

East of Denver the interstate highway trailed off into incompleteness, bright barriers signaling the end of the new clean and smooth concrete. Survey stakes and leveling operations, large earth movers and the two lane rutted asphalt of Highway 40 followed. I was riding in the back of a pick up truck at this point with two or three other hitchhikers. One of them offered me a marijuana cigarette. That was something I would never carry when I was hitchiking. With the questionable legality of hitchhiking, and varied enforcement of those laws, it made no sense to me to set yourself up for trouble. But I put the joint in my pocket. Thanks a lot.

Miles later the interstate resumed, and shortly after that my ride ended. The Saturday afternoon heat was building. There was a Stuckeys Restaurant at the top of the exit ramp where I had just been dropped off, and little else that I could see in any direction. But I had violated hitchiking rule number 1 that morning when I decided to stop in Illinois on my way back to western New York -- I had imposed a schedule on my travels. There was some traffic passing on the interstate, but where I waited at the top of the entrance ramp, I hadn’t seen more than two or three cars headed in any direction, much less the direction I was headed.

As the afternoon heat continued to build, I started to work my way down the entrance ramp. More heat and I was trying to get the attention of the cars headed east at 70 or more miles an hour. The heat continued to build. After I had been down at the bottom of the entrance ramp for about a half an hour, a Colorado State Patrol cruiser came down my way. I don’t remember if he turned on his flashers, but he pulled over next to me. What I was doing did not belong in his little part of the world. He didn’t read me my rights or anything, but in a few minutes a Kit Carson County Sheriff’s car pulled up with two deputies inside. They took my backpack and one deputy got in the back. I reached in my pocket and crushed the little timebomb and tossed it under the wheels of the car as I climbed into the front seat. As we started driving to Burlington, Colorado, about ten miles from the Kansas line, I stared out towards the wilting cornfields with anger and frustration. I realized that sharing this anger with the deputies would not help me in any way, so I tried to be friendly and discussed the drought effects on the local economy. Futile, they weren’t going to cut me loose because I was friendly. Oh, well. They were pleasant.

At the Kit Carson County jail, the sheriff had me empty my pockets ( I suppose I could have hidden the joint in my dirty handkerchief, but let’s not screw around with hitchhiking rule number 2) and went through my back pack. He pulled out a poetry anthology I was carrying with me. Great, I thought, now I’m going to take some shit from a redneck about “faggot poetry”. As he flipped through the pages he stopped and said, “Ah, Ferlinghetti. . .”

It was explained to me that I was being held unless I could post bond to ensure that I would appear before the judge, just as with out-of-state speeders. Well, I had about five dollars for my cross-country trip. I tried calling my family to wire me money - Hurry, Western Union closes at four o’clock. I knew my family was in Syracuse at my brother’s, and I couldn’t get an answer. They were out to dinner, and, I learned later, joking “Where do you suppose Don is right now? Probably in jail somewhere.” Ha. Ha.

To this point, I maintained a bit of detachment from what was going on. After all, a part of hitchhiking was the uncertainty of what happened next, the excitement of the unplanned. However, having my freedom taken away, the right to come and go as I pleased, reattached me to what was going on quite profoundly. There is no emotion that can compare to the feeling when you come to this realization. I stood holding the bars, squeezing with all of my strength. If it were humanly possible, I would bend those bars. I don't think anyone who has ever had his or her freedom taken can be the same after that.

My time passed fairly uneventfully, got two meals both days from the restaurant next door, not fancy - open faced roast beef sandwhich, peas, mashed potatoes, fried eggs and toast for breakfast -- but filling. The cell could hold six or eight,with third-tier bunks that were no longer used, and I shared it with a quiet, lanky, mild-mannered older man with glasses, who held his hands in the front of his faded overalls, everything but a sign declaring him a farm hand. There were some magazines, books and a small black and white portable television with rabbit ear antenna, that recieved one or two channels, one out of Goodland, Kansas. Re-runs of Andy Griffith, it seems, may have been shown, if not, that would have been appropriate. Saturday night I was awakened as someone else entered, but he was gone by the time I awoke in the morning. When I felt comfortable I asked my cellmate what he was in for. With a reflective, subdued look he told me he had killed someone. How nice.

On Monday morning I was to see the judge, and I asked for a razor to give my best appearance. I was brought to County Court Judge Curt Penny's chambers. He looked at the trooper and he looked at me and looked at the trooper and asked what were we doing there. The trooper explained that I had been hitchhiking on the Interstate. The judge asked me if I had enough money for a bus ( I didn’t even have enough money for lunch!), then said I could sit at the top of the highway entrance ramp, but I couldn’t stick out my thumb or hold a sign. Within about one half hour a young guy eyeballed me as he was getting on the ramp, asked me if I was hitchhiking, and offered me a ride. He was driving a muscle car that he had run all the way across Utah without an air filter, and it was only just starting to give him trouble. But, he was a Coast Guardsman from Oakland due in Washington, D.C. to report for colorguard duty before I needed to be back to New York, so I knew I’d make good time, and in fact made it door-to-door in about two and a half days. I probably slept right through to registration after I got in.

I had taken a job with the Fort Morgan office of Colorado Rural Legal Services. At the time I arrived, a case was developing concerning the conditions in the Morgan County Jail. Various matters did not meet constitutional minimums, like cells, cages really, with solid steel walls on all sides and no lights; the failure to segregate convicted prisoners from pre-trial detainees who had been able to post bond, juvenile offenders from adult offenders and more. My previous job at Boulder County Legal Services included a project developing and teaching classes on civil law to the inmates at the Boulder County Detention Center. I believed that I had gained insights that made me particularly effective dealing with inmate populations, and in Fort Morgan I was assigned to investigate and interview inmates at the jail.

Soon after I arrived in Fort Morgan, the regional council of governments was sponsoring a forum for senior citizens which was held in Burlington. Although Kit Carson County was not in our service area, I was asked to drive the two and a half or three hours to Burlington to give a presentation on the services available to senior citizens through the offices of Colorado Rural Legal Services. Sharing the dias with me was Judge Penny. I soon realized that this was the judge I had been presented to those few years earlier, but he didn't recognize me. Where I was able to defer several questions to Judge Penny, he had to field a number of tough questions, and shared with me through asides the frustrations of responding to some of the more difficult ones. By the end of the panel, Judge Penny and I had bonded as fellow insiders.

Shortly after that, our office got a call regarding the conditions at the Kit Carson County Jail. My announcement that I had some (ahem) personal experience was greeted as a quite pleasant surprize and made me a valuable resource. Chief among the problems in Kit Carson County was that the jail had been constructed on top of the courthouse, and there was only a single stairwell; a fire there would result in a death penalty for inmates largely in on minor offenses. Inmates are entitled to three meals a day. Another problem was the lack of segregation of offenders, a problem which many small counties face. The case was filed in U.S. District Court in Denver, named for one of the plaintiffs, an inmate at that time, William Left Hand Bull, et al., v. Kit Carson County Commissioners. A settlement was reached in a relatively short period of time.

It may have taken me six years, but I shut down that jail.