Little America
Memoir by Nancy Newman
In 1976, from a phone booth in Wyoming, I watch my car get the once over by a group of long-haul truck drivers. Shaking their heads and staring at it like they’re seeing an alien spaceship. I’m talking to my old boyfriend back in Vancouver. My car started acting up about a hundred miles west of Little America, the world’s biggest truck stop.
“It keeps slowing down for no reason. Now I’m in this huge truck stop in the middle of nowhere. They act like they’ve never seen a VW before.”
Gerry is not car-savvy. He grew up in London with a family who didn’t own a car and only just got his driver’s license a couple of years ago. I’m not calling for car advice. I need a lifeline.
Because, what am I doing, exactly?
After meeting Gerry in the Canary Islands where he was surfing and I was backpacking, it seemed like a natural thing to move to California, but the plan got put on hold when his visa was turned down due to a juvenile drug charge. We came to Canada with the expectation it would be temporary. But after four years, with his Green Card nowhere in sight, I decided to split and move back to the states by myself. I was sure I could get a job in journalism or go to law school.
Something, anything.
By the end of summer, a plan appeared at the old Jericho Pier in Vancouver, in a crowd welcoming Greenpeace’s return from the North Pacific after confronting Russian whaling ships. Across from me, eating an ice-cream bar and wearing aviator sunglasses, was a man introduced earlier as a United Press International reporter who had joined the ship in Honolulu to write a story and decided to stay on as crew. His Ivy-League style stood out in the crowd of hippies swarming the pier.
Maybe he can help me get a journalism job.
“Oh, hi. Aren’t you that reporter from Hawaii?”
“Yes ma’am,” he nodded, stepping closer, cool and polite. “But I’m from Norfolk.” He pronounced it Nawfuk.
At the phone booth in the truck stop, Gerry asks: “What are you doing? When are you coming back?”
I have no answers, only the same questions in my head.
I tell Gerry I have to go. “I’ll call you later.”
An older trucker, wearing a red baseball hat, says in a deep southern accent, “Look, I’m empty. I’ll follow you down the road and if she keeps acting up, we can throw her in my trailer. I’ll take you to the VW dealer in Denver.”
“Art from Alabama,” he says and shakes my hand.
We head east on I-80 toward Rock Springs. After about twenty miles, my car sputters and slows to a stop. Art pulls over behind me.
After the Jericho Beach party, Hal the reporter invited me to come on board the Green-peace ship, The James Bay. We crammed into the galley with the crew talking wildly about their high seas adventures. After a few hours, Hal offered to walk me to my car. The moon shimmied across the dark water and the boat swayed as we crossed the deck. The ship’s movement — or maybe the Maui Wowie — threw me off balance. As I reached for the railing, Hal grabbed my arm, pulled me in and kissed me.
We drove back to my place and Hal stayed for a few days. We went to Greenpeace gatherings around town. Early one morning he left, saying he had some long-distance calls to make from the Greenpeace office.
A week went by. I didn’t see or hear from him. Guess that’s that.
But he’d left his wallet behind: photo ID from United Press International and Bank of America. A stack of photo IDs from different work places.
“He’s CIA,” said my friend, who was reading Inside the Company: CIA Diary. “Definitely. Why else would he have all this ID?”
A couple more weeks went by and still no sign of Hal (if that was his name). I visited Soar, a Greenpeacer who liked to sneak into the Vancouver Aquarium late at night and swim with the dolphins.
“Probably been kidnapped by the CIA,” Soar told me. “He tried to fake us out with this reporter shit but we knew he was spying on us.”
About a month later, I opened my door and there was Hal, looking dishevelled, but still preppy: khaki trousers, polo shirt, Sierra Club jacket and sunglasses. He was in a hurry to go back east but he invited me to join him in a few weeks.
I didn’t ask him about the IDs or if he really was a reporter. I just handed over his wallet and said, “Everybody thinks you’re a spy.”
“Hmm,” he responded.
Green River, Wyoming, the place where my car quit on the side of the highway, is known for its miners and cowboys. Art follows me in his rig while I roll my VW downhill onto a secondary road. When we come to a stop, he jumps out of his cab and says: “Too bad I don’t have a ramp.”
A few locals stop by to gawk. The crowd grows as people come out of a nearby store. Pick-ups idle in the middle of the road. We look around for something — or someone — that might help.
Art spots some railroad ties lying in a ditch that he figures could be used as a ramp. We drag them over to his truck. A guy roars up in a pickup, filling the air with a thick cloud of dust. A straw cowboy hat obscures his face but his neck is red as fireweed.
“Hey! Where’d you get them ray-road ties?” Behind his head I catch sight of a rifle in a gun rack.
“Um. We found them in the ditch. My car broke down. We need to get it inside this truck so we can get it to Denver.”
I gesture towards my car, which Art has parked backwards behind his giant semi, railroad ties leaning up against the rear of the open trailer.
Cowboy spits from his cab.
“Well, you better not break any of ’em. That’s all I gotta say.”
Art motions to me to get in the car. “Back her in!”
“Wait. I thought you were gonna do that.”
“Oh no, sugar. That’s your job.”
As I slide into my car, the spectators shift around to get a better look. I start the engine, wipe my sweaty hands on my jeans and, with one hand on the steering wheel and the other on the gearshift, I find reverse, hit the gas and the clutch, hoping for the best.
I can’t even see the railroad ties in my rear-view but I picture them bowing slightly as the car makes it halfway up and rolls back down.
Shuffling, laughter and murmuring. The crowd inches closer.
Art leans into my window, “Now, I’m gonna go inside the trailer and this time I want you to just give her! Pop this baby right in there!”
I can barely breathe. I wipe my hands on my jeans again, push the clutch down and, with my other foot poised above the gas pedal, put the car in reverse. Gripping the steering wheel with both hands, I glance at Art in the rear-view mirror. He’s in the back of the trailer, waving me in.
I shut my eyes, slam the gas pedal all the way to the floor and vroom!
The crowd cheers. I open my eyes. I’m in the trailer. Art’s clapping his hands and stomping his feet.
“Yeah, that’s it! You did it.”
Cowboy yells, “Y’all just make sure you put them ray-road ties back where you got ’em, y’hear?”
At the VW dealership in Denver, a mechanic installs a new fuel filter for two bucks. I buy an extra one and stick it in the glove compartment.
When I meet up with Hal in a hotel in down-town Norfolk, he says, “Greenpeace was right about me being in the CIA but wrong about me spying on them. Now I’m trying to get out, but they don’t make it easy.”
Running his hand through his matted, unwashed hair, looking tired and preoccupied, he adds, “I don’t think you’re in any danger.”
When he hugs me, I feel a gun under his jacket, tucked into his waistband,
“Oh that,” he says. “It’s a tumour.”
He pulls the pistol out, slides his hand back and forth along the barrel.
Click. Click.
“I always keep it cocked and loaded. Just a habit.”
He places the gun on the bedside table and pulls me in again.
That would have been a perfect time for me to get the hell out.
Back to Vancouver. Back to safety.
Instead, we check into a motel in nearby Virginia Beach. Hal pays for the room for a month and leaves, gun tucked in his waistband.
The weather is cold and wild. The Atlantic Ocean pounds the shoreline a few feet from my motel balcony, making me shiver. In the middle of the night Hal lets himself in, climbs into bed, slides the gun under his pillow, and falls asleep.
It’s the off-season in Virginia Beach. The motel is quiet. Hal’s not around much and I’m lonely so I get friendly with the live-in manager, hanging out with her in the lobby. One night, while watching Roots, she mentions the “government types” who checked into the room right above me, in this nearly empty motel.
“What? Right above my room?”
“Yep,” she says, “Been in this business a long time. I can see them coming a mile away. Install their own phones. Don’t use the beds. Won’t let cleaners in. Definitely government. FBI, probably.”
Who are they watching: me or Hal?
Early the next morning, in a rush of adrenaline, I race around the room, throw all my things into my suitcase and take a cab to the airport. I don’t even bother with my car.
In 2006, at a friend’s birthday party in Vancouver, my home for the past thirty years, I ran into Rex Weyler, an early member of Greenpeace and author of a recently published book titled, Greenpeace: The Inside Story. I’d flipped through my husband’s review copy, looking for a mention of Hal. Rex wrote about a guy, posing as a reporter, who joined their mission in Honolulu and, because of his marine background, piloted the ship in the North Pacific where they confronted the Russians. In the book, he says they suspected him of being CIA, sent to spy on them. A reporter who just happened to know how to captain a ship.
Looking at pictures of the old minesweeper, its wooden hull painted bright white with red trim, accented with bold stripes of colour and a big peace sign, I thought about how I’d taken off on a cross-country chase following a guy named Hal, son of the eastern establishment, recruited from his Ivy League university straight into the CIA, a spy who infiltrated an organization that embodied the essence of the counterculture.
A guy I never saw or heard from again. After introducing myself, I told Rex I had an update for him on Hal, the CIA guy from his book.
“Yeah, he was CIA, but he wasn’t interested in Greenpeace. He was actually trying to get onboard a Russian ship so he could spy on them.”
Rex nodded and looked away, taking it in. “Wow. Well, yes, of course. It kinda makes sense.” Then he looked at me, paused and said: “Wait, how the hell do you know that?” »