For the whole time I lived in Alaska until almost when I got married to my wife I had a stash of American Express Traveler's checks and a map of France. Actually I started this when I got discharged from the army and continued it until I was nearing 40. It was my bug out bag of a sort.
It was basically enough for a ticket to Marseille, France and the directions to Aubagne and served as my insurance policy in case something happened and I needed to disappear.
I figured that if push came to shove and everything went south I'd bail out and join the French Foreign Legion.
While I didn't expect to need to disappear it was a good idea at the time to have the ability as I really never trusted the system. I was 'on the road' too much and I knew that it was easier to pin something on a guy passing through town than find the real perp.
I never really got too comfortable until I had lived in Kodiak a few years and was part of the woodwork there. For the record, the Kodiak PD was pretty good. They were reasonably honest and treated everyone fairly.
While I was wandering around in the States on the end of my thumb I avoided big cities and very rural counties. Cities, of course, sucked to begin with. Very rural places ranged between heaven on earth and the lowest level of Hell. Most were wonderful places but every so often you'd run into some little pit of the dark side of Hell.
A few of these places were corrupt as hell and to find a good example of a county being cleaned up by disgusted locals read up on the Battle of Athens, Tennessee.
During that time I got probably four or more rides from various rural area LEOs. Two were from small town cops that were halfway pretty decent guys and just wanted to help me along my way and get to where I was going.
One deputy sheriff was pretty good and explained to me he was taking me as far as the county line because the sheriff had instructed his deputies to keep wanderers moving. He was a pretty decent soul and treated me well. He was actually interested in my travels. Nice guy.
One was a real hateful jerk. He called me 'Boy' and fed me dire warnings about being found inside the county after dark and so on. That guy scared the hell out of me because I had visions of being carted off to some dungeon somewhere, being accused of every unsolved murder that ever took place in the county up to and including the murder of the rancher that owned El Rancho Costa Plenty back in 1874.
Looking back on it, I think he hated everything I was at the time. I was young, had no responsibilities, and lived basically off the leavings of an affluent society. My guess is that early on he had knocked up Betty Lou Thelma Liz and married her at shotgun point and the instant the ink was dry on the wedding certificate she had turned into a demanding shrew. On top of that her father was a divorce attorney that was the brother in law of the local judge and unless he towed the line he was going to end up living under a bridge somewhere. He clearly hated life and was jealous as hell of me. He struck me as a person that probably should have joined the Legion except that he was too damned fat.
I actually kept the stash at the family manse and had figured that if I had to bail out I'd find a way to get to it, grab the stash and get one of my sisters to give me a ride to Logan. While it wasn't on my person where it could be lost or stolen and wasn't readily available on short notice it was better than nothing.
By 1985 I was living in Kodiak, had been for a while and was headed to the Seattle area to buy my sailboat which became my home for the last year I lived in Kodiak after I sailed it up the Inside Passage and crossed the Gulf.
Sometime in the summer of '86 I was cleaning up loose odds and ends and getting ready to cruise the Inside Passage again and head south which is another story in itself. I called my sister and told her where my stash was and to hand it to my mother after she ditched the map of France and instruct her to send me anything that had accumulated over the past few years. A package arrived containing my traveler's checks, about $100 in cash and a couple of letters from old friends. It went into the ship's coffers.
Things were different while cruising in a sailboat. Because I had a financial investment in my mode of travel I knew I'd suffer no problems. If one evenly remotely behaves themselves. By this time Plan B could be discarded.
Over the years I've run into a few people about my age that bummed around in their younger years and while almost all of them had no regrets, a couple of them had bad experiences. I recall one guy getting jailed for a 90 day stint over a trumped up misdemeanor and another getting beaten up pretty good.
To a man they agreed that getting off the road and putting myself at someone else's mercy had been a damned good idea.
It wasn't much but it was an out and a backup plan, as flaky as it was.
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