After the examinations were over, Pepa had a proposal. We would work in June to earn money, and then in August we would go to Slovakia and hike and hitchhike for the month, sleeping outside, eating what we could find in the fields, and buying only what we had to.

I did not think my father would allow it. He allowed it, and he told me that the only reason he was allowing it was that he trusted Pepa. He believed that Pepa knew what he was doing and that he would take care of me.

Pepa had one rule about hitchhiking, which was never to do it inside a city or a village. You took a bus to the edge of the buildings, walked out to the open road, and only then put out your hand.

He changed the plan almost immediately. He had a girlfriend in Litomyšl and he knew that she also had a boyfriend there, and he wanted a week to look into it. The girl was one I knew. She had been in the fencing class I went to before high school. Pepa told me to meet him at the main station in Žilina in one week. I told him that I had relatives in Ružomberok and in Tvrdošín.

I had never travelled that way on my own before. I was scared stiff.

My first ride was with a young man on a Jawa 250. I had a cloth carrier that could be converted into a rucksack. I did not know that there were passenger footrests that folded down, so I gripped the motorcycle with my legs the way you would ride a horse. I think he was glad to unload me.

The next rider was an older man on a heavier Jawa 350. By then I knew about the footrests and it went better. After about a hundred miles of motorcycles I was lucky and got a ride with a family that was going all the way to Ružomberok.

My mother’s cousin Dušan Kniha was the head of a large paper mill in Ružomberok and lived in a nice house inside the mill compound. His son, also Dušan, was my age. I arrived without any warning and explained the situation, and I assumed that they would not tell my mother. They did not. My mother found out about that week only years later, when I told her myself. My father never found out at all.

I stayed a couple of days and then young Dušan took the train with me to Tvrdošín, to my mother’s cousin teta Maruška, where I had stayed for a few weeks as a small boy. She was happy to see me. I helped the bakers deliver bread to the villages.

Then I went to Žilina, and Pepa was there. I was very happy, since the plan had worked.

We hitchhiked back to Ružomberok, stayed the night, and left Pepa’s large suitcase there so that we could travel light. Then we went east, toward the Soviet border, which is Ukraine now.

We each had one blanket. Between us we had one triangular piece of a tent, which we put under us or over us depending on the rain, and the outer part of an army ešus, the three-piece mess kit. That was all.

We were not in a hurry. We stopped at historic places like Levoča, since Pepa was studying architecture and combined the trip with learning something. We slept buried in haystacks when it was cold, or a few hundred yards into a wheat or corn field where nobody would bother us, or on the ground in the forest. Pepa was often trying to meet girls.

At Spišký Castle there were no tourists at all, only the two of us and three local Cikán girls. One of them liked Pepa and arranged to meet him that night. We found a haystack and he left. He was gone a long time. By morning I was starting to be afraid that he was not coming back, and then he came back.

We got to Sobrance, near the border, and took a dirt road north toward Ubľa, about fifteen miles, with essentially no traffic on it. Halfway there we found a brook and made a fire and cooked potatoes that we took from a field. We bought butter in a village nearby and put it in the stream to keep it cool. Then it started to rain. We waited in the village pub, but the rain did not stop, and when we came back the stream had risen and taken the butter.

The fire was out, but one large log was still red-hot inside, and we managed to get the fire going again in the rain. After dark Pepa collected enough wood in the forest to last the night. We tied the triangular tent piece between two trees and moved the fire close to it.

The Carpathian forest there was wild and full of animal noises. I was convinced that I was hearing bears, although that may have been my imagination. I was not very afraid, mainly because Pepa was with me and he was strong and athletic and not afraid of anything.

The rain stopped in the morning and we got to Ubľa around the middle of the morning. It was Sunday and the whole village seemed to be outside after church, dressed nicely. We were filthy. Pepa had a torn shirt with his muscles showing and a neatly trimmed beard.

A policeman in uniform, walking with his wife, stopped us and asked for our papers. A beard was a problem by itself, since the photograph in your identity papers had to show you with a beard if you had one. Pepa smiled and told him that we had walked for many days, maybe a thousand kilometers from Prague, and that we had nothing to shave with. He teased him a little. The policeman became defensive in front of his wife and said that he knew very well how far Prague was.

The more serious problem was that we were in a border area that was closed to the public and we had no permission to be there. The whole village was watching. Many of the people there were Cikáni. They apparently thought that Pepa was Cikán too, and they were calling him brother. The policeman let us go, but he told us that if he found us there again he would arrest us.

We walked west to Snina, about twenty to twenty-five miles. That evening a Cikán orchestra was playing in the park on the main square and we stayed and listened. Pepa was an excellent dancer and danced with the girls. Afterward the two of us went with two of them and sat in front of their house the whole night, talking and singing. That was one time Pepa did not score.

In a village after Snina we were hungry and wanted to buy bread and mustard. Pepa went into the grocery store and came out with nothing. They had told him that they did not have any bread or mustard. Then I went into the same store. It was a tiny place, so it was not only a matter of asking for the bread and the mustard, and we talked for a while. I spoke Slovak naturally, like somebody from Slovakia, and during the conversation I told them that my mother had been born in Slovakia and where she was from. The people in that area had Rusyn accents. They sold me the bread and the mustard. It was obvious that Pepa and I were together. We understood then why they had not sold anything to him. That was the only time in my life that I ran into that in Slovakia.

Somewhere on that trip a Hungarian couple gave us a ride. I remember the woman as an actress from a film whose title I remember approximately as Two Times Two Is Sometimes Five. We could not communicate in Hungarian and they could not communicate with us in Czech, so we managed in Russian.

I also remember finding newly published books in Slovak towns that had already sold out in Prague. One of them may have been Steinbeck. I cannot now identify the titles with enough confidence to be more specific, but the fact that we could find books there that I could not get in Prague stayed with me.

Pepa had come back from his week in Litomyšl broke, and during the trip he was spending my money and telling me that he would pay me back. I did not mind.

For the way home he wanted to travel fast. His mother had a high position in the transportation department, and because he was her son he could get train tickets very cheaply. He bought an express ticket to Prague. What was left was enough for me to buy a ticket only as far as Žilina.

The plan was that after Žilina I would pretend to be asleep and the conductor would not wake me. It did not work. The other passengers asked him to let me sleep and he would not. So I went to my second story, which was that I had overslept and that my parents were waiting for me back in Žilina. The express then stopped at a railway crossing where it did not normally stop, and the conductor put me off there.

I had sixty haléřů left. Pepa asked me for it so that he could take a tram home from the station in Prague.

So I was standing near Žilina with no money. By then I believed that I could get myself home. It took about a day and a half.

Pepa was glad to see me. He had been worried that he might run into my family without knowing where I was. My father never learned about any of it, not the week alone and not the train. My mother and my sister found out later, I think after I was already in the United States, but I am not sure when.

My mother and my sister did not like Pepa and they thought that he took advantage of me. Maybe so. But I was getting a lot more from him than he was getting from me.

After we got back, Pepa said that we needed more money before school started. He found out that the steel mill in Kladno hired day workers and paid them at the end of the day, and that there was a very early bus from Pavlovo náměstí. I showed up. Pepa did not. I worked one day helping a man move things on a handcart. The heat from the melting steel was extreme. They had low-alcohol beer there and I drank three or four of them. I told my father about the day and he forbade me to go back, so that I would not become a drunk.

That first trip became a route. I went back to Slovakia every summer after that until I went into the army. The next summer I took Vašek and Zdeněk through the same places, Sobrance and Ubľa and Snina. Bohouš was on those trips too, with an older friend of his, and sometimes the different groups arranged to meet somewhere along the way.

Those later trips were also the closest I ever came to the Czech tramp culture. Bohouš was more involved in that world than Vašek, Jirka or I were. Sometimes the groups would meet, play and sing mostly tramp songs. I did not play an instrument with them. I whistled, and I was a good whistler.