But a minority of transients — runaways, addicts, homeless, American draft dodgers, and deserters — were left behind at summer’s end. “My girlfriend and I come out this spring [to Vancouver] and we went to Wreck Bay,” said Joul, a seventeen-year old girl from Toronto. “We got into drugs pretty bad. She turned into a junkie and I was doing a lot of acid and chemicals so I came back and we went to the ‘Y[WCA]’. I found out I was pregnant so I stayed... for four months.”
Convinced that most youth on the road were more like Joul and less like Art, the Canadian Welfare Council conducted national surveys of transients for three summers beginning in 1969. By the third year, the council concluded — reluctantly — that transient youths were not truly harbourers of social unrest. “Perhaps what has really happened is that the myths which were held dear by transients and communities alike have been largely dispelled.”
It’s tempting to write the whole thing off as tens of thousands of self-stylized hippies having a lark on the government’s purse. “I was trying to remember this while I was in the hot tub last night,” Adams told me from London, Ontario, where he lives in semi-retirement. “I think at the Thunder Bay hostel it was $2.00 or $3.00 for the night or you could stay for free if you worked. And most people ‘worked,’ [which] usually meant something like sweeping the floor for ten minutes.”
Historian François Ricard calls youth culture in Canada in the sixties and seventies “an exercise in collective narcissism.” Describing the holy migration to music festivals in his book, Lyric Generation, Ricard writes, “It was as wanderers that came from all directions, backpacks on their shoulders and faith in their hearts… to witness the spectacle of their teeming and triumphant generation. They had come to see and adore themselves.”
But in post-war Canada, it took guts to announce to your parents that you were off for the summer — without job, without destination, with backpack. And claiming youth-only spaces in Canadian towns and cities were small victories in the war over public sanctuaries. “I detect a stiffening of opposition in the city over last summer,” said an Edmonton youth hostel worker in 1970, “Two long-haired kids over at our hostel last night had beer bottles thrown at them on the street.” Initially transients were billed by the media, government and social work organizations as a disease — labeled neurotic, psychotic, nomadic, and addicted to the road.
So I’ll leave cynicism to the expert. Instead, I’ll go with good old envy: it’s what led me to this story in the first place. How awesome is it that hundreds of thousands of teenagers just upped and traveled across the country, staying in youth-run hostels (like the former Bastille on the Plains of Abraham) for fifty cents a night? Now that is some sweet love.
Like the generations before them, and today’s Europe-on-a-shoestring backpackers, youth travelers have always been after the same things: freedom, adventure, alien surroundings — and each other. Bangkok’s Khao San Road pulses day and night with Western backpackers clad in standard bum-iform: fisherman’s pants, Tiger Beer tank tops, flip-flops and dreads/afro/messy hair. They’re out to see the country, sure; but full-moon parties DJed by international superstars — fueled by buckets of Thai whiskey and Red Bull with nay a Thai in sight — aren’t exactly the road to discovery.
Hitchhiking is no more dangerous today than it was forty years ago, but our fears are greater. Newspapers in the seventies carried reports of abducted, assaulted, raped, and murdered hitchhikers along with shrill warnings from politicians and worried parents. But incidents were few, and the rewards outweighed the risks.
Instead of discovering other countries, over half a million Canadian youths in the sixties and seventies discovered their own. With climate change threatening to ground our ability to fly, the boomers still throwing their weight around, and an increasingly diverse, and sometimes segregated, population — perhaps it’s time for teenagers to hit the Trans-Canada and carve out spaces of their own, again.
