This was urban hiking, walking on sidewalks and along the sides of roads backpack-free and in regular clothes. You were a 53-year-old retiree wearing seersucker pants, saddle shoes and a Panama hat. As we checked into that City of Orange motel after the first day’s exhausting trek, our day came to a jarring end as the hotel manager asked us if we had heard the news that day — that Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot and killed.
We had not, and you had to explain to us 14-year-old boys how something like this could happen again, just 4 ½ years after President Kennedy’s assasination. (Two months later you would pull me out of bed at 11:30 p.m. to watch the news of Robert Kennedy’s slaying. “This is history,” you said, “I want you to see this.”).
The next morning most of us, especially you, had foot blisters, but that day we continued on along the old Santa Ana Canyon Road, now Highway 91, into Corona.
After another overnight stop in Riverside, we had the misfortune, in those pre-GPS and MapQuest days, to get lost. We ended up spending the night in a roadside ditch on Jackrabbit Trail, near present-day Moreno Valley. We were cold and hungry, but you made it fun telling us we were living the life of “hobos,” sleeping by a campfire of newspapers and trash in our Pacific Trail wind breakers and Sperry Topsiders.
The next morning, as we limped into Beaumont, we certainly appreciated the up-to-now taken-for-granted roof over our head, hot shower and warm meal. Whenever I’m in bed now and I hear rain on our roof or wind through the trees, I’m thankful for my modest home that provides me shelter.
