The Dartmouth Stowaway

The day our paths crossed. I was busy with no job, no residency, traveling the country going to baseball games. Then I met 21-year-old Carl Strom, who made me look like a conformist.

Steve, a college friend, and I had been traveling since California. As we were getting back on the freeway in Houston I saw a guy standing on the onramp holding a cardboard sign that read, “New Orleans.” That happened to be where we were going. Soon three of us were jammed into the compact rental car. Carl had left California about a week earlier and hadn’t showered since. This was evident.

His backpack consisted of some metal pipes, two olive canisters, some straps, and an old seatbelt. Connected to it was his tarp, and red plastic gasoline canister, which he used for water. He even wrote "water" in big letters on one side so people wouldn't question his sanity when he drank from the container. Carl had taken a bus from Los Angeles to El Paso, and then jumped on a freight train and rode it to Houston. He said, "I admit it was a little bit of a thrill to take that train, but it was also real practical too." He had just spent a month in California with his parents and was returning to New Orleans. He said it was nice to be "home for a while."

Carl allegedly after high school went to Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. He was there one year, but left because it was "elitist." Steve asked him what he studied there and he responded, "Well, nothin' really. That's why I left." Later I commented that he must have got good grades in high school. He replied, "Yeah, I played that game for a while." It sounds like the main character in Water for Elephants, a book set in the 1930’s. However, I think finding an Ivy-league educated stowaway has to be even less common now.

Carl’s upper middle class parents live in Tapanga Canyon in southern California. His younger sister attended UC Berkeley. He began an education at Dartmouth, and then chose to spend a half a year living in a canoe. He started with his canoe in the Atlantic up in the New England area and went through the Great Lakes and made his way over to the Mississippi. He took the Mississippi River all the way to New Orleans. Then stayed there for a while and worked as a deckhand. Carl took the road less traveled.

He seemed very intelligent, but spoke more like a deckhand from Louisiana than a student from a prestigious New England university. He was heading back to New Orleans to get work on the boat again. This time he scheduled an appointment for mid-July to get certification to become an able bodied seaman. He thought this would make him more employable, and maybe one day land him a job off a Californian coast. Our car ride discussion topics ranged from geography, to war to abortion. When we finally arrived in New Orleans Carl asked to come into the motel to clean-up. He pitched in $10 and spent the night on the floor.

His odor infected the hotel room less severely than it did the car.