more directly at them when they looked at me, more defiant and less afraid. I still wore my hair long, despite everyone's urging to cut it, and this seemed to be an issue, even though there were other mop-tops springing up here and there on campus.

The whole matter reached a head that Friday in the Physical Ed locker room when a big senior named Tiny grabbed me, forced me down on the floor, sat on me and cut off a few locks of my hair. When he got off of me and I got up, he gave me warning.

"All right, motherfucker. Either get a haircut or come to school wearing a dress. If you don't, we'll have clippers the next time."

I don't know where the coach was at the time, probably on a convenient smoke break for all I knew. It didn't matter. I had already made plans to run away during my stay at the psych ward. I had the weekend to pack a few things and $15 in unspent birthday and Christmas gift money. Greyhound was on strike at the time, but the Continental Trailways station in downtown

Sacramento was still open for business, so early Sunday afternoon — while my mother was away buying groceries — I grabbed a tiny suitcase and walked 5 miles to the downtown Continental Trailways station.

My plan — if you could call it that — was to go to New York and from there maybe stow away on a cruise ship to Europe. Having never been out of state before, I thought there would be guards at the state line on the alert for escaping felons and underage runaways, so I bought a one-way ticket to Truckee near the California-Nevada state line, hoping I could slip through the forest onto the other side. When the bus dropped me off in Truckee, I headed up the interstate hoping to find that gap in the trees off the road that would get me into Nevada.

As I walked, I came across a hitchhiker, a young man from Canada who introduced himself as Jerry Paquin. I told him my story, and he asked me to join him, providing me with a genuine-looking but photo-less Canadian drivers license that identified me as James Walter Craig from Wawa, Ontario, 20 years old. I don't know that I necessarily looked five years older than I was, but that fake ID worked its magic on at least three