Vignettes #25

In 1981 I took a 6 week tour of the United States together with my pals Martin and Christian. We had gotten a reasonable round flight ticket with Eastern Airlines that allowed us to take any flight within their range of US destinations and within a certain time. In San Francisco, however, we rented a car so that we could tour the West by road.

We were on our way from Yosemite National Park straight down to Las Vegas which was quite a stretch for a single day. We were driving for hours through extremely hot and deserted territory and were aching for a break. Although we had sandwiches and soft drinks along, we decided to prefer a warm meal, and when we saw an advertisement for a roadside restaurant about 2 hours down the road we were all ready to go there.

You can imagine our disappointment when we finally arrived and found that the restaurant was closed on that day. It was a single large white wood building in the midst of nowhere, out back we could see two trailers and up front were some tables and benches for picnickers. So we sat down at one of those tables and unpacked our sandwiches.

We were sitting there chatting about our trip and further plans, when we heard something, not really a voice, more like some kind of a click. We instantly looked up and found ourselves staring into the barrel of a shotgun aimed at us!

It was an old toothless Al 'Fuzzy' St. John lookalike old man threatening us with that weapon, and he started telling us something, but he had the voice you would expect from someone without a set of teeth. Obviously it was his opinion that it was illegal to have a picnic there.

We were talking to each other what to do, I had tried to explain to him that we had wanted to go to the restaurant, but that it was closed. The old man asked us whether we were Germans, and I told him that I wasn't, the other two were, but we were all visiting from Germany.

The old man instantly changed his attitude, and to our relief he set down the shotgun, sat himself down with us and starting telling his story.

He liked Germans ever since he had been stationed in Heidelberg during the war (somehow ALL Americans must have been stationed there some time or the other, even my Dad). He told us that he lived in one of those trailers and that his granddaughter lived in the other one together with her husband. They ran the restaurant. He got all started up complaining about how the 'young ones' don't treat him right and that they hump every night so loud that he never gets any sleep...

We politely listened to him for a while, he was a bit bonkers to say the least, and then said we had to go to reach Las Vegas not too late.

At least we came out of this encounter alive.