The bus got some strange reactions in Claremont—in fact, I would say that the reactions we got ran the entire gamut of possible emotional responses. Most of the people we encountered were, of course, friendly, and some of them were really enthusiastic about the bus. One guy that comes to mind is Harry Barnes, a talented photographer who stopped by on his bicycle, hung out on the bus for a while, and get very excited about photographing as much of the bus as he could.

Most of our exchanges were like that. But we also had some profoundly odd ones that we haven’t had anywhere else. We had parked the bus in the parking lot near some dorms for Harvey Mudd College, and our friend, Charlotte, had gone to the administration and received assurances that we didn’t need a parking pass to be there. But within an hour of us arriving a security guard had arrived on a golf cart and sheepishly said he had to ask us to identify ourselves because someone had reported suspicious activity in the parking lot. Then, the next day, a man who identified himself as one of the associate deans of Harvey Mudd stopped by to remind us in a mock-friendly, vaguely threatening tone that we were guests there. He suggested that he had seen a bong through the window of the bus, to our amusement; it goes without saying that we don’t actually have one.

Shortly after he left, we noticed that we were missing some of the trinkets we had collected over the course of the trip, such as a vanity license plate and a painting we had found in a dumpster behind Wesleyan University. Later we found out that some drunk students had heard about a hippie bus parked outside their school, and decided to investigate. One of them must have gotten a boost and been able to reach through one of the cracked windows to grab at some of that stuff. Fortunately, one of the people who was on the campus who knew us found out about it, and got the stuff returned.

No harm done, but it was still a strange experience; even in the reddest of the hippie-bashing red states, we had never once been threatened or stolen from. Perhaps it’s the weird environment of small colleges, especially during the summer when there’s practically no one around. In a strange way, a sparsely populated college campus is a distant cousin of the frontier town, with its own culture, laws and tribal politics.