The DROP OUT blog
Could you have survived the 1970s?
What On the Road captured for an earlier American generation, DROP OUT carries east into Europe, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. These are true stories from five years on the road.
How did Jay do it?
Ten questions from a world before GPS.
A twenty-two-year-old left South Dakota in 1972 with little money and no plan to remain away for five years. Tap a question for the answer, then follow the journey in DROP OUT.
How do you finance a five-year trip around the world?
It began at an all-night poker game in Huron, South Dakota. By Saturday morning, Jay had turned a $300 stake into $1,720, enough to buy a ticket to Europe and leave town with $1,420 in winnings. Staying abroad for five years would require sleeping free, working wherever possible, importing cars and learning to survive by his wits.
How do you sleep free in Paris?
Jay and Skipper slipped into a Sorbonne dormitory for showers, then spent the afternoon soaking up Paris at a sidewalk café. That evening, they climbed the ornate iron fence surrounding an old cemetery near the university. For the next two weeks, the cemetery became their Paris apartment.
What is it like to run with the bulls?
At Pamplona, reason eventually lost its argument with testosterone. When six bulls charged down the narrow, wet cobblestone street, Jay felt one breathing against his back. He grabbed its horn, pushed its enormous head away and leapt into an open doorway.
How do you meet Monaco's rich and famous?
Jay and Skipper lived on a deserted beach beneath a nightclub frequented by celebrities and watched yachts, helicopters, jewels and evening gowns pass overhead. They tried the casino, the Hotel de Paris and even followed a South Dakota woman driving a pink Rolls-Royce to her mansion. Their campaign to join the jet set ended at her front gate.
How do you buy the hottest BMW in Europe?
Jay studied Iranian tax law and discovered an opportunity involving two-year-old European luxury cars. In Munich, he paid $4,000 cash for an orange 1975 BMW 2002 tii and drove it toward Tehran through borders, bribery and a Turkish blizzard. He loved the car so much that he postponed selling it, until one late-night collision sent him twenty feet through the air.
How do you sleep beneath the Acropolis?
Jay arrived in Athens with almost no money, no food and nowhere to sleep. He quietly took bread and olives from unattended café tables, climbed a six-foot iron fence and found shelter between two stone blocks. With his bag beneath his head, he fell asleep above the Plaka under the illuminated Acropolis.
Can a teaspoon save a life?
When a condom filled with concentrated Afghan hash oil ruptured inside a fellow traveler, the drug began entering his bloodstream. Jay raced to a chai house for a tiny spoon while Suzan performed an improvised extraction under a table lamp. Teaspoon by teaspoon, they worked through the night to keep their friend alive.
How do you help run Kabul's first pizzeria?
Jay arrived in Kabul expecting to find Skipper traveling toward Nepal. Instead, Skipper was opening what they believed to be Afghanistan's first pizzeria on Chicken Street. Jay stayed for several weeks helping market it to hungry overland travelers desperate for a taste of home.
How do you survive a hostile mob on a desert train?
Jay and another American were the only Westerners aboard a train crossing the Pakistani desert during the Arab-Israeli conflict. A crowd surrounded them chanting against America, forced them into a bathroom and began breaking down the door. They smashed the window and prepared to jump from the moving train before a Sikh passenger intervened and saved them.
How do you get deported from Iran twice?
After Jay refused an order to leave Iran, armed police pulled him from his Tehran apartment and placed him on a flight to Kuwait. He altered his entry stamp, persuaded Kuwait to send him back, removed the record of his deportation and obtained a new Iranian visa at the airport. Months later, the authorities recognized him, jailed him and escorted him by train to the Turkish border.
South Dakota · 1972
The Life Already Arranged
At twenty two, Jay could already see the shape of the years ahead: the family businesses, familiar rooms and expectations that had accumulated around him since childhood. He knew how to work and how to read people. What he did not know was who he might become beyond the life everyone else understood.
Leaving was not a rejection of work or responsibility. It was a refusal to confuse inheritance with destiny. With little money and no elaborate plan, he stepped outside the arrangement and let uncertainty become his education.
Adapted from an episode described in DROP OUT.
Huron · New York · Europe
I Was Going to Europe
The sentence was almost absurdly simple: “I was going to Europe.” It carried no itinerary worth defending and no promise that the money would last. A bag, a ticket and a young man’s confidence suddenly made the horizon more than scenery.
Departure turned imagination into motion. Every mile placed another question between Jay and the person he had been at home. Europe was the named destination, but it was only the first door. Soon the map would pull east, toward places that felt less like stops and more like tests.
Adapted from an episode described in DROP OUT.
Pamplona
Run With the Bulls
Pamplona supplied the first blunt lesson of the road. The street tightened with bodies, noise and expectation. Then the animals came, and the cheerful dare became a calculation measured in horns, walls and the distance to a doorway.
Jay was no longer observing adventure from a safe edge. He was inside it, learning that courage and foolishness can occupy the same second. When he reached shelter, breathless and intact, exhilaration carried a warning: the world would offer experience freely, but it would never guarantee the cost.
Adapted from an episode described in DROP OUT.
Outside Florence
The Road Not Taken
Greta brought a different kind of risk. Near Florence, the miles slowed into evening walks and quiet conversation. She had a life with edges already drawn; Jay had become almost entirely motion. Their connection lived in the pause between those facts.
There was tenderness without a tidy future, intimacy without conquest. The encounter revealed that freedom was not merely the ability to leave. Sometimes it meant seeing the life one might have chosen, honoring what it awakened, and continuing down another road.
Adapted from an episode described in DROP OUT.
Istanbul
East of the Bosphorus
In Istanbul, travel changed character. The Pudding Shop gathered routes, rumors and young people trading news of the road ahead. Beyond the Bosphorus, familiar Europe loosened its hold and the journey became immersion.
At night, Jay and Skipper slept near the Blue Mosque and mistook openness for safety. A shadow approached with a board raised over Skipper. Jay woke, shouted and watched the attacker vanish into the dark bazaar. The East had opened, but innocence had narrowed.
Adapted from an episode described in DROP OUT.
Iran under the Shah
Tehran Felt Like the Future
Tehran did not arrive as a single story. It was stylish and restless, modernizing and constrained, alive with traffic, construction, cafés and ambition. Jay found work teaching at the Iran American Society and discovered the rare pleasure of feeling unexpectedly at home.
The city complicated every assumption he had carried in. Opportunity existed beside surveillance; hospitality beside rules he was only beginning to understand. He had gone east expecting distance. Tehran taught him to recognize possibility.
Adapted from an episode described in DROP OUT.
Herat · Kabul · Khyber Pass
Every Chai House a Classroom
Afghanistan before the wars moved at road speed: crowded minibuses, luggage and animals, sunlit streets, Chicken Street, an old chai house and the long pull toward the Khyber Pass. Children watched Jay reading a newspaper, curious about the foreigner who was equally curious about them.
No guidebook could arrange these lessons. The road taught by interruption through gestures, prices, delays, kindness and the sudden recognition of familiar human instincts beneath unfamiliar customs. Every mile made certainty less useful.
Adapted from an episode described in DROP OUT.
Old Delhi
A Conversation With Consequences
For several days, Jay and Halij exchanged glances across a busy milk market. When they finally walked together, even a short conversation carried a danger he had not faced. She hid her face from passersby. Reputation, family and social rules traveled beside them.
They parted without touching. The restraint was the point. Jay had crossed countries freely; Halij risked judgment simply by speaking to him. The road was teaching that freedom changes meaning depending on who is allowed to claim it.
Adapted from an episode described in DROP OUT.
Tehran
Barrie Arrives
Barrie entered like weather: a booming English voice, a swashbuckling presence and the natural certainty that any room might become a party. He brought comic disorder to Tehran and became one of the friendships that outlasted the journey itself.
Their adventures could tip quickly from camaraderie into chaos. There was cognac, a cab, Barrie on the hood and the two friends eventually asleep against a curb. Travel was not only geography or danger. It was the cast of characters who made a foreign city feel briefly like home.
Adapted from an episode described in DROP OUT.
Tehran
The Rules Beneath the Surface
Pouri was an intelligent widowed student who understood the city in ways Jay could not. Their conversations opened a private Tehran shaped by religion, family, gender and watchful expectations. Affection developed inside rules that could not be wished away.
Jay had imagined freedom as movement: the ability to go, leave, cross and return. Pouri showed him a more complicated measure. What looked like a personal choice to one person could carry communal consequences for another. The teacher became the student.
Adapted from an episode described in DROP OUT.
Pakistan to Iran
Break the Window
The pressure built in stages. Angry passengers crowded the carriage. Jay and Paul retreated to the washroom as hands forced the door. The desert raced past outside at fifty miles an hour, offering an escape that might be more lethal than the crowd.
Paul used a plunger to break the window. Glass gave way, hot air rushed in, and the choice became brutally clear: remain with the people closing in or jump toward the empty desert below. Adventure had shed every romantic disguise.
Adapted from an episode described in DROP OUT.
Tehran · Turkey · Greece
Still Moving
At three in the morning, four armed officers stood over Jay’s bed. Iran had made the decision he refused to make: five minutes to gather his belongings, then a cell, an armed escort and an aircraft carrying him away from the life he had built.
Later he was alone again, dusty and thin, walking toward Greece. Comfort, work and belonging were behind him; Athens was somewhere ahead. The road had taken nearly everything that made the previous years easy. It had not taken curiosity. He kept moving.
Adapted from an episode described in DROP OUT.