Rites of Passage: The Knapsack Nomads

SUMMER in Europe has become a rite of passage for American youth, the Woodstock of the '70s. Young vagabonds have always tripped out to Europe for the warm months, but there is something different about Exodus 1971. Most of the new wanderers are not highly motivated students seeking culture or well-heeled dollar scions out to raise hell. They are generally the same bunch of kids who would normally have had summer jobs lifeguarding at the pool or dispensing hamburgers at MacDonald's. Only this year few summer jobs are available for students. The unemployment rates top 15% for the 16-to-19 age group, and 9.9% for those aged 20 to 24, the highest in seven and ten years, respectively. The youth fares have given students and recent graduates a fresh chance to get away from it all.

The new nomads travel light: a few old pullovers wadded into a knapsack and a few hundred dollars stuffed into their jeans. Many of the girls are unsupported by anything but their male companions. While some of these not-so-innocents abroad may have well-planned itineraries, most are rather aimlessly following crowds of their countrymen in a quest for good vibrations. They are joining millions of footloose European youths, who are wandering far and wide from Hammerfest to Gibraltar--and points even farther out. Whatever their mother tongue, the youngsters manage to communicate. They speak a sort ot Jeunesperanto, and they share much the same style of dress, penchant for folk music and smoking habits.

"Thousands of my friends are going," observed ponytailed John Segall, 18. as he queued up to get his passport in New York. "No one will be left in the city this summer except the junkies who couldn't rip off enough people to get the bread to go." Said Conrad Young, 23, as his plane circled London's Heathrow Airport for a landing: "Maybe I'll go to Switzerland. Or maybe Spain. Anyplace with lots of young people. Just follow the crowds."

Old-fashioned hedonism remains an attraction. "I'll roam until my book of traveler's checks gets down to the last leaf," said Viet Nam Veteran Steve Verich of Akron, Ohio, traveling in West Germany. "When I was in the jungle, I vowed that if I ever got out alive, I'd spend a long time in Europe--drinking the local brand and making it with all the chicks until I got my fill. Then I'd return home to do something constructive. But now my traveler's checks are nearly gone, and I still haven't any notion of what I should do back home, or even who I really am."

Most young Americans abroad share one obsession: getting by on the least amount of money. Unlike the conspicuously consuming adult U.S. tourists of an earlier day, they spend little for gifts, souvenirs, meals or lodging. The challenge of "living free," seeing Europe on a shoestring and with a sleeping bag, has elements of reverse snobbism that appeal to the professed antimaterialistic instincts of youth. Ken Stephens, 29, of St. Petersburg, Fla., figured in Amsterdam that he can last two months on only $180. Bill Hyman, 23, said in London that he was getting by on $3 a day or less. The pinchpenny ethic usually requires sleeping in youth hostels (from 65-c- to little more than $1 a night), hitchhiking and mooching meals from friendly Europeans. One compromise with comfort, however, is a money saver: a new category of Eurailpass for students 14 to 25 costs only $125 for two months' unlimited second-class travel and sleeping on trains. All together, 104,000 Eurailpasses were sold in 1970, and travel agents expect sales to rise by 45% this year.

A whole underground lore of overseas moneysaving is being built up by waves of knapsackers. New tips are communicated almost instantaneously through a transnational grapevine. Among recent intelligence reports: sleeping in London's St. James's and Green parks, though normally forbidden by police, is being tolerated this year. University cafeterias in Germany and Switzerland sell rib-sticking meals for less than a half dollar. Specially cheap flights within Europe are offered by the British Student Travel Center and other official youth organizations to full-time high school and college students who have convincing identification. Sample one-way prices: London to Paris $13.20, London to Leningrad $48. Belgian railroads give 50% reductions to students. The municipal steam baths of Copenhagen, Stockholm and Oslo charge only $1 or less for steam bath and swim. Troubled travelers can get free psychiatric counseling in Amsterdam, free beds through Infor Jeunes (a voluntary youth service organization) in Brussels and easy tolerance of hash smoking (but not selling) in most northern European countries. A government-supported radio station in Amsterdam quotes spot prices for incoming hashish: "Morocco, 2.90 guilders per gram; Turkey, 3.40; Nepal, 3.70; Pakistan, 3.15 . . ."

An average-sized wad of traveler's checks for a young Eurovisitor--from $300 to $500--covers about two months of vagabondage. But not always. The American Express offices in London, Paris and other cities have long lines of youthful destitutes waiting to receive cabled bail-out money from home. Each week many hundreds of suddenly penniless visitors apply to U.S. consulates for help.

Disillusionment awaits them. "The Government has no obligation to finance the U.S. citizen abroad or to pay his fare home," insists Ralph Cadeaux, chief of special services at the U.S. consulate in London. Some 300 young supplicants call on Cadeaux every week. In bona fide emergencies, he lets them call home from the consulate--collect. In Paris, only the seriously injured, the infirm and those with a hardship story good enough to make strong men weep have any hope of parting the consulate from $235 for air fare home and a $40 subsistence allowance. Of the hundreds of hard-luck kids whom consular officers interviewed last year, only eleven passed his truth test. One headache for the U.S. consulate in Rome is youngsters who use their last lira to get to the city's Fiumicino Airport to catch their flight home--but forget about the $1.60 airport tax.

Young nomads who run into trouble with the law while abroad should not expect much aid. All a U.S. consul can do is help them find a lawyer and notify their parents. At last count there were 747 young Americans in foreign jails, all on charges of possession of and trafficking in drugs. Hirsute amateur capitalists who are caught trying to turn hash into cash find that penalties are generally harsher abroad than in the U.S.

There is a maximum sentence of death for pushing drugs in Iran, though no Americans have been executed.

One of youth's meccas is Amsterdam, where the populace is particularly tolerant of the hip and hairy. City-funded sleeping projects have been set up in abandoned factories and warehouses, offering foam-rubber mat beds, showers and rock music for 80-c- a night. Copenhagen is another In place. City fathers have opened new youth hostels and "youth cities" of cot-filled army tents where boys and girls, not always segregated by sex, can do more together than brush their teeth. At Vendersgade 8 in the middle of town, an advisory center directs new arrivals to cheap beds. Free rock concerts, orchestra recitals and open-air theater performances are held in the city. A municipally published multilanguage newspaper for visiting youths, Use It, contains the latest on what to do--and not to do--in Copenhagen. From a recent issue: "Bathing in the port and its canals, as well as in the ancient moats and in public lakes, is forbidden, and anyhow the water is not very tempting."

Eastern Europe is also becoming something of a lodestone. Said a College of New Rochelle coed in Cracow, Poland: "There's always something to worry about--the black market, the secret police, talking too freely. I'd love to see my parents' faces when they got my postcard and realize I'm here." But a taste of Eastern Europe's goulash tourism is often prohibitively expensive, and the Soviets have been known to stretch the charge of "disseminating anti-Soviet propaganda" to cover even travel guides.

The quest for adventure has led quite a few young wanderers out of Europe and into Asia. Incredibly cheap student charter flights leave almost daily from major cities. Typical fares: London to Bangkok for $185 one way ($528 regular economy fare) and Rome to Istanbul for $46 ($116 economy fare).

In Asia, hitchhiking is generally easy. Chinese, Malay and Indian food at street markets and bazaars is cheap, if not intestinally hazard-free. Visitors sleep in the youth hostels that are springing up across Asia, and sometimes in Sikh temples. In Bali, they gather on the smooth sands of the practically deserted Kuta Beach, and some swim nude. They can stay in modest Bali bungalows for a couple of dollars a day.

If the youth fares spread beyond Europe's shores, many parts of the world will become targets for summer invasion. Expatriation on $5 a day is becoming as institutionalized a summer pastime as baseball. "A $200 round-trip ticket to London lets you be a part-time dropout," said Wayne Biddle, a Cornell teaching assistant, over the Atlantic on a flight to London. "You can go on the bum for a summer and still be back in time for classes. You can live a counterculture life-style and not really mean it at all. It's like they say, 'Scratch a hippie and you'll find a Porsche.''

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