When I was 20 I entered Camp Pendleton with Lisa. According to Marine records, we never left.

We were visiting her mother in Laguna Beach that summer week, and we were avoiding her conversation that evening. Lisa borrowed the car keys and we hit the local pie shop. We weren’t ready to return to her mother’s place after that, so we headed in the opposite direction. Lisa unilaterally decided to pick up the two hitchhikers.

They were cute. They were male. They were Marines on their way back to base and we gave them a ride.

We had to register to enter the place. We conversed with two other young guys in an entrance hut and were given a visitor placard for our dashboard. We drove on into the camp.

It really did look like the setting for “M.A.S.H.” After a few minutes on the road our passengers had Lisa make a right and an immediate left and our headlights panned a sea of open tents, each with a scantily clad young man inside. We dropped off our riders and proceeded forward, slowly through the tent camp, off a little ledge and back (left, left) to the road. Except something clunked in the underside of the car when we dropped off the little ledge. And shortly after our wheels reacquired the road our car stopped going forward.

Suddenly we were surrounded by a horde of amateur mechanics. Statements were prevalent and contradictory. Along came a taxi with a driver about our age. Lisa and I got in his cab and left that place.

The cabbie drove us to the bus station but it was creepy and neither he nor we wanted us to leave his car. Lisa’s mother’s phone number was unlisted – we couldn’t call and we couldn’t travel – so we let our hero take us home and put us up till morning.

We thanked him and his roommate by cooking them breakfast. We felt it was the least we could do, especially after disappointing them by being Berkeley girls but not putting out. We almost lost Surf, their three-legged dog, on the way to the store.

As early as possible, Lisa called her stepfather at his job. He left work for us. We had the car towed out of Camp Pendleton (placard still on dashboard) and learned to our relief that it was only a rock in the universal joint. The guy in the garage pried it out like a stone from a horse’s hoof, and the car ran just fine.

We caught hell for not calling Lisa’s mother. We explained that we didn’t have the number. Her parents calmly and contemptuously pointed out that we could have called the Laguna Beach police and asked them to drive by Lisa’s mother’s house with our news.

Wow. I don’t know if it was our age or the revolutionary times, but to neither of us did the idea even occur to call the police, for help.