Dylan careens into the parking lot and approaches the camera crew.  "Did you get any rivers?  We're gonna need lots of rivers.  And trains.  Did you get any trains?"

In '71 I was in grad school at a University of Wisconsin campus twenty miles from Dubuque, on the lecture circuit conveniently  between Chicago and Minneapolis.  Ginsberg was coming to read on a Tuesday in March, the first day after spring break, during which I stopped in to see the student center director, who was distraught.  He'd expected the poet to fly in on Tuesday and had made arrangements but had just been wired that the arrival was on Monday.  The whole delegation was out of town.

"Can I go get him?" the kid with me asked.

"You don't know what you're saying.  You'd be responsible for him the whole time he's here.  If he wants to go somewhere, you take him.  If he needs something, you get it.  If he tells you to lie on the floor so he can sit on your face, you do it."  Sorry, but that's what he said.

I said, "I'll do it."  He paused and then tossed me the keys to a school car.
When Ginsberg and his friend Gordon Ball got off the plane at an airport overlooking Dubuque, he was excited:  "What's that down there?"

"The Mississippi."

"Where are we going?"

"Across that bridge."

He'd seen the river (Huck for starters, the River) from the air but had never been on it.  After we'd crossed he asked where he'd be staying.  I told him about the English teacher/poet and her poet husband who lived on a macrobiotic farm and thought maybe . . .

"How far is it from campus?"

"Thirty miles."

"Is there anything closer?"

"We also reserved a room at a motel in town."

"How far from campus?"

"About a mile."

"Anything closer?"

"I live with my wife and daughter half a block away.  You can stay with us."

"Okay."

To a breakfast of bacon and eggs he said, "I can't eat the bacon because I'm Jewish or the eggs because I'm macrobiotic, but I'll sit with you and enjoy the aromas."  Afterward he donned an apron and did the dishes.  At one point during the afternoon he suggested that if I needed a break I should go home and go through his suitcase ("the heavy one"), full of documents demonstrating that the CIA was running opium through the Golden Triangle.  I told him I just couldn't.

Ginsberg was charming, a perfect gentleman throughout.  He was booked to fly to Minneapolis on Wednesday, but I told him if he really wanted to see the Mississippi he should take the train, which hugged it the whole way and had vistadomes to boot.  At first he thought not, but I persuaded him and dropped him off at the station in East Dubuque.  As I drove away I looked over my shoulder and saw him standing on the riverbank talking into a tape recorder.