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| ISBN-13: | 9781569762370 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Chicago Review Press, Incorporated |
| Publication date: | 05/01/2006 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 240 |
| File size: | 364 KB |
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Riding with Strangers
A Hitchhiker's Journey
By Elijah Wald
Chicago Review Press Incorporated
Copyright © 2006 Elijah WaldAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-56976-237-0
CHAPTER 1
FORESHADOWINGS
Call me crazy. I'm standing at a highway rest area outside Boston, in the rain, trying to get the first ride in yet another cross-country trek, and there's no place I would rather be. Except in the passenger seat of that first car, of course. One has to pull over pretty soon.
These days, there don't seem to be many people who consider hitchhiking a pleasure, but when I was growing up a lot of us did it for fun as well as transportation. It was one of our ways of learning about the world — indeed, it became a cliché, with everyone from Michael Doonesbury on the comics pages to Simon and Garfunkel on the jukebox echoing Jack Kerouac's exhortation to hit the road. I made my first cross-country trip when I was sixteen, riding trucks from Reno to Boston after the bus I had taken out of San Francisco broke down en route. It was a fast shot, a little over three days, and relatively uneventful, but I fell in love. Partly with the motion, and the breadth of the landscape seen through the high, wide windshield of a semi, but mostly with the feeling of slipping into another world, then out again, with every ride. That love only increased in the following years, as I hitchhiked back and forth across the United States, around Europe, through Africa, India, Central America. The scenery and the languages changed, but the people were surprisingly similar, all willing to help me on my way and eager to exchange a few hours of conversation.
To me, that remains the great pleasure of hitchhiking: Not the rare, wild rides that make exciting stories, but the small, cumulative experiences of close meetings with complete strangers. There is no other situation like it in our modern world, no other place where, over and over again, people who know nothing about you invite you to share their space, expecting to have a friendly chat about whatever comes to mind. The conversations may be fascinating or mundane, but in either case the situation carries an automatic intimacy: the two (or sometimes three or four) of you are alone, in close quarters, and there is the safety of knowing that you will only be together for a brief while, and then will never see each other again.
In an ever more isolated and paranoid world, this makes hitchhiking a perfect antidote to alienation. It throws you together with all sorts of people, from different areas and backgrounds, with different tastes and beliefs, but they all share one, all-important characteristic: they stopped and gave you a ride. Especially if you've been standing at a lonely intersection for a couple of hours, that one virtue makes up for a lot of human failing. As the miles roll by and the drivers follow one another, you cannot help noticing that a lot of people who are very different from you, and with whom you might disagree about almost everything, are being awfully nice to you. It is an education I would recommend to any young person, and plenty of old ones too.
And yet, as is obvious to anyone cruising the highways, the roadside is no longer thick with optimistic voyagers, eager to run away from home and explore the wide open spaces. The romance of hitchhiking is largely forgotten or dismissed, except in the nostalgic memories of graying bohemians reminiscing about their long-departed youth. Put the contemporary American subconscious on the couch and ask it to say the first thing that comes to mind when it hears the word "hitchhiking," and the most likely response will be "dangerous."
That's why I'm out here on this rainy September morning, waiting for a ride. I am headed for the Pacific Northwest, but the destination hardly matters. In the last few years, while I've hitched in Mexico, in France, in Spain — even briefly in Texas and Arizona — I haven't done a proper, cross-country jaunt, and my cheerful proselytizing is meeting with ever more dubious responses. People tell me I'm living in the past, in a safer, friendlier world that bears little resemblance to today's highways. I respond that in my experience people are pretty decent and helpful, and that the world is by no means as dangerous a place as you would think from watching television or reading the newspapers.
These are hard times for a lot of people, in America and around the world, but the most dangerous thing we can do is to distrust the basic decency of the folks we meet every day. Because the most serious threats to our well-being rarely come from our neighbors, even in the worst neighborhoods. On the contrary, the greatest danger is that we will isolate ourselves in cocoons of mistrust, unable to get together with others who share common needs and interests because we feel so threatened and alone. There is a phrase that has always stuck with me, though its source is long forgotten: "If you trust everyone you meet, you will occasionally get robbed; but if you distrust everyone, you will spend your whole life surrounded by thieves."
So I have a mission: to demonstrate that it remains reasonably safe to get out on the road and look for rides, and that, despite all the horror stories in the news, there are still plenty of people who are happy to pull over and invite an unknown wanderer into their cars.
Beyond that, I want to give some tips to anyone who cares to follow my example, and a taste of the experience for the armchair traveler — not of the exceptional, weird rides, but of the normal experience of a hitch across the country. And also, for what it's worth, to give some sense of what I love about it, which may be hardest of all. It is an unusual taste, and I cannot help noticing that even my old hitchhiking buddies have taken up other modes of transportation. And yet, it still seems to me a uniquely pleasurable form of travel, one that introduced me to thousands of people I otherwise would never have met, and taught me immeasurable lessons about the world around me.
CHAPTER 2A DEFENSE OF THE GENTLE ART OF HITCHHIKING
Despite the calumnies leveled at it by ignorant and conservative critics, hitchhiking has as noble a heritage as any means of travel on earth. Consider a few examples.
We are all born hitchhikers: for the months until we learn to crawl, we can travel only when some decent soul, for no pay but the pleasure of our company, chooses to pick us up.
When proud Odysseus was cast on Phaeacia's shores, and only for the beauty of his countenance and his nobility of bearing was taken in and carried by ship to Ithaca, what was he but a hitchhiker?
Likewise Sinbad the Sailor, who setting forth each voyage a rich merchant was oft-times forced to stand at length on some strange strand and hitch a vessel home to Baghdad.
How many castaways, famous or unknown, have chosen to do likewise? And how many tired ramblers on how many dusty roads have been taken up by kindly wagoners?
Would some say, granting all of that, that hitchhiking is a mere act of desperation or begging, and has no special virtue? Recall the patron saint of travelers, Saint Christopher — who was he but someone who gave a lift to a hitchhiker, and who was that hitchhiker but the infant Jesus?
Or, if you prefer the Old Testament: when Jonah fled in fear from the Lord, he did it as a registered passenger, taking a berth on a ship and paying his fare — but when he repented of his cowardice, he hitched a ride with a passing whale.
Is this not good company? And there are hundreds more who could be added to the list. But more of that later. First let us look deeper into the whys and wherefores of the art, and then get out on the road and see for ourselves.
CHAPTER 3SOUND AND FURY
Why hitchhike? As well ask: Why set out on any adventure? Why is not the most predictable or secure form of travel, the one you would select when you had a pressing engagement or a prescribed round of appointments. But when you have the time and inclination to wander for a while through unknown climes, open to whatever they may hold, there is no better means.
Hitchhiking combines the greatest pleasures of travel, and raises them to their highest plane. There is freedom, first of all, the liberty to go where you will, to escape your workaday responsibilities, and, above all, to liberate yourself from the stocks in which friendly expectation locks and hobbles your homebound character. Among our friends, we must be ourselves with all our history, known for what our common, daily habits have made us. Out in the world, we can reinvent ourselves at every turn. And what better theater for this reinvention than the shifting stages of cars, trucks, and vans, each driven by a different and hospitable chauffeur? We enter their world already a romantic character, the lone wanderer, the man or woman without a country. We can choose to play a variation on this part or to play against it, to fulfill the myth or to reassure the drivers of our ordinariness and familiarity. In either case, there is no past or future to be overcome. We sit our hour or more on the passenger seat, and then that act is done and intermission taken by the roadside, until the next set comes rolling up and the plot adds a new twist.
And there you have the second pleasure: surprise. What would be the point of travel if we knew precisely what awaited us? The excitement comes from facing the unknown, experiencing new things and testing how they suit and work upon our humors. Traveling by train or bus, or worst of all by plane, we have subtracted the journey itself from this equation. If we fly to Guatemala, we may be astonished, enlightened, and edified by what we find on arrival, but we have experienced nothing in the intervening miles that would not have been identical en route to Dresden, Dakar, or Detroit. A bus or train is somewhat more in tune with its environment, but nonetheless that environment unfolds only through the window, watched as in a movie, while we remain cocooned in the mass-produced and proudly unvaried sameness of Greyhound or Amtrak. How many of us even talk to our fellow passengers? And how many of them would appreciate the intrusion? We are all marking time in a traveling antechamber, waiting for the doors to open on our chosen destination.
Of course there are those who, seeking freedom, set out in their own cars, their own hands on the wheel, individual masters of their destinies. It's the great American road trip: the lone driver, or better yet a pair of drivers — Jack and Neal, Thelma and Louise, Bonnie and Clyde. But that myth carries its own counterspell: to the extent that we keep to our own conveyance, it is our jail as well as our chariot. We ride like the tortoise, imprisoned in our cozy shell, even if we drive from Nome to Patagonia. This is the marketable fantasy of contemporary travel: the pleasures of adventure with all the comforts of home. While cultured travelers sneer at the package tourists who want to have their pizza, hamburgers, and deep-fried chicken instantly available wherever they may wander, how far is that from all the other, subtler means we employ to carry our own worlds along with us? How can we show greater contempt for the magic of a foreign place than to touch it only when and if we choose?
Poets, philosophers, and sociologists bemoan the isolation that has been a side effect of virtually all progress and invention since the Industrial Revolution. Machines have brought us many advantages, but also have inexorably cut us off from the day-today intercourse that once was an inescapable part of life. Read any older travel narrative and it will be full of tales of strangers met by chance on the road, sharing a little time and a few experiences, companions until the next city and as much a part of the countryside as the trees and farmhouses. Walking along foreign roads, earlier pilgrims were always in the company of native guides who could steer them to a friendly inn or fill them with the latest gossip, then point the way over the next mountain. Today, that experience has all but disappeared. I once tried to recapture the feel of a medieval journey by walking across northern France. It was excellent exercise, but I have rarely been more alone. Though the French were all around me, they whizzed by in their cars and I met with barely a half dozen people in my monthlong trek.
Contrast that experience with a day's hitchhiking: Anywhere in the world, you get into a car and you meet with a companion. Often the driver is acquainted with the region and can point out sights or suggest diversions, but more to the point, he or she becomes part of your experience, an unbreakable human link to those particular miles. You travel with the natives, and are treated as a guest and introduced to cultures and homes that otherwise would remain silent and shut.
It is people who make our world, for better or worse. Writers have often hymned the glories of unpeopled nature, but that is for a rest, not a lifetime. We are soothed and edified by Wordsworth's evocation of a solitary lakeside or Edward Abbey's of a trackless desert, but we read to be companions of the writers, not to duplicate their solitude. It may give us joy to walk alone in nature for a few hours, or even for a day or two — but good company can keep us fascinated for hours, days, weeks, and years. And when it comes to travel, it is people that make foreign lands foreign and the exotic exotic. What would be the thrill of going to Quito, Athens, or Beijing if the people there were just the same as those we left at home? Why else is Japan more foreign to a New Englander than the Arizona desert, or Egypt more foreign to an Arizonan than the glaciers of Montana? And as a means of traveling among people, hitchhiking has no peer.
I came of age in a time when the love of hitchhiking and humanity was commonplace. The roads were full of college students, hippies, Kerouac-mad poets, Guthrie-mad guitarists, as well as hoboes, tramps, and young adventurers of the sort that have taken to the road since time immemorial. If you saw a musician on a street corner, or a charcoal portraitist, or a couple just arrived in town with backpacks and tired expressions, you didn't have to ask how they got there. We all hitched, and as a general thing our parents had hitched before us — even the most respectable of them, on vacations from school, as adults grounded by wartime gas rationing, or simply because they needed to get to the next town and did not care to wait for a bus. It was considered a slow and haphazard means of travel, but enlivened by interesting experiences and quaint and colorful characters.
Today, the roadsides are empty. We see advertisements for "adventure travel," but almost always the adventure is in nature — scaling the peaks of the Himalayas, trekking the Alaskan tundra, or penetrating the jungles of the Amazon, with hired guides and all the latest equipment. Sensible people would rather trust their fortunes to a thin rope on a slick glacier, or the flimsy wings of a hang glider, than to the goodwill of an unknown driver. Tell your friends that you intend to hitchhike from coast to coast, and you will inevitably hear the same two echoing refrains: "No one will stop for you," and "You could do that in the sixties, but it's much too dangerous these days." No evidence is ever introduced for these assertions, but they are the common currency of the interchange, tendered as if backed up by a Fort Knox of statistics and investigative reportage.
This ubiquitous nay-saying is symptomatic of the paranoia that bedevils Americans and is a tragedy of our time — and yet, it has its good side: With the roadsides empty there is no competition, and the hitchhiking is better than ever.
CHAPTER 4SERVICE PLAZA
So there I was, standing in the rain on the first service plaza outside Boston, sticking my thumb out whenever a car passed. It was not the most romantic spot, but you have to start somewhere. Service areas are easy, efficient places to pick up rides, especially on a toll highway like the Massachusetts Turnpike. Left to their own devices, drivers stop for gas, food, or bathrooms whenever they feel the need or inclination, but on toll roads they only get an opportunity every thirty miles or so. As a result, service areas provide the hitchhiker's equivalent of a captive audience, and if the weather gets nasty you can go into the restaurant for a cup of coffee, or stand by the doors and approach drivers directly. But redolent of freedom and adventure they are not. They are bland and prefabricated, full of brand-name fast foods, clean restrooms, plastic souvenirs, all pressed like interchangeable widgets from the same mold, coast to coast and border to border.
My current service area was laid out in the standard pattern: driving in, signs directed cars left and trucks right, the former to the neatly laid-out lot around the entrance of the restaurant, the latter to the sprawling expanse behind the building. Casual motorists get the benefit of bright signs and a bit of lawn, and their gas pumps are always beyond the restaurant, since they must be enticed to spend a little extra money on their way through. Truckers get a utilitarian lot and their pumps are generally alongside the building; they stop for gas so infrequently, and the fueling takes so long, that they need no urging to buy some food or coffee, and maybe take a shower while they're at it. On this particular plaza, an island of concrete extended beyond the building to the pump area, after which it turned to grass and narrowed to a point where cars and trucks converged, channeled into a single lane leading back onto the highway. Before that point, a hitchhiker would have to choose between cars or trucks. After that point, the only place to stand would be on the exit ramp itself, where drivers were already trying to get up speed and legal complications might ensue — pedestrians are forbidden on the interstate in most states, including all the ones east of the Mississippi.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Riding with Strangers by Elijah Wald. Copyright © 2006 Elijah Wald. Excerpted by permission of Chicago Review Press Incorporated.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Page,
Dedication,
FORESHADOWINGS,
A DEFENSE OF THE GENTLE ART OF HITCHHIKING,
SOUND AND FURY,
SERVICE PLAZA,
COP,
LAWS OF THE HIGHWAY,
DANGERS,
CHICAGO INDEPENDENT,
MISSIONARY,
GODS OF THE HIGHWAY,
CHINESE-CANADIAN TOURISTS,
MEXICAN DRIVER,
NIGHT,
TRUCK STOP,
MALAISE,
ROUNDING ST. LOUIS,
WEIRDO,
REGIONAL MANAGER,
THE LITERARY LIFE,
HANNIBAL,
HOPPING FREIGHTS,
TOWNSPEOPLE,
SLEEPING ROUGH,
THE TRAMP'S ALARM CLOCK,
MIDTOWN CROSSROADS,
OF GRAIN ELEVATORS AND SKYDIVING,
THE EASY LIFE,
OF TOLL BRIDGES AND TORTS,
OF AIR CONDITIONERS AND CONSPIRACY,
A HISTORICAL INVESTIGATION,
THE ART AND SCIENCE OF HITCHHIKING,
A VEHICULAR TAXONOMY, OR NATURAL HISTORY OF THE HIGHWAY,
A FELLOW MUSICIAN,
A RIDE ACROSS THE PLAINS,
ANOTHER NIGHT ON THE ROAD,
RED DESERT AND LITTLE AMERICA,
RUSSIAN,
THE MELTING POT,
THE WHITENESS OF THE DRIVERS,
CORVETTE,
RUSSIAN REDUX,
DARK STREETS,
AND THE GODS LAUGHED,
ENVOI: MEXICO 1987,