Is Hitchhiking Dead?

(I hate to say it, but it is)

“You know I’m gonna live forever, don’t ya?” the man shouted to me over the engine noise as he sucked on a cigarette and bared his yellow teeth. The truck’s cab had no floor at all, and as we sped along the Montana highway, I watched the pavement race madly below my feet. He wore a leather cowboy hat that flapped in the wind flooding in through his rolled-down windows, and a scraggly grey beard covered his ruddy, sunburned face.

I said sure, I didn’t doubt he’d live forever: why not? It seemed to me that his truck – a 50’s-era International pickup – might live forever, so why not him, too?

“I’ll tell you why I’m gonna live forever,” he whispered, putting his hand on my leg as he spoke. I didn’t know this man. The bony, rough hand on my leg was unnerving; he’d picked me up on the side of the road in Kalispell, Montana, where I’d been making my way southeast in a hurry to get to Bozeman after a scuffle in Northern Idaho. I didn’t care who he was, or what he was thinking – just so long as I made it closer to Bozeman, I was glad to ride with him. Until he put his hand on my leg and made me open up the glovebox.

“Open it,” he hissed, punching the dashboard as he barked the order. And I had no choice but to oblige him. Inside, there was a bit of tupperware which he told me to open. “It’s eggs,” I said, because all that was in the tupperware was just plain old eggs. He took one from me and cracked it on the steering wheel – but yolk didn’t drip out, nor did I see the whites of a boiled egg. Instead, blood dribbled out, and the tiny face of an unborn chick, which he popped into his mouth whole. Chomping down on the little bones, speeding down the highway, the pavement flying down through the floorless cab below my feet – he said “that’s why I’m gonna live forever, boy…” and seconds later, he fired up his meth-pipe and stomped on the accelerator like a madman.

Then a song by Faith Hill came on his radio and he turned the speakers all the way up until they crackled and blared in deafening, distorted tones. He began to cry and even whimper. “I’ll take you to my place,” he said, flashing a look at me with his wet, bloodshot eyes. “I’ll take you to the place where yer gonna see JESUS!” And I began to realize that I was in one hell of a situation — this fellow might really insist that I go to his place to smoke meth and to “see Jesus.”

The whole mess of it, it was all surreal. The auspices under which I’d left Idaho were weird as it was – I’d been kicked out of the trailer park my girlfriend had been living at. As the obese landlady informed me of my ejection from the park, she told me local residents were “afraid I’d burglarize their homes,” and that I was very obviously “the product of inter-generational poverty.” Her nephews — who looked at least as much to be the ‘product of inter-generational poverty’ as I did — were outside shooting their shotguns at melons, staring at me, smiling. I bid my girlfriend goodbye, sleeping under a bridge that night, and stormed off toward Montana in a huff the next morning.

A sad-looking single mother brought me as far as Kalispell, giving me a cheese sandwich and a Budweiser, though it was only 9AM. And at Kalispell, this meth-smoking, fertilized-chicken-egg eating wildman was my next ride. Now, watching him get high and bawl his eyes out over Faith Hill and chicken eggs and Jesus, I realized I had to get out of that truck.

To my great relief, he pulled over to take a leak in the bushes not a few minutes later, and I grabbed my pack to sprint down to the river, where a bunch of other cars were pulled over to fish. I could hear the fellow growling mad once he’d realized I’d left the truck. And at the river I asked the first man I saw – a sweater-vest-wearing professor-looking type of fellow on a flyfishing trip – if he might be willing to give me a ride, post-haste. I didn’t usually pull stunts like these, but in this case, I figured that other man might come after me, and said as much, and the professor-man realized the trouble I might’ve been in immediately. He obliged without complaint, firing up his Buick that minute to run me down to Polson.

“Thank you so much,” I told him, and as we sped past the raving lunatic who was now shirtless and smoking more meth in the back of his pickup truck, he told me it was the least he could do for me.

These are the kinds of vignettes I can tell all day long; the kinds of yarns that have colored my view of this country and have come to define the word America for me. In 100,000+ miles of hitchhiking around these United States, I have found that this nation is nothing if not profoundly, feverishly, unbelievably weird. From the hitchhiker’s point of view, randomness is the word; an endless menagerie of sharply contrasting scenes, one after another, mile after mile, all viewed beside the majestic backdrop of the American continent as she passes by beneath the high-speed rubber tires — that’s the hitchhiker’s sustenance.

The Mormons and the Mexicans; the glue-sniffers and the queers, Codeine cowboys and Colorado cougars – the bizzaro procession never ends. One ride after another, the hitchhiker gets a window into what’s really pumping through the veins of this country, and usually, his up-close-and-personal view of it is shocking to behold. For not only is he seeing it first-hand – he’s in it; he’s offered himself up to it whole, and where it will leave him in the end is unknown and unknowable. He passes his years inside of it, drinking and belching, sweating and cursing, cackling and sucking down gas station chili dogs and tax-free smokes from the Rez. It’s winking at him like a flirt, it’s socking him in the jaw; America rises like a ghost from ten-thousand exhaust pipes – a hallucination that flies by him, finally leaving him standing in the sand by the highway to scratch his head in awe and wonderment, day after day.

For five years, I traveled this way, day in and day out. You might say I was addicted; it’s a ‘high’ that never gets old. Standing in the broiling daylight for hours and days, dodging the cops, loitering at the gas stations, begging God for mercy as the desert wind fills your every crack and crease with dust in a sandstorm; until finally the brake lights come on, and the window rolls down. What’s inside might be a drunkard with lizardlike skin, knee deep in fast food wrappers and empty cans – or it might be a golden-eyed hippie, or a perverted divorcee in a Prius, or an old veteran who leers and shows you his revolver and belches as you climb up into his truck. Whoever it is, and whatever they’re bringing with them, well, it doesn’t much matter – because you’re headed anywhere but here, and when the day is done and the miles have been traveled, you find you’ve gotten a mega-dose of adrenaline and weirdness, in equal parts.

For from the hitchhiker’s point of view, our country’s highways aren’t just long white and yellow lines on the asphalt, nor are they simply an unending stream of truck stops, corn fields, desert mountains, and billboards that say “HELL IS REAL.” They’re a kind of living organism; a place of convergence for souls in motion, each hailing from strange and unknown lineages that pool together in metal contraptions flying eighty miles-per-hour down the shimmering pavement. Elders and whippersnappers, outlaws and straights, rednecks, vaqueros, fondlers, holy rollers, Mormon soccer moms with screaming babies – they’re all there, rolling along together cross-country in silent synchrony, forever. Far from the sentimentalist platitudes and the blithering jingoism that’s ever been pushed by politicos, partisans, schools, and the media – this is America, real and raw and unfiltered. The hitchhiker’s highway hides nothing; it’s the God’s-honest truth served piping hot at eighty miles-per-hour, and once you’ve sampled it, it never leaves you.

And so it brings me great sadness to write the words that I have, by now, been left with no choice but to write: Hitchhiking is dead.

What I write here today is its eulogy – and if I said I wasn’t mired in a deep, years-long eddy of grief over this loss of a former national pasttime, I’d be lying. Without the hitchhiker’s highway, I am a man without a country; no part of my understanding of my homeland or my life makes sense. Lord knows, our children won’t know one fraction of the road I knew. By then, they may not get to live even the slightest flicker of it for themselves — not by thumb, at least.

This is because a thing like hitchhiking hearkens from an era of civilizational youth and innocence — it is an artifact of a time when social trust was high. Well before the slashers and serial killers and nutjobs started running the roads, well before the crisis levels of homelessness and immigration and drugs; America was the kind of place where a freewheeling youngster might stick his thumb out just for the sheer joy of it. No more.

These days, to catch a ride practically anywhere one feels as if they’re getting away with something. Passing motorists dial the cops, who come around with flashing lights, conducting ID checks and bag searches, considering the activity “suspicious.” Streams of automobiles whizz by, usually each of them piloted by a lone driver with leery eyes – some of them will avert their eyes from you, as if they might catch whatever illness no doubt has you standing there in the rain by the side of the road. When you do finally arrive at your destination, store owners will see your backpack and think you to be a thief; simply walking down public roads may arouse suspicions – practically anywhere you go now, the American hitchhiker is treated as a deranged criminal, and after so many years of this kind of treatment, it is hard not to feel like you’re not one bad day from living in the plot of Rambo: First Blood.

By the end of it, you realize you have got to stop hitchhiking or you’ll go crazy.

I certainly did both. That the end was near was apparent to me throughout my days of thumbing it; as it was, I was already considered a nut for even trying. “You’re going to get murdered!” was a common response to my profession; claims about rape and assault and crime of all sorts seemed to have taken the popular imagination over on the subject of hitchhiking. Perhaps I was simply lucky, but in all my years of hitchhiking experience, I have not been murdered yet, nor was I ever raped, beaten, or kidknapped. Quite to the contrary, I found myself being initiated into a kind of mystical brotherhood of underworld wanderers – a guild of vagabonds and vagrants for whom the randomness of the long American road is a known friend and a wellspring of life and hope. Though I have done many things in my life, I am first and foremost a hitchhiker; and for all I have seen in my miles, I am a patriot too – albeit a patriot for a country that no longer appears to exist, save as a haunting and distant memory.

Years after my own hitchhiking heyday, I mused on these ideas aloud to my wife as we stood by the side of the road with our thumbs raised. Her stomach was bulging with a baby who will, God-willing, be born in the next few days. Being that I had a doctor’s appointment over in Vermont – and that the county bus just doesn’t go over there – we saw it fit to raise our thumbs along the road to Burlington, just for old times’ sake. As we stood, we realized we were violating a key rule to hitchhiking – never hitchhike in groups of more than two people. For though we only would be in need of two eastbound seats; we were indeed traveling with a third person, whose status as an unborn baby made for easy travel. Heaven knows, years from now, we’ll be able to tell the little fellow that he or she was a hitchhiker even in utero – a true protege of its mother and father.

But by the time our baby grows into adulthood, what will this country be looking like then? It’s distinctly possible — even likely — that there will be no more hitchhikers out on the highways; that the flickers of fraternal roadside warmth I knew as a young man will have been snuffed completely. It may really be that “The United States of America” will, by then, only be a kind of “economic development zone” in which citizenship doesn’t mean much more than the right to earn money and file taxes. The polarization of our people might reach a fever pitch that makes the divisions in this country today seem downright quaint; fences and cameras, tracking apps and biometric ID’s, robocops and drones and social credit scores – God only knows what kind of a country our baby will grow up to find. While we can hope that things turn around, if these last ten years are any indicator, we aren’t exactly optimistic.

Soon however, our discourse on the country’s future was interrupted, and a nice lady pulled over in an SUV. She was talking a mile a minute; telling us about the great community work she was able to do with her local Episcopalian Church, giving us the rundown of who-lives-where, how much snow they got this winter, what trees fell down and whose yards were flooded by the heavy rains. She said she’d never seen hitchhikers around there before – but was delighted to have the chance to pick us up. Meanwhile, our baby slept soundly, deep in the womb; and my wife and I were glad to be out of the hot sun. It was a full day’s travel to Burlington for us; riding the ferry, catching the city bus, staying overnight in town – all for a fifteen-minute appointment, during which I was informed that I should, by all rights, be wearing a hearing aid.

“Maybe I’m just getting old,” I said to my wife. Maybe it wasn’t the country that was going downhill – maybe it was just me. “You’re only 31, Andy,” my wife said, half-rolling her eyes at my display of faux-geriatric melodrama.

Then again, I argued – it ain’t the years, it’s the miles.

But as we raised our thumbs again to head southward, toward the other, smaller ferry in Charlotte, Vermont, the sun was glistening through the leaves of the trees. The birds were out in full force, flying in formations like a chirping little Air Force. A lovely old woman scooped us up, just as if it were the good old days of hitchhiking, and cracked jokes with us the whole way to the ferry. We stood there, waiting for that old, slow, rusty boat across Lake Champlain, staring out at the vapors curling over the mirror-flat water and the Adirondack Mountains and the little islands of emerald green shrubs and trees – maybe this country’s got miles yet to go. Maybe some kind of revival could happen here. It really could be that these days, this country’s just in a dark little chapter that has no need to continue nor to worsen; a time that comes not as a permanent reality but as a teacher of an all-important lesson about what a nation is and ought to be.

If we do stay here in America, well, we’ll need to keep that kind of optimism with us. We’ll need to give it to our baby.

And if we should find ourselves driving down the road in a car – we’ll just have to pick up every hitchhiker we see, however rare they become. It’s our hope we’ll see many more of them yet.