Hitching
Have Thumb Will Travel
Outside April 01

Another car blows by. I drop my arm and fold in my thumb. The driver didn't even look at me. He was staring down the road as if there was something so interesting out there he couldn't take his eyes off it. It's a common response: I'll act like I don't see him so maybe he won't see me, so I won't have to think about him standing there in the cold while I fly right on by. The emperor's new clothes in reverse. I understand. Nobody likes to feel guilty.

Of course maybe he doesn't feel guilty at all. Maybe he thinks I'm getting what I deserve, for what kind of an American doesn't have a car? What in the world did I do to lose this great country's God-given right to automobile ownership. I must have done something. Decent Americans, even decent poor Americans, own a car and drive it everywhere. A man afoot in America is no man at all. A man afoot is a loser.

I wait. A freezing prairie wind is rattling the reflector poles. It's trying to snow again. Flakes cartwheel across the highway like tiny tumbleweeds.

A pickup comes around the curve. The driver is wearing a cowboy hat. I put out my thumb and look him in the eyes. He looks right back into mine. People believe if they look into your eyes they can discern the truth---for instance, whether I'm an ordinary guy down on my luck or a serial murderer. It's nonsense, but if you want a ride you play along. The cowboy stabs sideways with his finger, indicating he's turning off just up the road. I wave and he casually salutes as he passes.

The snow is coming now, brilliant white confetti tumbling all around. I should put on my sunglasses but don't. Sunglasses make you look like you're trying to hide something. Your thoughts, your secrets, your identity. Sunglasses make you look unknown and people don't like the unknown.

A long, low-slung sedan shoots past. But then, in the corner of my eye, I catch the red glow of brake lights through the snowfall. I spin on my heels, run down the road, swing open the car door and get in.

Away we go.

There was a period in my life when I hitchhiked all over the country. The kind of car I could afford wouldn't have been reliable enough to go any distance, so I went without. I hitched from Wyoming to West 73rd in Manhattan to visit a friend. I hitched down to Tempe, Arizona to see a girlfriend. I hitched out to Joshua Tree to go rock climbing. I hitched up to Boston to work for an uncle. Once, after a family reunion in Pennsylvania, I raced my own family back to Laramie. It was a gentleman's bet. Dad stopped on the highway, I got out, and he sped away with Mom and my five younger brothers and sisters staring out the rear window. It was 2000 miles. I was sitting on our dusty porch, pretending to read the newspaper, when they drove up.

By then I'd learned that there's a right way and a wrong way to hitchhike. There are rules. The rules are based on human psychology, on generalizations about human behavior that are mostly true but sometimes gloriously or horribly false---which would account for how I once got a ride in Utah from a woman so beautiful and lonely I stepped onto the road the next morning without my belt, and likewise how I once got a lift in South Dakota from a hippie so hurting he held a cocked revolver against my temple for an hour.

Eventually I got a car and stopped hitchhiking. I wasn't a starving writer anymore, just a writer. When you own a car you own the world. You are invincible, invulnerable, free. Whenever I saw a hitchhiker I picked him up. I'd been there. Some of them had sorry tales, meant to elicit sympathy---stories that, even if counterfeit in every detail, were honest enough in spirit.

But over the years, hitchhiking got a bad name, the number of hitchhikers dwindled, and I began to wonder if hitchhiking was dying out. Fortunately, I'd recently received an invitation to a party in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I packed my rucksack, walked my kids to school, and asked my wife drop me off at the edge of town. (Yes, she was upset about this potentially unhealthy exercise in investigative reporting.)

Rather than take I-25, which cleaves the plains from Wyoming south to New Mexico, I decided to thumb the blue highways down the spine of the Rockies. Fewer cars but fewer cops. Too many cars and everybody always thinks the next guy will pick you up. It was only about 600 miles, but given current fear and loathing of hitchhikers, I figured I might be in for some long waits by the roadside. It was the dead of winter. I brought a sleeping bag.

My first ride was cheating. The driver was a friend.

“Mark! What in hell you doin' out there?” George said, flicking his cigarette out the window with the stumps of his thumb and fingers. He'd lost them in a sawmill accident. Dylan's Blood on the Tracks was playing on the tape deck. “Little experiment.”

George used to teach English at the University before things went sour. He told me a story about how he once hitchhiked up to Sheridan, Wyoming with four Dostoyevski novels and hid out in a motel just reading. “Finest damn week of my whole damn life,” he declared. Then he talked about his divorce. He was trying to figure out how to get more time with his kids.

George dropped me off at the sawmill turnoff, 12 miles out of town. “Good luck, man. I wouldn't have picked you up if I didn't know you.”

I didn't wait five minutes before the next car stopped. Country music on the radio. Driver's name was John. Thin black mustache, smoked discount cigarettes. A traveling salesman.

“Industrial parts. I used to be in-house sales. Then one day I couldn't take it anymore. I couldn't take one more minute being inside an office.”

John was on his way to the lumber mill in Saratoga.

“They're my best customers, but the phone won't do the trick. They need to see a face.”

At the mountains we disappeared into a blizzard, the snow swirling in from all directions. We slowed down to 20 miles an hour.

“Used to drive truck,” John said, “You don't take chances with snow. Nothing wrong with being a little late. Go off the road and you could be late forever.”

Peering through the fogged windshield, I thought how grand it was to be inside, dry and warm and moving along, when I could just as easily have been outside, cold and wet and going nowhere.

John started to talk about his 14-year-old son and I listened. This is what you should be good at if you want to hitchhike. Everybody needs somebody to talk to and people will tell a stranger things they'd never tell their own spouse. They know they'll never see you again and they know you'll never meet the people in their story either, so they feel free to go ahead and tell the truth.

John said he doesn't know where his son gets it. Kid is a straight-A student, always has been. And he's playing on the high school basketball team even though he's still in junior high.

“Boy's just got the fire in him.”

He talked about his son until he'd covered everything that amazed him about this child of his, then talked about his daughter.

“Damned if she ain't a straight-A girl herself. And she's gonna need ‘em if she wants to get into that school.”

His daughter wanted to go to the Airforce Academy in Colorado Springs.

“And I'll bet she will. I'll just bet she will.”

John dropped me off where the road splits. It was a desolate place. At the three-way there was a wooden cross in the weeds: Tara Swanson-Nov 20 1973, May 24, 1998-Tara We Miss You. If you're looking, you can find memorials like this on practically every curve on every highway in America.

It was still snowing, but only lightly. A rancher in a tractor was hauling hay out to a herd of cattle. Some 1950's automobiles were sinking into the snowdrifts. I paced back and forth to keep warm. I hung around the intersection, but I didn't sit down. Sitting makes you look lazy. Americans don't like lazy. Americans in their cars believe they deserve to be there because they've worked hard for it, and if you can't even get up on your feet, you don't deserve a ride.

Three big automobiles passed by in row. Each was loaded with older women. Must have been a club of some kind. Cow Belles, a church group. They were obviously full so I just waved. Some of the women frowned at me disapprovingly; some waved back; some looked away as if I were roadkill.

Twenty minutes went by before another vehicle appeared. It was a semi, rolling steady as a steam engine through the storm. Truckers don't stop for hitchhikers anymore. Their insurance forbids it. I'd decided not even to stick out my thumb, then abruptly did it anyway.

Next thing I knew I heard the whoosh of the brakes, the engine groaning, the tranny downshifting, and the tractor-trailer shuddered to a stop---dead in the middle of the road. The door swung open above my head and I climbed up into the cab.

“Been standing there long?” The driver had a good-natured, saggy-jowls, cocker spaniel face.

“Not too.”

I watched him work through the gears, getting the beast back up to speed.

“Eighteen of ‘em,” he said. “Some trucks have ten, some 14. Eighteen's better if you're running a lot of up and down.”

He was wearing a trucker's baseball cap, had forearms thick as thighs and a vast belly. I thought he must have been a trucker his whole life.

“Nope. Started four years ago.”

He said he's doing it for the money.

“Wife is getting used to it now. Learning how to do a few things ‘round the house that I used to do. My boys are 15 and 20 and pretty much doing their own thing. They don't miss me that much.”

He's only home two nights a week. Rest of the nights he sleeps in his cab. He eats in his cab too, cooking off a hot plate to save a little money. He doesn't like the truckstops and only uses them for a shower.

“Ten hours or 600 miles every day.” He doesn't doctor his books.

“I guess you could say I live here, right in here, all the time. They told me when I first started that being a trucker was a lifestyle, not a job. They turned out to be right about that at least.”

“What do you do at night?”

“Read. I got a little tv but I like reading better.” He threw his eyes back over his shoulder toward a stack of paperbacks on his bunk.

He talked about his sons as we cruised through Cowdrey and Walden and then traversed the hay fields of North Park, riding far above the ground blizzards writhing across the road. He dropped me off at Muddy Pass. He was continuing west on Highway 40 to Craig to deliver a load of hay.

“Was good to have your company, but just so nothing gets back to anybody, I'd appreciate it if you didn't remember me.”

Muddy Pass is down the road from Rabbit Ears Pass which is above Steamboat Springs. People in SUVs with the latest skis clamped in the latest ski racks blasted past me. I didn't care. Three good rides and I was on a roll.

It was snowing hard now, soaking my jeans. I half wished I hadn't shaved, but facial hair is out. So is long hair. Leather jackets. Ragged anything. All our mothers told us not to judge a book by its cover, and every one of us does it all the time. You want a ride, you need to look normal. Like somebody's brother just trying to get home from college.

If you look strange, strange people will pick you up. Strange people are supposed to be interesting, but usually they're just messed up, and if you happen to get caught up even for 15 minutes in their messed up lives, you can get killed. They'll be drinking or doing dope and driving ninety-five and want you to be cool like they are and if you won't they get their feelings hurt and then start scheming in their paranoid heads and pretty soon one of them will try grabbing your throat from behind and everything will go haywire and they'll roll the car.

But it's not only looks. Posture is also important. No slouching. Shoulders back, chin up, both hands out of your pockets. Have your hands hidden in your pockets and people don't know if you have something in them or not and they'll start imagining all kinds of things. Stand natural, not trying to conceal anything about yourself, looking like all you want is a ride, because that's the truth. Your hitching arm should be slightly bent, steady but relaxed. Never stretch your arm out and lean into the traffic or jug your arm up and down. That makes you look desperate. Desperation's one of those things people will go clear out of their way to avoid.

After a while, a little car stopped and I folded myself clumsily into the backseat. Reggae music, chimes hanging from the mirror, peace sticker on the window.

“I'm Emily,” said the driver.

“I'm Justin,” said the young man in the passenger seat.

They both reached back between the seats to vigorously shake my hand. They were on their way to an Earth First! meeting in Boulder. They were so happy to see me I might as well have been family.

Emily had just finished studying in India for two years, was spending three months with her family down in a remote part of Mexico this spring, and would be going to Colorado College in the fall. Justin had camped out in trees in Oregon to protest clear-cutting and was bound for Chile to study permaculture. They were planning to save the world. I found myself envious---I was once like them. They gave me hope.

“Earth First!” Justin expounded, “is a non-organization made up of non-members dedicated to not giving up.”

When they dropped me off in Dillon, Justin tore a strip from a poetry paperback and wrote down his email address. As they drove away, I turned the scrap over in my hand to find the last line of a poem: “You shall above all things be glad and young.”

I shouldered my pack and walked to the I-70 on-ramp. It wasn't a big pack. People see a big pack and they have an excuse: I don't have room. On the other hand, hitchhiking without a pack is worse. People wonder what you're doing out there with nothing. They're thinking and their probably right that anybody who's legitimate is carrying a pack. If he doesn't have a pack then he probably isn't going anywhere. If he isn't going anywhere then why's he got his thumb out wanting you to pull over and let him inside your car.

I've seen a few people hitching with a suitcase, but that's weird. People with suitcases are the kind of people who should be taking a bus or the train, or someone who's hoping someone will listen to them for a while and then talk them out of it and drive them back home.

A pickup pulled over.

“Just throw it in the back.”

I slung my pack in the empty bed of the pickup.

Guy's name was Bobby. “I hitched myself for 15 months,” he said.

I wondered why he was so specific.

“DUI. Lost my driver's license. But everything works out for the best. I learned a lot about people, having to hitchhike every day.”

Bobby said he gave his life to Jesus about a year ago and hasn't touched alcohol since. He went ten miles out of his way to drop me off on Highway 91.

I was standing beside a snowdrift when a husky came trotting up to me and nuzzled my hand. No fear of strangers whatsoever. I scrubbed his lower back and his tail went mad, then he traveled on, content as only dogs know how to be.

I've met people hitching with a dog, but it's dumb. Dog people like dogs, but the rest of the world is full of cat people or people unattached to the animal kingdom. I've also met people hitching with other kinds of pets, mostly small animals they hide inside their coats. They feel out the situation to see whether they should show the driver their friend. I've met people with gerbils and snakes and guinea pigs and ferrets.

A corollary to no pets is no pals. Two guys standing on the road looks too much like two guys either trying to get away from trouble or trying to get into it.

I was standing there pondering this when the driver of a car going maybe 60 slammed on the brakes and fishtailed to a stop.

I looked through the window before opening the car door. The driver was staring straight ahead, both hands on the steering wheel. He had a crew cut, a scar on his forehead and a tattoo of a cross on his left hand. He was wearing Carhartt overalls splattered with cement mud. The car was a mess inside. I got in.

The first few minutes in a car with a stranger are always the most tense. You've got all your antennae working to figure out the score, and so does the driver. You can both feel the vibes. It's as if every human is surrounded by their own electromagnetic field. Most of the time a simple conversation starts itself and the atmosphere soon clears, but not always.

I once got into a Cadillac in Iowa. The car was immaculate inside and out. So was the driver, even though he was probably 90 years old. He didn't say a word for half an hour. He just drove smoothly through the cornfields. He eventually turned his white head toward me and said, “Well, if you're plannin' on killin' me, you might as well git it over with.” I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. After I finally convinced him that I didn't want anything more than a lift, he told me how he'd fought in the Great War and then hitchhiked from New York City back to Iowa. “I was still in uniform,” he said. “There weren't many cars but not one ever passed me by.” He ended up taking me to the VFW and forcing me to eat two whole meals because he said I looked like I could use a little meat on my bones.

Now I introduced myself to the driver.

“Calvin,” he said, and we shook. His hand was thick with muscle.

I took a guess. “You lay concrete.”

“Sewer line.”

I got him to tell me a little about his work, but he wasn't the talkative kind so I left it alone. He drove fast but knew how. At one gas station he bought us both candybars, at the next I bought us plastic-encased burritos.

Calvin was going home to Antonito to see his girlfriend and visit his family. After a few hours, as we got closer, he began to laconically point out the roadside attractions. A crocodile farm. The Jack Dempsey museum. A UFO observatory.

It was dusk when we pulled into Antonito. It had been the best ride of the day. Long, fast, no small talk. He showed me a house-cum-castle built of aluminum cans, then dropped me off.

Highway 285 south into New Mexico is a lonesome stretch, especially at night. The only vehicle that passed me was a Colorado State Patrol car. I didn't have my thumb out, but the patrolman knew exactly what I was up to. He also knew that I knew that if I was still here when he passed by again, he'd pick me up.

Hitchhiking is against the law almost everywhere. But the law is as malleable as the people who enforce it. I must have been picked up by the highway patrol fifty times. They put in you the backseat and run a check on you to make sure you didn't kill anybody lately. Then you get the lecture about how hitchhiking is illegal and they could put you in jail just like that if they wanted to. Be polite and keep your lip zipped and they'll sometimes just let you out and tell you to disappear.

The moon was up when the cop came back. A tractor-trailer was lumbering by and I had my thumb out. I was less than a hundred miles from Santa Fe, but nobody stops when it's dark. For one thing they can't see you until their headlights hit you, and then you can't help but look like a ghost or a prison escapee.

The cop was turning around and I was wondering if I might not be spending the night in the Conejos County jail, when the 18-wheeler inexplicably roared to a halt and the cab door uncorked like an opening in the night sky.

We made it to Santa Fe in two hours, riding through the velvet desert counting shooting stars.