2. • I knew they could see me. Families on their way to
the lake, truckers hauling loads on deadlines, couples
heading for church or breakfast – they all would have
found me directly in their line of sight as they
screamed into the westbound curve at 70 miles per
hour. I imagined that for those 10, maybe 15
seconds, they thought: Is that a person on the
shoulder? Where’s his car? What’s he doing? Looking
for a ride? Really? Then, whoosh, they were past.
• They were coming at the rate of about one vehicle
every four seconds. That would be more than 15 per
minute. More than 1,000 per hour. Times two, for the
time I’d been there. I knew it wasn’t personal, but
from where I stood, it was still a lot of rejection. The
sun rose higher, its glare and warmth intensifying.
• All I’d have to do, I thought, was hop across the
median and turn my back on all of this – head east,
back to the Twin Cities and home, and never tell
anyone I was ever serious about hitchhiking 1,700
miles to visit a friend in Twisp, Wash., a small town in
the mountains east of Seattle. I could be home in two
hours, and spend my week’s vacation fishing.
3. It was early on Day Two on the summer road trip I’d been thinking about
for several years – an appealing Western road trip, sure, but also an
examination of whether the American road even resembled the one I
thought I once knew. For beatniks in the ’50s and baby boomers after
them, the highway was a cultural Main Street, combining adventure and
community, and hitchhiking was a way to join the parade. If you had the
time and curiosity, it was as good a way as any to walk off and look for
America. But it had been more than 30 years since I’d been out there, and
in that time hitchhiking had simply vanished, like phone booths and penny
candy. Now seemed like the time to find out where everybody had gone –
whether the Me Decades or a generation of ramped-up fear had made that
highway commons a different place, and made us a different people –
suspicious, driving solo, insulated by our custom music and podcasts.
Also, I had just turned 60. In another year I could be having a hip
transplant, or worse. I realized I was in a rare position, as lives go: no
elderly parents, no wife, no girlfriend, not even a dog. No disabilities. My
two grown daughters seemed to turn pale when I mentioned the trip (the
urge to wander being a symptom of Alzheimer’s disease), but they weren’t
about to say no. Suddenly, thumbing halfway across the country – farther
than I ever had before – had become something I knew I had to
do now, before it would be impossible or certainly just crazier. It was
something I knew I would deeply regret not doing.
4. But what was I thinking? Even when thumbing was commonplace, hitchhikers were an object of
suspicion, and old ones even more so. Now I could easily be taken for a guy fresh off a 40-year hitch in the
penitentiary. A crazy. A deadbeat. And that was even if people understood the meaning of the little sign I was
holding, with its one, handwritten word: “West.” So after two hours on the shoulder that morning (and one
hour the evening before), I was beginning to have my own doubts. If I’d wanted to celebrate my seniority, why
hadn’t I just gone on a cruise or cut back on salt? Twenty-four hours after leaving my Minneapolis home, I
was stuck in Albany, Minn., only four rides and 100 miles up the road, and the first 40 had been on a
commuter train out of town. Turning back east, to what was close and familiar, suddenly seemed to make
sense.
That’s when the big red pickup hauling the enormous horse trailer slowed to a long halt on the entrance ramp
shoulder. The driver opened his door and waved to me.
“Where you going?” I asked.
“Bismarck,” he said.
And I was in.
5. I began hitchhiking to get to high school, as my brother had before me. We lived on
a busy street near a traffic signal, so we could simply walk the line of idling
cars, books under our arms, asking for rides. We were clean cut and always got to
school, which of course got me thinking this was a pretty reliable way to get from
place to place.
In time, my hitchhiking horizons broadened. There were trips on college weekends
to see my sweetie, or relatives in Chicago, or friends in Sioux City or Saugatuck.
Trips to big-city concerts, and once 1,000 miles to an antiwar protest in
Washington, D.C. That trip featured a night in jail for my young wife and me in
Henry County, Ill. (for walking on the interstate shoulder, though insurrection was
implied).
Hitchhikers were a common sight in those days. In fact, there were so many that on
busy highways we often had to negotiate who got to stand where, or ask drivers to
drop us off farther up the road, where there wasn’t so much competition for the next
ride. If a rusty old van came limping over the hill you could often count on it pulling
over to absorb everyone into the river of road-trippers. But all kinds of rides were
possible. Businessmen in wide, air-conditioned sedans often stopped, looking for
someone to keep them awake with conversation or to pepper with questions about
us young kids and hair and the war. Guys just out of the
service, readjusting, curious about college and girls and driving hot new cars.
Sometimes “older” couples with kids about our age. All types, and they’d often tell
their secrets, encouraged by the odd intimacy of the front seat, where the hours
demand conversation but eye contact is difficult. And then they dropped you off and
drove out of your life, leaving you a little closer to your destination, with their stories
now in your bag.
