HITCH ACROSS AMERICA: 1992
We are are all travelers in space and time, even when we
are vegging in front of our television, killing brain cells with Budweiser,
Camels, and Dan Quayle campaign mucus.
Even in the passive and stationary posture of tube worship, we are
nonetheless moving rapidly through (Cartesian) space in several
vectorial dimensions (e.g., the earth’s rotation, and its revolution around the
sun; the sun’s motion within the galaxy
and the galaxy’s rotation; the galaxy’s
movement within the local supercluster;
the expansion of everything since the Big Bang, assuming that the
universe began with a bang), and through various kinds of (Newtonian) time,
most of which we measure with respect to the cycles of day and night; the seasons; and the sun, moon, and other heavenly bodies. Even when we are asleep the seconds tick
away, at least for those of us who continue to live within the
Newtonian/Cartesian paradigm, moving us inexorably towards…the unknown.
Aside
from these more cosmic, philosophical, and relative forms of travel, however
(relative to our inertial reference frame of living on the surface of the
Earth, these movements are imperceptible), our usual methods of experiencing
transforms of our existential spatio-temporal coordinates, our more common
modes of moving from place to place take the forms of self- or vehicularly-assisted
locomotion/transportation on the ground, on water, or in the air. In the last century we have progressed from
animal- and wind-based forms, to forms based on the combustion of fossil fuels
in steam engines, to the wide array of forms in use today, ranging from the use
of nuclear fission in ships and and submarines, to the combustion of liquid
hydrogen and liquid oxygen in rocket engines, to the use of dilithium crystals
in Federation Starships, to bicycles, to the use of solar-electric power as
well as the burning of fossil fuels in the internal combustion engine in
land-based vehicles. The latter is by
far the most widespread and ubiquitous mode:
95% or more of all surface vehicles burn fossil fuels. This is due
primarily to the ease with which crude petroleum can be drained from the Earth
and to the energy conglomerates’ rabid resistance to change.
The
fossil fuel age is drawing to a close, if only because the terrestrial supply
is finite. Unless interplanetary probes
or explorers discover oil on the moon, Mars, or Titan (which is highly
unlikely, since, as far as we know, these worlds have never harbored life-forms
that could have become fossilized…on the other hand, what if we did find
fossil fuels there…we’d surely see the NASA/EXXON Shuttle-Tanker!), and even if
“we” use up all the petroleum in shale deposits (there’s enough to last
a couple decades but getting at it requires strip-mining of unprecedented
scale…and this is a lovely sight, indeed!), by the year 2050 or so the fossil
fuel age will necessarily be over. Well
before then, however, at present rates of pollution, the air over much of the
planet will be toxic and unbreatheable.
The drivers
of today may be dooming our grandchildren to “life” in sealed enclosures like
Biosphere II. But hey, with the vast
array of modern brain-washing techniques, few of our grandchildren may even
realize that life outside the domes ever in fact existed; they may never know that air was once
free! Most of them will probably like
it. After all, things will be so…convenient! Or maybe using the wonders of genetic
engineering to allow us to “evolve” into things which no longer require air to
breathe would prove to be even more convenient!
Whatever
the mode of power generation, however, tens of millions of personal
automobiles, trucks and vans daily cruise the millions of miles of highways
criss-crossing beautiful North America.
I owned a vehicle continuously from the age of 16 up until November
1984, when I sold my last, a rusted-out Toyota pick-up, to a Denver junk
yard. I love the freedom and
convenience of owning your own vehicle.
But is precisely this freedom and convenience that we take for granted
in the astronomical number of miles we drive;
and this vehicular excess is a primary causative agent in the etiology
of the current global ecological scenario we have today. Anyway, enough said about the fossil fuel
scenario. It’s important to
think about, OK? It is the existence of
widespread vehicular transportation that makes it possible to hitch-hike.
By the
time I sold my old pick-up, I had already done my first trans-continental
hitch-hiking trek, from July through early December of 1983, as well as
hitching back to North Carolina from Key West in early December of 1982. By May of 1984, when I first moved to
Athens, I had amassed over 12,000 road miles, and wrote my first article on
hitching, entitled, surprisingly enough, “A Trans-continental Hitch-Hiking
Trek: Part One.” In this piece I related the fundamental
“do’s” and “don’t’s” of hitch-hiking, based on my experience, and described
some of the rides I had and people I encountered. I also began to delve into the more cosmic and esoteric dimensions
of this process.
In June of 1987 I left Athens with a 19-year-old Los Angeles run-away blonde named Heather; we hitched together to New Orleans, up through Austin, over to Santa Fe, and up into Wyoming and southern Colorado. At this point, after about a month, she returned to California, and I continued north through Wyoming and Montana, crossing the Canadian border and continuing up to Calgary, heading over to Banff. From here I hitched up the Icefield Parkway to a little resort town called Jasper, then headed southwest down through British Columbia over to Vancouver, proceeding south onto the Olympic peninsula, then southeast through eastern Oregon to Salt Lake City. Here I spent a weekend partying with a group of radical Mormon youth, and ended up riding with one of them down to Los Angeles, detouring through Death Valley en route. I got to “Shaky City” (trucker lingo for L.A.) just in time to experience a 6.2 earthquake from less than ten miles from the epi-center (I was on-lab at the Whittier branch of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory that sunny September morning. I was sitting at a bus-stop at the time it happened; I thought that the concrete was buckling and the palm trees and lamp-posts were swaying because of an underground train!) From L.A. I ventured north briefly to Santa Cruz (here I ran into Heather by “chance” at a coffee-shop!) and to Berkeley, then returning south and then east over to New Mexico. At Las Cruces I made a short traverse over to Alamogordo, site of the first nuclear detonation (very creepy vibes there!) then I headed north on I-25 up to Santa Fe again, detouring to visit the VLA (Very Large Array, a network of 27 85-foot radio dishes which can function as one giant radio telescope 19 kilometers in diameter!). Then I high-tailed it back to Georgia on I-40, having hitched over 12,000 miles in four months. Safely back in Athens I retreated to Rocky’s Pizza and wrote the first 87 pages (not all in one sitting!) of a document entitled, surprisingly, “A Transcontinental Hitch-hiking Trek: Part Two.” This was intended to be a book, but somehow I got caught up in the real-time life of Athens that I love so much, and never finished it. These things happen. But I continued to hitch-hike.
Here it is, the last day of May 1992. Hey, this year is the quincentennial of
Columbus’s invasion, I mean…intrusion, I mean…infection, I mean…discovery
of America. Where would we be without
him? Anyway, as of last week when I
arrived here in Boulder (the Athens of the Rockies!), I have hitch-hiked right
at 91,000 miles since the fall of 1982.
Pretty impressive, huh, especially since it’s “impossible” to hitch
anymore, not since the late 60’s or early 70’s at the latest. Not in the states, anyway. So I am told.
Some people tell me that I’m the Jack Kerouac of the 90’s. Among other things! I’ve read “On the Road” and “The Dharma Bums”, I think. Kerouac is certainly the archetypal hitch-hiker. I’m not sure that I’m the “anything-of-the-anything” that’s existed before; but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that I’ve hitched more miles than he did. Not that that would be any big deal. Back in the 50’s and early 60’s, when he did most of his mileage, there surely weren’t as many miles of highway or as many millions of automobiles or as many thousands of people with the time and money to drive all over the country at will. But, on the other hand, back then, in the proverbial “good old days of yesteryear” (when Reagan was just an actor (?) and Tonto and the Lone Ranger did their do-gooding! “That right, chemosabe.”) Americans still knew and trusted each other; a lot more people lived on farms and in rural areas. All we had to worry about was those evil Communists in Russia and Cuba. Crick and Watson had just discovered the DNA helix, and walking on the moon was the highest, most imaginative and seemingly unattainable goal we could set our sights on; it was the dawn of the Space Age, and John Lennon had just met Paul McCartney over in Liverpool. But…back to hitch-hiking!
Back when Kerouac was on the road, the psychological
climate in America was radically different.
Television was only beginning to become widespread; we were yet to experience the scourge of
mind-management, consumer propaganda, and the unprecedented concentration of
power in the hands of increasingly smaller groups and their undeclared war of infotoxin
that Einstein warned of just before his death in 1955. Technology was the answer, and Uncle Sam its
unabashed prophet. The United States of
America was the sole and untouchable leader of the Free World, and we were
proud of it.
But then the rot set in.
From the assassination of President Kennedy and the escalation of our
involvement in Viet Nam, to the resignation of Nixon in the wake of Watergate,
through all the covert operations conducted in the 70’s and 80’s and the
concomitant nuclear proliferation; the
multi-ringed tumor-circus of the Reagan years, its cast of characters
(including Oliver “Himmler” North, Mike “Goebbels” Deaver, and Cap “the Gap”
Weinberger) and its legacy of subversion of the democratic process in favor of
corporate control, culminating in the public disclosure of such grotesque
violations of the constitution (not to mention basic human rights) as the
Iran-Contra affair; all the way up to
and including the “election” of a former head of the CIA as president, and the
attempted implementation of the agenda of the “new world order.” Its mission: to undermine the Gifted Society.
It looks like Uncle Sam has terminal brain cancer, that is, of course,
if he’s not already dead (like Reagan, maybe he’s being kept “alive” by a daily
dose of reanimation compound, the chemical warfare agent from Return of the
Living Dead!).
Yes, even though I was just being born,
it would seem that the over-all mood of
the people in America was pretty different 35 years ago: more trusting, relaxed, optimistic, looking
forward to a brighter world where you could live in peace and where your
children could be a lot smarter than you thanks to the revolutions in education
and communication made possible by the new technologies.
Look
where we are today. Thanks to the
widespread proliferation of the petrochemical industry, we have a grotesque
surfeit of food to eat, but much of it contains pesticides and other toxins; perhaps as much as 70% of the Earth’s human
population is chronically under-nourished.
Thanks Monsanto. Thanks, DuPont. We have plenty of gasoline to burn, and it’s
not as expensive as in Europe, until you add in the costs of things like the
war in the Persian Gulf, the Valdez
oil spill, and the non-numerical but
more real ecological costs of
burning fossil fuels. Thanks
Gulf-Western. Thanks, Exxon. We also have plenty of legal drugs to do,
like Prozak and methadone. Thanks,
Dan. And plenty of illegal ones, too,
like coke and heroin. Thanks,
George. And hemp, probably the most
economically important crop we could be growing now, remains illegal. Thanks, Richard Anslinger. Thanks, DEA. We also have, on the average, more televisions per household than
we do children. Does this mean that
we’re highly informed about what’s going on?
Hardly. The average American
watches 6.5 hours of television daily, the vast majority of it consisting of
psychologically “sophisticated” programming aimed at selling products of
necessity and instilling attitudes of desire.
Thanks, ad agencies. Thanks,
Hill and Knowlton. Thanks, NBC.
The
News is supposedly the most important stuff on TV, right? Except for The Simpsons. We generally
believe the news to be truthful and accurate reports of things that really
happened, right? Even if it’s
invariably the worst shit that happened that day, it supposedly really happened, right? But in today’s technological and political
climate of subterfuge, social engineering and deceit, how can we really be sure
of the “reality” of what we see on TV?
Moreover, even if all the stuff that’s given the status of “news” is
true, who in fact decides that it’s news? We could have Pat Robertson to thank, had he had sufficient funds
to buy UPI; a “Christian News Network” would surely provide objective
and unbiased “news”!
Yes,
the social, psychological, and political climates (and perhaps the global
atmospheric climate) of today are indeed quite different from those of the
friendly fifties. Back then you could
hitch-hike safely, knowing that the people who might pick you up weren’t likely
to be gun-toting AIDS-infested child-molesting cannibalistic psychopathic
serial killers who listen to “porn rock” and vote Republican! You didn’t have to worry about stuff like
that back then. But now, in the
Notorious Nineties, you never know who might be an alien lizard-being in
disguise! The Evening News is always reporting heinous atrocities
everywhere: everyone must be fucked!
That’s
why I love to hitch-hike: it’s impossible! It’s dangerous! It’s
insane!
I
don’t know how many miles Jack Kerouac hitch-hiked. It’s not really the quantity of your mileage, but the quality of
the miles, of the places you visit and the people you meet. As of the writing of this article, I have
hitched 91,000 miles since the fall of 1982.
I’ve visited about 35 of the United States, and the southern regions of
Alberta and British Columbia. This
figure is accurate to within about 5%, or about 2,000 miles. I have hitched 0.0098 astronomical units (an
a.u. is the average distance between the Earth and the sun, or approximately 93
million miles), or 0.000000015 light years (a light year is the distance light
travels in one year, or approximately 5.98 trillion miles). At 1990 levels of driving, Americans will
drive one light year from 1990 to 1996.
Until
this past trek two weeks ago, from Athens to Boulder, I had met only one person
in all my miles of hitching who had hitched more miles than me. I think his name was Jim Johnson, from
somewhere in Texas. He had a big van
pulling a large U-haul trailer, and very long ( I mean almost ass-length!)
hair. He was returning from down in a remote
region of Mexico, bringing back a load of dresses; he went around and set up this big tent and sold the dresses at
considerable profit here state-side. He
seemed like a very cool dude with a solid gig which made him a lot of legal
money. Anyway, he said that he had
hitched a little over 100,000 miles, including to Guatemala and back, during
his former days of life on the road.
Then,
two weeks ago, a dude named Jim Buffington gave me a ride part-way across
Atlanta. He’s a mechanic, and was on
his way to pick up a freshly-machined engine head. He told me that he had hitched 250,000 miles in 15 countries over
20 years of hitching, which I believe spanned the 60’s and 70’s. Now, I
know the degree of accuracy of my mileage
figures: I have a scientific mind and
am very honest. I generally believe
most of what people tell me, unless they give me a reason to doubt them. Both of these Jim’s seemed intelligent and
honest, so I take their figures as accurate.
Plus or minus a few thousand, OK?
“Shit!”
I thought, when he related the 250,000 mile figure. I always to hitch the most miles of anyone I knew of! 100,000 looked like an easy mark to
beat; 250,000…I don’t know. By this fall, when I will have been hitching
for 10 years, I will probably have surpassed the six figure mark (especially if
I hitch from Newfoundland to Alaska in July, like I’m planning right
now!); this averages out to around
10,000 miles per year. To hit the
quarter-million mile mark, I’d have to continue at my present rate until the
year 2007. I’ll be 51 then. I guess I could do it. I could also get really serious about my hitching, and actually stay on the road for an
entire year (as it stands now, I’m actually
“on the road” only a few weeks of the year). A typical truck-driver might drive 250,000 miles in one
year. Seriously. Or if I wanted to get really serious, I could take to what is known as air-hitching. Now, I’ve only read about this; but it doesn’t involve standing by a run-way
with your thumb extended! To perform
air-hitching, you go into the terminal at the airport and start asking around about
who’s flying where. This is something
you do in small, private airports, of course.
A friend of mine who’s a psychiatrist said that a lot of medical
supplies are transported by plane, and that those pilots might be good to
approach. Of course, if you were going
to hitch over-seas, you’d have to have all your papers in order, n’est
pas? Damn, by hitching on planes I
could rack some miles fast. Like
several thousand miles in a few hours!
And be stylin’, too! Maybe I
should go for a million! I wonder if I
could hitch to Australia? The
moon? Mars? The Arcturan Star System?
Oz?
But
this is getting off the mark. At no
point have I ever hitch-hiked simply to accrue miles. I hitch to get somewhere, always with a specific destination on
each trek. I am where I am while I am
there, but then, when I get where I’m going, there I am. What I mean is something akin to Ram Dass’
maxim “be here now.” In a logical
sense, this is all you really can do,
unless you undergo spatio-temporal re-location, which is some form of movement
in space and/or time. You can “be there
then” , but not “here” and not “now.”
But you know what I mean! Buckaroo
Bonzai already explained it: “Wherever
you go, there you are.”
Being
very much a "people" person and very into meeting new and unfamiliar
sub-species of homo sapiens, and in
establishing communication with them, has certainly sustained and enhanced my
career in hitch-hiking. If I hated
people or meeting new ones, yet persisted in hitch-hiking as a mode of transportation,
it would surely suck. In a big way.
In
my first article on hitching I mentioned that what it's all about, in addition
to actually getting where you're going, is the people you meet. I would estimate that I have had rides with
at least a couple thousand people over my 91,000 miles. This form of meeting and getting to know
people is vastly more interesting, educational, and varied than the
"encounter" groups of the 70's;
since you are exerting no control whatsoever over who picks you up, the
forces which in our daily lives operate to prevent us from interacting with
people who are radically different from us are attenuated. In other words, we don't usually meet or
interact with people much unlike ourselves:
it's too scary, too unpredictable, too…inconvenient! Most of us live our lives in terms of the
repetition of daily routines, and don't really meet large numbers of new people
as a matter of course anyway.
During
hitch-hiking you are like totally wide-open to the unknown. I mean, not totally: for example, you
can be relatively certain that whoever stops to pick you up will be human. Relatively
certain. But you never know; at least all of my rides to date have looked like humans! And you can be relatively certain that when
you get in the car the "laws of nature" of this part of the galaxy
will still hold. Relatively certain. Of
course, if you're accelerating to velocities approaching the speed of light,
you will experience a slowing of the temporal process, known in Einsteinian
parlance as time dilation. But compared to the statistical
probabilities of everyday life, hitching involves a highly elevated coefficient
of the unknown, for sure.
One
thing that is certain, however, almost as certain as the fact that the vehicle
which picks you up will be burning fossil fuels is that you will encounter an
exceedingly interesting and diverse array of people. So diverse, in fact, that I find it difficult to generalize about
the people who give me rides; except to
say that in general they are all alive and are going somewhere, the one thing
that they have in common is that they are almost all invariably nice people.
Before
I extrapolate on what I mean by "nice", allow me to present some raw
anthropological data on the nature of the people who give me rides and my
encounters with them. My latest trek,
from Athens to Boulder, in late May, was a prime example of the harmony and
diversity of the hitch-hiking experience.
To
head out from Athens, I got my friend Eric to give me a ride out to a good hitching
juncture, about ten miles out of town, the point out past the mall where 78
bifurcates off to the left, and 29 continues on to Winder. The last time I hitched from there was back
in February; I got picked up by a dude,
Hamlin Endicott, a wine salesman whose brother Marcus is a professional
traveller and has a book out entitled Vagabond Globetrotting: State of the Art. Before dropping me at my friend's house in
Atlanta along with a sample of his wares, he took me by his place in order to
give me a copy of his brother's latest book, which is a humorous, fact-filled
guide to alternative travel all over the world.
On
this latest trek I got a ride from this nexus with a dude named Rick
Longenecker, an Atlanta computer specialist who is also involved in putting on
the Phenomicon event (a multi-disciplinary conference of authors/minds
focussing on leading-edge neuro-politics, science fiction, conspiracy theory,
and other anomalies of modern thought).
He recognized me from the Human Rights Festival. Our encounter consisted of an hour-long
brainstorming session on topics ranging from computer technology in art and
music, to Frank Zappa, to the Church of the Subgenius, to the infotoxin
hypothesis, to the agenda of the "new world order." He dropped me on I-85 south, just north of
spaghetti junction, in time to make his last business connection of the day.
I
walked down the on-ramp (this one was particularly long, being a kind of short
access-road, too; of course, even the
shortest ramp can seem interminable when you're carrying over 100lbs. of gear
in 90+ degree heat!) headed toward my favorite hitching spot; the vertex point where the on-ramp meets the
highway. Here, technically, you are on
the ramp, not the road, and you are visible to the passing traffic, as well as
being at a visual apex of the white-lines which define vehicular trajectories
(most of the time!).
I
had been standing there only a few minutes when, yes, a car pulled over. Ah, that moment of joy and gratitudd, the
one whose proximity is as elusive as the hose-beaked fryceratops (tuborhine lysergoceph) or perhaps the
mythical "hide-behind" of Australian folk-lore (it's an animal
resembling a kangaroo which gets behind you…but you can never see it because
it's always able to stay directly behind you, outside your field of vision!)
When you're hitching you constantly have to look over your shoulder, "down
traffic", to see if anyone pulls over.
Failure to respond promptly to a car who pulled over could result in
loss of ride; being the diligent
hitcher, this has never happened to me.
I hauled ass, as I always do, towards the waiting vehicle (and I'm
skinny enough to be able to haul ass in one trip!).
Running
at the pace of a moderate jog with 100+ lbs. of gear can tend to kick one's
ass, even it it's only for a couple hundred feet. I would say that this is the average distance I have to cover on
foot to get to a car. A lot of times,
they are able to stop closer, or sometimes even ahead of me; occasionally people will back up to meet me;
trucks usually end up a quarter-mile or
more (it seems!) down the road because they can't stop very quickly.
I
arrived at the car, breathless. Now,
this is the initial moment of encounter. During this first few seconds of interaction
a tremendous amount of information is exchanged, mostly non-linguistic and
pre-conscious. The person stopping gto
pick me up has already seen me and sized me up, at least for a second or
two; if they're stopping to get me,
it's because they wanted to (and this is certainly the way it is, because when
you're standing out there you are powerless to make someone stop. Of course, you could do stuff like jump into
the on-coming traffic…but this would mark the end of your terrestrial hitch-hiking
experience; or you could flash a
handful of bills with two digits. No
hitch-hiker is likely to have that kind of money…but if you did flash it, even
someone going over a hundred miles per
hour would see it, down to the serial number, because when it comes to
the human response to money, many of the normal laws of nature, reality, and
everything go awry as the psyche becomes affected by strange attractors at the
quantum level! Or if you're a female
person you could lift your skirt and/or show your breasts in the manner of
Cicciolina, the blonde sex-goddess from Budapest who was recently elected to
the Italian parliament. Seriously. But I prefer to stand there in proper
stance, like a good hitch-hiker (once I even got a ride because the dude said I
had good posture!); doing any of these
things to try to get someone to stop could easily lead to one or more of the
undesirable outcomes people always associate with hitch-hiking!).
During
the moment of encounter I am simultaneously doing such things as reading the
basic personality characteristics and sensing the overall vibrational aura of
the driver, looking around inside the vehicle for signs of trouble (empty
alcohol containers, weapons, unusually large quantities of garbage,
unidentified viscous substances on the floor, venomous reptiles, syringes,
containers of radio-active waste, or hidden passengers) noticing smells, and
talking to him/her (usually a "him" but not always), often beginning
with "Hey, how's it going? Where ya headed to?" followed by "Hey
man, thanks a lot for stopping!"
And I mean it, too. All this is
taking place while I am loading my gear into the car. I have only turned down rides a few times, usually because they
were only going a mile or two or because the vehicle was filled with
people. Once I turned down a ride
because the dude wouldn't tell me where he was going. I mean, a hitch-hiker without a destination is bad, but a driver
without one is worse because he'll get there a lot sooner! The most potentially "interesting"
ride I ever turned down was a few years ago, as I was hitching along I-40
somewhere west of Oklahoma City. I was
walking along, not even hitching. This
old van pulled over with several fairly disturbed-looking individuals
inside. They looked like worn-out road
junkies, not all that old, but pretty fucking beat! They all had this really kind of hungry look…I don't mean for food…but hungry for something!
Detection of this vibe within about 150 milliseconds of seeing them
iinstantly defined my response:
"Thanks for stopping, but you really don't have room." I don't think they were rabies-infected
Republicannibals; they just wanted some
more shit to shoot up! So anyway, I continued walking down the
road. Then they pulled up next to me
again. "Hey, if you've got some money, we'll make some room for
you…" They didn't quite get it,
did they? I was too nice to tell them
that I hitch for fun and adventure, not out of desperation and lack of
alternatives, and that I wasn't about to get into a van loaded with homo sapiens road-kill. As well, they didn't realize that asking me
if I had any money wasn’t exactly going to
encourage me to join their merry band of junksters; in fact, I've had a small number of people to
pull over and ask me if I had any money, and then keep on going when I answered
them, honestly, that I didn't…but I was glad.
Who would want to ride with someone driving a car with no money? "Hey buddy…that sure is a nice camera ya got there…" These guys must've really wanted to help me
out, though, because then the driver leaned over to talk to me, in front of the
chick in the passenger seat, who apparently had been not unattractive in the
not-too-distant-past, but who now resembled William S. Burroughs' retarded
step-daughter before she went into rehab!
"Hey, we can stop and get some money…she gives good blood!" They were serious! The implications of this statement made me
kind of cringe. I said "No, but
thanks anyway" and kept on walking, hoping they would drive on and leave
me alone. They did. I wasn't afraid of them; they didn't seem violent or aggressive (they
must've been on that smack!) But for some reason I didn't want to become
a part of that happy group of fellow travellers!
Anyway,
back to the ride at hand. This guy's
name was Jim Buffington. He's a
mechanic in Atlanta and was on his way to pick up a freshly machined engine
head for a job he was doing. He was
maybe around 50. He was a damn cool
dude. He's the one I mentioned earlier
who said he'd hitch-hiked a quarter-million
miles in 15 countries! A lot of his
hitching strategies revolved around wearing the proper clothes, contrasting
what he would wear while hitching in Europe as opposed to what proper dress
code would be for hitching in the States.
I wear what I always wear: jeans
and a t-shirt in summer, add cold-weather gear if it's cold. Fairly clean clothes, nothing fancy. That's one of the three basic
"do's" of hitching which I formulated in my 1984 article (the other
two are "Have a back-pack" and "Make a clear, legible
sign."). Being interested in
alternative fuels for the post-fossil-fuel age, I asked him what he knew about
propane as a fuel for the internal combustion engine. Not to my surprise, because he seemed like an in-tune dude on top
of his profession, he knew quite a bit about it. Of course, he didn't think there was anything better than
gasoline for commercial use (from the perspective of the non-ecologically
minded mechanic, I'm sure this is true);
the major drawback from using propane is what is known as valve-seat recession. I forget the precise mechanism of action of
this process, but it results in having to get your valves retooled more often
than you normally would. But overall,
he only strengthened my case for propane, by verifying the positive things I've
learned. While conversing about
placement of fuel tanks, he related that he had welded a full tank of gas
before. He said the dude who owned the
car insisted on going into the building across the street while he did it! Jim was a damn good dude, and he told me
that he could do the propane conversion thing if I ever needed it done. He dropped me at a good hitching spot where
Clairmont Road crosses 85.
The
spot was good, but it now looked like it was going to start pouring down rain
at any instant! I was probably an hour
before sunset, but really dark due to the thunder clouds. This brings us to another prime variable of
the hitch-hiking experience: the
weather.
Like
getting a ride while hitch-hiking,
the weather is outside the domain of our immediate control. More than even the 'software of the
atmosphere', the weather is dynamic and alive, expressions of the living forces
of Gaia. If you're an atmospheric
scientist or meteorologist, however, the weather consists of contiuously
changing patterns of chemical and thermodynamic non-equilibrium interaction,
solar-driven matter/energy transductions between land and sky, ocean and cloud,
liquid and gas. A clear, beautiful day
has less 'weather' than a day of violent thunderstorms, hurricanes, tornadoes,
cyclones, and microbursts: weather is
in a sense the events of the
atmosphere.
To the American Indians and other indigenous, aboriginal
peoples of all continents, the forces of the atmosphere have always been
regarded as entities, beings, or deities with whom humans coexist; and a significant part of the spiritual life
of these peoples centers on maintaining harmonious relationships with these
forces.
I
feel the Earth, the atmosphere and its weather and the whole of nature,
including the mountains and minerals as well as the florae and faunae, to be
vastly alive. I have come to experience
Gaia as a consciousness, a web of life that connects everyone and everything on
the planet. When I am out in nature,
and particularly when I am hitch-hiking, I feel especially close to her.
In
terms of the weather, I usually seem to be in the right place at the right
time. I carry very little rain
gear; when it's warm it's fun being out
in the rain. But I carry a significant
amount of stuff (writings, for example) that could be damaged by water; plus water-logged gear weighs a lot more
than dry! Normally, given that I have
the choice, I tend to stay where I am if the weather is 'bad.' This might mean staying an extra day at
someone's house, or at least waiting for a break in the 'weather.'
If
I do find myself standing by the roadside beneath threatening clouds, while
recognizing that that storm spirits are my allies, I might also scope out where
I could go if the bottom drops out.
This would usually be somewhere like an over-pass bridge or a restaurant
within walking distance. You never know
when a storm spirit ally might want to douse you for fun! Plus, I could always pull out the rain fly
from my tent to stay dry if I really needed it.
Anyway,
I was standing there at Clairmont Road and I-85 south beneath a dark
thunder-head. My destination for the
day was just over a little beyond Six Flags, to my sister's house in
Winston. I figured that two more rides
would be all I'd need: one down I-20
West, and one out to the Douglasville exit.
But it was pretty dark, because of the clouds, even though another hour
of daylight remained; I knew that if I
had to walk up the on-ramp to get out of the (possible) rain, it might get dark
on me. This is another factor in
hitching; I rarely hitch after dark,
unless I really want to expedite my arrival to where I'm going. And even then, I only hitch from well-lit
ramps, which this one wasn't.
I
wasn't exactly stressing, just hoping for someone to stop. All of a sudden a pick-up pulled over. It was loaded with gear for house
painting. And he had a shit-load of
furnace filters up front. This was Doug
Sikes. He was on his way home up to
Marietta. He was a damn good dude. About five minutes after he picked me up the
rain started. It was pouring down
pretty hard, and my gear was in the back;
but we were moving fast enough that it didn't matter. Until we hit the traffic going to the
Brave's game! But by then the rain
slacked off somewhat. He fired up a
joint and we got a nice buzz as we conversed about all kinds of cool shit. He was basically headed over to get on 75
North when he got me, but went out of his way not only to take me over to where
20 West and 285 meet, but even further, all the way to the third Douglasville
exit, to within five miles of my sister's house! Then he bought me a drink before heading up to Marietta. An excellent person.
My
sister Susan and her two-and-a-half-year-old son Tyler came and got me. We watched the giant orange solar disc
setting as we headed for the house. I
spent two days with them, watching Leonard Nimoy's "In Search Of"
with her husband Dave (this particular episode was called 'The Sun Worshippers'
and was about the end of the fossil fuel age, alternative fuels, and solar
energy. Fascinating, Captain.) Watching Tyler pitch the classic
"terrible two's" fit at Po' Folks, and doing hand-painted t-shirts
with her daughter Lindsay, who's six.
My niece. "Uncle
Jeff." I hate being called that.
It's not that it makes me feel old
or anything (I mean, I just turned 36 but most people think I'm about 27); it's just that I'm the only one in the
family who has two names. There's
well…
My
sister is the normal one of my
parents' two children; I am, of course,
the mutation. But we get along pretty
well. As she was preparing to take me
out to the highway when I was leaving, she told me that I must have an
"excess of guardian angels" because I rarely get sick, don't have any
allergies, and always have good rides hitching. I have always felt that a lot of beings are watching out for me,
but certainly I don't have an "excess" of assistance!
Susan
drove me out to Carrollton after work (she's a speech and communications
therapist), leaving me in the warm glow of a North Georgia late spring
afternoon, on the threshold of Memorial Day weekend. One of the things I really enjoy about hitch-hiking is being able
to spend time alone out in nature; if
you're along a highway kind of away from a city, and there's not much traffic,
it's pretty nice to be there. As long
as you're not there for too long. And
it's not sub-zero temperatures! I have
developed a kind of sensibility about how long it's taking me to get a
ride. A lot of times, if it seems like
a ride is long in coming, this means that the next ride will more than likely
be really good.
I
would estimate that I waited maybe 45 minutes.
Now, this is probably about average for the duration of a wait, maybe a
little long but not by a lot; two hours
would be really long! A truck pulled
over but then kept on going. This
happens occasionally. I know I get
talked about on CB's sometimes; I'd
like to hear what is actually said!
Most of it is just passing the word that "Rodger Dodger, ya gotta
hitch-hiker about eight miles southbound." Some of them might think I was a girl if they saw me from behind,
because of my hair.
Anyway,
a big yellow Ryder truck, probably the largest size they make, pulls over in
front of me. This means I was spotted
from a distance and that a speedy decision was made. He was pulling a trailer with a car on it, too. Charlie Gallion. He was going to Dallas.
Dallas? Yeah, in Texas. Around 800 miles! He was also a fellow North Carolinian, from Greensboro, close to
where I grew up. Excellent! He was moving in with his new girlfriend,
who was paying for everything, including the move! I saw a picture of her: a
real honey! He was kind of in a hurry
to get there (I wonder why!?); those
rental trucks have governors which prevent their being driven at over 65
mph. This is probably very sound
thinking. I drove for several hours
throughout the night, and we got to Dallas just before rush hour. In order to help me get through the
metropolitan area, Charlie drove me about 25 miles north, towards Denton (home
of NTU and where Heather, the blonde run-away chick from LA and I partied with
some frat people on the Fourth of July in 1987!). Another damn good dude!
Where
he dropped me was a sort of non-descript quasi-industrial/suburban area. I walked
along the side road for about a quarter-mile, to get on the nearest
on-ramp. Right over beside me was a
large grove of beautiful trees, oaks maybe.
I stood hitching for a few minutes;
but the trees were drawing me near…I had to find out why. Those gentle voices I hear…explained it all
in a sigh! I walked over and sat at a
picnic table for a few minutes. I
cannot explain the mystical feeling I had in that grove, but it was somehow
connected to the spirit of nature as a whole, and to the Indians who lived
there not all that long ago. Their
presence is alive even now, to those who can perceive it. I feel that it is this force or
consciousness that puts me in the right place at the right time and connects me
with the right people. After changing
into long pants and looking at my road atlas (a customized, water-proofed 1984
Rand McNally), I felt it was time to get back onto the highway.
After
a very short span of time, only five to ten minutes, a car pulled over. Paul
Jones, from Aubrey, very close to Denton.
He had been doing some house-painting, but was on his way home. He was very into the Indians who had once
lived in this area, and spent a lot of time out by the streams collecting
various kinds of arrow-heads. He was a
very spiritual person. He drove me up
to the north edge of town. We went into
a convenience store and he bought me a bar-b-que sandwich. We sat and talked for a while. He drew me some pictures of the kinds of
arrowheads that were likely to be found in this area: Washita, from around 500 A.D;
Fresno; Clovis, from around
10,000 B.C; and the Adenz, from around
6,000 B.C. Then he had to split because
of a court date: he had recently got
busted for growing that evil narcotic devil-weed hemp! When I go back through that area he's going
to take me arrowhead hunting. Yet
another damn good dude!
I
sat in the store a while, waiting for a break in the drizzle. I felt surrounded
by an aura of intensely positive spiritual vibes. It was that living Indian nature energy. When the rain stopped, I walked up the side
road and onto the on-ramp. A car pulled
over before I even got onto the highway.
This was Matthew Tresp, from Whitesboro, about 30 miles up the road. He had seen me in the store. He had just got off work but was kind of
fooling around for a while before heading to the house, the wife and kids. We drove through the rain, which was
moderate. He offered to take me on into
Oklahoma, which was more than a few miles.
Just as we were reaching the exit where he had to turn around and go
back, the rain had diminished to naught!
Standing
there amid the lush grassy plains of southern Oklahoma, I felt totally at one
with the land, the surrounding area, the spirits of the Indians who used to
live here, the herds of mightly buffalo.
I felt totally at peace with everything. I realized that I was at the southern end of what is known as
"tornado alley", a region several hundred miles wide which extends
from central Texas up through the Great Lakes area and into Canada. Although the sky was overcast, I did not
perceive any serious storm precursors.
By this time I was beginning to feel pretty beat, after driving all
through the night with Charlie Gallion.
I decided that if I didn't get a ride fairly quickly, that I would go
down into the field next to me, pitch my tent, and catch a few z's. It was only around 10a.m. I was running well ahead of
"schedule" (not that you can have an actual schedule when you're hitching, but I know how I'm doing compared to
previous experience; the scale of
comparison is based on what driving time
would be, which I compute at 65 mph plus stopping time for food and fuel…this
is about the fastest you can do the ground-travel thing, and to do this well at distances of over 1500
miles or so requires more than one driver), and could afford to take a break if
need be.
But
after no more than 20 minutes a car pulled over. Neal Brown. He had been
living down in Mexico City for the past month, and was on his way to meet his
business partner, Les Powers, up at a place called Bob's Pig Shop in Paul's
Valley. They represent musicians of
different kinds and as a team function as a sort of regional, smaller-scale
Bill Graham Productions of southern "tornado alley" country
musicians. We arrived in Paul's Valley,
OK. This was early afternoon on the Friday
of Memorial Day weekend. By now I was
feeling like a brain-dead zombie; Neal
suggested that I crash out in his car while they had their "business"
meeting, then come in and join them later.
When I laid down I instantly zoned into a hyper-rem space; my degree of fatigue forced me to sleep, but
my innate wariness of being on the front seat of the car of someone I'd just
met less than an hour ago, and in a town I knew nothing about prevented the
sleep from being very deep.
I
remained in this state of semi-sleep (I'm not sure exactly what kinds of
brain-waves I was generating…from the dreams I was having, they must've been a
full-spectrum combination of gamma, zeta, lambda, and pi!) for one or two hours of real time (this is
one of those commonly-used scientific expressions that I could digress on for
aeons!). The Neal came out and got
me. I went into the bar and joined him
and his friend Les. We started in on
drinking some Budweisers and eating bar-b-que and tamales and exchanging
stories about hitch-hiking, country music, life in Mexico city, and
chicks. Primarily the latter. We were also scoping out all the female
resources which passed through. Did you
know that in Texas, if a girl is old enough to go to the store, she's old
enough to get bred? HaHa!!! Seriously.
What age would that be, 12? I
guess it depends on if the store is close enough to walk to, or if she has to
drive, in which case it would be 16.
"I heard that." That's
another colloquial Texanism I learned.
We
drank quite a few Buds and exchanged quite a few tales. From what Neal was relating, life in Mexico
City is pretty damned cool. I wouldn't
mind checking it out some time. Neal
sounded like he was planning to spend a lot of time there. By now it was around 5 p.m., and we had to
be on our ways. Neal had to return
south into Texas, and Les was returning north up to Oklahoma City. I loaded my gear into Les's car as he
donated some hemp-based pharmaceuticals to Neal's cause. Then we were on our way, up I-35.
We
burned one after we got on the interstate;
after a while, my road fatigue set in again, and I started nodding
off. By the time we got to OKC I still
had plenty of time to catch a ride, and Les was going to drop me over on the
west side of town; but then he said I
could come and crash at his house as long as I didn't slit his throat in the
middle of the night. I said I wouldn't,
as long as he didn't try to fuck me up the ass or anything like that!
By
the time we got to his house in a nice suburban part of OKC I didn't feel
sleepy anymore. Les's girlfriend and
her kids came over, as well as his friend Mike. Like myself, Mike and Les design t-shirts. I showed them my line
of designs, and they showed me some of theirs.
I played them some music they hadn't heard before (that's partly why my
back-pack weighs so much…I typically carry 10-12 cd's and maybe 80 cassettes!),
including my friends The Samples from
Boulder, and some William Orbit (his "Strange Cargo" disc has been my
favorite music of the past year). We drank
a few Corona's, consumed some more cannabis, and acted silly with the kids.
It
was at this point that I got to hear the infamous "Ass-whippin' "
tape. I can't remember how they got
this tape, but it's by this dude back in Tennessee somewhere. I don't know his real name, but on this tape
he uses three aliases: Bill Morgan, Roy
Mullins, and Leroy Mercer. What he does
is to call up a store, like an automotive supply or a shoe store, and he tells
them that he recently bought something from them but that it fucked up somehow,
and now he wants a new one of whatever it was, and sometimes more. Supposedly he is a "sophisticated
businessman", according to Les;
but he speaks in the quintessential American redneck dialect. It sounds real enough to me. He's outrageously antagonistic to the store
peope, and makes incredible and unrealistic demands; but he begins with premises that are so outlandish that anyone
who even talks to him for long has to have patience on the order of infinite,
and/or have an acute lack of intelligence.
The funniest parts are when the store people disagree with him or say
they won't fulfil his demands, and he says,"Well, somebody's ass could get whipped over this…" See, that's why they call it the
"ass-whippin'" tape. Get it?
The
evening was deepening, and I felt the land of nod tugging at my
brainwaves. I slept very soundly on
Les's sofa, awakening once in the middle of the night to a stressful scene in
some late-night science fiction movie.
Over the last few years I have grown quite accustomed to sleeping on
sofas. Regardless of their length or
density, I can always manage to obtain some form of decent rest. The next day was Saturday of Memorial Day
weekend. Les had a lot of stuff to do,
so we took off around noon. The day was
damp and overcast, but tranquil. He
drove me out past Yukon (a tiny suburb of Oklahoma City…my only previous
experience there was when I was hitching through in the winter of '90…somehow I
was there after dark with no ride and it was colder than fuck…a waitress from a
restaurant where I had eaten and her boyfriend took me to what had used to be a
motel but was not a shelter of sorts for people on the road who needed a place
for a night…but they wouldn't let me stay there, however, because I was guess what
…a single male! So they drove me to a
truck-stop down the highway) and dropped me at a Love's (a kind of truck
stop/convenience store found throughout the Midwest). I asked Les if he'd mind giving me a dollar or two for some
coffee. I still had two sweet
roll/pastry-type things that Paul Jones had given me back down in Denton,
TX. I knew they were probably still
edible because I've always heard that the shelf-life of a Twinkie is 9.2 years; I've yet to test this figure. I also remembering that Twinkies aren’t
actually cooked, but that they just sort of rise
to the occasion! Les said "No
problem", and added that since I might be an angel, he had better help me
out! I felt surrounded by a powerful
aura of good vibes. "May the force
be with you" I said as I got out of his car. Was he an angel?
A
little ways before we turned off I-40 to cross over to the Love's we saw a
hitch-hiker walking down the highway.
He was a dude maybe ten years older than me, with a long, scraggly
beard, standard "road attire" (dark, somewhat soiled clothes with a
jacket bearing the emblem of an oil company, and matching hat), and an
Army-surplus duffle bag with a large reusable coffee mug dangling from it. I mean, I didn't register all this
information until I talked to him in the Love's. All I noticed when I first saw him walking was that he resembled
the typical hitch-hiker that people see and go "Ooh, I'd never let that
guy close to my car…", and the fact that he was hauling ass on foot.
I
was sitting at a table, drinking my coffee, eating my sausage biscuit and
welll-preserved pastry, looking at my road atlas and enjoying the good vibes of
being in the middle of an excellent trip.
I was taking my time, waiting for the drizzle to subside, reflecting on
the excellent "luck" I'd been having so far. Then this dude comes in, the one I'd just
seen walking down the road. He sits
down in the booth behind me. Two of the
guys who worked there were sitting across from me; observing their response to him was interesting. They knew that I, too, was a
hitch-hiker; they could see my sign and
my back-pack outside. But their
response to me was somewhat different.
They saw me as someone at the very least "on their
level," someone with whom they
could communicate; I could tell that
they saw him as somewhat sketchy.
I
think that most people I know would've seen this guy as sketchy. Regardless of whether he was hitch-hiking or not. He had a kind of wild, unkempt look. Like he might be kind of…yes, crazy! Now, this is a topic on which I could
digress at great length: the relativity
of the concept of "sanity."
To some people, anyone who hitch-hikes today is obviously insane; this
would be something that would constitute the very definition of "insane."
But people can tell from talking to me that, although I might be a
little crazy in a positive sense, I am not only not insane but that I am
probably a good deal saner than most people.
I know plenty of people who would argue this; my point is that I actually am fairly normal (another topic of digression) and am perceived as such by
most people.
But
this other hitch-hiker may easily have been perceived as a wing-nut by many
people. I could tell from talking to
him and from looking into his eyes, however, that he was not insane, not mean
or crazy or someone to be afraid of. In
fact, he seemed like a pretty damned good dude. He did seem a little lost, and by his appearance he definitely
didn't "fit in" with the status quo.
Like myself, he didn't have much money.
He was drinking some coffee, and I offered him one of my donor
Twinkies. He was really glad to have
it, saying that he hadn't eaten in a couple days. His name was Chris; he
didn't have a specific destination, but was looking for some work harvesting
wheat.
I
felt a great deal of compassion for this man.
He seemed like an innocent soul that had been wounded by having to exist
in the disease of human society today;
we didn't talk all that much, but we probably share an equally profound
disdain for much of what motivates people today. He seemed like essentially a country person, which I, too,
am. He looked at my atlas, and
complained about not getting rides. I
suggested that he formulate a destination and make a sign.
After
a while, the drizzle abated. He left
before me. By the time I hit the
on-ramp, he was gone. I wonder on
occasion where he finally ended up; of
if he’s still walking the interstates of southern “tornado alley”, waiting for
that certain ride that will take him where he wants to go. Maybe he
was an angel…in search of harvestable wheat.
I
walked out across the interstate bridge and down the on-ramp to the edge of the
west-bound traffic. After a little
while a guy pulled over. Jay. Something or other. He was only going about 10-15 miles; sometimes short rides can be good in that
they can reposition you into a more suitable location. Where I was was fine, but I went
anyway. The difference between walking
five miles with a hundred-pound pack and being driven five miles is
significant, to say the least. This
ride was one of those rare instances of encountering
the pervert. This dude wasn’t
seriously twisted, not as far as I could tell, anyway; but after a few miles he started rubbing his
pud. He seemed like an elementary
school teacher who might go after young boys.
I could easily envision him doing it, plus I could sense the vibe. At least he didn’t pull it out of his pants. At that, I would’ve been forced to be let
out. Luckily, this has never
happened. I can always tell before they
ask me “the big question! But this dude
just started in on a’strokin’ while we were in the middle of a conversation
about New Zealand. This dichotomous
situation had an interesting effect on my mind; on the mental level, I was interested in the information he was
relating. But on the gut, instinctual
level, I was recoiling. I mean, he
wasn’t really going at it like he was serious;
he seemed unsure of how far he was going. I started wondering how much this depended on me; I also kept willing him to stop it, beaming
my strongest telepathic laser beams at him.
Finally a sense of relief: we
had reached his exit. Just as we were
pulling over, he said “Do you mind if I ask you a question?” I instantly replied “Don’t even
bother.” I politely thanked him for the
ride, and left him with my official motto of the 90’s: “Don’t fuck up, because fucking down is more
gravitationally efficient.” Then he was
on his merry way.
I
looked around. The middle of
nowhere. No stores, not even a service
station at this exit. The clouds
weren’t really dark, but it did look like it could raining. I wondered if I shouldn’t have stayed back
where I was. But I felt really good
vibes all around. A moderate cross-wind
was blowing out of the north; it kept
my hair in my face as I looked into the on-coming traffic. I had just got my hair cut before I left
Athens, so I wasn’t looking quite as wild as I usually do. I had on my blue and purple pull-over from
Australia that I got in Crested Butte back in March; if has aborigine-esque images on it. I felt at one with everything. I was expecting to be there for a
while.
It’s
hard to describe the state I go into when I’m actually in the act of hitching,
standing there by the road-side with my thumb out. If I’m unstressed and everything is taken care of, I think that
my mind kind of expands out into a larger domain. At this particular time I was quite content to be there, maybe
just a little anxious to be picked up, because of the possibility of rain. But I was very happy.
Once
when I was hitching down from Murfreesboro, Tennessee two summers ago I had the
experience of kind of seeing all the way up the highway for quite a long
distance. I didn’t exactly see over
this distance in a visual sense; it was
more like a sort of nerve impulse that seemed to travel out from me and up the
road at very high velocity. I was in a
kind of altered state; I had a two-day
mid-summer cold virus, and had just ingested a dose of this stuff called
Thera-flu. This day was warm but rainy. The nerve impulse thing is something that I
noticed more later on than at the time it occurred. I don’t know the purpose it may have had; I certainly didn’t will it to go out. It reminded me of something out of Carlos
Castaneda crossed with the aboriginal “dream-time” continuum. Anyway, standing there in Oklahoma that day,
I felt a similar connection. To
something I am a part of, yet which is infinitely vaster than me. That is aware of me and watches over me.
After
not very long, I looked up and saw a tractor-trailer pulling over in front of
me. I had been immersed in thought and
failed to notice if he came off the on-ramp I was at the end of, or if he was
coming down the highway. I wasn’t
positive that he had stopped for me;
but when I saw him getting out and opening the passenger door, I knew I
had a ride.
Jim
Gwinn is probably the nicest truck-driver I’ve ever met, maybe even one of the
nicest people I’ve ever met. Plus, he
gave me one of the best rides I’ve ever had.
It was one of the top ten I’ve ever had in terms of length: over 1,000 miles, from just west of Oklahoma
City all the way to Denver; and it was
one of the top five in terms of the good vibes and quality of camaraderie we
shared.
We
travelled all through the night, cutting up from Amarillo across northeast New
Mexico, and stopping to sleep in southeast Colorado. The force was with us as we talked at length about the state of
the world and the hidden agenda of the “new world order”; Jim related his intuition that a lot of people
in America were getting really fed up with the overall scenario of economic
oppression and corruption in leadership.
I shared information I had gleaned from my college town friends and my
network of “intelligentsia” cohorts. We
agreed that a higher force exists, one who is powerful and benevolent. We cruised beneath bridges whose clearance
was two inches lower than the height of
his truck!
At
sunrise on Sunday I awoke to the electric cobalt blue of the Colorado sky,
after a few hours of attempted sleep on the floor of the cab, entwined with my
back-pack and the gear-shift lever. Jim
awakened shortly, and we had breakfast in the restaurant in whose lot we had
parked.
I
will never forget the faces of his two grand-daughters. He had pictures of them in his wallet. They both looked exactly like little angels
who were looking up at someone or something really brilliant. All of his family, wife, daughters, and
sons, and their husbands and wives, looked like extremely nice and spiritual
people. I felt blessed.
Jim
dropped me in Denver at Colfax Avenue (the longest street in America, being
over 30 miles long), a central thoroughfare of the Mile High City and the
Banking Capital of the West (as well as “air pollution capital of the
Rockies”). This put me to within about
a quarter-mile walk of the RTD, which in turn I rode up to Boulder. I left him with the “Oklahoma is Twister
Country” t-shirt that Les had given me.
Jim continued on I-70 east back up to the metropolis of Brush, to visit
his sister, as he had a day off. We had
spent about 22 hours together on the road.
I arrived in Boulder around
1:30pm. I had left Carrollton, GA
approximately 67 hours earlier;
subtracting the time I spent hanging out with Neal and Les in Oklahoma,
my trip took about 47 hours.
This
trip put me over the 91,000 mile mark of hitch-hiking. I remained in Boulder for around two weeks,
assembling visual information for the upcoming tour I was to do with a local
band, Midnight Kitchen. We left on June 9 to do a tour of New
England. I did gigs with them in
Chicago, and at the Wetlands in New York City, where they opened for an Athens
band, Allgood. I did get to “drop some NYC” for the first
time; I got to see Manhatten and
experience a full moon with lunar eclipse on my birthday. Due to assorted personality conflicts with
some of the band members, my intolerance of their stupidity and idiocy, and the
fact that I wasn’t getting paid, I terminated the tour and returned to Athens
in mid-June, where I have been until now, July 7. I have been doing a lot of writing and research, particularly on
the psychology of mass-media and the “conspiracy behind conspiracy
theories.” In NYC I by chance met with
the senior vice-president of Hill&Knowlton, the world’s largest public
relations firm; and upon returning to
Athens, I met with a former CBS news correspondent who teaches broadcast
journalism and is working to start a
college cable news network based out of UGa.
But all this is another story entirely.
Well, not entirely…but another
story!
In
my first article on hitching in 1984 I observed that the Jungian phenomenon of synchronicity is a fundamental aspect
of the hitch-hiking experience.
Synchronicity, together with uncertainty, movement, and encounter,
constitute the four-fold transform operators which are the basic substrate not
only of hitching, but of life itself;
hitch-hiking makes these phenomena more salient and brings them into
sharp focus.
Synchronicity
is essentially the temporal conjunction, or simultaneity,
of two or more events which are causally unrelated but whose coincidence is
meaningful to the person experiencing them.
If a June-bug flies in your hair one day and you dreamed that this
happened the night before, this would be a synchronistic phenomenon to you; but to anyone else, it would be a “random”,
or less meaningful event (it wouldn’t be meaningless
because it would still mean that a June-bug flew into your hair!).
My
hitch-hiking excursions are laden with positive synchronistic
improbabilities; to me, this is
evidence of a higher intelligence at work.
Dr. John C. Lilly, whose dolphin communication group I worked with for a
while in California in the early 80’s, even refers to “God”, in this domain of
the universe, as the “Earth Coincidence Control Office”, or ECCO.
Someone who can control
coincidences would surely be pretty high up there!
This
last trip from Athens to Boulder contained a number of synchronicities on
different levels. First, the fact that
Rick Longenecker recognized me from the Human Rights Festival, and that we are
both really interested not only in the psychodynamics of the emerging
socio-political “order” but also in computer applications in art, music, and
multik-media performance/presentations.
Then,
that Jim Buffington had himself hitched a lot more than me, plus the fact that
he knew all about the use of propane as a fuel, and could even do the
installation himself. This is something
that had been on my mind quite a bit; I
had been wondering who to talk to about actually getting conversions done. Even though I thoroughly enjoy hitch-hiking,
I would still like to get another vehicle, for certain practical reasons, like
the transportation of musical and visual hardware…but I promised myself that I
wouldn’t get another vehicle until I could get one that didn’t burn gasoline
exclusively.
Then
there’s the weather synchronization.
Getting picked up by Doug just minutes before the bottom dropped out,
and his being nice enough to got out of his way to take me beyond the rain and
close to my sister’s house. And Matthew
Tresp taking me extra miles to beyond the edge of the rain-fall.
At
my sister’s house, when I was watching TV with her husband, Dave, and “In
Search Of” was all about alternative energy sources, a topic of major concern
to me (and to every other living being on Earth!). I even took notes on this show, jotting down the names and
companies of many of the people Nimoy interviewed.
Then
the next day, when my sister dropped me off in Carrollton, Charlie Gallion
picked me up. That morning he had just
left from the exact area in North Carolina where my folks live, Concord, the
basic area where I lived for over 20 years of my life.
Paul
Jones being the amateur archaeologist interested in Indian artefacts and
attuned to the nature spirit-energy which is the fabric that connects all
living things, taking the time to draw arrowheads for me, and offering to take
me out by the rivers where they used to live.
Neal
Brown being into the music scene, and a fellow partyer; Les Powers being into the music scene, and a
fellow partyer and t-shirt artist/entrepreneur. And having a shirt with a tornado on it: I’ve never actually seen a real tornado, but
they are probably the single most recurring theme in all the dreams I’ve ever
had.
Even
Gay Jay stroking his pud had some interesting things to relate about New
Zealand; I’ve been wanting to go to
Australia and New Zealand for several years, to visit the aboriginal shamans.
And
“farmer Jim”, one of the nicest people I’ve ever met on the road, taking me all
the way to Denver, and having grand-daughters who look like little angels; their pictures spoke to me that Sunday
morning in a way that I will never forget.
A higher presence was beaming down on us.
This
is a partial list of the more significant synchronicities of my last trek. To someone who has never hitch-hiked or been
alone on the road, these connections may not seem very impressive or even
noteworthy. But when you think of the
endless array of possibilities of who could
pick you up, of what could happen, of
how unsafe and impossible hitch-hiking in the Notorious Nineties is, just how
improbable is it for me to meet only
really nice people, many of whom have useful and relevant information or
stories to relate, and who go out of their way to be nice to me?
The
good luck I experience on the road is evidence to me that the world is
basically a much friendlier place than most people would like to believe, and
that a higher power does indeed exist, one who watches over and cares for
people who are living in tune with the matrix of life and who are working to
bring the human race back into harmony with the forces of the cosmos we have
always been an integral part of.
In
this document I have begun what I hope to be a book about my hitch-hiking and
travel experiences. I have many more
stories to tell from previous trips, many more insights to share and theories
to relate concerning the cosmological and psychological dimensions of living in
a quantum-relativistic/participant-observer omniverse. Within two days of the completion of this
essay I will be headed out once again for Colorado, hitch-hiking probably along
the same route as on this trip. Depending
on the rides I get, I am planning this time to come up through central New Mexico
so that I can visit some friends in Santa Fe and also visit the San Cristobal
site, an unexcavated Anasazi pueblo in the Galisteo basin about 30 miles north
of Clines Corner. This is one of the
most magical places I have ever visited;
it feels like a window opening out into an entire other universe of
unknown but friendly forces.
From
there I will return to Boulder for a few days, to work on some art. Highway 285 from Santa Fe to Denver is one
of the most beautiful drives I have ever been on. You have the Rockies to the west and the Sangre de Christo’s to
the east; both are over 14,000 feet
most of the way up. This route also
takes you right by the Great Sand Dunes national monument in southern Colorado,
one of my favourite spots anywhere.
After
Boulder I am planning to hitch up through northern New England to Maine, then
over to Newfoundland, then to return westward, hitching across southern Canada
all the way over to Alaska. This trek
will put me over the 100,000 mile mark.
After this, I’ll be ready to hitch on a continent other than North
America! I think Australia will be
next, but probably not until next year.
I have some visiting and business to do in California first.
I
highly recommend hitch-hiking for anyone who is feeling bored with their life,
who is suffering from chronic ennui and/or lack of appreciation for all the
things you take for granted in your normal life. Hitching kicks the ass of any sloth or malaise; it puts you into sharp focus through
interfacing you with the real world
(by definition, “the domain of possibility in which stuff you don’t like or
can’t predict can happen.”) Hitching is
the polar opposite of sitting home watching television, vegging to election
year rhetoric, public relations propaganda, consumption persuasion and mindless
mediocrity.
Theoretically,
you can go anywhere and do anything. Even if you don’t have much money or own a vehicle. The people who give you rides are already
going that way anyway, and I’ve yet to have a ride from anyone who expected me
to have more than a few dollars. People
are nice; you won’t starve to
death. You can always find some place
you want to go…Oregon, British Columbia, Idaho, Alaska, Maine…get there, find
some work, meet some people. Get a new
life.
As
far as you know, this is the only life you will ever have, so make something of
it instead of sitting around worrying about stupid shit and complaining about
how fucked up things are. Get out and
see beautiful North America before we destroy it all! Hitching is economical fuel-wise, too…when someone picks you up,
they instantly double their people-miles per gallon. You can even help them pay for it if you want!
Remember: you are traveling through both time and
space even while you are sitting still.
By the way, our solar system is moving toward a point in the
constellation Hercules, directly overhead in the summer sky. If you happen to see me in the vicinity of
the Arcturan Star System with my thumb out…how about a ride?
Yes,
I do use my thumb when performing road-side solicitation of relocation
assistance! When I’m standing at the
highway/on-ramp vertex, my right thumb becomes a sign, a symbol, an instrument,
an antenna, and a friend in this travel-oriented art, science, adventure and
exercise in interpersonal encounter and relinquishment of total control over
the immediate aspects of my situation, otherwise known as hitch-hiking!
In
the immortal words of J. Paul Serengeti:
“The only thing that’s faster than
light is simultaneity.”
p.s.
Carry a towel, read lots of Vogon poetry, use the number “42” as a
mantra…and maybe you’ll meet Zaphod Beeblebrox, president of the galaxy!
Jeff
Phillips
Athens
Georgia
7
July 1992
Earth
Word
count: 12875
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