Like all humane acts, you have got to decide ahead of time whether you’ll pick up a hitch-hiker at all. Otherwise, you’ll be speeding down the freeway outside Grand Junction when suddenly you’ll spy a lonesome stranger with his thumb out, and all at once you’ll wonder what if he’s a killer? An escaped convict? A strung-out addict? Mentally unstable? A scammer? A con artist? A hijacker? What if he assaults or attacks or robs or rapes or murders me? And of course that most despicable of Anglo-American impulses will streak across your mind, the one that assumes that the poor are so because they deserve to be, and so to help them would be a sacrilege—
But then you cast that last awful thought from your mind, and the better angels of your nature kick in, as you consider the great leaps of faith that this forlorn hitch hiker is taking, having all the same worries of you as you do of him, and how every good act carries some intrinsic danger in it but that doesn’t excuse us from doing them—in fact the danger alone is what makes it good, worth doing—and how if these hitch hikers are sticking their thumbs out in the middle of the desert then something has clearly gone south in their lives and what they really need is not your judgment but your help, and if nothing else you consider that life is unpredictable and uncontrollable so who knows one day it might be you sticking your thumb out on a desert highway and you’ll sure want good Karma then, plus this transcontinental road trip is plenty lonely as it is so you pull over to the shoulder—
* * * * * * * *
Atop the Eiffel Tower, her soul swelled. She was a total tourist, and she didn’t care—let all the other trust-fund bohemians seek their high-end “authentic cultural experience,” as though there were such a thing. No, her motives were honest, her intentions true. Even the jaded French warmed to her.
And what’s more, she’d been paid to come here. When she considered that mere weeks ago she was waiting tables and working front desks at hotels and auto-shops, far more than the view overwhelmed her.
“You want, um, ah, picture?” asked the foreign man behind her. She smiled brightly, and handed him her smartphone—its weight still pleasing to her fingertips, now that she could finally afford one.
Her green eyes sparkled, with all of Paris behind her; the phone made a snapshot sound. She already knew this would post online. “Thank you so much!” she enthused, reaching for her phone.
“Now one together!” insisted the man, holding the phone aloft for a selfie, as he wrapped his arm surreptitiously around her waist. Her smile was a little more forced now. This would not post online.
* * * * * * * *
And an 18-year-old drifter leaps into your passenger-side seat; you actually don’t mind the sudden overwhelming body odor that hits your face—it means he’s honest, that he really has been walking for hours. You ask him how far he’s going. He says as far west as you can go. You say you can take him to Salt Lake. He says perfect, that will make a serious dent in his journey. His sob story is that his younger sister whom he hasn’t seen in twelve years is dying of leukemia in Sacramento, and his uncle had tracked him down and invited him to see her one last time and live with him. The kid himself had had a row with his Mom and her boyfriend back in Grand Junction, so he just up and left spur of the moment for parts West. He didn’t even have the scratch for a bus ticket.
In that inimitable self-focused way all teenagers are, he talks endlessly about himself, about which album Metallica sold out on, about how thanks to a truck driver grandpa and some illegal, underage cruise ship gigs he has seen all fifty states and most of Canada (he spouts off a bit of French to prove his time in Quebec; you can only respond, “je ne parle pas le francais”). He has an odd M-name that you asked twice but couldn’t remember either time. He’s observant enough to wait till you stopped for gas to step out for a smoke. He says he’d been walking since midnight previous; you don’t know whether to believe all of it or half of it or none of it—but then, at midnight previous yourself, you fell asleep in a ’99 Honda Odyssey at a truck stop in eastern Colorado while reading The Innocents Abroad on your phone, so it certainly isn’t you who should be questioning extravagant road stories.
At about the two hour mark he suddenly passes out. As he sleeps, you take in the mountains, the rivers, the canyons and the valleys of southern Utah, all of which you feared you’d never see again when your last car—like your last love—died for good in Iowa City. In Salt Lake City you drop him off at the I-80 junction; by the time you turned around he was already gone, leaving you to wonder if maybe you hadn’t just dreamed the whole affair.
* * * * * * * *
In Amsterdam, the Hotel as a courtesy loaned her a bicycle free of charge, and she wound her way through the canals and the windmills in spring. In Maui they lent her snorkeling gear, and she saw the many colors of the reefs and the fishes, like she’d only seen in films, in screensavers, in her dreams. In Barcelona she soaked herself in the Mediterranean Sea, so much warmer than the cold California coasts of home.
She soon grew to hesitate telling inquisitive passengers about the innumerable perks of her job, lest they droop their heads in weary envy—regaling them instead about the tedium of passing out peanuts and of shrieking infants. Only when they insisted would she tell them of the sights she’d seen and let them be happy for her.
Yet curiously, the one place she found she never needed worry about making others jealous was among her new friends in Cambridge. Boston was her first base of employment with the airline, so she chose that most preeminent of college towns as her new home. She never tired of walking across the timeless charm of Harvard Square on her way to and from the airport. Her neighbors were the stars and flower of American academia—students at Harvard, MIT, Brandeis, BC, BU, and so on. She was not intimidated, on the contrary, she found them delightful (it’s not like she’d never dated a grad student before).
But though they were never less than cordial to her, there was still this quiet strain of condescension about them, as they noted that she had only a Bachelors, that she only worked customer service—which, while technically true, still had her traveling the world while they were strapped to Boston with impossible rent, in impossible debt. She soon learned that in New England every conversation is a competition (the verbosity of Gilmore Girls was no Hollywood fantasy but an ethnography). She longed to just talk to these people, to actually know who they were.
* * * * * * * *
You were not entirely prepared to rule out the possibility that he was some sort of Field of Dreams-esque traveling ghost, haunting the highways since the 1920s.
He was a fiddler, you see. A fiddler. That is seriously what he called himself. He carried a violin, and there were patches on both his case and his overalls. Had a big black bushy beard and a beaten baseball cap; only his weathered Jansport backpack kept you thinking that he maybe lived in this century after all (but then, how do you know that ghosts don’t grab abandoned Jansports from off the side of the road?). You picked him up somewhere east of Boise; he said he was hitching over to Nampa, to hop a freight train—yes, a bona fide freight train, as though he were some itinerant tramp during the Depression, with a knapsack slung from his shoulder.
Mind you, this was not some aged transient, some grey-haired relic from days gone by; he could not have been older than 23, 24, you swear.
He told tales of busking back-and-forth across America, jamming with Dixie-land bands in New Orleans, with Bluegrass groups in West Virginia. Yet for all his transient lifestyle, he did express a desire to settle down at long last—he tells you of his plans to return to Washington this autumn for “some cherry-picking,” which he insisted straight-faced “you can actually make pretty good money on.” He said he wanted to “just buy a small piece of property,” as though he were some migrant Okie, or an Oregon Trailer, or a wandering mountain man coming home.
Maybe you should have asked him about the current President, whether he favored Harding or Hoover in the coming election, just to make sure he was from the land of the living. But you won’t get a chance to call him later and ask, because he has no Facebook, no cell-phone. By any and every metric you could devise, he was a man genuinely off the grid and out of time.
* * * * * * * *
She never possessed (nor valued) the pedigrees that so obsess the East Coast; nevertheless, her green eyes and bright smile were currency everywhere, and she caught the fancy of more than one PhD candidate (what was it with her and grad students, anyways?). One in particular took her on picturesque dates to the Boston Commons, the Quincy Market, the Charles River, the Waterfront. He bought her a cannoli at Mike’s—it was so rich that she was actually honest when she said she couldn’t eat another bite.
Though his native need to show off often grated her, still he was charming, almost in spite of himself. Much like Boston itself, come to think of it. She was interested.
He gently slipped his hand into hers. She squeezed back.
Only to then jolt back with a shock—his hand. It was the smoothest hand she had ever felt. A privileged life unmoored from all physical labor. This distressed her somehow.
* * * * * * * *
“Yeah, that’s another thing that bothers me,” he said—amiably enough, but with a far away look in his eyes—as his muscular, farmer-tanned arms twisted some stiff metal wires in the blazing sun. My tire had blown out, so violently that the plastic tire guard was torn apart. The tire was replaced easy enough, but now loose electrical wiring dangled across the rim, waiting to be caught and torn away.
I feared we’d be stranded here in the desert, still so far from home, but the tow-truck driver took one look at it and said, “Oh, I bet we can fix that. We just need to tie ‘em up, tuck ‘em back in there. Here, I got some metal wiring in my truck,” and here we were.
But as grateful as we were for his help, his cheerful tone had begun to take an imperceptible turn: “This ain’t event the worst I’ve seen, far from it,” he started, “One time, I had to tow a tipped-over U-Haul not too far from here. Seems this sweet old ladies’ kids were finally moving her into a nursing home, clear out in Washington or some such. She’d lived here for something like fifty-odd years, raised her kids, buried her husband and everything, right here in Ontario. Heart-breaking to force her to leave like that, to make her move someplace strange to die…
“Well, anyways, they were hardly a mile down the highway when they took a turn too sharp, and the whole truck tipped right over. Boxes fell out, priceless heirlooms spilled all over the road. The worst of it were the photographs—there were photos scattered everywhere—old ones, black and white ones, irreplaceable stuff, ya get what I’m saying? I tried to gather as many of ‘em as I could, but some were damaged, and some were just lost, blown away in the wind. That really bothered me.”
When my tire blew out, after a few tense seconds of wrestling the car to the shoulder, I called Triple-A for help, and they asked my location. “Um, Ontario, Idaho,” I said, remembering a sign I’d just passed, but unaware we’d just barely crossed the Oregon border.
“Canada?”
“No, America.”
“So, um, Ontario, California?”
“No, no, I said Idaho—Ontario, Idaho.”
“Sir, there is no Ontario, Idaho.”
“What?”
“Ontario, Idaho, it doesn’t exist.”
“No, that can’t be right, I just barely saw a sign that said, ‘Now Leaving Ontario.’”
“I’m sorry sir, I’m just sitting in front of a computer here in California right now, and according to my records there is no such place as Ontario, Idaho.”
“What is this?!” I shouted, feeling a mounting panic, wondering what Twilight Zone or purgatorial land of the dead I had just stumbled into outside of all maps, space, and time.
But all that was soon cleared up, and now an hour later, we were in a Les Schwab in Ontario, Oregon, on just the other side of the Idaho border, and the kind tow truck driver was tying up my loose ends. “You’re lucky, really lucky, that you blew out when you did,” he continued, “Just a few miles further, and you would have been outside all cell-phone range, and who knows what might have happened to you.
“We may think we’re all civilized and settled and such out here, but just a few miles from the freeway, it’s still wild country. In fact, some of the older folks ‘round here swear there’s still Indians roaming about. Well, maybe their spirits…”
“Hey man, we really appreciate your help, here, let me pay you…” I offered, partly in sincere gratitude, but also partly to distract him, because despite his pleasantness he was frankly beginning to make me uncomfortable. But he just barreled forward, as though I hadn’t spoken: “Yeah, that’s another thing that bothers me. There’s still so much we don’t know about this area, even just right in our own backyard. Why just recently, they found an old skeleton, not too far from here.
“Must’ve been from the old pioneer days—which ain’t as long ago as we like to think, mind you. Whoever he was, this poor feller probably died of thirst—and from the way the skeleton plopped down, you could tell from what direction he probably crawled. And from what the authorities could tell, he could have just come across a hundred miles of desert without finding a single drop of water.
“But you know what was only a quarter mile away from where he collapsed? The conjunction of three rivers. Ya hear me? Three! If he had wondered just a quarter mile to his left, or to his right, or even just straight ahead, a quarter mile, he would’ve found all the water he could’ve possibly needed. But he didn’t. He collapsed dead in the sun, all alone in the world, but there was water surrounding him. That sort of thing really bothers me.”
We all fell silent. A slight breeze blew, briefly alleviating the searing heat, and we all gazed down the long desert road, still a long, long way from home.
* * * * * * * *
Still, she and the smooth-skinned grad student continued to hold hands—at least for a while. Though of course she couldn’t help but note how easily he chatted up other girls at parties: was he just being friendly or flirting? And on their dates, was he just being playful or condescending—or was there a difference? Was she a California girl still adjusting to an East Coast vibe, or was he just kind of a jerk? He gifted her a fine China vase, but the vase was empty.
She had been taught since a little girl to pray, and so she prayed about it one night in her Cambridge attic apartment: should I stick with this guy? Will it go anywhere? Will I know?
Later that evening he came by and seemed more distant than usual. After an uncharacteristic search for words, he said he thought they should see other people, and then braced himself. But instead, she calmly stood up, opened the door, and said, “OK.”
It caught him off-guard, perhaps because it didn’t exactly flatter his vanity for a girl take his break-up so casually. “That…that’s it?”
“Yep,” she said simply, and motioned him out. He muttered some commonplaces about staying friends; she nodded and closed the door behind him.
* * * * * * * *
You picked up this tatted-up older fellow just west of the Oregon border. You could almost describe him as Hemmingway-esque, what with the stoic manner in which he was defeated but his spirit was not defeated and so forth. The younger hitch-hikers you could take in stride—for of course an eighteen-year-old is broke, and of course a fiddler is hopping a freight train, you’d be disappointed if he wasn’t—but this man was already well past middle-age, with tragedy written across his face, and it got to you.
His wife was leaving him, he said, so he was hitching back to a home he hadn’t seen in 15 years, “to work the docks” in Portland if he could, bone broke and carrying little more than a backpack and a terminal cancer diagnosis. If he can save some cash in Portland, he hopes to hitchhike up to the Virginia-Mason in Seattle, he tells you. He casually mentions his time in the Navy, sailing along the African coast (you wondered if he dreamed of the lions on the beach), of his years as a cross-country truck driver (you wondered if he knew the kid from Grand Junction), of his greenhorn season as a firefighter in Yellowstone during the fire of ‘88.
That last detail came up when a wildfire suddenly blocked the I-84, because Mother Nature likes to remind us that she’s still master, and that we cannot disrupt her weather patterns with impunity. Hundreds of cars and semis pooled together at an old abandoned truck stop, waiting for the blaze to clear. The pristine windows of a long-foreclosed storefront revealed the empty specters of an abandoned diner, the stools still standing where the last patron left them, this massive traffic jam of customers arriving far-too-late to save the place.
After a quarter-hour, a Highway Patrolman waved everyone over and announced that the fire could clear in an hour, or not for another day, no one knows for sure. “Hey, we just need to reach Portland, could we maybe cut north though Spokane?” asked one driver. “Yeah, you could try, but there’s also a wildfire up there.” “What if we head south through Bend?” “Well again, you could try, but there’s a wildfire down there, too.”
Not too long ago, you had smiled when your Midwest friends spoke in hushed, reverent tones about the “West” (implicitly said with a capital W), as though it were some Cormac McCarthy novel, massive and wild and ominous and free in a manner that frankly frightened them. “No, no, it’s all the United States, we have paved roads and everything,” you’d said with a chuckle—but now you wondered if the Midwesterners didn’t have a point after all.
The fire cleared after two hours. You and the old man both fell silent as you drove pass the blackened and charred remains of the mountain pass; and again through the surpassing beauty of the Colombia River gorge at dusk; and again among the stalwart pines under starlight. You dropped him off at the Mission on Burnside in downtown Portland, and then continued your way home to Washington.
* * * * * * * *
On your return to Iowa, you cross desolate Nebraska once more (Bruce Springsteen named his saddest album for the state with good reason). Once again, you pick them up—this time at a lonely gas-station, a couple carrying a pair of beagles with more teeth than they. Their faces were wrinkled by years of tobacco use, which made it difficult to pinpoint their ages. They had been trapped in Nebraska for two weeks they said; their precious puppies had made it impossible for truckers to take them on board (liability laws had long strangled American hitchhiking since the golden age of Kerouac). They had been tenting under a bridge by the Platte River, and his fishing tackle alone had kept them fed.
Seems they were trying to return to the Ozarks, after having hitched their way clear up to Idaho, in the hope of promised jobs. Come to think of it, everyone you’ve picked up was moving West, weren’t they. Even at this late date, the Great American Dream is still always to move West, ever further West, with the hope that if we can just make it to where the sun sets, we will finally be free.
And that Great American Dream is still as treacherous as ever; the promised jobs never materialized, so now they were hitching home to Missouri in defeat. Like the fiddler, they had hopped a freight train in Nampa, but had slept through the switch-off and gotten stranded in Nebraska instead. You drove them forty miles to the next railroad junction, then continued your own lonely way back to Iowa.
* * * * * * * *
She had recalled how they first locked eyes over the counter at Midas, when she was still working multiple, minimum wage jobs with a college degree. He came in when his car over-heated, which he needed fixed ASAP as he was moving to Iowa next month. He had brought McCullough’s John Adams to read for the 4th of July, but it clearly wasn’t holding his interest, as his eyes kept wandering up to hers when he thought she wasn’t looking. She took a chance.
“What’s happening now?” she asked.
“Oh, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams just had a falling out,” he said, “It’s actually very tragic, I’m hoping they’ll be besties again by the end.”
“Well let me know if they get back together,” she said brightly.
* * * * * * * *
He decided to take four graduate courses that Fall—an ungodly amount, as every one of his classmates and professors warned him. He told them all it was because he wanted to graduate faster, that he was already getting too old for this, that after a Summer of picking up hitchhikers and transients he wanted to live as much of his life as he could before it was too late.
But really, it was because he still wasn’t quite over her—it had been many months since their vicious break-up, and though the long drive West had gotten him outside his own head a bit, still she haunted his dreams. So he figured that a solid semester of reading the literature of the Mexican Borderlands, of High Modernism, of Shakespeare, and of Whitman with his lines as long and contradictory as America, might consume his thoughts once and for all.
Then late one October evening, as he revised a midterm on The Merchant of Venice, his phone vibrated and his heart stopped: he saw the name he thought he’d never see again, and a text:
“John Adams would like to be friends with Thomas Jefferson again.”
*****
Photography Credit: Jason Rice
Jacob L. Bender is also the author of “Modern Death in Irish and Latin American Literature” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). His other writings have appeared in West Trade Review, NEATMag, JMMLA, CLS, Dialogue, Sunstone, and others. He is English faculty at Middlesex College in New Jersey.
