Thumbing across America

Two summers ago, I had the chance that every middle-aged man dreams of: the chance to go back to his youth—to see what it really looked like, to see how he would act, knowing what he knows now, with the supposed benefit of age and wisdom. Specifically, I got to hitch-hike around North America for National Geographic (a magazine article to be followed by a book version), roughly following the route I took when I first came over from England and thumbed around the continent, twenty-five years earlier.

At almost exactly the halfway point of my journey, I met up with my first ex-wife, Gail Hudson, in Seattle. She, too, is a writer, and at once she asked a writer’s question. “What’s the book about?”

She didn’t mean the obvious, the traveler’s tales. I thought for a moment. “I think it’s about fear.”

The trip was bookended by fear — not mine, but everyone else’s. Almost everyone I knew had hitchhiked twenty or thirty years ago, and given a sliver of encouragement would launch into their road trip stories. These tales had the fierce, shared intimacy of war stories, or the relaxed camaraderie of camp stories, making the tellers’ eyes light up, their faces glow — yet everyone ended by saying “I wouldn’t do it now, of course....”

“Why not?” I’d ask, and at once the clouds would roll over their foreheads. Sure, everyone hitch-hiked back in the Sixties, they said, but for them America had become a dangerous and terrifying place, a place that I came to think of as The America of the Mind. Fear steadily edged in from the corners like dusk itself, and the land filled with dark shapes: religious cults with private armories, Nicaraguans marching through Brownsville, neo-Nazis, psychotics with shotguns in fast-food restaurants, satanists in the belfry, pipe bombs in the mail and more psychotics in the mail room, poisoners and perverts, 14-year-old drive-by gang shooters, rapists in pleasant parks and on leafy campuses, sharks in the shallows and chainsaw killers up the dirt roads — monsters for every age and every political persuasion. It was common knowledge that all hitch-hikers were murdered — that was why nobody hitch-hiked any more — or, conversely, were murderers, and drivers were too scared to have anything to do with them.

Several people advised me to take a gun.

“Nobody in their right mind will pick you up,” one friend told me.

“You’ll be a target for every wacko and werewolf from here to San Francisco,” said another. I was stunned by their vehemence. My God, I thought, this is the America they think of when they make political decisions. No wonder they vote for mandatory sentencing and more prisons, and buy their wife a car phone for Christmas. Or a handgun.

The more honest of my friends said “I’m a more timid person now.” But that was amazingly hard to admit; for us educated people, the myth of objectivity is ground right into the pores. We follow the news, we read books; if we believe the horror stories they seem to be telling us, then, they must be true.

Bollocks, I said. America is actually safer now than it was twenty-five years ago. I cited the latest FBI violent-crime statistics. Even the roads are safer: more vehicles, but even so, fewer injuries and deaths.

Facts didn’t matter: people clung to their fear as if clinging to an electric fence. The entire country seemed to be suffering from a kind of patriaphobia. What happens, I wondered, when we become afraid of our own country? So that became one thread of the journey: hitchhiking as metaphor for vulnerability. By standing unarmed by the nation’s roads I was using myself as a barometer of goodwill. As for my own beliefs, it seemed to me that it had more to do with living a steadily more sheltered adult life. When we were kids we went out on the road to disprove our parents’ anxieties; maybe now that we are parents we should go back again to disprove our own.

Once on the road, I learned about fear largely through the illusion of danger. My first day out, I got a perfect illustration of the difference between genuine threat and perceived threat. I was walking along the shoulder of I-80 in western Pennsylvania, having been told that at the next exit was a cheap motel. As darkness fell, trucks seemed to outnumber cars, and they seemed to be coming in convoys: for every singleton, there was a massive cluster of two passing three, a solid phalanx of heavy metal.

After twenty minutes, I began to realize a flaw in my plan. Where the interstate leveled out, crossing the dark, wooded heart of the valley, was a bridge — a long bridge, maybe a thousand feet. The bridge had no shoulder.

The trucks, which couldn’t see me, were now slamming past two or three feet away. I thought quickly: did I have a single item that was reflective? No. I looked over the parapet, which was barely thigh-high. The river was a hundred feet down, and looked shallow. If I hit that, I was dead.

Curiously, I wasn’t frightened. I was alarmed, certainly, but it was clear what I had to do. I started running as hard as I could, the pack lolloping from side to side and threatening to drag me over the edge, until I heard the next truck coming up behind me, and at the last moment I squeezed down against the parapet, trying not to stumble off the bridge. As soon as the truck had passed, I jumped up and ran again, stopped again, crouched again, then ran again, sweating hard. By the time I reached the middle of the bridge I found to my dismay that as the trucks passed, the bridge bounced. The traffic seemed to intensify: sometimes there was so little gap between one cluster and the next it made no sense to run on, so I just stayed huddled against the parapet, waiting for a decent break. At last the road behind me cleared, and I ran the last twenty or thirty yards, passed the end of the parapet and lurched right onto the shoulder, which seemed as wide as a tennis court.

Yet it was now that I started getting worried, because about thirty yards ahead, where the interstate began to climb again, a truck had pulled over. It looked evil, its flashers blinking, its engine idling, the cab, of course, in complete darkness. It seemed not parked but crouching. I had seen enough movies: I didn’t want anything to do with it. I walked past it like a kid passing a graveyard, believing that if he just didn’t look, and kept repeating that he didn’t believe in ghosts, he would be all right.

I’d got maybe half-a-dozen paces past the massive front end when I heard a short hit on the horn, not a blast but almost a quiet “ahem.” I turned round, walked back, and looked way up at the cab window. It was dark. There was nothing else for it: I put one foot up on the sill, hauled myself and the pack up to the door handle, and opened it. The driver, a short, ordinary-looking guy in jeans and shirt, looked across at me. “You’d better get in before you get yourself killed,” he said.

Far from murdering me, he had stopped to rescue me. This would be the pattern for the trip: I would always be afraid of the wrong things. People would turn out to be friendly; my most dangerous enemy was myself. True of most people, most of the time, if you ask me. Time and again, in big ways or (mostly) small, my subconscious — my inner panicker — would throw up these phantoms. It was very revealing: when we talk about prejudices and stereotypes in the classroom, they’re all very distant and safe. On the road they came charging at me, screaming: the journey was like an inventory of my assumptions.

For example: I got a ride from York, Nebraska, with a trucker I’ll call Chris. Very nice guy. Quite bright, thoughtful, good conversationalist. Then he stopped to get gas in Wyoming, and as I was idly flipping through his road atlas I found his gay pornography.

Half of me remained perfectly calm. The other half panicked. The panicking half ran screaming around my head, yelling “Do something! Do something!”

The calm half said “Think about this. The guy has shown you absolutely no ill-will. You’re actually bigger than him. Besides, does it really make sense to throw away a good ride?”

The panicking half, meanwhile, had got in touch with its inner homophobe, and was not going to let him go. Chris had good reason to want his sexuality kept secret: if the word got out around the trucking fraternity, they might beat him to death with crowbars. If Chris knew I knew, and felt threatened, who knew what he might do? I would become the crowbar candidate.

After several minutes Chris got back in the cab and set us back on the road. The two halves carried on muttering furiously. Eventually, between panic and reason, they formed a plan. The next time we stopped I called my voicemail at work. I left a synopsis of the situation, Chris’s (real) name, the name of his trucking company, his destination and the number of the truck, reasoning that I could prevent anything escalating simply by telling him I’d taken this precaution.

By now I was calming down a little and had reasoned that I was learning some very useful things about fear, and about violence. For one thing, this was not a credible fear. I have gay friends of both sexes and never feel threatened by them in the least. No, this was an old worm, a deep, deep serpent of fear, one that hadn’t surfaced for decades, and it had taken the extra vulnerability of hitch-hiking to bring it to the surface. This was an interesting journey of self-discovery: I wondered what other worms might surface before the trip was over. So I pretended nothing had happened, but this don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy was a crock. Within fifty miles or so I realized that I was getting exactly what I deserved. I had left myself to gnaw in silence on my fear, thereby guaranteeing that I would never know even whether these were Chris’s pictures (he could have borrowed the road map) or, more interestingly, what it was like to be a gay man in the trucking trade. Besides, he and I had steadily been getting to know each other better, and now that stopped dead: from now on I was cautious and a little distant. My fear, my loss.

Yet to encounter such specters is surely far healthier than to avoid them. The next time I met a gay man I danced with him on the windowsill of a church — but you’ll have to read the book to find out about that.

Everywhere I went, the spontaneous images of anxiety turned out to be mirages. Before I left, I was a little nervous about cops, rednecks in pickups, lightning storms, and bikers. The only cop to catch me hitchhiking on the interstate turned out to be a model of Good Neighbor community policing, and seemed more solicitous of my safety than I was. Most of my rides were from working Americans driving pickups. The only lightning storm that came my way seemed to make the Drowned Rat Sympathy Effect kick in, and I got picked up at once. And not only did I find myself in a biker bar, I found myself in a biker town, during the annual Harley-Davidson rally in Sturgis, South Dakota, surrounded by a third of a million bikers. A good time was had by all.

In short, America was very much the same place that I’d found in 1973, when I first came here: colorful, unimaginably diverse, and full of affable, generous people who’d give me a ride. The only difference is that nobody thinks of America that way, nowadays — and who knows where it will lead, this suspicion of our own countrymen and women?

The most dispiriting part of the entire adventure was that when I came back, nobody wanted to hear the good news about America. I felt like the little boy who cried “There is no wolf!” and was roundly disbelieved.

The first question everyone asked me was “Were you ever in danger?” and they seemed disappointed when I said “Only in my own mind.” VQ

Tim Brookes’s book about hitch-hiking, A Hell of a Place to Lose A Cow, will be published in July 2000 by National Geographic Books.