My editor said, “Helen, I can’t believe you ever hitchhiked!”
“It was the summer of ’89,” I said.
“Oh,” she said, “that’s the year I was born.”
In 1989, I was a camp counselor in Upstate New York. I canoed. I color-warred. I wrestled in short shorts in a vat of chocolate pudding. And I hitchhiked. On my days off, if there wasn’t a dog or a chain saw in the back of a stranger’s flatbed, my friends and I would pile in and get dropped off at a river eerily called Beaverkill. I was