Hitchhike America

By Jon Lott

Hitchhike America honestly recounts the humorous, adventure-filled, and unforgettable journey made by Jon Lott as he hitchhiked west across the United States.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Sep 12, 2018
• ISBN: 9781732583115

Book preview

road.

Introduction

In 2016, I decided to hitchhike across the United States.  I had never hitchhiked before, never even seen a hitchhiker in real life. I took a bus from Boston to Washington, D.C. and stood by an on-ramp with my thumb out on the morning of March 15th, holding a cardboard sign that just said, WEST.

It’s not very easy to explain why I decided to hitchhike across the country.  Usually the people who don’t understand it never will.  On the other hand, some people intuitively know and never needed to ask why.

Part of it was a desire to see America, unbound.  My parents had taken my siblings and me on vacations in the heartland of America as young children, seeing National Parks and walking in the footsteps of so many other families.  I didn’t want to drive or take a train or bus across the nation; I wanted to live in the moment, unplanned, letting the wild wind blow me west.  I often told people that my adventure was like going up in a hot air balloon and drifting in the general direction I wanted, but leaving all details and destinations to chance, to the destiny of the drivers and the circumstances of the road.

I didn’t want to do tourist stuff, and I didn’t want the packaged experiences that guides and websites sold. I wanted to see and experience amazing things, to taste new excitements, to search for the real and ever-evolving American soul.

If this sounds pretentious, I don’t want it to.  I romanticized the idea in my head before, during, and after my travels were over.  I still think about it that way.  I had read beat literature and watched movies with hitchhiking, but I didn’t want to be like their protagonists, who were usually bottom-feeding freeloaders in search of cheap liquor and cheaper women, willing to con anybody for a couple bucks.  I wanted to be part of a new generation of hitchhikers, as carefree and adaptable as the past, but more honest and responsible.

Also driving me to take this journey was a compulsion to push back against the growing, modern cynicism taking root in America.  Fear and prejudice and selfishness have made hitchhiking in the United States nearly extinct.  Americans are among the least trusting people on the planet, but we have so much to share.  We can be close-minded and willfully ignorant, scared of opening our sanctuary-like vehicles to anybody because of a few secondhand tales about hitchhiking murderers thirty or forty or fifty years ago. 

I didn’t want to live life in fear like that.  I didn’t tell many people about my trip beforehand; every one of the adults that I did tell opposed the idea and tried to convince me against it.  The younger people I told, some of my friends and students, nearly all approved of the idea, still holding onto that bright optimism and belief in adventure.

I had this itch to hitchhike for almost a year before I started.  I had rolled the idea over in my mind and preemptively settled on the summer of 2017 to try it.  But some ideas are like parasites, and they grow inside you in unpredictable ways.  This was one such idea.  I knew that I had to start in 2016 to appease my hungry soul and purge the thought from my overactive mind.  I didn’t expect my cross-country odyssey to grow my craving to travel.  In fact, I thought it would satisfy my enthusiasm and calm my spirit.  But you can never really know how hitchhiking is going to turn out.

There are other reasons why I decided to hitchhike America, but some would be hard to explain and others might just not be worth it.  Like I said, those who already understand need no explanation, and those who don’t won’t learn anything by what I write.

It took me seventeen days to hitchhike across the country, journeying across ten states.  I spent under $100 on my way from D.C. to the west coast (excluding start-up costs, like my tent and backpack).  Roughly two dozen drivers picked me up, and I was never threatened or robbed or harmed by anybody on my trip.  I didn’t make any lifelong friends, but I made a lifelong lover of the road, and plenty of memories along the way, which you are about to read.

Day 1

I often thought during my journey about how differently the whole thing would’ve gone if any given driver hadn’t picked me up.  I’d have to wait for a different one, going to a different place at a different time altogether.  It would’ve changed the whole trajectory of my trip in entirely unpredictable ways.

I had spent the previous day with my friend Hilary in Washington, D.C.  She agreed, the next morning, to drop me off at the on-ramp of my choice.  Since it was still winter, and I didn’t want to sleep outside in the cold, I settled on I-95, heading south to Richmond, Virginia.  I intended to make it to South Carolina, and then head through Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, riding that southern sunbelt across America. 

But you can never predict much when you’re hitchhiking.  It turned out that I never made it to South Carolina, nor Georgia, Alabama, or Mississippi.  Hilary didn’t know exactly where she was dropping me off, and she was late for work, so I ended up hopping out near an on-ramp to I-66, heading west.  You can never control your destiny on the road, and you shouldn’t even try.  This was the first lesson I learned.

A construction worker passed me on the sidewalk, noticing my sign.

Where are you going? he asked.

The Pacific coast.

He looked taken aback. Good luck.

It just so happened that on my first day hitchhiking I was pretty lucky.  I got my first ride in about twenty minutes.

A black Audi pulled up, and I saw the driver move some stuff into the back of the car.  He waved me in as he moved a tiny terrier onto his lap.  I put my bag in the back and got into the passenger seat.

I had planned beforehand to take a picture of every license plate that picked me up, in case I went missing or died or got into any real danger.  I didn’t end up taking a picture of this car’s license plate, or any other, because most cars in the south don’t have a front license plate and because you really don’t have a whole lot of time to take a picture when a car pulls up for you and waves you in.  Sometimes traffic can build up behind you, or you don’t want to look suspicious to the driver, or you just don’t care.  I was so excited to get a ride that I didn’t even think about taking a picture.

Where are you headed? I asked.

Around Manassas.

Sounds good to me, I said. Where is that?

About thirty minutes west of here.

I introduced myself, but I didn’t hear what his name was.  His dog’s name was Buddy.  The driver was a man in his sixties, with a mop of curly blond hair that looked similar to his dog’s.  He wore sunglasses over glasses and black velvet pants.

You don’t get to judge people when you’re hitchhiking.  You shouldn’t, anyway.  You just observe and ride the ride.  Passersby often think you’re homeless, or at least poor.  You often go days without a shower and longer without a good night’s sleep. And don’t be afraid to decline a ride (especially if they’re not going far enough; holding out for the long rides is usually worth it), but you should also take what you can get.

I can’t get the seatbelt to work, I confessed. 

That?  Don’t worry about the seatbelts. We’re not trying to live, he joked.

People often build this fear of hitchhikers in their mind, but I think it’s much more dangerous to be the hitchhiker than the driver.  The driver holds most of the power; he is driving the vehicle, controlling its speed, your destination, and almost everything else.

The driver worked for the Navy, researching body supplements and exercising equipment, then recommending to the Navy what they should and shouldn’t buy for their sailors.  Most of the time we talked about energy supplements and bodybuilding food.

The driver gushed about protein powders and energy drinks, and herbal mixes that he added into his chili, cornbread, and water.  He loved spicy foods, and we talked about peppers and exotic spices and how they interact with the supplements he researches. 

Most of it was too technical for me.  Besides, bodybuilding food has never been on my shopping list, and probably never will.  I was happy to hear him talk, though.  Most of the drivers who picked me up were by themselves, and I suspect they stopped more out of loneliness rather than benevolence.  It didn’t matter to me why, though, as long as I kept going west.

Have you ever picked up a hitchhiker before?

Oh yeah, the driver said. Not for a long time, though.  Twelve or thirteen years.  Way back I did a lot of hitchhiking, in the 1970s.  Once I went from St. Louis, Missouri all the way to Key West, then back to St. Louis.  Stopped in Selma on the way back for a little bit.  These were the days when you’d wait just ten minutes and someone would pick you up.

I was only waiting about twenty minutes.

That surprises me.  I haven’t hitchhiked in a long time. I never had to; I’ve had a car for so long now.  I’m going to drop you off at a rest area outside Manassas.  I think you’ll have better luck there than at the exit.

Sounds good to me.

We soon pulled over at a rest area and he let me out.  I thanked him.  He wished me happy travels and pulled back onto the highway.

One of the reasons I was able to travel across the country so cheaply was because of what I ate most of the time.  Water was the beverage of choice, and I had two water bottles and a thin, collapsible water container clipped to my backpack with carabiners.  What I planned to eat was pretty repetitive: nut bread, peanut butter, and multivitamins.  I spread a little gob of peanut butter on my bread and ate it as I waited.

I stood outside the visitor’s center for a little while, eying the cars coming and going, wondering if they wondered about me.  Eventually I went inside for a map of Virginia.

A woman inside was offering free samples of peanuts grown in the state. I grabbed a map of Virginia and told the woman what I was doing, hitchhiking across the country.

That’s so brave, she said.

I might be standing outside the building for a few hours looking for a ride, I told her.

I don’t mind, honey.

As it turned out, I waited only about twenty minutes before I hitched my second ride.  A gentleman in his late 50s picked me up in a rundown, swamp green, 1998 Honda Accord.  He was heading to Charlottesville, Virginia, and seemed surprised that I wanted to ride all the way with him.

The driver, Barry, was a tall man with some fading blond hair as thin as his voice.  We joked about how broken his car was, and he spoke about how little he cared for cars as status symbols.

I used to have a Camaro when I was about your age, Barry told me.  I grew tired of it pretty soon and it was too expensive for me.  Now I drive a car for twenty years and I don’t care what happens to it.  I glanced at the odometer: about 170,000 miles.

We talked about gardening, an interest we have in common, for some time.  He was close to retirement now, owned a couple homes, and claimed to be responsible for locating and bringing back to America the same strain of a seed that Thomas Jefferson used to grow on his estate.  He claimed that it had gone extinct in the United States and could only be found in Europe now.

Once a year I go to Italy and visit my seed grandma.  She tries to sell me some seeds and when I don’t want to buy them, she gives them to me for free anyway. I have a huge garden in Virginia, growing cabbage, tomatoes, basil, and everything.

We talked about politics and the upcoming election, and the way the world was going.

We teach kids about sex in school but not how to manage their finances.  I think it’s just disgusting, he protested.

We stopped three times so Barry could use the bathroom, even though he drank nothing on our drive.  Every time we stopped, he asked me to leave the car so he could lock it, a reminder that even after an hour of conversation, the bond between driver and hitchhiker is not always solid.

Hitchhiking is an inherently trusting activity.  The driver must trust the hitchhiker enough to pick him up, and the hitchhiker must trust the driver enough to get in the car. Once you get picked up, you must build that trust, which usually isn’t difficult considering the type of people who pick you up in the first place. Jaded, fearful people won’t usually stop to pick up a hitchhiker.

He let me out in Charlottesville, Virginia. It was a beautiful day. The overcast skies gave way to brilliant blue, and the sky was speckled with small clouds drifting west with me. The warm air felt distinctly summer, though it was still technically winter. 

Cars coursed by through the city and people waved, giving me a thumbs-up, or ignored me altogether.  I could tell when people inside the car were talking about me, stealing a glance at my sign, imagining the horrible reasons why they shouldn’t pick me up.  You can’t let the rejection get to you.  You’ve got to stay eternally positive, perpetually chill, and smile