Safe Travels: Hitchhiking on the Kindness of Strangers

By Noah Bacon

My true story of 4400 miles by thumb. Relying on the kindness of whoever I met along the way I traveled ride by ride from Colorado to San Francisco to Boston.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Noah Bacon
• Release date: Jul 24, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393381143

Book preview

Chapter One: Context

Ididn’t really have a clear plan. I knew I wanted to see the Pacific Ocean and maybe San Francisco. I mowed lawns and worked at a local two theater cinema all throughout high school. Lots more odd jobs scattered throughout. I did a lot of that same work and had two jobs all summer after graduating from high school, in a suburb of Boston in the spring of 2011, to line my pockets. All this in preparation for what I thought would be a standard gap year of farming on the Big Island of Hawai’i and then taking the Georgia-to-Maine route of the Appalachian Trail with a very dear homie who was also skillfully adventurous.

Hawai’i was great and then when I came home for Christmas neither my friend who I had planned hiking with nor I wanted to go through with the hike. Other journeys to explore.

So I went to Colorado to become a yoga teacher after not a lot of thought. I was a very amateur anasa-er at the time and didn’t know much about the 8 limbs of yoga, also known as Yoga. I was simply a meditation fiend. I started at age 13, trying to levitate things with crushing disappointment upon each perceived failure. This was the first time in my life I considered suicide. As I accepted my place and became more interested in development and exploration of the inner and outer worlds I started gradually progressing through studies of Native American shamanism, early Christian Gnosticism, Sufi writings, occult texts, new age channeling, Buddhist practices, Hindu practices, and many more. I would visit libraries wherever I was and sit down in the spirituality/religion section to pull books for a few hours. No one ever minded.

Now, years later, I have mostly been interested in whatever I can grasp of non-dualism and Buddhism mixed with healing-focused shamanism that I have experienced on my other journeys. I enjoy listening to lectures by many teachers such as Eckhart Tolle, Mooji, Papaji, Ramana Maharshi, Nisargadatta, Sadguru Jaggi Vasudev, Abraham Hicks, and Darryl Anka. I meditate much more consistently nowadays and can almost maintain it during daily activities. I haven’t finished my undergraduate college process even now at age 26, but over time as I do, at whatever speed I can, I hope to contribute in some grasp to the study of neuroscience and to have more insight on what’s going on in (our collective) here. I will take it day by day, so no promises.

I paid for the yoga training with a swipe of my debit card. $3600 for 28 days, all included. There went a lot of bicycle tune ups and movie ticket sales. Hitchhiking technically started in Sedona, AZ, but I wouldn’t have gotten there were it not for my 30 year old yoga roommate, Jeremy.

Jeremy’s aid came just as I had finished my 200 hour hatha yoga teacher training at Shoshoni Yoga Retreat, of the lineage of Baba Shambhavananda. One time during that month long training we went for a field trip to the main ashram where Shambhavananda lived. At that time I still wasn’t sure if I believed in an extra-ordinary reality, though I held onto the hope like an addict walking the streets at night. Everyone bowed their heads while he processed. I mentally screamed at him something rude like prove it, you fake! I snuck a glance (discreetly) and he was staring right at me as he processed, smiling sternly in a knowing way. Who’s to say?

The community there was phenomenal and I have them to thank for helping me on my path in a huge way. One time around the halfway mark of the training Jeremy and I went into Boulder, 40 minutes away, and got pot and smoked it. We had chosen an inopportune night for such an adventure. When we got back from our adventure off grounds we found out someone had smoked in the prayer room, which is a big no-no. The administrators thought it was us, since we arrived to the scene firmly high, and we almost got kicked out. Someone intervened and everything finished smoothly. Jeremy also took a big stand for me. I think they could tell we cared about the training. I don’t know if they ever found out who was smoking in the prayer room, we didn’t tell them.

After we got our diplomas and prayer beads Jeremy offered for me to come spend a couple of weeks with him at his house near Taos in New Mexico. On the way there he told me, Make sure you get it together before age 30, otherwise you might never get it together. I wondered if he felt like he had it together. I wondered about his community and integration out on the spacious plains. He was full of life and joy, a kind and funny warrior. I looked up to him and his time spent with Native American teachers and his contentedness in his ways more than most people I knew. Thank you for everything, Jeremy.

We arrived at his home under the auspices of building a bouldering rock climbing wall in his backyard and having a lot of fresh carrot juice amongst the dry sage bushes. After he had offered for me to come with him south, I went to the post office in Boulder and mailed home my laptop, winter boots, and as many clothes as I could fit in the largest flat-rate box or two. I was all ready to go.

I loved Jeremy’s company and guidance, but it came time for action three days after we arrived. We had smoked some pot one night and watched the documentary DMT: The Spirit Molecule. Having done DMT alone three times in high school in a safe and intention-blessed setting, I was reinvigorated by the movie to open myself to the wind and the wolves of the mind and see what happened. It would be an understatement to say I romanticized my coming journey.

On Big Island of Hawai’i after farming some days I’d hitchhike into Pahoa town to get cigarettes and buy groceries. Sometimes I stole groceries from one of the markets. I apologize for this. We got a $60 weekly stipend on the farm and I was very hungry. I would pour granola into my backpack and stuff it with vegetables. Then I’d find some affordable rations and pay for them normally with my secret hiding on my back. The farm I was on didn’t like us eating their crops and to my very limited foraging knowledge there were only fruits in the surrounding jungle which encompassed us. We ate a lot of fruit. Lots of guava, rollinia, longan, and berries that looked like raspberries. Hilo side is so wild and verdant. My experience of what I know of the whole of the islands of Hawai’i has been vividly beautiful. My time on Big Island was only the beginning of our relationship. I heard a story once of physically-manifest Pele walking onto someone's property in a storm to warn them about something in their personal future and I believed it.

I want to mention now before we really get going that I had a privileged and difficult youth and especially so in high school. During my sophomore and junior years I spent many, many nights sitting quietly in my room with my grandfather's pocket knife open and would debate to myself why I should stay alive. I never wanted to hurt anyone and I tried to intervene in any school bullying I saw, but inside I fantasized someone would try and get me so I could fairly maim them in a way that became obsessive for a while. No need to hurt others if the conflict is something you’re holding onto yourself. That’s healed now, friend. There were certain experiences which built these feelings, some acute and some peripheral. I am very glad I stuck around.

Feel free to contact me if you want to talk about suicide. It’s worth doing something grungy and funky or silly and happy, or just clean your room or someone else’s, instead of offing yourself. You don’t know yourself until after the next experience has had time to integrate, and there’s always another experience until there isn’t. I’ve found it is almost always easier than earlier imagined unless you hype it up and assume conflict from others. Just contact me.

Chapter Two: Wolves / Escape

So, Jeremy had friends in the Taos area as he had lived there for a few years, and while we were gently out on the town one night we ran into some of them. During a game of pool they told us, We’re going to a music festival in Death Valley. I asked, Burning man? We were in luck, No, that’s on the Playa in the summer. This is a smaller electronic festival. We’re leaving tomorrow. Jeremy told them I wanted to hitch a ride west. I was in luck, the driver had done some hitchhiking in his earlier years and was happy to oblige.

On that beautiful sunny high plains early spring day Jeremy drove me in his SUV into Taos proper at around 9am. We hugged and blessed each other and he gifted me some Rosemary Oil and Thieves. Thieves is a combination of Clove, Lemon, Cinnamon, Eucalyptus, and Rosemary oils that medieval doctors and robbers alike used as a face mask and scrub to try and avoid the plague. It smelled fantastic and really got my nervous system going. No drug effects, more