Riding Shotgun
“I rode with a stuntman who estimated he’d sustained 50 concussions. A few years later, in Utah, a young man said God told him to pick me up; the next morning, a mother coming off a night shift told me she regretted her disinterest in the Church. In Wyoming, an oil-field geologist steamed about his divorce after months alone in a trailer. ‘You’re the first person I’ve talked to,’ he said. The next year, around Tennessee, a bounty hunter argued to me that the Earth was flat, and a Mexican American man told me why he kept a ‘Make America great again’ hat on his dashboard: In his town, he said, not showing support for Donald Trump could lead to your mailbox getting smashed. Near Pennsylvania, a young salt-factory worker showed off hands so callused, he couldn’t use gloves without developing blisters. He dreamed of driving a truck to Kansas. The freedom of the road beckoned to us both.” Those are Andrew Fedorov’s hitchhiking recollections, not mine. The road generally only beckons me to drive away from social interactions; especially rapidly when those interactions are with people I don’t know. I’m fine with device-aided textual communications, but, these days, when it comes to the traditional in-person stuff, I’m all thumb-drives. But Fedorov’s reflections on how the waning popularity of hitchhiking has also mirrored a loss of something else in American culture is nothing to thumb your nose at. The Atlantic (Gift Article): Does Anyone Still Hitchhike? “‘Few transport experiences involve being repeatedly catapulted into other people’s lives with such intensity,’ Jonathan Purkis wrote in his 2022 book, Driving With Strangers. Studies have shown that conversations with new people make us happier. In a time when social connections with strangers are so often algorithmically regulated, the unexpected, serendipitous meetings from hitchhiking can be all the more powerful because they’re so much rarer.” (Whether through hitchhiking or some other means, hopefully those social interactions in our rearview mirrors are closer than they appear.)
