Riding all night on a gravel train headed east through the sprawl of Houston and the falling sunlight and the eerie stillness of the shotguns clustered on the edge of the train yard deep in the fifth ward. Stratus and I. With the rising sun we find ourselves abandoned by the engine on a siding by a giant culvert miles from the interstate.
Hitching a ride through the sundown towns in the back of a U-haul driven by three good old boys and in the back no cargo but two shirtless boys laughing as they smack each other to raise the welts on their skin. They ask where we are headed.
We’re going to Mardi Gras.
We’re going to Mardi Gras too. In Galveston.
The truck stops on the side of the interstate and the door of the U-Haul is flung open. Eastbound to Vidor. We stick out our thumbs but no one will stop for us.
A young professional in a nice car. Takes us all the way to New Orleans. A week of drunken madness wearing clothing made from garbage and getting into fistfights with strangers. Accordions and three-card monte, jousting tall bikes and circus punks. Whiskey dreams slowly entombed in amber. You can forget everything here. Walking down Elysian Fields.
Back to Texas in the back of a pickup truck shivering through delirium tremens. A family of three in the panhandle headed to Texarkana. A strange man in a nice car headed to Little Rock.
Would you like to stay in my hotel room? I’ll get some beer.
Just drop us on the riverfront. We can find our friends there.
A kind and gregarious trucker from El Salvador buys us dinner at a Chinese buffet in a strip mall on the way to Memphis. He buys shirts at the mall to send to his sons back home. The great pyramid on the skyline is sinking into the Mississippi, he says.
Sleeping on a stack of plywood in the rough frame of a construction site. Scrambling into the darkness as the lights of a pickup illuminate our bedrolls.
It's better if we split up. Two guys in the Deep South aren’t getting picked up. I’ll see you in Winston.
A heavyset trucker stops for me. Headed to Spartanburg where he offers to pay me $50 to help unload the freight. We share the narrow bed of the cab after the job is done and he snores through the night.
Caught in a deluge outside of Winston-Salem. Waiting out the rain soaked to my skin under an overpass. A county work truck packed with a road crew of older black men.
We saw you standing there and doubled back. It’s nasty out.
They are drinking tall boys and crack one and hand it to me.
Want to come party with us later?
Thanks, I’m good. You can let me out downtown by the jail.
We make friends with a woman in Philly who offers a ride to Detroit. Cirrus and I explore the caverns of an abandoned train station. The ghosts of high society still haunt the ruins of the terminal stripped bare to the spartan graffiti and crumbling plaster. The women in their finery and the men hauling leather suitcases. Lurking in the detritus of America at the turn of the millennium.
A lesbian couple on the way to a methadone clinic in Lexington lets us ride in the back of their pickup. Later that night we see them in a grocery store as we’re buying beer and wave as we both depart to altered states.
A trucker from the Caucasus Mountains drives us through the Midwest. His English is poor but he likes to pick up hitchhikers to keep him company.
In my country we find a cold stream and put a table in the water and we sit with our bare feet in the current and drink Vodka. It’s very nice, you can drink all night like this.
We meet up with some travelers in Lawrence and sleep by the Kansas River sweltering and killing mosquitoes. We load into the van with all of our gear and our dogs and make for the cornfields of Iowa like a band of Neolithic migrants.
A month camped in the soybeans by Noble Lake. Work is from sunrise to near dusk and we bath in the warm silky water of the Missouri River in the fading sunlight. When we break camp we head for the mountain states.
A woman in a moving truck with a cooler full of Budweiser in the cab going all the way across Nebraska. A confederation of crusty travelers spots us outside of Denver and offers a ride all the way to Portland. Waking on the floor of a strange house.
We make for the South Portland trainyard and catch out on a grainer just south of the yard by the golf course where we board the train just as the sprinkler comes on and the rail cop arrives.
Riding the rails through the Cascade Mountains and the hidden clearcuts that lash the ancient forests. Thundering past waterfalls and mountain lakes and sacred landscapes of the Klamath tribes whose legends speak of the eruption of Mt. Mazama thousands of years ago. We are all itinerant wanderers on the earth bound by the whims of our great host. America is only her most recent visitor.
Busted in the yard getting off the train in Klamath Falls. I show the bull my Kodak camera and tell them I’m just a harmless rail enthusiast.
A lumber truck winds through the gauntlet of ancient redwoods notched into their trunks for the passage of the machines hauling off their kindred. Crossing into California, the driver tells us how many revelers wander into the headlights of his truck on summer evenings high as kites spilling out of their woodland raves like so many lost children.
Wandering high as a kite through the Avenue of the Giants. Among the trees that have witnessed the rise and fall of the Pleistocene migrants who first walked these lands only to be beaten down by an ancient ancestor who crossed the whole of the world to conquer them.
A man approaches us in a gas station outside of Ukiah. If we have money for gas we can ride with him to Petaluma. We offer up what little change we have and hop into the van.
He cranks the radio each time he speaks as if to deliberately obfuscate his words.
We should carve out the hills and put the face of Jesus up there.
Radio silence. He makes a sharp turn up a gravel road and I reach for my knife, ready for it.
I’m just trying to walk on God’s grass.
He rolls a joint in the driver’s seat and offers it to me. I can’t refuse.
People been known to put stuff in their weed around here, you should be careful.
Just take us back to the 101, man. We don’t want any trouble.
No trouble. You think I’m poor? It’s not all poor around here. Your dog is a filthy animal.
A sigh of relief when the door slams and we’re back on the road. The feeling of being trapped is hard to shake. We stick out our thumbs. If there is somewhere a god who looks after travelers we have surely run afoul of him.
A tall and imposing white trucker with black beard like a Bronze Age chieftain. Bearing down on the Arizona desert with the full weight of an ancient pedigree of road warriors from Yamnaya steppe herders to the scalp hunters of the Glanton Gang. The lineage that shaped the Western world. There are no more endless pastures or buffalo to slaughter and in America today those ancestral yearnings give way to dashboard crank and Nazareth on the tape deck and the AC at full blast.
In the words of Gary Snyder, there is no other life.
Too stir crazy to sit still in Austin, we leave for Halloween in New Orleans. Hastily packed wigs and sequins in an army rucksack. Sleeping under the stars outside of a truck stop with the light of the moon casting a pale filigree over my dark companions. Across the great expanse of the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway sharing secrets in the back of an Econoline driven by a silent family.
A young couple in a nice car scoops us on the other side of the bridge and takes us all the way to New Orleans, even though it’s not on their way. They have just seen a movie called Pay it Forward and they’re eager to practice the philosophy of reciprocity.
Darkness on Decatur Street. Blind drunk in a bar I raise a flask to my lips in front of the bartender who scowls as she tells me It’s not so much what you’re doing but where you’re doing it. The Big Easy is a lawless place where the cops who don’t like the look of a kid can lock him up and charge him with “leaning with intent to fall.” The land that care forgot.
Picked up outside of New Orleans by a pair of old men driving an off duty cab. Their Cajun patois is so thick we can’t make out much of what they are saying. They tell us they just robbed a bank. We laugh it off, pretty sure they are fucking with us. By the time the sun has set we are stranded in the swamps outside of Baton Rouge. Imagine trying to sleep here. Step off the road to piss and your foot is in gator infested waters. In an act of desperation we try to hitch in the darkness and get picked up by a trucker carrying a mechanical pallet in a work van. He’s already aggressive by the time we hit the border challenging other truckers in big rigs on the cb. Napoleon complex. We stop several times in several truck stops to fight phantom truckers that never appear. I’m in the front seat trying to keep him awake and sane. He keeps dropping hints that he would be open to uppers if I had any. The election is in two days and I ask him who he’s voting for.
Well, you gotta go with Bush. Whole country’s going to hell right now.
The first year of the new millennium passes. Leaving Texas again, this time for good. Somewhere in the Deep South I am standing on the roadside and a woman throws an envelope from the window of a minivan. Scrambling to fetch it, thinking it is probably money or Christian literature. Inside is a ten dollar bill and a pamphlet concerning the impending judgment of God upon the idolatry that has gripped America.
In an anarchist enclave just outside of Asheville. We spend the night drinking with old friends and wondering when the cancer of capitalism will devour the world. In the morning a stranger shakes us awake from our bedrolls.
The World Trade Towers are gone and a plane just hit the Pentagon.
Perhaps America has overstayed her welcome.
*
Ghosti. An ancient proto-word with roots reaching back to the Eurasian steppe whose corpus contains the seeds of the English guest and host. A primordial reciprocity, inherent in our language if not our customs. The tradition of welcoming the stranger and breaking bread with him in the hope he may one day do the same is an old one that stretches back through time and across many cultures. The Greeks of The Iliad went to war with Troy not so much for Helen’s beauty as for the violation of the guest rite undertaken by Paris’s betrayal of the custom. Such an insult cannot stand.
I am grateful to each and every human who has sheltered me and shared the hospitality of their vehicle on the great highways of the American countryside, even the crazy ones. If I could ever repay their generosity, I surely would. A world where the stranger is welcomed without reservation or precondition would probably be a better one. If we were all better angels, perhaps. For hospitality carries with it some degree of danger. I am reminded of a story from the road of a woman who picked up a hitchhiker without reservation since her son also traveled in this way. The man murdered her and dumped her body in a ditch.
Perhaps the ancient world was not burdened with the specter of the anonymous psychopath, back when it was small enough that one’s word was sufficient to ensure that reciprocity would be upheld. Today the borders of America teem with migrants from the global south, and politicians and pundits rail against the dangers posed by the unimpeded approach of the stranger. Families fleeing the disasters of the post-imperial world and taking their chances on the rails of La Bestia and entrusting their children to dangerous coyotes, all for the hope of a better life. Are we so sure that it is only right to close our lands to these immigrants? Would the benefit of incorporating those who would go to such lengths to protect their families not supersede the desire to preserve whatever vestige of an American “identity” still persists in the 21st century? It is not an easy question, for borders are an ancient human tradition as well, but perhaps it could be framed in a way that did not manifest such hostility towards the stranger.
I was lucky to travel what remained of the wilds of my country in the days before 9/11 reshaped the political landscape and the ubiquity of the internet rewired the contents of our minds. I walked those highways without so much as a cell phone. I was young and reckless in those days but I feel that I have been shaped in no small part by hitching my wagon to the whims of the fates and trusting the kindness of strangers. The people who stopped for me on the road represent our better angels, be they immigrant truckers who spoke little English or conservative Christians who would not spare a single word in the pursuit of a soul they deemed worthy of salvation. Perhaps today an act of kindness is worth more than it was in the ancient world, for it is bestowed upon someone with whom you will likely never cross paths again.
I am now and have always been a fierce critic of the greed and violence that have haunted America from the very beginning. But I love my country. Its soil is stained with the blood of conquest and it is largely inhabited by the mean and ungrateful who would sooner kill the stranger than help him out of the wilderness. Yet angels walk among us whose souls rival the beauty of the land. Stick your thumb out on the highway and you might find them.