If you are a backpacker on a trek along a crest or a divide, traveling from Mexico to Canada or vice versa, sometimes you and your partner will need a hitch fifteen or thirty miles off your high route, down into a no-stopsign town where you will find a box of food you packed months ago waiting for you in the post office. If your trail descends from tree line and intersects a dirt road or a slick highway, you will emerge from this corridor, which at the moment you consider your home, and put out your thumb. For an afternoon or a day, you need to stop your walking and revisit the world you left behind.
If you need a hitch, you won't know what awaits you when you slide into a back seat or clamber into the bed of a pickup. You will not know what conversation or silence you will share, what cargo you will sit on, what bumps you will feel, what air you will breathe.
You won't know if this person drives like a maniac in L.A. rush hour, or like your grandmother, both of which terrify you, or whether you will be able to slump with ease during the ride. You won't know whether there are guns or homemade ginger snaps in that plastic console between the two front seats, or whether either will be thrust in your direction.
You won't know what compelled this person to pull over for you. After you watch with relief as the vehicle swerves and jerks to a stop, you won't see anything but taillights and a silhouette in the driver's seat. Even after you approach the unrolled passenger side window, gush with gratitude, name some small town, and ask if it is on the way, you convince yourself this person, who stopped while so many others flew by your wagging thumb, must be all right.
Really, you have no idea what you're getting yourself into.
But if you are sweating or wet or cold, if you can't remember when you took your last shower, if you are famished or dehydrated, if it is snowing, if it is so hot the asphalt is melting under your shoes, if you are sure that lightning is about to strike you, if you know the post office closes in two hours and a package is waiting there for you, then you will not care what or whom veers off the road toward you. You will go.
Even if your first hitch terrified you because the driver floored that dying heap of a pickup around every curve of the desert highway, you are not deterred. In some strange way, after it was all over and you were still alive, you looked forward to doing it again. You liked how, in that moment, you began to slough off your city-wise pessimism, and that now, although you know should worry about all the ways a hitch could go terribly wrong, you won't.
If you and your partner have climbed into a back seat, you know the driver may soon regret stopping for you because your stench will infiltrate the small cabin. If you are wet, you smell like a dog; if you are hot, you reek of days-old sweat. Even if you wear your cleanest fleece for the ride, you will feel bad that your dusty, salty, sweaty legs and back are sinking into the car's cushioned seat. If the air conditioning is on or it is sleeting outside, you will want to roll down your window but you don't, and at the same time you will wonder if your driver wants to roll down his window too, but doesn't because doing so would somehow announce that your stench is unbearable, that the heat or snow or whatever is going on outside is better than what you've got going on inside his car.
If your driver does not make conversation right away, you don't either, because when you stuck out your thumb and the driver pulled over, it was understood that you were only asking for a ride, not a new friend. Curiosity will get the best of your driver sooner or later, and you will be asked questions, the same questions you are always asked, about where you've come from and where you're going. After you explain that you are hiking the distance between Canada and Mexico because it means you can quit your job for five months and do what you love, which is to walk through quiet and rugged landscapes, then, if your driver still wants to talk, you will carry your half of the conversation. Or, more likely, you will listen to your driver talk. You know that many drivers pull over only because they are tired of the sound of tires on old asphalt, or stints of small-town radio between hours of static, or wind pushing against the driver-side window. You know many are lonely. And you, too, are tired of silence and the song that's been playing in your head since you heard it nine days ago in the diner one town behind you. You will listen to stories about your driver's travels along the route of the Lewis and Clark expedition, or about his altercations with the Forest Service over his cattle grazing allotments, or about the breakup of his marriage, or about an estranged son or daughter who is a convicted criminal, or about elk hunting, or about the one-hundred-and-fifty pound pack he carried in Vietnam, or about basketball or politics. Or about the time a truck full of frozen turkeys overturned at this spot in the road and word spread fast, bringing people from all over the county who clambered into the ravines on either side of the highway and filled their pickups with the strewn birds. You will listen and nod your head when your driver glances at you in the rearview mirror, even if you do not hunt, hate cattle, don't follow basketball, or know that your driver must belong to an extremist militia.
If you've been on the trail a while, you may feel carsick, especially if the road curves on its way to town. You are not used to traveling more than three miles per hour, so you concentrate on looking straight ahead. If you are mesmerized by the way speed turns lodgepole pines into a blur of forest and the current of the Big Hole river into a sunken line, you will think about the fact that at this moment you are covering the equivalent of days' distance in mere minutes.
If you are offered a lift in the open bed of a pickup truck, you will climb in and settle on your pack, unless the bed is already mostly full of sand bags or rafts or lumber or plastic crates you cannot see into, in which case you sit on the lowest, softest thing or wherever your driver tells you to sit. You pull on another shirt for the ride and make sure nothing on your pack is loose. If there is already a dog in there, you sing "nice doggy" and pet it, even if it's mangy. Or, if your driver pulls over somewhere along the way to pick up his wet mutt that got loose the night before and is now roaming the roadside, you welcome it, letting its muddy belly wiggle across your lap. If you are riding along a pocked dirt road rippled with washboard, you hope your driver is compassionate and remembers what it's like to ride in the back of a pickup going 50 mph over a pothole. If he does not, then you brace yourself with your hands clenched over the side of the truck or pressing down on your seat to protect your tailbone. If the day is hot, you will like the way the wind dries your eyes and lips and the sweat at your hairline. Otherwise, you will close your eyes and hunker down with your chin buried in the neck of your shirt and your hands balled in your sleeves.
If your driver likes to talk and knows something of the town where you are headed, you will ask for recommendations for good, cheap food. Your driver probably assumes you want a fat burger or steak when all you want is a meatless pizza.
If it is raining when a family of four from Eau Claire, Wisconsin, invites you into their custom-wood-paneled, country-music-rockin', entertainment-centered, cheesehead-decorated, packed-full road-tripping van, you will get in and watch beads of water skitter along the passenger window. If you have been waiting long in that rain, the warm, suddenly-indoors feeling that washes over you and the swish-swish of wiper blades will put you in a trance. If Willie Nelson croons in surround sound, you will not nod off. Instead, you will admire the girls' new cowboy boots and help them name the stuffed animals they just purchased at the National Park gift shop.
If you're picked up by an author whose work you admire, you won't get over it for weeks. You will break your rule about not forcing conversation upon your driver, barraging him with questions about his new book, and when you tell him you are an aspiring writer, he will give you his address and you will keep it for years in a pocket of your day planner.
If your driver lives in the town where you are going and asks if you'd like to stay the night, you will know this person is sent from God. If this person feeds you dinner, offers you a bath towel, the washer and dryer, and the keys to the car to run errands in town, then makes you pineapple-upside-down cake and turns a bed down for you, then you will think you must have crashed in that car, died instantly, and gone to heaven.
If someone unexpected stops for you, say an ambulance driver or a National Park Service cop, you remember that this is as much your adventure as the miles you walk each day.
If a mother and her grown daughter pull to a stop and you hop into the leather seats of a clean, new SUV and are whisked over the Colorado border into a small New Mexico town, you will be glad that not only strong men are willing to pick you up. If you are watching carefully, you will see the daughter pass a small note to her left, and the mother's gaze turn from the road ahead to her lap just long enough to read the torn bit of paper. Then, if a moment later she invites you to stay the night, you will accept this offer, and the next one, which is a ride back to the trail in the morning, not in the SUV but in an open car of the railroad this family operates. After a night's rest in a soft bed, you will board the Toltec Railroad with hundreds of tourists who've paid good money to see the Rocky Mountains' fall colors. But if you've been walking through this red and gold landscape since you witnessed its turn three weeks ago, you will be far more interested in reading the newspaper for an hour, until the steam train stops at the pass for water and the conductor yells, "Backpackers off!" Then, as red faces lean out the endless string of railroad car windows, and fingers point to you like they do the wildlife, and voices pepper you with questions, you will realize you are less a passenger than a part of the attraction, like the rotting lean-to you retreat behind until the train pulls away.
If a man who stops to give you a lift out of town is so enchanted with the idea of meeting actual thru-hikers he almost doesn't let you out when you arrive at the trailhead, then you enjoy the moment because most of the time you just get that you're-doing-what-are-you-crazy look.
If you are walking the highway that connects the trail and your next town stop, and that highway takes you past the county prison, then you will nod and say hello back to the man behind the buzzing wire fence who looks bored in the exercise yard and must have seen you coming down that hill. If you are taking photos along the way, just past the prison you will take a picture of your hiking partners standing, all grins, with their thumbs out in front of the large highway sign that reads, "Do not pick up hitchhikers." And then, if the postmaster in town has seen your package arrive, and noticed your expected arrival date on the address label, and out of the goodness of her heart drives up that road to meet you, you will be momentarily terrified because a stranger in a minivan has driven up, rolled down her window, and called your name. If, at this point, she introduces herself, and even if you are within a few miles of town and don't mind walking, you will let her drive you straight to Dairy Queen.
If someone stops for you before you can even drop your pack, or if you wait for four hours on some forsaken byway before a single car approaches from the haze of the valley, and upon seeing it you stand in the middle of the narrow dirt road and wave your arms just in case there was any chance that car didn't feel like stopping, you will remember that people are generally trustworthy and kindhearted. You will realize that many of your fears about strangers are unfounded.
If you're a seasoned hitchhiker, you know that people never accept cash, so you won't offer. You will wish there were some way of thanking your driver but you don't know what that is, so you will just bumble profusely and hop out quickly, as if your driver were in a hurry. You know that the only thing to do is be that same kind of driver when you are cruising a highway and someone is wagging a thumb and hoping, desperately hoping, in you.
