My favorite rides were those in the back of pick up trucks because you can really feel the land you are traveling through - the sun on your face and the smell of desert, pine, prairie or ocean in the air. These rides are closest to the spirit of hitchhiking - the freedom and adventure of it. And when I'm in the back of a pick up I'm always reminded of that classic chapter from On the Road that begins:
"The greatest ride in my life was about to come up, a truck, with a flatboard at the back, with about six or seven boys sprawled out on it, and the drivers, two young blond farmers from Minnesota, were picking up every single soul they found on that road — the most smiling, cheerful couple of handsome bumpkins you could ever wish to see, both wearing cotton shirts and overalls, nothing else; both thick-wristed and earnest, with broad howareyou smiles for anybody and anything that came across their path. I ran up, said "Is there room?" They said, "Sure, hop on, 'sroom for everybody."
I wasn't on the flatboard before the truck roared off; I lurched, a rider grabbed me, and I sat down. Somebody passed a bottle of rotgut, the bottom of it. I took a big swig in the wild, lyrical, drizzling air of Nebraska. "Whooee, here we go!" yelled a kid in a baseball cap, and they gunned up the truck to seventy and passed everybody on the road."
It reminds me of a ride on Day 6 in the back of a pick up through the Navajo Reservation - going a hundred with five Navajos in the back, bumping around and smiling, a grandmother at the wheel and her son and grandson in the passenger seat. We blew by all the Subarus and Toyota FourRunners with their mountain bikes and kayaks on top, all headed up to Moab to bike the red rock trails and run the Colorado River... the same cars that had just passed me and now I was smiling and waving at them from the back of the speeding pick up with the Mario Andretti grandma at the wheel. And when I hopped out on the edge of the Rez near Mexican hat, a woman in a Subaru who'd passed me once and could do it again with a clear conscience, pulled over and took me clear to Moab.
Most of the time there was room in the car, so these rides were rare. I'd caught another glorious one down Mingus Mountain just two days earlier, described in the first post on this page. And I would catch one more on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia on Day 44 with three high school kids - Grant, Patricia and Dylan - who were "cruising" the Inverness "strip" in Grant's vintage, bright orange Ford pick-up. Apparently bored with the five blocks of downtown Inverness they took a spin out into the country where they found me with my thumb out.
Some time later, I received an email from Grant that read:
Hey, it's Grant from day 44. I thought you might like a picture of the truck:
No comments:
Post a Comment