Although movement is often much of the excitement of hitchhiking–a string of surprises of who will pick us up, what stories they will tell, and where we will go– waiting comprises mostof the experience. We often wait in places that are unloved and never intended for people to stay still in. We wait on the edges of roundabouts and on patches of yellow-green grass before the village road leads to the freeway. In these in-between spaces, I am playing with gravel, sitting, eating, picking at grass, staring at the sky. Bodily restlessness from the anxious hope of moving onward, demanded by a plot-driven narrative of life, quietly settles into an acceptance of the pleasure of being without the mandate of doing. These periods of waiting are also when stories are told. We share longer tales our therapists only had time to hear abbreviated versions of. It is also on these strange patches of dirt and grass that I start to truly pay attention to the expansive landscape around me. There I luxuriate in a brief, false respite from modernity, connected to the 95 percent of history when humans worked an average of fifteen hours a week and the rest was left for story-telling and being with our loved ones, as Ursula Le Guin notes in The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.
The rhythms of hitchhiking compel us to engage with places outside of our original vision of what places are worth seeing.
Humans have been relentlessly trying to conquer the materiality of geography through faster modes of crossing landscape. We can now get on a plane and never see the land we pass over for most of the flight. But hitchhiking, by the nature of how time-consuming and unpredictable it can be, makes transit the star of the trip, a time-place where things are happening and unforgettable memories are being made. Landscape becomes a main interlocutor, not only the backdrop along which we are both moving and stopping. We are subject to the lands’ rhythms. The sun becomes a bookend to our day. Seasonal changes in rural roadways upend our plans and throw us to new directions.
Lumi and I, somewhere on la Carretera Austral, Chile, 2019
Lumi and Alea taking their first Mandarin lesson on the side of the road, as no one picks us up, Chile Chico, Chile, 2019
Looking for a ride out of Boğatape, Turkey, 2024
Juahna and I fooling ourselves, Ljubljana on the road to Idrija, Slovenia, 2023
The rhythms of hitchhiking compel us to engage with places outside of our original vision of what places are worth seeing. It was the pouring rain that made Juahna, Adèle, and I take refuge in a nearby kebab shop in Slovenia, where we ate fries, sopping wet to the bemusement of a kind waitress who gave us a Sharpie to redo our cardboard sign. It was the setting winter sun in the village of Ani, the last stop in Turkey before the closed Turkish-Armenian border, that forced my friend Shenni and I into intensive negotiations with local farmers, an entrepreneurial group of eight children ages five to nine, and the gendarme as dark encroached and our toes started to lose feeling. With my flawed Turkish, I ended up absurdly negotiating with an eight year old girl who said we could pay to stay the night with her parents.
Coming back to the U.S. means saying goodbye to hitchhiking and all the potential non-linear pathways, detours, backroads, and adventures with strangers I will never take. The U.S. is rich in many things, but sometimes I feel it robs me of some of the experiences I love the most: material expressions of solidarity, cheap transit, spontaneity, and expansive time. Submitting to randomness in time and movement feels precarious under neoliberalism, which asks us to maximize our every movement and decision. Hitchhiking reminded me that time is not something I can dominate but can instead peacefully submit to. Giving up agency in choosing my path also embraces the reality that I never had full control of my circumstances in the first place.
Recently, I am doing more yet feeling increasingly time-impoverished. New temporal logics are dividing my days into blocks of time to manage, wrangle, and maximize. All the while, a part of me longs for an entire day of indeterminacy with a friend on the side of a rural road, pleasantly wrapped with the excitement of not knowing how things will unfold.