Hitchhiking in America

Tom Kando

In my previous post, I described a hitchhiking adventure I had in Italy as a child. Just a few years later, I was hitchhiking again, this time in the US. I first came to America in 1960, as an Fulbright exchange student. I was nineteen. I fell in love with this gigantic and magnificent country. I was eager to explore a wide world beyond the narrow confines of Europe. Having almost zero money, So I hitchhiked. 

I was enacting a book I had just read breathlessly, a revolutionary book - Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. To me, the book’s appeal was not in its glorification of drugs, but in that it was a celebration of America, of the American spirit of freedom, of the grandeur of America. I saw the book not as anti-American, but as quintessentially American, an ode to the beauty and diversity of this country and its people, in the tradition of Thoreau, John Muir and Jack London.

My Fulbright scholarship was for a year at Union College, Schenectady, N.Y. At Easter break, all the college men (Union was still all male), went home for the recess. A great guy named “Buzz” Jackson was from Wichita Falls, Texas. He was going home for the break. He generously agreed to take me and two other exchange students all the way to Texas for a minor contribution to the gas expenses. The other two exchange students were Mike, like me also from Holland, and Saleem, an Algerian student. 

So the three of us rode with Buzz all the way to his parents’ home in Wichita Falls. We went non-stop in two days. We drove through Washington D.C. just in time to see the cherry blossoms. We crossed the whole Deep South, driving across the Carolinas’ bright red-earth landscape and Georgia’s and Alabama’s cotton fields. We only stopped to eat, fill up and go to the bathrooms for whites only. To the three of us from overseas, those segregated bathrooms were a stunning visual indication of an apartheid we had never pondered. 

Then, after enjoying the hospitality of Buzz’s family for a couple of days, the three of us hit the road hitchhiking for two weeks. We wanted to go as far West as possible, maybe cross into Mexico. We would return to Buzz’s house and drive back to Schenectady with him at the end of Easter recess. For a bunch of European boys this was exhilarating.

It took us a couple of days just to reach New Mexico. Sometimes we had to roll out our sleeping bags and sleep in the desert, under the stars. For example, the night we were stuck outside of Roswell, N.M. on US 285. We were in an arid region known as the Llano, a vast plateau of about 40,000 square miles at 3,500 feet elevation. We had been hitchhiking across this desolate and sparsely populated area, sometimes crossing open-range ranch land, sometimes going through high desert country. 

It was getting dark. The sun had just set behind the snow-capped peaks of the Sacramento Range, to the West. There wasn’t a house in sight, no sign of human existence. The road stretched out endlessly to the horizon, and so did, alongside it, a single-track railroad. Twice a day, a freight train would come by, a gigantic, caterpillar-like convoy, sometimes over hundred cars drawn by five diesel locomotives, slowly, ponderously, the cars bearing magnificent names like ‘Sante Fe and Burlington’ and ‘Southern Pacific.’ 

We decided to sleep on the far side of the railroad tracks, next to a cactus as large as a tree, hoping that there would be fewer rattle snakes there. First, we made a campfire, using tumbleweed for fuel. Then we ate our sandwiches and chatted, smoking Marlboros, which tasted a lot better than European cigarettes, and drinking Budweiser, which tasted a lot worse than European beer. Finally we crawled into our sleeping bags, bracing ourselves for a cold night under the stars. It was early April and we were in the high desert at nearly four thousand feet elevation. There wasn’t a cloud in the star-studded sky, a sky so magnificently clear that you felt you could touch the stars. 

Falling asleep was a challenge. We knew that there were probably all sorts of critters around us - scorpions, rattle snakes, coyotes, maybe even some mountain lions. Would they start bothering us, once they smelled us and our food? The temperature was starting to dip below freezing. But we huddled together and eventually all three of us were sleeping the deep sleep of the just and the innocent. 

The next day, we pushed on toward El Paso and the fabled Rio Grande. We were still on Highway 285, for the second day in a row, a desolate and endless road going South by Southwest in the foothills of the Sacramento range. We were approaching Mexico. We got a few short rides between tiny towns. These were now 100% Hispanic. The clothes, the sombreros, the language, the food, the aroma, the magnificent trumpets blaring out of bars, everything said ‘Mexico.’ 

A car with two Hispanic men stopped for us. They worked at the famous Carlsbad Caverns, about hundred miles up the road. Communication was difficult, as the two men hardly knew English and the three of us didn’t speak Spanish. Everyone settled into a comfortable silence, at times dozing off. The car radio picked up great Mexican music, for example the beautiful recent song There is a Rose in Spanish Harlem. 

At one point, we stopped at a lone gas station to fill up. There was an amazing sign: ”Last Chance to Fill Up: Next Gas Station 285 Miles.” I was astounded. That was the distance from Amsterdam to Paris! Before we could reach El Paso and the Mexican border, we had to cross 285 miles of desert, without a single town in between! 

At the turn-off for the Carlsbad Caverns the men dropped us off. We stayed on the main road towards El Paso. It was late afternoon. There was zero traffic. Just desert and silence all around us. We would have to spend another night under the stars. And we had to be careful with our water supply, even though we would probably come by a stream here and there. 

We walked along the desert road, hoping to find a good spot for a campfire and for our sleeping bags. It was dusk and we were not even hitchhiking any more. We were lucky: A lone car approached, the first one in a quarter of an hour. Lo and behold, it stopped. Seeing three boys walking in the desert at night, they took pity. The car was a luxurious Lincoln Continental driven by a middle-class looking couple from Michigan. They were on a vacation touring the Southwest. Their destination for the day was El Paso, which we reached after dark. 

We told the couple that we wanted to stay at the YMCA, and they took us there. As we approached and then drove through the city, we saw a skyline that differed from other American cities we had seen so far. El Paso was our first truly Western city. It had sparkling skyscrapers and more neon signs and lights of all colors, sort of how I imagined Las Vegas. 

The next morning, we did what we had been itching to do for days: Like Jack Kerouac, a visit to Old Mexico was to be the grand finale of our trip On The Road. We crossed the Rio Grande and entered Juarez, El Paso’s Mexican sister city. All day we sauntered around the city’s old streets and market squares, looking at the vendors and their fly-covered meats and chili peppers. We sampled the latter but not the former. I discovered that some types of Mexican chili peppers were incomparably hotter than any paprika I had ever tasted, and it wasn’t long before I learned the meaning of Montezuma’s Revenge. Many times, young children tugged at us, demanding money. Some of them couldn’t have been older than six. Our appearance, except for Saleem’s, was so gringo-like. The Mexican kids didn’t know that we were as destitute as they were. When I turned a boy down, he spat at me. To us, old Mexico was a stunning mixture of appalling poverty and exotic beauty. 

In the evening, we drank cerveza in a café, listening to the guitar and the clattering trumpets played by men in sombreros on the sidewalk. 

Late at night, we finally gave in to the umpteenth cab driver wanting to drive us to a nightclub. The man drove like a maniac through the maze of tiny, dark, unpaved dirt streets, finally dropping us off in front of an establishment marked by a solitary neon sign. This is the bottom of the world, I thought. Were we to disappear tonight, nobody would ever find us again! 

Inside the nightclub, we drank tequila at the bar. Surprisingly, in view of the place’s forlorn outside appearance, the crowd inside was enormous. There were many buxom, often attractive, and very, very friendly ladies. They asked us to buy them drinks, but we declined politely.. 

It wasn’t long before a large and unfriendly looking Mexican man approached us. The problem was that we, the gringo-looking boys, were taking up three valuable stools at the bar, while dozens of Mexican customers had to stand, and we were not providing enough business. 

The large man told me, menacingly, to ‘shit or get off the can.’ I had no idea what that meant, but I did get the clear message that we were no longer welcome - hogging bar stools but reluctant to spend a lot of money. The large man made us give our seats to more promising customers. For a while we stood around, finishing our drinks. Then we took a cab back to the US border and walked back to the YMCA. 

After this, we spent a few days hitchhiking to the glistening skyscrapers of Dallas, and then back to the Jackson family in Wichita Falls. From there, Buzz drove us all back to Union College, nearly two thousand miles away in upstate New York. This was my first great trip across the North American continent. Many would follow, but none left as indelible an impression on me as this one.

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