I sat on my pack in the dirt beside the eastbound ramp. I held up my sign and smiled weakly at the first few cars. Some of the drivers looked at me. Some didn’t. Some pretended to be preoccupied - fiddled with the radio, checked their gas gauge - anything to avoid making eye contact.
The sun beat down in breathless silence. It baked the pavement and dirt and wrung the sweat out of me. I drained the first of two water jugs and pulled my visor down low over my face. The cars were few and far between. Most of them were local and just crossed over the highway on rte 111 without turning. Of course these people weren’t afraid to look. They craned their necks and squinted, trying to read my sign. Kids pointed and waved and stuck their tongues out. One little brat even gave me the finger. It’s a lot easier to look a hitchhiker in the eyes when you’re not going his way.
I wasn’t the only one working the roadway that day. A bearded, boney, leather-skinned fellow stood on the median of the 111, not a hundred yards from me. He had an old tattered sign of his own that said Will Work For Food. And the sign wasn’t his only prop. In his other arm he dangled a skinny puppy, it’s gangly oversized paws hanging limp in the air, it’s tongue lolling around in the heat.
He had the cars trapped at the light. Most of the drivers lowered their eyes or stared like statues straight up at the light until it changed. When the inevitable few rolled down their windows and held out some coins or cash, the bum shuffled forward, took the money, nodded solemnly and returned to his post.
This went on for about a half hour. Then, during a lull in the traffic, he crossed the road to the gas station where his equally boney and haggard-looking buddy was resting in the greasy shade by the bathroom. He handed him the puppy and the sign and his buddy hoisted himself up off his skinny ass and wobbled over to the median to work his shift.
I thought about trying to buy the puppy. But what would I do with the thing? I wondered if it would help me get rides.
The first guy to pull over was basically a mobile version of these two. The back window of his dented, red Toyota pickup was smashed, a rectangle of cardboard duct-taped inside the spidering safety glass.
He rolled down the passenger window and rasped, “Sedona? Why you going to Mexico?”
“Sedona’s in Arizona.”
“You need some weed man? I’m trying to sell some weed to get some gas.”
It’s amazing how irritation can help you overcome fear. Timidity wasn’t getting me anywhere. I was attracting flies like a carcass. I stood up and began to lobby the gleaming, air-conditioned sedans and SUVs in earnest. I smiled and pointed to the word please on my sign and pinched my index finger and thumb together to indicate that I’d be grateful for a even a short ride.
Finally a thirty-something guy in a black Mercedes pulled over.
“I can take you to Dillon Road. It’s only a few exits, but it’s better than sitting here.”
He was right about that. Just the twenty minutes in that air-conditioned leather interior was worth it. Like a providential wink - proof of some time-tested adage (in order to walk a mile you must take a first step) - that short, inconsequential ride turned out to be just the kindly nudge I needed. He deposited me in the shade of a giant sycamore just a few blocks from the last rest area before the I-10 climbs up out of the Coachella Valley and unspools into the rocky desert.
In that peaceful, unmolested patch of sun-dappled shade, I set up my camera to record the excitement of my first official ride, but and before I could even start rolling, a Volvo station wagon pulled over. A cute brunette leaned towards the passenger window, eyed me semi-suspiciously from head to toe and asked, “What’s your deal?”
I didn’t tell her everything at first. Just that I was trying to get to Sedona, which should’ve been obvious from my sign. But by “What’s your deal?” I’m assuming she meant, “Why are you hitchhiking to Sedona?” After all this isn’t Mexico, or even Canada where it’s acceptable to be without a car. This is the good Old USA, home of Henry Ford and Route 66 and the zero-down loan. There really has to be something wrong with you to not have your own set of wheels.
Apparently she gained enough confidence from her first impression of me to feel safe giving me a ride. This, I know, is no small thing for a woman. But Jeannette wasn’t any woman. She owned two Harley Davidsons and had ridden one of them across the country. And, in a seeming harbinger of good things to come, she was also an enthusiastic, first year golfer on her way home to Lake Havasu from the US Open at Torrey Pines in San Diego. She gushed about the fact that she’d somehow managed to score a volunteer jacket even though she wasn’t a volunteer. In short, she was a Harley riding golf geek. Exactly the kind of person who could relate to what I was doing.
I told her all about my trip and that she was my first real ride. Well, second if you count the guy in the Mercedes, but my first long ride - the first time I felt like I was out on the road covering some real ground. She told me I should bag the hitchhiking and get a Harley. I told her I was hoping to be driven across the country by a string of beautiful women in air-conditioned Volvos.
We laughed and shared stories for two hours as we drove across the crumbling waste - the muted, broken lines of mesas moving slowly in the distance. Jeannette drove an hour out of her way and dropped me at a quiet, little junction just south of the tiny town of Salome, Arizona so I would be on a road heading towards Sedona.
“Go and do your mission” she said. “Woman driving nice cars are all over out there just waiting to give you a ride.”
I looked around me at the desolate crossroads. I wasn’t so sure.
Her Volvo raced off, trailing dust. The sudden silence and solitude was shocking, but I felt an incredible freedom being out there in the middle of nowhere - in a place I would’ve never stopped under any other circumstance. It was like being beamed down from a space ship.
It was a bittersweet feeling I would come to know well over the next weeks and months - bonding with someone, being sucked into their world like a whirlwind and then spit out again onto the side of the road. On the best days, I would get picked up again right away, like a ball being bounced from one kind, colorful soul to the next. But that first day there was less than an hour of daylight remaining and I was still 150 miles from Sedona. It wasn’t looking good. And it almost got worse.
As I was setting up the camera, an Arizona State Trooper cruised up. He stopped, stepped out of his cruiser, adjusted his hat, hitched his belt and sauntered over.
“Hitchhiking?”
“Just trying to get to Sedona. Going to play some golf.”
I pointed at my clubs strapped to the side of my pack. If he thought that was interesting, he didn’t show it. He nodded at my camera.
“What’s that there?”
“It’s a camera.”
He considered this.
“Hitchhiking’s illegal in Arizona. I could take you to jail right now.”
I didn’t respond. Neither one of us said anything for an eternity.
He just stood there hitching his belt and contemplating me - my guitar, golf clubs, backpack, camera - probably weighing the pros and cons of dragging my ass to jail and filling out the paper work. In the end he decided I wasn’t worth the trouble.
“Sedona’s a long way. It’s almost dark. There’s a little town called Salome just ahead. They’ve got a motel there. Shouldn’t be too long before someone passes this way.”
He tipped his hat, walked back to his cruiser and drove off. He was the first and last police officer to pay any attention to me.
The cars were few and far between on that little two-lane road and the few that passed never let off the accelerator. They drifted across the center line to give me a clear berth and blew by like rockets. It’s amazing how fast sixty or seventy miles an hour seems when you’re standing on the side of the road - skin and bones next to a speeding hunk of metal.
Finally, just as the sun was getting fat and red and serious about setting, a young man in a pick up came puttering up the side road. His name was Jake. He was wearing overalls and a trucker hat. He was on his way home from work at a local dairy.
He gave me a wry, twinkle-eyed smile - half suspicious, half admiring. It was a look I would see often on young people’s faces - the suspicious part because even teenagers in this country think it’s a God given right to have a car and wonder what’s wrong with you if you’re without one, the admiring part because despite their suspicions, they think hitchhiking right on out of whatever town they’re living in looks like a darned good idea.
Jake described his job in minute detail as we drove the ten miles to Salome. He ran and maintained the dairy’s computerized milk pumps - a job that sounded like it required considerable responsibility. But Jake humbly downplayed his role and talked instead about how he planned to go back to school and eventually move on from this place. It was exactly the kind of conversation you’d expect to have with a young man in the dusty, middle of nowhere rangeland of western Arizona. There was nothing unusual about it at all, except that halfway into town I felt something poking into my back and reached around to find a plastic DVD case that had obviously been on the seat when I hopped in. I was about to toss it in the back when the title caught my eye: Happy Gilmore.
“You play golf, Jake?”
“Nah. Not really. I played a couple of times. I just thought that movie looked funny so I thought I’d watch it tonight.”
I swear, sometimes it felt like the universe was winking at me.
Salome, AZ is a one horse town… actually, it’s more like a one everything town: one gas station, one restaurant, one bar, one motel. Jake dropped me in front of the motel.
The veranda fronting the single row of rooms was covered with a slanted terra cotta roof, its white-washed underside lit neon pink. Mexican fruit pickers lounged in front of their open doors, smoking, drinking cervezas and listening to soft mariachi. The office was in a separate house in front by the street. I laid my pack down in the grass and went in and rang the bell. An apartment attached to the office took up the entire back of the house and I could hear a tv set through the door behind the desk.
A woman emerged talking on a portable phone. She was followed by a little girl, maybe five years old and a dachshund puppy. The smell of fresh cooking wafted out behind them. She fumbled for the registration card amidst the minor chaos of her young family. Cartoons blared through the open door, the young girl tugged at her dress, the dachshund tried to escape through the screen door behind me. I ran back and tugged it shut, but the dog escaped five minutes later and raced off across the lawn on its stubby legs.
The charming chaos of this scene was made more hilarious by the juxtaposition of the languorous Mexicans. They watched me chase the dog in circles on the grass as the woman yelled in that stern, frantic way people yell at dogs when they have no control over them. I finally managed to tackle the thing (his name was Ozzie) and carry him back to the house. I gathered my belongings and walked to my room at the end of the building. I was a little breathless and sweaty under the weight of my pack after the chase. I tipped my golf visor to the Mexicans. They raised their beers and smiled and stared after me, probably wondering what the crazy gringo with the huge pack was doing in this flat, dusty country.
The sun was now just an afterglow behind the distant mesas and the air began to stir as the cool night tussled with the rising heat of the day. I walked up the street past the dark store windows. The lights had come on in the bar across the street, but there were no cars out front. Two blocks up I found what I was looking for: Lorenzio’s burrito truck. He was closing for the night - wrapping up the salsas and wiping down the metal counter jutting out from the small window. Music tinkled from a radio inside the truck. A woman sat at a picnic table nearby, smiling as a little girl pirouetted barefoot on the grass.
Lorenzio kindly unpacked everything one more time and prepared a burrito for me that made my forehead sweat and my eyes water. Every bite was an explosion of onion, tomato, chili pepper, cilantro and spicy carnitas. I dreamt about that burrito for months - when I was sitting by the side of the road with only beef jerky and water or eating overcooked green beans and pot roast in some truck stop cafe. I washed it down with two bottles of Coca-Cola - the Mexican kind made with real cane sugar that comes in old, recycled bottles stained with rings from the packing crates. Afterward, I strolled back to the hotel along the quiet street under the stars. There were so many of them that I could barely make out the major constellations. The Milky Way arched across the sky like chimney smoke.
That night as I wrote in my journal I was thinking of John Steinbeck, not just because this town could easily be the setting for one of his stories, but also because he was so good at describing how it feels when time slows down - a boy hunting birds with a slingshot in the dusty hills of California’s central valley, a waitress working the counter at a diner at some desolate highway junction. Time was beginning to slow down for me too.
I calculated how many miles I’d gone that day: 179 - a little more than half of what I planned. It was such a different experience from driving your own car across the country when you’re constantly looking at the odometer, speedometer and clock, trying to figure out how far you’ll get each night, always focused on your destination. Towns like Salome don’t even register unless you need gas. They just blow by like ghosts. And that’s only if you’re on a nowhere road like this to begin with. For most travelers places like this don’t even exist.
I was able to control my route to some degree - write a specific town on my sign, accept or decline rides - but I never knew exactly where I’d end up. And that was the beauty of it - spending nights in towns like Salome, eating out of Lorenzio’s Burrito truck and chasing Ozzie around on the grass. It doesn’t sound like much, but as they say, God is in the details, and I could feel a little soulful magic beginning stir.
I copied this passage from John Steinbeck’s Log From the Sea of Cortez into my journal:
“The Beagle couldn’t get about rapidly. She moved slowly under sail. And we can imagine that young Darwin, probably in a Bos’n’s chair hung over the side, with a dip net in his hands, scooping up jellyfish. When he went inland he rode a horse or walked. This is the proper pace for a naturalist. Faced with all things he cannot hurry. We must have time to think and to look and to consider… It was the pace that made the difference. And in the writing of Darwin, as in his thinking, there is the slow heave of the sailing ship and the patience of waiting for a tide.”
The next morning I awoke to the sound of a freight train rattling past. Sunlight slanted in through the window.
The contents of my pack were strewn all over the floor and counter tops: bags of clothes, toiletries, suntan lotion, pieces of cardboard, pens, markers and books. Battery chargers flashed green in the sockets. Yards of power chords and connector cables stretched between my camera and computer and the wall. The tripod stood by the door. It took me forty-five minutes to pack - a routine I would repeat more than fifty times over the next two months.
When I was finished I left my pack leaning by the door and walked up the street to the gas station to buy some breakfast bars, beef jerky and water. I looked wistfully across to where Lorenzio’s burrito truck stood shuttered. Above his truck I noticed a billboard that read: “Desert Palms Golf and RV Resort.” I munched on a breakfast bar and considered this.
I was planning to hitchhike to Sedona to play Sedona Golf Resort that afternoon - a picturesque parkland course surrounded by red rock mesas. But then I thought of Steinbeck’s words about slowing time down. I thought about Jeanette picking me up on her way back from the US Open and the Happy Gilmore DVD in Jake’s truck… the billboard looked like the next in a series of bread crumbs. I decided to go back to my room, grab my golf clubs and follow the trail.
I walked a quiet country road past a few squat houses out into the sage-pilled plain… people always ask me if I walked very far when I hitchhiked. I think they’re visualizing David Banner from the Incredible Hulk roaming the lonely highways with his thumb out. But the truth is I could barely make it a hundred yards with my giant pack. But I did often walk locally, when my pack was safely stowed in a hotel or campground or at someone’s house. And I came to love these walks because they took me through little back streets and neighborhoods, like this one, and along rivers and through parks. And the people who stopped to pick me up on these walks were almost always locals who further filled in the picture by the way they spoke and dressed and the stories they told and advice they offered.
I was usually carrying my golf clubs too, so sometimes people pulled over even if I didn’t have my thumb out. And that’s exactly what happened in Salome. A big, burly guy with a deeply lined and tanned, almost ageless, desert face pulled up next to me in a half ton diesel and said,
“Going golfing?
He told me that Desert Palms was built by a Canadian developer who was selling lots to other Canadians - snowbirds trying to escape the arctic winter. He was as baffled by this as I was. He shook his head, let out a wonderful, deep, Marlboro-aged chuckle and said, “This ain’t no Scottsdale.”
But there it was - an eighteen hole executive course with white sand bunkers and decently shaped greens. It even had a shiny new fleet of golf carts parked next to a practice green and an air conditioned double wide trailer for a pro shop. And judging by the rows of prefab houses, some with stickers still on the windows, the lots were selling.
Honestly, I was a little disappointed by the whole thing. I don’t know exactly what I was hoping to find, definitely something more interesting - maybe oil and sand greens, jack rabbit skulls for tee markers, an octogenarian version of Carl from Caddie Shack on a tractor? But I’d walked this far so I decided to go inside and have a look. And that’s where I met John and Cookie.
They were snowbirds themselves. They’d heard about the place from a fellow Canadian (Cookie is Canadian) and after coming down for two winters, liked it enough they decided to stay for the summer. That seemed like a brave decision given the remoteness and the heat, but John enjoyed working on the golf course and Cookie had recently fallen for the game herself and was tending the pro shop. They had a simple, comfortable existence that would certainly be the envy of some with lives more complicated. I also sensed from them that special something that emanates from couples who are truly in love. I could imagine them living almost anywhere as long as they had each other.
When I told them about my trip, a gleam appeared in John’s eye. He tipped back his cowboy hat and said,
“A buddy of mine I met back when I was in the Air Force down in central Indiana, he was a golfer and we started hitchhiking all over Illinois and Indiana and Wisconsin to play in tournaments on the weekends and one time we hitched right through downtown Chicago…"
Cookie interrupted, "You were in uniform with your golf clubs?"
Apparently she hadn’t heard this story before.
"We were in Air Force blues with golf clubs and an AWOL bag and we never had any problems. One time I remember in particular, we got hung up in a traffic jam on the JFK so we set our clubs down and dropped down over the edge of the freeway and went down to a bar and got a six pack and brought it back up and got a ride right away… I've got fond memories of hitchhiking with golf clubs."
Then John told me he was driving up to Wickinberg that afternoon to get some work done on his truck.
He offered to give me a ride. Wickinberg was sixty miles further west, right on my way to Sedona.
Talk about breadcrumbs.
With a couple of hours to burn and an empty golf course sitting there, I bought a couple of cans of cold Coors, grabbed a cart and played nine holes.
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