Indiana > Montana From the top of my new highway embankment I walk 15 yards downhill into no-man's land and am immediately granted the invisibility of being somewhere you are not expected: the unreachable, unfathomable negative space between the roads of the American Highway System. I eat a psychedelic mushroom and drink my last Heineken. I briefly ponder my temporary role as a professional carpooler, then climb back up to offer my services to the intermittant drip of cars going my way. (Part I)

My first ride, and the easiest, is in a late-model, spotless, fully insured Toyota sedan from which faint whiffs of the factory can still be caught despite it being the vehicle my mother used to drop me off at wrestling practice some six years prior. She’s doing something similar now, making a side trip on her cross-town commute to drop me off at what I hope is my exit northwest to Montana via Chicago. We pull over onto the shoulder of the onramp so she can hug me and draw one last scrap of reassurance from the confident smile that I now pull out and apply to my face like a cream. She alternates between my left and right eye. She finds what she needs and puts it away in a place they show you when you become a parent, no doubt to be pulled out many times over the coming months and polished by worried hands until it is as smooth as a river stone. This is a scene I’m familiar with: an emotional but hurried roadside goodbye performed for passing traffic, and although it’s usually cast with walk-ons, the usual techniques apply. I mug and wave until she’s out of sight, light a cigarette and redress for unseasonably cold, fidgety weather. I stand 6’3” in boots, silhoutted through a thin grey mist in a black poncho and 70L external frame backpack. I get the cream back out and stick out my thumb.

A young, cerebral black man named Sun picks me up and takes me 15 minutes down the road, into open fields just outside my range of hometown familiarity. His tiny sedan is messy but not unclean. It is decorated with beads. Sun does not think this situation is weird. He speaks with the easy confidence of someone who occasionally gets laid, or is good at something. He squints as he does so, in a manner suggesting he has done this in a mirror at some point. It does, admittedly, make him look very cool. Sun, possessing a rare understanding of the terms of our relationship, does not apologize for being unable to take me further, or for where I’ve gone and got myself, which, looking around, has little traffic and no coffee. From the top of my new highway embankment I walk 15 yards downhill into no-man’s land and am immediately granted the invisibility of being somewhere you are not expected: the unreachable, unfathomable negative space between the roads of the American Highway System. I eat a psychedelic mushroom and drink my last Heineken. I briefly ponder my temporary role as a professional carpooler, then climb back up to offer my services to the intermittant drip of cars going my way.

Through western Indiana I ride with a steel mill worker, a banker and her son, a grandmother. I’m crossing the border into Illinois and my ride is telling me the name of his bar 150 miles back in Lafeyette, is on his way to a wedding in St. Louis, says Boulder is beautiful. On the whole my rides are people going through changes, making moves. Lauren is on her way to a new job in the big city. Daniel just broke up with his live-in girlfriend and needs to drive.

I get turned around and roll my ankle on my way into Springfield, IL. I’m weaseling my way around Chicago, trying to maintain a level of population density that allows for both hitchhiking and stealthy camping, but the sun is going down and I have time for, at most, one more ride. Re-orienting back to the proper highway takes a trek through whatever sleepy town I’m stuck in, and as I’m kicking rocks I notice an old sedan pull a U-turn to approach me in an adjacent empty parking lot. Angel and Trevor are kids younger than I am. They saw the backpack, and am I tryina’ throw down on a blunt? I am. I hop in and we go score, buy a wrap, and they take me back to their house. Trevor runs a computer repair business out of his basement that seems to be doing well. He says something like, “computers are getting to be pretty big” and I agree with him. We listen to early American dubstep at an aggressive volume. I excuse myself, having had a long day, and fall asleep exactly where I sit on their couch.

By the time I leave in the morning, I have been given what feels like most of the food in their modest home. Angel is neither the first nor the last person without money to give me everything she could think of; neither the first nor the last to help me more than they could afford to. A tube of saltines from a scant pantry can cut a man in half, in a way a twenty dollar bill held out the cracked window of a still-rolling Mercedes never will.

I walk to the interstate and make a funny sign out of french fry packaging and boredom. A mother driving past sees me and looks up through the mirror at her elementary-school-aged passengers, cautioning them to never, ever pick up hitchhikers, brandishing an accusatory index finger that might as well have been pointed at me. I yawn and brush my teeth.