Hitchhiking

From the dining room table, I noticed a bird on the ground a hundred feet away. It’s posture and size suggested a Northern Flicker and, sure enough, a minute later when it flew upwards, its white rump and orange underwings boldly pronounced its flickerness and I recalled my first encounter with a flicker. I had been hitchhiking north from San Francisco on Highway One and the driver casually identified as a flicker a bird flying away from the road. I was so amazed that he could identify it at a glance that I asked him how he could do that. He demonstrated a possibility that I did not know existed and which, later, I learned to do.

That memory led to a reflection on the people I met while hitchhiking and some of the consciousness-expanding gifts they gave me:

– A double amputee from Vietnam who drove very fast because he had learned that no policeman would give a ticket to a man who had given two limbs in service to his country.

– An Alaskan couple who were moving into their current farm house. They had set a full-length mirror against an outside wall as they were moving things around. Later, they heard a shattering crash. Their billy goat had rammed his reflection.

– On Highway 395 I was picked up by a man who had been away on a job and was now heading home to LA. He was looking forward to getting home and seeing his wife and kids. But as we drove south, he started debating to himself whether he should maybe nip over to Las Vegas for just a little gambling. He debated back and forth and finally decided he shouldn’t, that he would go home, but at the last turnoff to Las Vegas, he dropped me off and turned east to Las Vegas. My heart went out to his family. A great sadness.

– The bird-watching couple who told me that if I wanted to see birds, I had to go to Alaska. That changed my life.

– Learning about the necessity of crop insurance from a farmer in Kansas, land of hail storms and tornadoes.

– A mother who picked me up because her son was somewhere out there hitchhiking and she wanted to know what life might be like for him.

– The still-alive Marine who commented on the thrill of a knife fight because only one of you was going to come out alive.

– The army recruiter and the man with him who was re-enlisting because what he liked about the army was that someone was always telling him what to do. He didn’t have to decide himself.

– The man who gave me his copy of Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire about a seasonal National Park ranger which I later became.

– Trying to understand an expert in spider taxonomy’s explanation of the evolutionary principles underlying taxonomy.

– The trucker who was well-pleased with himself because his job was delivering the ultimately easiest load (from a truck driver’s point of view): potato chips. They don’t weigh a thing and there is no weight shift going around corners. He said the weight shift made delivering live cattle the worst trucking load of them all.

– A newspaper reporter who taught me that the amount of news that appears in the paper is determined, not by the amount of news that happened that day, but by the amount of advertising space that was sold for that day. – A trucker who warned me about wrapping my thumb around the steering wheel. He said that in an accident, the wheel can whip around very fast and slice off a thumb. He said I should rest my thumbs on