Off-Roading

Polite notice for the sole reader of this blog:

I'm relocating to my new self-written website here: https://dormiensvigila.github.io/home.html
All the hitching stories from the blog  are there and it's where new things will end up too.

Le Mans

 

Somewhere near Le Mans in 2015 I think.
At a petrol station there is a young man, French, who is hitch-hiking.
Tall, thin and pale where he isn’t sunburnt. Dark brown hair cut short with clippers, bushy eyebrows, black eyes like a snowman would have. Thin stubble everywhere. He reminded me of Where’s Wally somehow, I don’t know why exactly. He was very animated.
I walked up to him and we shook hands in greeting. We laughed when we realised that we couldn’t communicate verbally. He gestured at a baguette in the side pocket of his backpack and pointed to me. I smiled and refused as I wasn’t hungry. I pointed at the cardboard strapped onto my backpack  and pulled out a marker. He nodded. I dropped my backpack to the floor and knelt down to pull out a piece of cardboard for him, then handed over the pen and waited while he wrote his sign. This accomplished I stood up and shouldered my pack again.
We hugged in parting and said ‘bon voyage.’

Some minutes later I am waiting by the motorway on ramp as the sun goes down.
These are the most sacred moments of my short existence.
The evening pours out of the world like honey leaving a main artery.
I am filled with a mix of joy and curiosity about where I will sleep. There is no knowing.
A car beeps as it passes me. I see this young man waving furiously from the back.

Nothing can solve existential pain but there’s something about briefly having a brother.

Lu'ay Samir Sami

 

Who Sees You

Entropic Villanelle

Tom Disch

Things break down in different ways.
The odds say croupiers will win.
We can’t, for that, omit their praise.


I have had heartburn several days,
And it’s ten years since I’ve been thin.
Things break down in different ways.


Green is the lea and smooth as baize
Where witless sheep crop Jessamine
(We can’t, for that, omit their praise)


And meanwhile melanomas graze
Upon the meadows of the skin
(Things break down in different ways).


Though apples spoil, and meat decays,
And teeth erode like aspirin,
We can’t, for that, omit their praise.


The odds still favor croupiers,
But give the wheel another spin.
Things break down in different ways:
We can’t, for that, omit their praise.

The Ghost Walks

Inside Skinner's Box

 "The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do. The mystery which surrounds a thinking machine already surrounds a thinking man."

"It is a mistake to suppose that the whole issue is how to free man. The issue is to improve the way in which he is controlled. "

"A person who has been punished is not thereby simply less inclined to behave in a given way; at best, he learns how to avoid punishment."

  "We admire people to the extent that we cannot explain what they do, and the word "admire" then means "marvel at."

"I do not admire myself as a person. My successes do not override my shortcomings. "

  "I did not direct my life. I didn’t design it. I never made decisions. Things always came up and made them for me. That’s what life is."



Random bits from BF Skinner.

Bivouacs

 

Bivouacs

In Somecourt Wood, in Somecourt Wood,
The nightingales sang all night,
The stars were tangled in the trees
And marvellous intricacies
Of leaf and branch and song and light
Made magic stir in Somecourt Wood.

In Somecourt Wood, in Somecourt Wood,
We slithered in a foot of mire,
The moisture squelching in our boots;
We stumbled over tangled roots,
And ruts and stakes and hidden wire,
Till marvellous intricacies
Of human speech, in divers keys,
Made ebb and flow thro’ Somecourt Wood.

In Somecourt Wood, in Somecourt Wood,
We bivouacked and slept the night,
The nightingales sang the same
As they had sung before we came.
‘Mid leaf and branch and song and light
And falling dew and watching star.
And all the million things which are
About us and above us took
No more regard of us than
We take in some small midge’s span
Of life, albeit our gunfire shook
The very air in Somecourt Wood.

In Somecourt Wood, in Somecourt Wood,
I rose while all the others slept,
I seized a star-beam and I crept
Along it and more far along
Till I arrived where throbbing song
Of star and bird and wind and rain
Were one – then I came back again –
But gathered ere I came the dust
Of many stars, and if you must
Know what I wanted with it, hear,
I keep it as a souvenir,
Of that same night in Somecourt Wood.

In Somecourt Wood, in Somecourt Wood,
The cuckoo wakened me at dawn.
The man beside me muttered, “Hell!”
But half a dozen larks as well
Sang in the blue – the curtain drawn
Across where all the stars had been
Was interlaced with tender green,
The birds sang, and I said that if
One didn’t wake so cold and stiff
It would be grand in Somecourt Wood.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

And then the man beside me spoke,
But what he said about it broke
The magic spell in Somecourt Wood.

                        --Gilbert Waterhouse

Just The Good Stuff

 Hang in there.

Precipitating Luck

Principles Of Hitching

Once in a while I’m asked how to hitchhike.
Everyone has their own methods and principles for travelling in this way, ranging from the scientific to the superstitious. All methods have to do the same thing, which is to be, or seem, effective enough to survive repeated road-testing.
Here I'll describe elements of my approach and the thinking behind it. This isn't a how-to-guide, it's just a description of my practice and reflections to myself about it.

Why hitch?
How a person hitches only makes sense in the context of why. There are as many reasons to hitch as there are to travel in any other manner.

I hitch as a means of travelling slowly, with a view to observing nature and crowds, and connecting with individuals and small groups of people. I do this whenever I have a sufficiently large margin of spare time that I can choose to forget about counting minutes, hours and, occasionally, days.

One fundamental reason for this is my belief that the slow speed of hitching affords space for stimulating or novel experiences of time, as well as a quality in human interactions that I seldom encounter within the confines of my normal working schedule.

Hitching in the way I do often allows me to escape time as a routine and instead see it as duration, expressed in weather, light and other natural phenomena. I like to think it teaches my eyes something. It also gives me plenty of time to think.

With regards to human interaction, there's a kind of rarefied human intimacy that runs throughout hitching. To me it seems more prevalent in lifts given by people who have had some time to deliberate before deciding to host you in their personal space. For this reason, my approach is to wait for people to choose to pick me up, and to not directly ask for lifts.

How I hitch: My hitchhiking style is thus about being extremely visible, extremely patient and waiting in places that afford a driver the maximum amount of time to consider the prospect of inviting me to travel with them.


Who I'm waiting for: My ideal lift is from someone who’s fit to drive and isn’t inclined, intentionally or otherwise, to harm me, themselves or anybody else for the duration of our journey together. What they do before and after our meeting rarely concerns me if these requirements are met.

The following considerations and roughly hewn maxims emerge from the above why and how of my hitching style.

 

Hitchhiking Maxims

1) Wear a fluorescent vest.
Night or day, this helps with visibility and giving a sense of legitimacy.

2) Use serif lettering.
Perhaps magical thinking, but I think again it makes you look more legitimate and less crazy. Seems to help.

3) Be genuinely patient enough to look patient. It can’t be faked.
If you don't enjoy waiting, hitching might not be for you.

4) Roll up your sleeves.

Advice given on hitchwiki once with the reasoning that you look less threatening. I swear by it.

5) Shave.
Doesn't cost anything and seems to help.

6) Let people see your character.
In order to get a lift I feel there is an act of empathetic reflection that takes place. Myriad people have to be able to see themselves in you if they want to let you in their car. Seems to work better if you're relaxed and physiologically honest.

7) Dress neutrally.
Same reasons as above. You want to be seen as human/traveller first, not as a member of a subculture.

8) When meeting potential drivers, be extremely judgmental where it counts and non-judgmental where it doesn’t.
The reverse of 6 and 7. You need to make an informed guess about whether this person is someone safe to travel with, which means not getting distracted by non-essentials such as clothing and taste. You're looking at physiology and body language first, who they voted for and what bands they like you can discuss in the car.

9) Stay humble and patient, and learn to listen.
If you're easily frustrated by personalities that are different to your own, hitching might not be for you. Being offended is not the same as being in danger, and you must remember which one of you chose to hitchhike.

 10) One good evangelist deserves another.

You might be tempted to change minds once in a while. Try, by all means, but remember how fun that usually is the other way round.

11) Give.

If you have something that your driver will appreciate, however small, you should offer it to them. You will feel better. Remember that they have to be willing to accept it or it's just losing something, and not giving it.

 12) Receive.

Equally you will be offered things. I tend to decline most unnecessary things but there are certain moments in which accepting something will feel like the only right course of action.

13) Don’t take negativity too personally.

You have decided to become an ephemeral public spectacle. Reactions will be mixed and some will be strongly negative. You're dealing with countless pockets of unexpressed stress and anger (noise in the social circuit), conceptions of hitchhikers as parasitic beggars and the fact that you are anonymous and temporary, so an easy target. It doesn't affect me personally unless I feel I'm really seen and criticized as a person.

14) Any encouragement can completely refresh you.
Someone coming to talk to you and wish you luck will make you feel like the last three hours waiting didn't happen. It does something odd to time, worth experiencing.

15) The best experiences are often not lifts.
Surreal happenings proliferate in the petroleum archipelago. You're never far away from a problem, conversation, solution, punchline or striking visual composition. Just enjoy it when it comes.

16) Retain your ability to marvel.
Related to the above. You're going to be alone for many, many hours/eternities with your thoughts, so it helps to be entertained by small things. If you're not fascinated by the fact that you are an unusually sociable talking mammal sharing metal boxes powered by the sludge of fossilised creatures, then hitching might not be for you.

17) Remember in hope.
When you pass the point of being able to entertain yourself you have to go into the directory of hope-giving experiences. My usual call is thinking of my longest or worst waits and the countless time I have been picked up just as I was giving up.

18) You will always (and thus never) be surprised by who is on the road, regardless of day or time.
Links to the above. This is one of the great truths of reality and great side-effects of industrial culture. In any petrol station you can potentially find (and will occasionally find) someone driving to your exact destination, at any time of day or night. Similarly, in any city there will be someone living three doors down from you whose personality and way of being would blow your mind if you ever discovered them.

19) Stay on the road and you will move forward.
Simple and statistically true...or true enough.

20) You can never prove that the world is entirely safe. You can only prove that you are lucky, and it is wise not to invite complacency.
Exactly how much danger I put myself in by hitching is difficult to discern, but the final maxim is based upon a quote by Gregory Bateson that I found helpful in choosing how and where one lets sustained experience calcify into identity:

"The principle of pride-in-risk is ultimately almost suicidal.

It is all very well to test once whether the universe is on your side,

but to do so again and again, with increasing stringency of proof,

is to set out on a project which can only prove that the universe hates you."- Gregory Bateson (Steps to an ecology of mind.)

This is the point here. What you are doing is trying to make informed guesses about trust whilst travelling by car. Don’t identify yourself with your ‘success’, and don’t mistake your luck for skill.

 

Rest well.

The Tunnel

The Tunnel

It is very difficult to choose which of the stories should be told first so here’s one I’m choosing because it came straight from a film.
I was stuck in a petrol station in Kortrijk, Belgium, in early August.
Kortrijk is a playground for me by this point, there are some messages I scrawled on lampposts and crash barriers and it has a mixed history of good lifts and long waits. I was brought there by a young French couple.
Think I waited there about 4 or 5 hours. The only memorable event was a man returning to his Porsche with a look of pleasant surprise. He was turning his head this way and that, if you’ve ever seen Goya’s depiction of Hannibal seeing the alps for the first time it was a similar level of pantomime disbelief. I sat there chuckling, imagining what he wanted to be heard saying to himself: “Wait, this can’t be my car? No, it can’t be!...but it’s a Porsche! Think about how expensive those are! Oh! The key works! It is my car!”
At some point a web designer lifted me up the road to what he thought was a better spot.
Well now. Better in what way?  I will let you decide, but I believe that every last liquid ounce of time that I have spent in a petrol station I would spend again for what happened in this place.

Just another petrol station. Probably about 7.30pm. Big crowd of football fans standing around smoking and getting tanked up. Few giggles and exchanges of looks as I stood there. After some time I walked into the shop. The station attendant was a man in his 30s with very short hair, square framed glasses and a bright and quizzical expression.
“Good evening, sir.”
 He was very polite and helpful. Exceedingly so, pointing out where I could get free water, and that if I wanted to use the facilities I should do that before buying anything and use the ticket to get a discount. After this exchange he asked: “Is that an Australian accent I detect, sir?”
I explained where I was from. He looked a little bit disappointed in himself and I assured him that a lot of people do think I’m Australian, even in Bristol.
I went back out to wait. Few more coachloads of wobbly fans went past. Advice, shrugs, smiles and belches came my way.
I waited. It grew dark. Some people told me I was on the wrong side of the road. A few more people told me I was in the right place. I looked over the road to the petrol station opposite and noticed there was no bridge. I shrugged and sat back down to ruminate. I think it must have been close to 11 when I went back into the shop to get some coffee.
As I was paying I conceded to the attendant that perhaps I was in the wrong spot.
“To be honest sir, I would agree. But that’s ok. I’m finishing in a moment and I can take you there.”
“Where?”
“To the other station, sir. Pick up your phone from where it’s charging and meet me outside. I shall open the tunnel.”


I use to say that being surprised or fazed was the import tax placed on your imagination by not having a conceptual model to meet an experience. I don’t know if I still say this. A lot of things get worn away when you travel by waiting. Time and the sun burnish your attention span and your skin, and eventually your capacity to be surprised is worn away. As I went to unplug my phone I remember having a bicameral response of ‘What the fuck is the tunnel/of course this man is about to open a subterranean escape route for my benefit.’
Amazingly the capacity for gratitude only seems to get stronger after years of reality showing its tendency to segue into a novel at odd hours of the night and day.

He came outside in a black jacket, rolling a cigarette. He placed it behind his ear and unlocked his bike. We walked together to a sort of non-descript grey booth that looked like a vent. They’re all over the place and you never notice them.

He unlocked the door on the front of it and looked at me quietly for a moment.
“Remember sir, to close the door when you reach the other side. You won’t be able to come back.” He mounted his bike and lit his cigarette.
I thanked him profusely, somewhat stunned by the combination of luck and decorum.
As he turned to leave I asked him his name. He looked at me over his shoulder, exhaling a plume of silver-blue smoke.
“My name is Frido, sir. Good luck, and remember to close the door.”
He rode off into the night and I walked down the steps into the tunnel, remembering to close the door.
I emerged in a petrol station, the mirror image of the first. I half expected to meet Frido’s twin but thankfully that didn’t happen. The other attendant was a short, blonde haired lady in her 40s, busy in the corner with some boxes at that moment. I was relieved. It was hard enough having all of the now-steaming football fans stopping off there for more beers on their way back from the game. Fuck, we were all spooked that night. I was still reeling from my initiation into the arcane brotherhood of petroleum corridors and they couldn’t work out how I was there when they left and there when they came back. I should have said I’m like the absinthe fairy except just what you see when you buy shit beer. Instead one of them came over to ask if I was a member of Antifa and sensing his anger I feigned ignorance. I slept in that station and got out the next morning with an ice cream man and his two year-old daughter. He confided in me that Belgians are not a trusting people and he dropped me off at Kortrijk.
This time I waited about 4 hours before instantly falling in love with another hitchhiker I met. Her and her cousin got me a lift out of there in the one spare seat of the car of a Dutchman who was driving his young son around the national parks of France to look for insects because ‘why not’.



Since that episode I’ve taken to calling a petrol station with its twin on the other side of the motorway a Frido.

Motor Accident August 2018 (Non-hitching)

Account of a car accident (not hitching)

I went to visit my mother this summer. It was the first time I’d seen her properly in a year and a half. I arrived on the 30^th of July and she picked me up from Pescara bus station.

I got off the bus and found her after a couple of minutes. She seems to skip town during Time’s census, looking younger and younger as the years go on. She’d probably attribute it to a diet of low-income, constant views of eagles and eating her neighbour’s tomatoes. She swears by astral planing with cats at shoulder and dogs at foot. I digress.
I got in the car with her, the little Fiat of whatever description. The one she’d been excited about since April when she placed her slowly-accumulated funds on it.
Some bastard car from about 20 years ago, apparently done up to speed but you’ll see.

Anyway, we drove home. I met her dogs for the first time. Comments were exchanged about life, the garden, the size of the cats.

The next day we drove three hours across hill, dale and motorway to visit her friend Antonio. Have to sidestep for a minute and just say this man’s grace simply beggars belief. The man is burdened with grace. He is a slender, red-bearded, bespectacled lamb with a pack mule’s load of knowledge about renaissance art and architecture at the humble age of 26.

He showed us around his town for a few hours. We parted. He gave us a watermelon. We drove the two and a half hours back to her house, stopping on the plateau so that I could take some long exposure photos of the night sky. They weren’t the best but I enjoyed stepping out into a cold wind and the sound of sheep-bells in the distance. That was a placid 6 minutes or so. I got back in the car, we drove through the rest of the plateau without incident and soon we were descending along the bended roads towards her house. About 20 minutes from home a thought came to me.

“Mum…”
“Yeah?” Still driving.

“You must be spending a lot of your time driving around mountain bends in quite a small and old car. What’s the contingency in case you fly off a road one day? Do you have an Italian will written out?”
“Err no, but I have an English one.”
“But is that good enough?”

Conversation continues as we make the distance closer to home.

We were about five minutes from her house when we came down a steep road and the brakes cut.

“Shit. We’ve lost the brakes Mike.”
“Fuck.”

“Oh wait, no we have them.”

Brief relief. Some seconds later:

“Oh no, they’ve gone again.”
We begin accelerating down the hill.
“Does this mean we’re going to die?” I didn’t know what else to say.
“Well….”
At this point everything that happened was pretty sudden but my father’s old model of ‘consciousness concertinas when you’re about to die’ seemed to hold true. This he learnt during his own close call, whilst nearly drowning on a beach. The seconds seemed to stretch as we sped downhill and shot straight off a curve.

The instant at which we left the road the realisation hit that this was actually happening and odd inconvenience turned into a coin-flip of whether we’d leave that car alive. As the trees came up to meet us I tried to remember the surrounding terrain- in my head it was all steep drops and cliff edges so I was expecting us to flip. Instead we bounced down a wooded slope and came to a stop.

I asked Maria if she was ok. She said yes. I was definitely ok. I told her I was going to open the door very slowly to make sure we weren’t on a precipice, and it was then we realised the headlights were gone. We were on fairly solid ground so I got out, went round to her door and opened it. Thinking of it now I must have gone around the front of the car, which had been stopped by a tree, but I didn’t notice it in the darkness.

All I could focus on it that moment was getting her away from the car and back onto the road, so I just remember the feeling of grabbing trees for support and brambles cutting my shins. At one point we were treading on what felt to me like household junk. I expected we were walking through a local fly-tipping spot but it turned out to be parts of the car.

We got back to the road and began to walk down.

Maria: “An angel must have stopped the car.”
Me: “Which angel cut the fucking brake cables?...Sorry, it’s too soon for me.”

We were lucky to have had that accident on a moonlit night, because neither of us had torches or working phones on us. We padded down the road, stunned. I remember how glad I was to be walking on solid ground. On top of this there was a weird feeling that ‘being alive’ was seeping back into the picture. In that moment I felt something like a cat who, having been violently chased out with a broom, was now returning to cautiously lap at the milk of the senses. Colours, sounds and smells seemed more vivid.
It was around this point that my mother spoke again.
“Mike, are you sure that you’re alright?”
I shake my limbs and rub my back. “Yeah…I mean we’ll see by morning really, but so far so good. You?”
“Yes, I’m completely fine. But isn’t that strange?”
“What do you mean?”

“Well do you reckon we’re really alive or just dead in the car?”

I laughed and patted my mum on the shoulder, and we continued to pad down the road, entertaining that night’s ghosthood.

In my memory the rest of the event felt much shorter than the crash. We arrived home and called the police, who told us to go to bed and that they’d be over in the morning. They never came. We then called Maria’s friends Goldie and Richard, who came over to help us retrieve our things from the car. Going back to the site an hour later was surreal. There were more brambles than I remember. Richard and I walked through them and down the slope to the car. When we got there, he surveyed the car in silence with his torch, turned to me and said: “I’m surprised that you and your mum survived this.”

We took out the bags and the car keys, and climbed back up through the brambles and splintered saplings. Goldie and Richard dropped us at home and we sat up on the porch with the dogs, drinking brandy. I couldn’t sleep properly for two days.

I’d say that since that crash I feel less like a broomed cat and more like a tree that has had all of its leaves shaken off temporarily. As though you can’t pass through that tiny window of being alive and unharmed without dropping what was in your hands somehow. Some days it feels like being alive and being dead must be pretty similar, given how easy the switch can be flicked. It feeds back into my hitch-hiking too. I used to occasionally feel guilty on the behalf of my family for putting myself in cars with strangers all the time, but after almost dying in such a domestic setting I feel a lot less bad about it.

Robert Service- Grey Gull

'Twas on an iron, icy day
I saw a pirate gull down-plane,
And hover in a wistful way
Nigh where my chickens picked their grain.
An outcast gull, so grey and old,
Withered of leg I watched it hop,
By hunger goaded and by cold,
To where each fowl full-filled its crop.

They hospitably welcomed it,
And at the food rack gave it place;
It ate and ate, it preened a bit,
By way way of gratitude and grace.
It parleyed with my barnyard cock,
Then resolutely winged away;
But I am fey in feather talk,
And this is what I heard it say:

"I know that you and all your tribe
Are shielded warm and fenced from fear;
With food and comfort you would bribe
My weary wings to linger here.
An outlaw scarred and leather-lean,
I battle with the winds of woe:
You think me scaly and unclean...
And yet my soul you do not know,

"I storm the golden gates of day,
I wing the silver lanes of night;
I plumb the deep for finny prey,
On wave I sleep in tempest height.
Conceived was I by sea and sky,
Their elements are fused in me;
Of brigand birds that float and fly
I am the freest of the free.

"From peak to plain, from palm to pine
I coast creation at my will;
The chartless solitudes are mine,
And no one seeks to do me ill.
Until some cauldron of the sea
Shall gulp for me and I shall cease...
Oh I have lived enormously
And I shall have prodigious peace."

With yellow bill and beady eye
This spoke, I think, that old grey gull;
And as I watched it Southward fly
Life seemed to be a-sudden dull.
For I have often held this thought -
If I could change this mouldy me,
By heaven! I would choose the lot,
Of all the gypsy birds, to be
A gull that spans the spacious sea.

Note on the cathars

Then they attack and vituperate, in turn, all the sacraments of the Church, especially the sacrament of the eucharist, saying that it cannot contain the body of Christ, for had this been as great as the largest mountain Christians would have entirely consumed it before this. They assert that the host comes from straw, that it passes through the tails of horses, to wit, when the flour is cleaned by a sieve (of horse hair); that, moreover, it passes through the body and comes to a vile end, which, they say, could not happen if God were in it.^[27]

Of baptism, they assert that the water is material and corruptible and is therefore the creation of the evil power, and cannot sanctify the spirit, but that the churchmen sell this water out of avarice, just as they sell earth for the burial of the dead, and oil to the sick when they anoint them, and as they sell the confession of sins as made to the priests.^[27]

Kevin

There's a to-do list on my computer called 'impressions of spirit'. Basically all those encounters that left a particularly lasting impression on me. Kevin's the first on the list.

Kevin- 07/14

On a grey and drizzly day somewhere in central Norway I got stuck on a roadside bend in the hills. I waited patiently in the face of the wheeled milieu till my brain leaked out through my ears and decided to join the rabble of pines lining the road. We waited in a different mode, peering over the crash barrier-cordon to silently cheer on the trickle of cars. It must have been a race since none were stopping. After about forty minutes of spectatorship a camper van pulled over suddenly and I was a person again, surprised it was a camper van because I’d long since given up on even trying with them. Most of them had Dutch or Belgian plates and a retired couple glaring at me with suspicion behind map and steering wheel.
In this case I didn’t see the driver. As I walked up hefting pack over shoulder the side door popped open and a smiling blonde haired man stuck his head out. Slightly round face, short hair, crow’s eyes framing blue's eyes.

“Hey there, we’re heading south for about an hour if that’s any good?”
“Thanks a lot, that would be a massive help.”
“Oh are you English? Maybe you can help my son Kevin practise his English.”
I follow him into the van and a boy looks up from his place at the table.
I greet him and shake his hand. He is a very relaxed-looking ten-year-old, and minus some puppy fat he is his father’s double. I can see this because the man is standing beside Kevin with his hand on the boy’s shoulder, beaming with pride.

“You see I named him Kevin because he looks so much like Kevin in home alone.”
I briefly wonder how much a newborn can look like Macaulay Culkin in his prime, but I take the veracity of such origin stories pretty lightly given how many conflicting ones I’ve heard about 'Michaelangelo'.

I hear a toilet flush. The bathroom door opens and a startled woman emerges. She looks like she could be Thai and it later turns out that she is.

“Oh…hi?”
The father explains he’s picked up a hitcher to teach Kevin.

“Ahh, ok! Welcome to our van!” She beams at me.
Husband and wife climb back into the front seats and off we go.
Kevin and I are left in the back of the van as we wend through the alpine drizzle.
He speaks to me in perfect English, with an accent somewhere between Norwegian and American.

“This is weird. You’re the first hitch-hiker I’ve ever met. I’ve only seen them in video games.”
I laugh and assure him that we are out there in the world, whilst taking out my paper and pen to doodle. Kevin’s relaxed air is interesting. To me it seemed borne of a sort of worldly confidence that I roughly associate with eldest siblings and only-children, rather than the relaxed air of someone whose head is in the clouds (speaking for myself here).
He’s relaxed in the way that someone like Alexander Von Humboldt might be relaxed; prepared to be surprised by newcomers but not expecting to be fazed. In fact, writing this now I bet Kevin had met a thousand hitchhikers and was just trying to make a rudderless traveller feel noteworthy for a moment. Courteous devil. 

“So Kevin, tell me what you like doing?” I am slowly drawing a sort of amorphous monster, the kind of thing I usually draw to let my head wander.
“Well I like minecraft. I mean I’m always on minecraft building things, buying things, selling things. And then what I really like to do is troll people.”
I look up from my drawing, interested. Kevin continues.
“I’ll say I’m selling something and get someone to follow me to a far-out part of the map where I’ve built a trap. I kill them, film their reactions and stick them on youtube. Oh man, some of them actually cry. You wouldn’t believe it.” He is smiling just at the memory of it. My first thought is that Kevin needs very little help with his English from me, given his ability to operate in the cybersphere at a Machiavellian level, entirely in his second language.

Kevin’s stepmother walked to the back of the van and came to the table some minutes later, offering us a plate of spring rolls.
We thanked her and continued our conversation, munching away as the road straightened out and we descended slowly into flatter territory. I asked Kevin what sort of outdoor activities he enjoyed and he explained to me that he saw most of the outdoors in Norway as being either dark, wet, cold, scary or exhausting. He preferred to be inside, usually playing videogames. I asked him to explain more about his aversion to the outside world and we carried on, sharing ideas about how differing variables would affect these approaches. He pointed out I was bigger, older and perhaps more weatherproof. I added that I was probably less technologically engaged. At that point in fact I was travelling without any electric or electronic devices, with the exception of a torch. An entertaining decision during the 24-hour daylight of summer in the far north.  I told Kevin that on the solstice in Lofoten I emerged from my tent after an indefinite period of bad weather. I asked a passing walker for the time and he told me 9 o’clock. A moment later I had to run after him to see whether he meant the morning or the evening.
Kevin seemed unable to waste words in acknowledging such a misguided experiment. The conversation turned to art somehow as he began to take interest in my doodling. It was just at this moment that the van slowed to a stop.
His parents told me they were about to turn off the main road and so this was me.

I thanked them for the lift, the spring rolls and the conversation, tore the drawing out of my notebook and handed it to Kevin.
I grabbed my bag, said my goodbyes and disembarked from the camper van. As I stood by the roadside putting my bag on my back I noticed Kevin was still in the doormframe, eyeing the drawing. He looked up at me, waved and shouted.

“You’re a creative genius!” I laughed and said thanks.

Hitch-hiking: On Dangerous Situations

"The principle of pride-in-risk is ultimately almost suicidal.

It is all very well to test once whether the universe is on your side,

but to do so again and again, with increasing stringency of proof,

is to set out on a project which can only prove that the universe hates you."
- Gregory Bateson, Steps To An Ecology of Mind

The question comes up in almost every conversation I have with people about hitch-hiking. “Have you ever been in a dangerous situation while hitching?”
Ignoring studies in the perception of danger versus actual accidents,  I’ll take this to mean “Have you ever felt that you were in a dangerous situation while hitching?”.
The answer is a few times with varying results. I don’t have my journals to hand so these are from memory.

“I was bladdered at breakfast.” 

A petrol station in Nottingham, August 2012. I got there with a lift from an American man living in Bristol. He knew a lot about cold winters in Massachussetts, hunting muskrats, the fur industry and skiing. He worked in a managerial role for a lingerie company somewhere in the UK and went as far as Nottingham that morning. I’d had a bit of an odd summer. A family member had died and I had broken up with my girlfriend. Another family member was in the middle of a mental health episode. Things all felt pretty ethereal and my head was in the clouds most of the time. One weekend I decided to hitch up from Bristol to Bradford to see my brother Pat at university.
Standing in the petrol station with my sign, a middle-aged woman walked past gesturing indirectly at me. I didn’t register what it meant but then she turned back, beckoned me over and said she’d take me close to Bradford. I followed her, got in the car and thanked her whilst putting on my seatbelt.
The instant she turned the keys in the ignition ear-splittingly loud pop music blasted out of the speakers, and we began to reverse out of the carpark. The noise was horrific, and just before we hit the road she paused the music. In the then-deafening hush with my ears ringing, she leaned over clumsily and said to me: “By the way, I was bladdered at breakfast.”
She presses play, the music returns, we join the road and begin one of the most nerve-racking journeys of my life.

A few themes throughout the journey:

-Every CD she had was from a reality TV music competition.

-She forgot how to use the volume dial. It was either play or pause so an immense contrast every time she wanted to say something.
- Her speed remained close to 95mph for the whole journey.

- My level of conviction that this woman was steaming drunk remained at about 95% for the whole journey.

I remember a basic feeling of being pinned to my chair by the speed of the car, coupled with the shock realisation that she was a wild one, followed by self-enforced calm and ruminations about what things I could and couldn’t control.

I think my initial internal monologue was “Uh oh. This is shit. Well, you can’t do much until you take in more information so relax into it. There’s no way you’re climbing out of this car on the motorway….and after all, everyone dies when they die and at least it’s a beautiful day.”

As we sped through the morning light on the mercifully empty motorway I crept out of my philosophical gazing and back into my body. I eyed my driver suspiciously as she demonstrated an audacious capacity to multitask. Between her left index finger and thumb a lit cigarette, between her right index finger and thumb the small birchwood paddle of a large dripping ice lolly. With the six remaining fingers she maintained control of the wheel. I calmly (threw up inside) took this in and thought some more. That particular CD’s roaring wall-of-shite production drew to a close, only to be followed by what appeared to be the same track. She hit pause suddenly. Ears ringing, I leaned in for her next revelation.
“That’s the problem with these artists, they all sound the same.”
I didn’t point out that the track was on repeat. I merely gasped in horror as she frowned like a scolded toddler and six-finger steering wheel contact turned to three-finger steering wheel contact. Her now off-duty right hand lurched forward to take the offending CD out of the player and I realised this was a moment when I could turn from death-wish passenger to survival-oriented crew. I snatched the stack of CDs from the dashboard and told her “It’s ok, I’ll deal with the CDs, you can just focus on driving.”
We continued at close to 100mph down the motorway. I was on the verge of a mental breakdown, noticing the hedges blur past whilst flinging shitty pop singles into the CD player with all the aspiration and effort of an Olympic discus-thrower. I just hoped each one would wipe my memory of the last. Well I also hoped I would survive but I was distracted.

She on the other hand was on the verge of a spiritual breakthrough as she carefully mediated the sacred dialogue between cigarette and ice-lolly. Her tongue must have felt like a child in the midst of a divorce. Occasionally she’d side-track to tilt us out of the path of sudden and bloody obliteration, with all the focus of someone remembering to stir a soup.
People usually ask why I didn’t just get out of the car. I still ask myself that sometimes. What I remember is the feeling that the only way to get out of that one would have been gradual inception. Slowing that car down with conversation was like trying to melt ice with nothing but your hand. I was getting results towards the end by engaging her in conversation about her son, but by the time I noticed a slight improvement she came to a full stop in Leeds city centre and said : “Here you are, close as I can get you, it’s a five minute train ride.”
I thanked her and left, swiftly.

“Come with me all the way and you’ll only have to take a two hour train!”

Dear me, this one’s closer in the memory banks but seems farther because it happened in the middle of so many lifts. I was just saying goodbye to Kevin and family. Their camper van was pulling away as Kevin cried “You’re a creative genius!”, I laughed and shook my head and before I had time to ascertain where I was, a car stopped and a rather twitchy man in his 40s jumped out and ushered me in.
Confused? So was I. Where was I? Somewhere in Norway. It had been a long day, I think I’d done about 250km in fits and starts on a night of very little sleep in a cold ditch.
Anyway I jumped in the car with this guy and off we went. He was Romanian, living away from his wife and children and working somewhere in the southwest of Norway. He was talking very excitedly and kept turning his head to meet my gaze and see my reactions to what he was saying. I felt uneasy pretty quickly. I was on my way to see a friend in Oslo. I got my map out to look at where we were going and work out how long I’d be in this car with him. We were headed down the same road for something under 100km. I pointed out a likely point to part ways and he looked very anxious. He tried to persuade me to go the same way as him but I politely insisted I needed to go to Oslo. “But?! Don’t you see? Come with me all the way and you’ll only have to take a two-hour train!” Inside my tired brain a tired young man slaps his hand to his forehead.
“Err, let’s see how long it takes us to get there. ”
You’ve been here before. No sudden movements, just be patient and find the opportunity to escape the situation, but actually do it this time. A couple of minutes of him talking more about missing his wife and children whilst my mind wandered over different escape plans. I was thinking of asking to stop at the next petrol station to use the toilet, then bailing, but it was easier than that in the end. He suddenly said to me “I need to stop here to buy a phone.” The car stopped and I’ll just sum up the situation before I relate what I did.

I regret forgetting this man’s name and not having my notebooks to hand. To this day, I don’t think there was any ill intent. He was lonely. Loneliness manifests in people in completely different ways and I guess I view it with the same mind-set as I view a mental illness with the sense of chaotic potential. Something to the effect of ‘empathise heavily but carry a big stick’…haha no, more like ‘enter with empathy but keep in mind what is and what isn’t your problem’.

I grabbed my bag, got out of the car and said to him “Right, I don’t want to offend you but I’m travelling on my own and I have to act on my instinct. Your energy level is making me uncomfortable so I’m leaving now.”

His response: “Ok, have a nice trip.”

“We’re going to have dinner in Bordeaux if you feel like it.”

I’m writing this at home in a sparsely furnished front room awaiting fumigation. I read some of the first story to my friend/flatmate and he reminded me that I had a recent lift I had to terminate early. This is a good one so I’ll put it in while it’s fresh.
Somewhere near Hendaye about two months ago. Slow day, one prior lift from a kind young woman named Araotz. A veterinary student who walked past me three times and decided to eventually free me from the petrol station I’d been in from the night before until the mid-afternoon that day. She was flying to London that weekend and it was going to be her first ever flight. If I was born in that part of the world I doubt I’d have travelled anywhere near as much. It’s so culturally, environmentally and gastronomically rich it makes my toes hug the ground.

She dropped me in Hendaye  where I walked into a petrol station with sign for Baiona/Bayonne in hand. Of course, I don’t expect much but a van driver beeps at me and beckons me over, puffing furiously on a cigarette. Young, Spanish-looking man with mad hair. Throws open the door and says “I hope you like dogs” before a massive American pitbull looms into view and barks in my face. He tells me she’s really very relaxed and that he needs to go and buy tobacco. Her name is Frida.
Yet again. “Here we are, stay calm, obtain information.” I think to myself with Frida on my lap, who may as well have been made of marble for how disturbingly heavy and powerful she felt. I stroked her box-shaped head and slowly shook my own in disbelief. Anyone scared of dogs can sort of relax, Frida was not the ultimate reason for ending this lift prematurely. Our driver returned surprisingly quickly, and dealt with the queue of beeping motorists behind us by speeding up onto the road and cutting in front of not a few grateful drivers. He then introduced himself as Guillermo. He was from Segovia and had been working a few years doing seasonal agricultural work around Europe. That day he was on his way to Switzerland. He explained to me that he should have a licence for Frida but doesn’t, and also that before joining the motorway he’d like to stop at Toys R Us and get a toy.

“Stay calm, obtain information about this man’s toy.” I think to myself, with Frida on my lap, praying to the God of Dogs to keep me safe outside Toys R Us in the idling van. I definitely remember trying to think if I knew how to begin killing a dog like that if it came to it. Hope the Dog God didn’t hear that one, but I suppose not since I still have both of my testicles.
Guillermo returned surprisingly quickly, with a toy wrapped in his jumper. We sped off and he threw the package to me. A sort of marble-run obstacle course built into an orb. He told me he was obsessed with them. Somewhere near the motorway entrance we have a conversation to the effect that Guillermo didn’t want to pay the French motorway toll and if I didn’t mind he would drive through the barriers. He explained that the barriers automatically spring forward under enough pressure and that it wouldn’t damage the car, but if I was willing to help him by running ahead of the van and pushing the barrier it might be useful. I responded that I didn’t mind how he drove but that I wouldn’t get out of a vehicle on a motorway.
I fell asleep soon after this conversation and awoke to a loud snapping sound followed by shrill beeps. “Ah yes, the motorway.” I thought to myself blearily as Guillermo floored it.  Somewhere in the first 40km or so of those roads there is a September audience of very tall elephant grass. We were driving so fast I wondered if the police were coming for us, and I remember passing through the middle of this verge-side valley of feathered grass in the sunset, calmly pondering whether we might die there. I fell asleep again and awoke to the same snapping sound followed by the beeps.

“How many more of these are there?” I asked Guillermo.
“That was the last.” What followed felt like driving along southern France’s clandestine Nazca lines for 45 minutes and suddenly we were back on the national roads.
Guillermo gets a call from his friends in Bordeaux and rattles off in Spanish for a while. I listened to the conversation. Talk of dinner, some beers, a lot of weed and if there was any speed or MDMA, Guillermo would keep driving for the rest of the night. What Guillermo relayed to me was “I just spoke to my friends and we’re going to have dinner in Bordeaux if you feel like it.”
I looked up at the foot of the barn owl, swinging from the rear-view mirror. I thanked him but politely declined, explaining that what I needed was sleep and I wouldn’t get it as the passenger of someone under such a cocktail of drugs, regardless of their actual ability to drive.
He understood. I gave him a chorizo from my backpack to share with his friends and I hopped out into the woods.

Nick and Marcus

Nick and Marcus are sitting together in the cabin one calm evening, drinking tea.
They’re both lost in thought. Gradually Marcus discerns a ticking sound above the swaying creak of the boat’s timbers.
“Nick?..”
“Yeah, it’s my titanium valves…”
“Wow….that’s sort of soothing.”
“Fuck off! Soothing for you maybe. When that sound stops it means I’m dead…."

This story was told to me by a driver named Marcus who brought me from just outside Tours, in France, to just outside London, three weeks ago. There are holes in the details, for example the fate of the person driving the petrol tanker or the nature of Marcus’s first job, but I suppose they just weren’t necessary. The Acropolis has a lot of holes in it and nobody seems to mind.

Tours
During my last trip to England I found myself standing at the entrance to a petrol station between Tours and Le Mans, sometime in the early evening. A large petrol tanker drives past. The body a chrome barrel with the effect of a funfair mirror. As it passes I see myself reflected. A barrel-gnome in a fluorescent orange vest, standing in France’s finest interpretation of the deserted central asian steppe. Dun grassland as far as they eye can see. Just the view I needed to bring home the unlikelihood of another lift at that point. I thought about heading out to find the nearest woods and sleep when a silver volvo with an English licence plate drove straight past me, ignoring my freshly serifed sign (“Je Vais Au Nord- Paris/Calais”).
When a man emerged from the car in a rush and began filling it with petrol, I decided I may as well check in case he either hadn’t seen the sign or was put off by the French. I slowly walk over to this man. A stocky and thick-set man in his mid-40s. Blue jeans and a grey t-shirt. Shaved scalp, thick stubble and a pleasing proportion between his well rounded-head and a square jaw. I’m reminded of diagrams I have looked at on the subject of drawing heads. I also have an impression of keen intelligence from him.
“Excuse me, you’re not going to Calais are you?”
“Err…” He looks at me, mouth open and petrol pump in hand. “..Yeah, actually that’s exactly where I’m going. Go on, I’ll give you a lift.”

We drive, north, fast. This is the story.

Nick and Marcus

Marcus was an avid sailor in his youth. From my brief meeting with him I could see he took things on directly with both head and hands, and he sounded like he’d have been quite an industrious teenager. At the age of 15 he went on a normal sailing weekend with his family somewhere in England when a fancy-looking yacht anchored up nearby. When a man emerged on deck Marcus went over and said “That’s a nice boat you have sir, can I help you sail it?”
In that moment he met Nick.

Nick came from a family who owned a large lumber yard. At some point a few years previously, he had been in a car accident where his car collided with a petrol tanker. The resulting explosion slung a sharp metal bar through the car’s windscreen, piercing Nick’s heart and pinning him to the car seat.
The emergency crew arrived, sawed his chair out of the car and took him to hospital where he was thought to have a 5% chance of survival. Three of the four valves in his heart were broken and replaced with titanium ones. Nick spent two years in hospital, slowly recovering. When he was sufficiently fit again he sold his inherited lumber, took around £2 million and decided to carry on living his life. Boating became a priority, and from the day of their first meeting  the two became firm friends, sailing together whenever they had the chance each summer.

Four years after their first meeting, Marcus has finished school and is excited about his first job. An excitement dampened by the sobering realisation that, now out of school, he would no longer have school holidays. Nick asked him about that summer’s sailing possibilities and Marcus replied that he’d be able to manage two weeks but not more.
“Well we can do Ireland at least.” said Nick.

Two days into their Ireland trip, Marcus says to Nick “It’s a bit odd that we haven’t seen land yet.”
At this, Nick shrugs and walks down the steps into the cabin. Marcus senses something is up. He finds Nick inside making tea.
“Err, Nick? What’s going on?”
“…Yeah Marcus…we’re going to America mate.”
“What?!…Oh for fuck’s sake! You can’t be serious! It’s my first job, Nick! I have to be back in there on Monday.”
“Come on Marcus, this will be so much better.”
“Nick it’s my first fucking job. They’re going to fire me!”
“Not if you resign first.”
“We’re on a fucking boat in the Atlantic!”
“Yes, but I have a satellite phone.”


Marcus pacing back and forth on deck.
“Hi? Yeah it’s Marcus. I know I’m meant to be in on Monday but I’m on a boat in the middle of Atlantic and we’re going to America. I’m sorry but there’s nothing I can really do about it. It was sort of a surprise. I’m just calling to give in my resignation."
Marcus’s boss: “Well I can’t say I’m impressed Marcus. It’s all fun and games for you but we needed you this summer. I’m sure you’re aware that formal resignation can only be processed in writing so I’m afraid I’ll have to give you the sack.”

Marcus returns to Nick, loudly lamenting his impending dismissal.
Nick: “Writing eh? I have a satellite fax.”
Marcus faxes his formal resignation letter to his boss and the two sail across the Atlantic.


Florida, some weeks later…
A fancy-looking yacht anchors up in a port somewhere in the Florida keys.
A gaggle of tourists in floppy sunhats and oversized sunglasses canter up the pontoon, arriving beside the yacht slightly out of breath.
When two men emerge on deck, someone in the crowd calls to them.
“What a nice boat you have, do you day-charter?”
Nick eyes the crowd cautiously.
“Err, yeah. Yeah we will…” he says, scratching his head and scanning the ranks of hopeful faces. “Come back in two days.”

Nick and Marcus investigate the boating scene and come up with a business model.
“Well it seems that for this to work all we have to do is sail people around the place, keep an icebox full of beers, pull a couple of lobsters off the reef and barbecue them. Well we would have done all that anyway, right Marcus?”

Marcus and Nick spend two weeks day-chartering the yacht. They charge $600 dollars a head. At the end of the fortnight the yacht is back in the harbour and the last tourists have left. Nick turns to Marcus and hands him the lion’s share of their accumulated loot.
“Alright Marcus, I’m sorry I lost you your first job, but it was worth it. This should be more than enough to fly you home and keep you going through the summer.” Marcus flew back to England the next day.