Can Hitchhiking Save the Country?

Hitchhiking is dangerous. We've all seen the made-for-TV movies about innocent youths who either blithely step out on the highway for some Kerouackian fun or naively pick up a stranger on the side of the road. On either side of the equation, the result is the same: death, mayhem and murder.

Clearly, the highways and byways of this land are filled with crazies. Everyone out there must be waiting to do evil at the first possible opportunity. Everyone, that is, except you. And everyone you know. And pretty much everyone they know.

Is it possible that maybe strangers aren't as scary, or hitchhiking as dangerous, as we've been told?

That's one of the driving factors behind Elijah Wald's new book, Riding with Strangers: A Hitchhiker's Journey. The book follows Wald's most recent cross-country hitchhiking trip, from Boston to Seattle, and forms a sort of travelogue of life on the road's shoulders.

But this is no travel book. Wald has been hitching for 40 years, across this country many times and on pretty much every hitchhike-able continent. In that time, he's watched hitchhiking in the United States decline from a commonplace activity among people of all stripes to today's prevalent belief that you'd have to be crazy to thumb it on the road.

During this same time frame -- and the kind of cause-and-effect involved here is certainly up for debate -- the country has become much more polarized, much more isolated and substantially more fearful.

I talked to Wald over the phone recently, as he was gearing up to start his tour for the book. (Unfortunately, I forgot to ask if he's hitchhiking from city to city on the tour.)

Matthew Wheeland: Tell me a little bit about how you came to write this book. Did you leave Boston knowing you were going to write a book about it?

Elijah Wald: Absolutely. Basically what happened was, as is clear from the book, I've done an awful lot of hitchhiking, and naturally when I started writing, everybody on Earth said, "You really ought to write about your adventures." But the problem was, by the time people started saying I should write about hitchhiking, I had done so much of it that it no longer seemed particularly unusual to me. It was like anybody being asked to write about what they do full-time.

For a while what I felt like I should do was take someone along with me and write about their impressions of it, since that would provide a fresh take on it. And then I realized that was the book I wanted to write: the book about how it's not this wild, heroic, amazing, strange thing full of astonishing adventures. It's this really quite small, intimate experience of meeting all these different people in this unique way. And I realized what I really wanted to write about was not the exciting rides, but the sort of normal experience of being inside it and into the cars of quite normal people who you never get to meet normally.

With that in mind, I decided I would just head across the country and just write about all the rides. Just one trip across the country, who stops for me and what it's like.

MW: How did this trip stack up? How many rides did you have in how many days …

EW: I haven't added it up. Let's see, Day One is something like five rides, so that means it's gotta be another five or six just from St. Louis to Iowa City. I'd guess it's probably 15 or so rides.

And as far as how long it took, I count it by the nights. It was essentially two and a half days into Iowa City and then two days from Iowa City to Portland.

MW: So how does that compare in terms of either the time it took, or the number of rides or even the quality of the rides you got?

EW: It was not particularly unusual. If I had done a straight shot across on Route 80, it would have been a lot fewer rides. It's the nature of the beast: You get a bunch of small rides, and then you get a huge one. And I mean the first time I ever crossed the country, it was Reno to Boston in three rides, and that's not really all that unusual if you're doing trucks, because they do that! [laughs] And they don't want to do less than that really. By and large, a truck driver doesn't want to pick you up and take you a hundred miles, because it means they have to stop.