The most important teacher I ever had was not some Harvard professor, or one of many newspaper editors who carved up my prose. It wasn’t even a person, a whole person anyway. It was an appendage:
My thumb.
Hitchhiking was my passion. Every car and truck became a classroom, every driver an instructor. I did it for many years, sometimes hundreds and even thousands of miles at a time.
When I dropped out of college halfway through sophomore year, I got a backpack, and a sturdy case for my guitar. I said goodbye to my stunned parents, and ambled to Route 128, the highway crescent around Boston. There I stood, facing traffic, opposable digit extended, until someone stopped. I was on my way somewhere, nowhere, everywhere.
I made it all the way to Key West, crossed the South and reached Taos, New Mexico, where for the only time in all my years I was ripped off — by a man whose life I had saved days earlier. At other times I hitched the West Coast to Seattle, the Pacific Northwest past the Rockies into broad high prairie with sunrise over my shoulder.
I’ve gone left-handed in England and Scotland, back to the right in Greece. I’ve only been arrested once, and that wasn’t for hitching exactly; vagrancy, sleeping under a boardwalk in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, resting between rides.
Everyone who stopped had a reason, and a story. Every ride became an interview, minus a notebook (until nightfall). I became good at nuances, inflections, distilling truth.
Journalism 101.
Not that I enjoyed every ride. But this was important too, to remain civil, suspend judgement, understand how far to go and how honest to be.
Journalism 102.
Serendipity’s power overwhelmed me. On a whim, someone would stop and pick me up, carry me an hour or two, then leave me at another place and we would part forever. Then, on another whim, someone else would pick me up, and on and on it went.
None of them knew the others. Yet the only reason I was able to meet any of them was because each put me in an available place and time. A chain of unbroken human links stretched thousands of miles. Yet I was the only one who knew the chain existed, who was aware that every link was essential to forging the next.
Life 103.
Roadsides became temporary sets. I displayed my guitar and backpack to suggest that I was a counterculture adventurer, not a guy with a cardboard suitcase just out of the slammer. I never wore sunglasses, always showed my eyes, never sat.
Thumbing imprinted on me one profound impression:
There is a deep wellspring of kindness and generosity that courses under the surface of many people. I experienced it every day:
The pot-smoking guys who bought me a cheesesteak in Philly and threw down a sleeping bag in their apartment. The couple who lived on a farm outside Tallahassee and named their dog L. Ron Hubbard. The burly trucker who bought me a burger and beer in Gillette, Wyoming, then picked a guy up off a barstool who was giving me a hard time because I’m Jewish and threw him into the parking lot.
I could go on, and on.
After that semester-long stint, I was ready to go back to school, but changed my major from government to English. I knew I wanted to write — about people. I already had my degree, but I went ahead and got another one, then hitchhiked to Cape Cod and landed a job working in a little weekly newspaper.
I didn’t stop hitching. On Saturdays I’d slide onto Route 6A in Yarmouthport, thumb to Provincetown for kale soup, and thumb home before dark.
The main reason I eventually stopped, cultural shifts aside, was not because I got old: After awhile, most everyone who picked me up knew me.
