I’ll be on tour so soon! Feminist Press has kindly collected links to each of my events that’s planned thus far. This very Saturday I’ll be doing an online event in conversation with Lane Smith about her new tarot deck. If you’re in or near NYC, Beacon, Baltimore, Philly, Charlottesville, Boston, rural Maine, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Ann Arbor, Bloomington Illinois, Madison, Minneapolis, Lincoln, Fort Collins, Salt Lake City, Quilcene, or Portland Oregon, come see me read and talk! I’ll be adding a few more dates on the westward leg, and also soon planning the eastward leg.
I don’t hitchhike anymore. I suppose I would if I had to, but I’m quite glad my life is arranged in such a way that hitchhiking isn’t a regular part of it. It’s tense, stressful, and dangerous. It’s also, frankly, magical. When you hitchhike, your faith in humanity is renewed and crushed and renewed several times a day, and it exposes you to people you would have no other means to meet.
There’s a magic to it, because you meet characters that seem straight out of mythology on a regular basis. You meet people that cause you to wonder if everything in the world is exactly as people say it is. The other day a friend told me a story from their hitchhiking days that will linger in my mind for a long time: about camping out behind a gas station, with permission from the owner, a man hadn’t physically left the property in thirty years. Everything he needed, he had delivered. He lived above it. He was in his 60s, had left his girlfriend his own age to date his girlfriend’s mother, whom he referred to affectionately as “the witch.” At night he held open the screen door and screamed “cats!” and dozens of cats came out of the woods and into his house to sleep. He seemed happy enough, and was happy enough to let my friends sleep there.
This week’s piece is a bit of memoir I first published on my old blog, about a man I picked up hitchhiking. It was an experiment in writing memoir presuming I believed the magical to be true, with my cynicism turned down. I’ve been writing and living that way a lot lately. Not where I… believe… in the supernatural, but where I entertain it. Where I suspend by disbelief. I believe and disbelieve at the same time, in equal measure.
I Met Death on the Road
or: some who wander are lost
Of all the hundreds of people who’ve picked me up hitchhiking, of all the hundreds of people I’ve picked up myself, only once did I meet eyes with death.
I’ve met murderers before. I once yelled at a murderer, who I knew had a gun and a bad temper, in the middle of the desert about how stupid he was for having once had a swastika tattoo — not my brightest moment.
Not every murderer is death. Only once have I met death.
It was the summer of 2013, I think, and I was driving north through the woods of western North Carolina. I was driving my van Leviathan, the home I’d had the longest and my constant companion for so many years. The sun was up and bright, and I was lost. I mean, I knew the highway I was on, and where I was going, but that wasn’t a good summer for me. I was lost. Atlanta was behind me, Asheville was ahead of me, and death was hitchhiking down the road.
I saw him from a ways off. A shirtless hippie was hitchhiking on a backwoods highway that didn’t have a shoulder. Years ago, one of the first women I ever traveled with taught me her rule about who to pick up: if a traveler has a pack, pick them up. People without packs are trouble.
This guy didn’t have a pack. Or a shirt. Hell, I was surprised he had shoes.
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