Glasgow and the Cone on its Head

I secured a Couchsurfing host in Glasgow well before leaving the States. Pélagie is a French student living in Glasgow (but moving imminently to Edinburgh). She shaves her dark hair at the temples in a way that gives her bangs a little punk edge. On her Couchsurfing profile she describes herself as a counterculture enthusiast, and she’s really into specific threads of American ’60s and ’70s culture, like Californian psychedelic rock and Jack Nicholson movies. I caught her at a good time – her classes were finished for the summer, but she wasn’t yet swamped with the burden of swapping cities. She lives with Xavier (not pronounced the way Professor X pronounces it), who’s into metal and post-rock and recently left his job. They volunteered to pick me up at the airport. I wasn’t running on much sleep, but getting to watch the first half of this little movie called Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens on the airplane rejuvenated me more than any amount of sleep ever has, and when I emerged from the airport, the Glasgow sun was warmer than I’d felt since, well, before Iceland. Iceland was wonderful, and I’ll miss it, but the transition felt great.

Edinburgh draws more tourists with its antique charm, but Glasgow reminds me in some ways of Pittsburgh – a small, accessible, working-class city whose energy comes from vibrant universities and a proud, good-humored, hard-drinking populace. After a power nap, my hosts took me out to see the city. Cool young people like the west end, where from its hilltop the beautiful University of Glasgow Main Building looms over a long main street of shops and restaurants, laced with side streets and little alleys hiding cool diversions. Péla and Xavier live just south of the River Clyde, which bisects the city, essentially separating the cool downtown stuff on its north side from the more utilitarian residential areas. I precariously perched on the back of Péla’s bike as we passed the huge BBC Scotland building, crossed a bridge over the river, traversed a big tunnel bridge over a highway, and emerged close to the university. There, Kelvingrove Park, a sloping, grassy green lined with old fences and winding paths, sprawls out before the school. The supposedly rare sunny day had brought forth enough students and families to cover the landscape (never saw a cloudy day in Glasgow). Children laughed in Scottish accents and dogs splashed through fountains as we walked bikes through the park and up to the free museum to peruse it briefly before closing time.

We meandered to our eventual destination, a cool pub with a ping-pong table, and sat out in the sun with some drinks and talked. Péla’s been in Glasgow for almost a year, Xavier a little less, partly because she wanted to be a student there (university is free for residents of most EU countries), and partly because they’re both a little bit embarrassed to be French – these two progressive, globally-minded young Frenchpeople will be the first to admit that the French can have a bad attitude about the rest of the world, and they don’t want to live into that stereotype.

Of course, with all the talk of national identity, the inevitable question was even more inevitable than usual: “So… what do you think about Donald Trump?” I started with my usual apology of “I’m so sorry you even have to be aware of this horrible train wreck,” and shared my understanding of why he’s come as far as he has, and apologized some more. I wish they hadn’t continued by asking if I thought he actually had a chance to win, because I hated to disappoint them. I’ve enjoyed watching the State Department and FBI investigations of Hillary Clinton unfold against her favor inasmuch as it’s the only way Bernie Sanders could get the nomination, but if that doesn’t happen, it’s just making a President Trump look more and more likely, so I couldn’t give them the answer they were hoping for. I’d love to say that’s enough politics on a travel blog for now, but the reality is that Europe is watching all this just as closely as we are, and it’s no joke to them either. This is real life, and they’re scared for us.

The next day, we drove up to Loch Lomond (after a quick pit stop at a place called Devil’s Pulpit), which is about as beautifully Scottish as you can imagine. After eating lunch on a sandy beach, where I discovered the most fascinating bacon-maple-syrup flavored chips (crisps), we approached our chosen trail, an ascent of about 2,500 feet to the top of Beinn Dubh, one of the tallest of the area’s rolling hills and ridges. We found our way up the slope on a barely-there trail, stopping only a few times for breath, watching sheep pastures give way to purple and yellow coated fields of wildflowers. By the time we were even a quarter of the way up, we could see far across the lake behind us, dappled with green, wooded islands, verdant slopes and peaks engulfing the horizon. I was pretty pooped early on; I couldn’t remember the last time I’d walked up for so long. Every ridge looked like it would be the last, but very few actually were. As wildflowers turned into scruffy mountain grass, I thought of the part of Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums, which I read last April, where as Kerouac’s protagonist hikes up Matterhorn in California, on the tail of his friend and mentor Japhy, he feels his youthful, spiritual optimism dissolve in his exhaustion, and he trudges on with a terrible attitude until he nears the top and wholly forgets himself. I felt spent when we finally reached the top, but it no longer mattered. I’d done it, and it was beautiful.

We hiked along the  grassy ridge for an easy hour, eventually taking a break alongside a cairn, where I basked in the sun and half-napped with my head on a rock, as Snoopy’s brother Spike might. On the way down I jogged ahead, galloping through the little step-like divots that comprised the trail now, feeling rejuvenated as if by photosynthesis, having climbed that little bit closer to the sun. “Ah Japhy you taught me the final lesson of them all, you can’t fall off a mountain,” Kerouac wrote as his character discovered the joy of fearlessly bounding down from a summit.

Staying with these French people in Scotland was nice, but I was ready to make a local friend, and because I’m an innovative little app whiz, I’d made plans to meet a very Glaswegian girl named Jane the next way. So after taking the subway (Glasgow’s system is just one big loop) towards the west end and finding a library from which to finally start typing about my Iceland week, I headed to the west end’s main street and busked until she came up to meet me in the early evening.

The first thing you’ll notice about Jane is her audacious, Nickelodeon-orange hair. You’ll see quickly that it suits her. She’s a negligible wee little bit older than me, but with one of those faces that will always make her look 10 years younger, and the biggest blue eyes you’ve ever seen. The first thing we talked about, walking to a bar where I would drink something local, was something I’d been dying address: all the cool Glasgow bands. Belle and Sebastian, Frightened Rabbit, Camera Obscura, Mogwai, Orange Juice, Teenage Fanclub, Chvrches, Simple Minds – it’s been a productive little city.  Jane is proud of the scene – we’ve been sending each other links to good songs, and she seems to have an inexhaustible supply of good local music to share. I’ve found the best way to know a city is to befriend someone who’s proud of it; Jane grew up in Glasgow, and she elucidated everything Glaswegian around us, good and bad, from the little quirks in the dialect to their sense of superiority to Edinburgh to the complexities of the recent vote on whether to stay in the UK, which stressed relationships in all of Scotland to the breaking point. Jane’s parting gift to me that night was an insistence that I try Tunnock’s Teacakes, a profoundly delicious, indulgent little desert that I cannot thank her enough for sharing with me.

The next day would be my last full day in Glasgow before heading up to St. Andrews, so I figured it was finally time to finally see the city center. I’d heard it was good for busking, and it was, only not for my kind of busking, as I discovered. The wide, pedestrian-only main street is loaded with foot traffic at all times – a much more touristy, shopping-oriented crowd than you’ll see on the west end – which is ideal for street performance. I set up in a few different places and tried my luck, but other than meeting a girl from Connecticut who plays clawhammer banjo and happily recognized my Joe Pug cover, I found little success. The scene was dominated by loud acts, like the accordion player who seems to be busking in every European city, or emotive singer/guitarists blaring their music through amps, forcing you to pack up and move when they invade your sonic territory. By the end of the day I was busking at the west end again, to relative success.

Jane wasn’t tired of me yet, thankfully. We’d decided our conversations the night before were worth continuing, and she invited me to her work thing. Despite her vitality and youthful good looks, Jane is a successful grown-up, in charge of internet stuff for an outdoorsy company, and as a result, she had just spent the whole day attending the TEDx Glasgow event. Now she was at an afterparty, rubbing shoulders with coworkers and other interesting people, and she figured she could sneak me in there without any tragic consequences. It was as easy as her meeting me at the door of the trendy hotel and walking me right in, banjo case and everything.

The bar was very much open, and the people were a lot of fun. There was Trevor, a major goof whose brand of enthusiastic awkwardness felt like something out of a Tim & Eric sketch, and Josh, a charming little English lad who pointed us to the lobby, where a man was apparently claiming to be a member of Sugarhill Gang. One of Jane’s coworkers was so proud to have us try on his little VR headset and look around a sharp little virtual house of Iceland-inspired conceptual architecture. Technology! It should tell you something about the tone of the party that a guy in street clothes could hop right in there, or how often we heard the crash of a glass breaking, or that everyone wound up covered in extra TEDx Glasgow stickers. Jane said it was pretty much business-world as usual in Glasgow.

Glasgow nightlife doesn’t go all night like Reykjavik, but after we left the TEDx thing, Jane led the way to a backalley late-night bar and venue with posters for some very cool upcoming shows, like Giant Sand and Paws. After that, the final Glasgow stop was a local icon that I’d already heard a bit about, the Equestrian Statue of Duke Wellington, a very large statue that, for decades, has perpetually had a big orange traffic cone on its head. The government has taken steps to stop this practice, but the community has rallied around its defense – they want a cone on that thing, and they’ll fight for it. If you haven’t learned anything about Glasgow yet, just let that sink in a little bit.

Yeah, Glasgow made it onto my potential relocation list.

 

Two Days Hitchhiking Iceland

Morty the Spanish-Icelandic kitten pawed me awake to the muted daylight of a cloudy Icelandic late afternoon. I packed everything up into my backpack and banjo case and took them with me, just in case I didn’t come back to Reykjavik that night. It’s nice to have choices. I followed Hitchwiki‘s advice and took bus 5 to a gas station at the outermost reaches of the city, where I crossed a traffic circle sending cars southeast on Route 1, the Ring Road that circles the perimeter of the island.

Had I more time in the country, I would have hitched all the way around the Ring Road circuit – other than little Akureyri in the north, the country is very sparsely settled, and natural beauty abounds. But I only had two days left to see the wilds, so I’d have to make do. Everybody recommends some part of the island, but Bylgja and Tóta generally had a lot more to say about the north than the south. Realistically, one day of hitchhiking with the intent to return by nightfall wouldn’t get me too far in either direction, but I elected to save the northerly jaunt for a day when I didn’t start after lunch.

As long as the road has a good, wide shoulder, hitchhiking off of a traffic circle is extremely easy, as everyone’s moving slow and has had a good chance to see you up ahead. I didn’t get a ride immediately, but in the world of hitchhiking, 15 minutes might as well be nothing. And so it came to be that my first hitched ride of this journey was a pair of Icelandic teenage sisters (the older one driving couldn’t have been older than 16) heading back home after going in town to go shoe shopping for the younger one (they didn’t get anything). I don’t know if Icelandic teenagers are told not to pick up hitchhikers; everyone says it’s really common there, and they didn’t seem uncomfortable about it at all.

Icelandic-language pop music pulsed softly on the radio as we crested the mountain range that surveys Reykjavik from the southeast, popping my ears and opening up into a wide sprawl of rough scrub grass and red-roofed farmhouses. The landscape reminded me of the area around Laramie in particular – rolling, rough plains, sparsely populated, neatly hemmed in by a horizon of snowcapped mountain peaks. Only the colors were swapped – rich, deep greens over beds of rich volcanic soil made even blacker by the white mountaintops above, themselves far brighter than the mist-gray sky.

The girls live in Hveragerði, the first substantial settlement after the mountains. There’s not a lot there, but there are natural hot springs and mountain views, enough that the map at the foot of the town has directions for dozens of tourism sights, mostly geothermal in nature. I walked around for a few minutes, stretching my legs and enjoying the sight of someplace other than Reykjavik, before heading back to the Route 1 roundabout and seeking another ride out.

Across the street a busful of high school athletes of indeterminate sport were putzing around in a parking lot, presumably commuting to a game. The boys cheered when, after only a few minutes of waiting, a car pulled over for me. Driving was a 20-something local girl with dyed-white hair who was driving out of Reykjavik to meet a friend in Selfoss for coffee. Although Selfoss is a more substantial settlement than Hveragerði, I wasn’t interested in towns, so I walked the mile or so to the edge of town, where a grocery store gives way to a barren plain and more highway, and kept hitching.

There was considerably less traffic going on from Selfoss, but a ride eventually came. This time it was an American expat with three kids in the backseat. She had moved to Iceland with the father of one of the kids, but now she was with the father of the other ones in Hella, which is not pronounced the way you might think, although I can’t quite get it right either. This woman was very nice and had a lot to say about her life, most of which I won’t recount here. She offered me a quick tour of Hella, which I accepted because she seemed so enthusiastic about it. I maybe shouldn’t have. Her idea of a tour seemed to drive painstakingly slowly up every street in town – past her kids’ school, the local gym, her house, the house of someone she knew, the house of someone else she knew who did something once, the stables where they raise the horses, the stable where she thought she might know the owners…

When she finally dropped me off I was mentally exhausted and the afternoon was late. My loose goal for the day had been to get to Vík, known for its black-sand beaches, but getting there and back again wasn’t looking likely, so I thumbed out on the other side of the road – better to get back and be ready for an early start tomorrow.

But the rental car that pulled over for me had much better plans. Owen and Pam were in the front seat, two friendly Americans squeezing as much Iceland as they could into one weekend (sound familiar?). They were coming back from the beaches at Vík and asked if I would mind a couple scenic stops on the way back to Reykjavik, and I didn’t at all. We compared lives on the way to Gullfoss Falls. Pam is a Captain (soon-to-be Major) in the U.S. Army who’s been stationed in Germany; her manner is blunt and a bit wry, but warm, too. I hope our military has lots of Pams in it. Owen lives in Vermont, and when I told him that basically all I know about Vermont is Ben and Jerry and Bernie, he delighted me by confirming that he’s into both – the state universally adores Bernie Sanders, and Owen actually works for Ben and Jerry’s, doing quality assurance, which includes, yes, regular ice cream tastings.

I’ve seen a lot of waterfalls, and in typical Icelandic fashion, Gullfoss, while not being the biggest falls I’ve seen, had a strange aura to its grandeur that startled me. From a large, damp stone platform that juts out into the middle of the falls, you can watch the water rushing down in tiers, bursting from fall to landing above and around you, ultimately plowing into an abyss far out of sight. Wherever that deep canyon takes the water, it leaves a gift, a steady flow of thick, cool mist that fills the air, drizzling almost imperceptibly on the whole spectacle.

Between Gullfoss Falls and Reykjavik is the site of Geysir, a big geyser. It’s no Old Faithful, especially now, having been dormant for some time, but a smaller geyser nearby erupted a handful of times while we were there, jetting its plume of steam-water high in the air to come down as a sticky, sulphurous fog over tourists and geothermal basins much like the ones in Yellowstone, clear and still and unnaturally brightly colored. We walked up the nearby hill and took pictures, appreciating the silence between eruptions.

At around 22:00 they returned me to Reykjavik, and I decided that an ice-cream-covered Belgian waffle from a food truck could count as my dinner.

The next day, Monday, my last full day in Iceland, began in much the same way as the day before, only much earlier. I took a bus to where the Ring Road leaves the edge of the city, and after a little lunch at a bakery and stocking up on snacks at a grocery store, I found my roundabout and started thumbing. Traffic was steady, but a ride didn’t come immediately. A few minutes into my wait, a massive backpack came into view, hiking up the roadside towards me on the back of a girl. In a light and fascinating accent, she joined me at my spot and introduced herself as Marina, from Montreal. She’d just arrived in Iceland that morning and was looking to hitchhike north to see the sights. We’d just gotten through our introductions when a car pulled up with room for both of us.

Aileen is from Ohio, but she’s lived in Chicago for a few years. We’re the same age, too, and although we didn’t have mutual friends on Facebook, we do have friends that know each other, so that’s fun. Aileen is no stranger to traveling; she’s been to Iceland a few times before, and this time she’d been staying at a friend’s place in the city for several days before finally renting a car to see some new sights. She was accommodating beyond all expectations, having built plenty of time for spontaneity into her day. My goals were to get into some hot springs and maybe eat something authentically Icelandic other than hot dogs. Aileen wanted to check out an area called Kirkjufell, on the Snaefellsnes Peninsula, north of Reykjavik and pretty much 9:00 from Iceland’s center. Marina just wanted to see cool stuff, but she had her eye on a hostel called the Freezer, near the peninsula’s tip. So we went to Snaefellsnes.

The day was warm and buoyantly sunny for the first time since I’d crossed the Atlantic, perfect for zooming down Route 1 between tall mountain peaks and the ocean gently rippling with light. Aileen played spacey DJ mixes through SoundCloud, and we ate Icelandic licorice chocolate and compared our travel experiences, both at home and abroad. I think we’d all been expecting a day of beautiful but lonely travel; instead we made friends. We took a road down the southern flank of the mountainous peninsula, then took a path up and over the snow-capped peaks to the north side, where strangely round Mount Kirkjufell juts steeply over the water. A black-sand beach stretches up to the parking lot, beyond which a 50-foot span of millimeter-deep water shimmers darkly. You can walk out on it and feel like Scandinavian Jesus.

Across the road from Kirkjufell, a river pours down from the mountains, transforming briefly into a mighty waterfall and back again, rushing towards the ocean. We watched a group of locals on horseback tromp through the water, escorted by the happiest frolicking dog. When we felt our cameras had absorbed as much as they could, we drove into town for food. There’s a cafe in Grundarfjörður that serves, among other things, a traditional Icelandic fish pie. There was nothing flashy about it, but it was pretty decent and super filling. Goal achieved. As for the other goal, hot springs, I’d Googled up a travel blog with directions to a natural hot pool. Checking our maps on the cafe’s WiFi, we compared routes and found that Marina’s hostel was to the west, directly opposite of the way toward the hot spring and Reykjavik (and the southern destinations Aileen wanted to hit the next day). After stocking up on some groceries in town, we left Marina to hitchhike the rest of the way to The Freezer, where she’d already made a reservation for the night, confident that a ride would be hitched.

Aileen and I crossed back over the mountains and, following a GPS pin situated off the main road and sort of in the middle of nowhere, made our way to a gravel road, a rocky path, a cold creek crossing, and finally a steamy little puddle in the rocks, occupied by a young European couple who, up until we arrived, had probably been having a nice romantic moment. The hot pool could fit three acquaintances, maybe four close friends. We told them to take their time and kicked pebbles around for a while until they hopped out. Aileen’s got a boyfriend in Chicago and a pretty carefree demeanor, so what might have been awkward or intense with a different spontaneous travel buddy was a pretty relaxed occasion. It was a cozy little natural hot tub, too hot to stay in for very long, with some natural perches of mossy rock under the water to lean against. On our way out, we passed a large group of visibly disappointed tourists who must have assumed, like I initially had, that the pool would just happen to be the perfect size for a group of any number.

We’d parked the car near a decrepit farmhouse, and I wanted to take a peek at it. It was crumbling and long since abandoned, floor covered in debris, windows empty. By the front door was a sheep carcass, mostly skeleton and hair, preserved by Iceland’s chilly climate. Aileen already had the sheep teeth she needed to make a necklace, but she still found it incredibly fascinating. She’s got some niche interests. On an inside wall, someone had written something in very shaky Latin (“Latin they probably got from ‘Warhammer 40K‘ -David Westfall) about “all spirits of the world,” with the word “exorcism” scrawled in English over the top. I wonder if one’s Latin needs to be grammatically correct in order for witchcraft to work properly.

It was late but not too late when Aileen dropped me off near where she’d found me on the outskirts of Reykjavik – when the sun doesn’t set until midnight and it never really gets dark, “evening” has a very loose definition. When the sun finally went down, I was back at Mariam’s place, doing a quick load of laundry and getting ready to wake up and catch a flight to Glasgow.

 

Clayton, Bylgja, Tóta

As I recounted in an introductory post on this blog, my season of traveling was preceded by months of casual research and mental gestation, largely triggered by my introduction to the hitchhiking and vagabond communities on Reddit.  One particular traveller shared in an AMA interview that one of his methods for scraping together hosts and friends on his travels was to use the much-maligned dating app Tinder, repurposing it into a beacon for like-minded travellers and locals. See, it’s great because it sends your mission statement to every interested young person around you, so you can reach a wide audience of people very quickly. Innovative, right? I used it a few times on my US trip to find hosts and pals, and I used it in Reykjavik too. My profile explains how I’m traveling and what I’m looking for – mostly tour guides and good conversation, since finding hosts is something I prefer to do before I arrive someplace. A few people who were on board with that, and Bylgja was the one that I met, though it would be a few days before our schedules aligned.

In the meantime, I struck up an unexpected friendship with a young, scruffy guy who was playing ukulele at my usual busking spot on a drizzly Thursday afternoon. His name was Clayton, and he was from California, more or less. We busked together, playing songs from my canon as well as some of his originals and covers. Like me, Reykjavik was his first stop on a larger European adventure, planned very loosely and at minimal expense. After our fingers froze we exchanged contact info and parted ways, and the next day we reunited for more of the same, this time following it up with a long conversation at a coffeeshop up the street, where a rich hot chocolate poured life back into my near-dead fingertips.

Clayton is a few years younger than I, having arrived at a similar place in life through different means, embracing the travelling life as a late teenager and falling in love with it quickly. His mind rushes with ideas and ideals; he thinks deeply and dreams easily. I’ve got a little more busking and traveling and general life experience than he, but not by much, and we both had a lot to share with one another, although I probably shared the best thing – where to find a good Icelandic hot dog, which, unbelievably, is a thing. Everyone I know who’s been to Reykjavik raves about them, and they do not disappoint. As long as your level of expectation is appropriate for cheap street food, they’re easy to love – sweet, tangy, with a little crispy crunch.

Clayton flew to Ireland on Saturday, where he’ll join some friends and continue the journey. A couple hours later I met Bylgja at her favorite local haunt, Kaffibarinn. She’s a teensy bit younger than I, and she could not possibly look more Scandinavian, but like every young person there, her English is great. Bylgja spent a good chunk of her life in America, did some school in Norway, and probably lived some other places that I can’t recall. We broke ice quickly and got along very easily. She’s got some of the strongest opinions I’ve ever encountered, but she’s gentle with them, and good humor underscores everything she says. She works for NATO but doesn’t have a very high opinion of it. She’s also got some pretty harsh criticisms of America (several people in Iceland informed me that in their politics, Bernie Sanders would be pretty moderate), but thankfully she was able to withhold those judgments from me personally. That being said, she laughed the first time I started a sentence with “In America…,” as if I was about to espouse some USA-as-center-of-the-world grandstanding. It became such a running joke over the next couple of days that I will probably never use those words that way again without thinking about it. If you ever meet her, see if you can get her to show you her American impression – she will enthusiastically dive into a bubbly suburban sorority girl persona and start gushing (in a 95% passable accent) about how she found herself on her trip to Asia and it changed her life so much.

Soon we were joined by Bylgja’s friend Tóta, a tall, dark-haired girl who would fit into any fashionable American city – I don’t know how hard she tries to look cool, but she makes it look effortless. She’s the more reserved of the two, letting Bylgja provide the effervescence while she mostly listened. Tóta works in the film industry as a set dresser, taking care of little aesthetic details on the sets of Iceland’s vibrant film scene (lots of shows and movies film there; you’ll understand why when you see it). She went to school in Glasgow, and we’ve been texting today about where I should go in town.

They told me about how when they were teenagers, this bar was the coolest place, but now it’s packed with tourists, a microcosm of Reykjavik as a whole these days. We played “spot the tourist,” and I learned while I know embarrassingly little about the differences between specific European nations, I can at least pick out who’s American and who isn’t with supreme confidence. Icelandic tourism has been booming for years. Every month some historic downtown building is closed down and replaced with another hotel or tourist booking agency – every block downtown had one or more of these. It’s a weird kind of gentrification, and it’ll be interesting to see if it continues. Bylgja is pretty sure there’s going to be another economic downturn, and that the politicians will do everything they can to pretend everything is fine.

We went to another bar with more locals and met a couple more of their friends, but the night was almost over for them. As we emerged onto the street, Bylgja invited me to join Tóta and her for her sister’s grad party the next day. Of course I accepted. And then I was on my own again. It was well past midnight, and the sky was the same hushed blue that blurs into the hazy horizon after the sun sets over Lake Michigan – more vague than dark. While winter plunges Iceland into an almost endless night, sunlight hardly leaves it in the summer. I busked a little more in the twilight, experimenting with my new foot tamborine, making several dollars and krona, a few euros, and a 6-inch Subway sandwich before heading back to Mariam’s.

The grad party the next day was the nicest thing, with family and friends speaking softly in a warm suburban house while nibbling on a dizzying array of homemade vegan treats – a very familiar scene rendered very tastefully, only with none of the dialogue in English. Tóta hardly knew anyone either, so we stayed together most of the time while Bylgja “worked the crowd,” in her words. A tiny child impressed everyone by playing familiar nursery rhyme melodies on a little classical guitar, stooping on a classy little guitar chair at the top of the stairs. It was fantastic, and Bylgja decided that I ought to play my banjo. After a little nudging I did, playing a few soft pieces of old-time Americana before Bylgja’s brother took to the piano and played some incredibly bleak and brooding classical pieces, with all the focus and dignity of the great Schroeder. They still haven’t heard me play anything very rowdy, but maybe they will someday.

The family portion of the party came to a close, so we bounced between a couple other places and ended up back in the city, where the Saturday nightlife dwarfed Friday’s dramatically. In typical European fashion, the bars and clubs are open all night, and when the sun never really sets, how does anyone know when they’re tired? Apparently they don’t. Recently graduated and newly booze-legal 20-year-olds flooded the streets in their adorable little student caps, celebrating vigorously. I managed to overcome my frequent social-dance-anxiety and boogie down a little with my new friends before settling into my favorite busking spot to close out the night. It was easily the most successful busk I had in Reykjavik, a satisfying conclusion to a day and night thrumming with life.

I said goodbye to Tóta in person and Bylgja via text – her party stamina knows no bounds – and if life puts us in the same country again, I’ll be happy about that. Tomorrow would be Sunday; after seeing Reykjavik at its most alive, I had only two more full days in the country, and it was time to finally get out of Reykjavik and see the rest of Iceland.

 

First Day in Rekjavik; Spanish Hosts

I’m writing from the spare bedroom of my hosts’ apartment in Glasgow, where I arrived yesterday, on what, depending on how you measure, you could consider the tenth day of my trip. I’ve been taking notes and posting to places like Instagram and Snapchat, but I haven’t tried that hard to find a real computer to tappity type on until tonight, so there’s a bit of a backlog. Iceland deserves more than one post, so there will be more than one. Thank you to all you people joining me on this adventure, and to all who followed me on the last one and are still reading, double thanks.

When you leave from O’Hare Airport in Chicago at 7:30 in the evening headed for Iceland, it’s about a five or six-hour flight. But you don’t arrive at 12:30 or 1:30. No, you arrive at around 6:30 in the morning the next day, because you’ve just flown across the dark side of the earth and cut your night in half in a misguided rush towards the eventual sunrise. Hard as I tried, I got maybe one hour of fitful, knocking sleep on the plane. My first day would be rough.

I had no plan that day except to find my Spanish Couchsurfing host, Mariam, and to address any issues that might arise. And arise they did. The travel wisdom of a great new pal of mine named Emily led me to get a Schwab bank account and card — they reimburse all ATM and international transaction fees. You just gotta remember to keep a little money in that account, as it takes a couple days for transfers to clear. Well, apparently it takes four days, not a couple. I just had 100 USD until more cleared, which is not a lot, and Iceland is not a cheap country. This wasn’t a real problem; all I really had to do if I wanted more cash was use my other card and suck up the fee, but I’m on a budget, and I was very tired. I was discouraged.

At Mariam’s advice, I took a bus from Keflavik airport to Reykjavik, struggling to keep my eyes open and on the gorgeously desolate volcanic tundra whizzing by. I knew I was going to be cold, that this would be the coldest part of my trip, and it was. The temperature there doesn’t vary much between day and night – maybe two degrees celsius – and the temperature barely changed throughout my five days in the city. But the wind! The wind could be brutal. I needed to buy a windbreaker. Also, my phone plan was supposed to provide decently affordable international roaming services, but I was getting no data at all, and data’s the really useful part. And I found I had lots of time to kill – Mariam was working until 4:30. In my flimsy, jetlagged, underslept emotional state, I found myself despairing. I was very self-aware about it, though. I knew I was just tired and all these issues would work out (and by the end of the next day, they had). But I still felt the feelings – “what do I think I’m doing here?”

Hungry and with time to kill, I wandered into a small neighborhood grocery store, ready to burn some krona. Somehow I ended up talking to a tiny Icelandic woman who had to be in her 80s. She lit up when she heard I was traveling and had just arrived, and she led me all around the store to show me the good authentic stuff, like sweet, filling Icelandic rye bread and Skyr, a thick and delicious Icelandic yogurt that I’m now finding has a more interesting history than I expected. Thanks, Wikipedia, and an even bigger thanks to the stooped old woman who puttered around the store with her rudimentary English and made me feel warm again.

I still had time to burn, so I did one of the main things I was there to do – try my luck at busking. I knew from consulting the Iceland subreddit that Laugavegur Street was the place to play, so I found a plaza and pulled out my banjo. I would do so every day for the next five days, and each time was such a positive experience. Most of the people on the streets are tourists, but I got tips from people of all stars and stripes, including lots of locals. Other than my bus fare to and from the airport, I was able to support myself almost completely on busking tips after the first afternoon. And the people I met! On the first day I saw a family wearing Hope College paraphernalia and struck up a conversation with them. One of them works in their technology department, and his picture ended up on my college’s Twitter. And the local teens were very generous all week. A pair of them dug my music, and one offered me some of his chocolate bar. Not to be outdone, the girl with him dumped out her bag of chocolates into my case – little bite-size chocolate bars labeled only with the numeral 3 and threaded with a core of black licorice. I didn’t expect to be as into those as I was. They love their licorice in Iceland; it’s practically the national flavor. Maybe it’s the quality of Icelandic licorice, or maybe it’s the fact that it was covered in chocolate, but those things were so good. The next day busking I would meet a generously-tipping American who lamented that he couldn’t find anyone in Iceland to sell drugs to – the country was too wholesome. The next day I met Clayton, an American traveler who played his ukulele with me whom I’ll write about later. That Saturday I would meet another American musician and play with him, although his name escapes me and will continue to escape me until he finds me on social media. He has my card.

Since Iceland stayed pretty much the exact same temperature all week, whenever I busked, my fingers would become unbearably cold after about the same amount of time, and on that first day, it was just about the right time to meet Mariam at the end of her shift. Mariam does housekeeping for one of the classy tourist hotels downtown. I met her at the front door, where she was also meeting Andrea, a pal of hers who’s just started her migration to Iceland. The three of us grabbed groceries and rode the bus back to the northwestern corner of the city, a township called Seltjarnarnes, where Mariam lives with her brother, another friend, and now Andrea. They’re all pretty new to the country, working entry-level jobs or hustling pretty hard to find one – I didn’t see them much except in the evenings. They said the quality of life was just better here than in Spain. They were optimistic about Reykjavik, and really giving it their all. Although they frequently bust into Spanish when they’re together, they made a pretty good effort to include me by speaking English, and they’re pretty good at it. And America already has a presence in their lives, as it seems to everywhere. When Daud receives a text, his phone plays the wololo sound from Age Of Empires. Mariam’s is a clip from Futurama. We had a great talk about why Adventure Time is so good (it really is). And they have a kitten named Morty. The best thing about that is how it sounds when they say it in their accents – the first syllable becomes sharper, and the R rolls a little into a harder T. MOR-Tee. It’s beautiful. Morty is black with white on his face and paws, and he’s very tiny. He’s still at the age where he vacillates between hyper monster and snuggly sleeper. He’s really great, except when you’re trying to sleep in and he keeps jumping all over you and swatting at your face. Someday he will be a fine cat and a good companion to his friends, who will have settled into their lives in Reykjavik, working jobs that they don’t hate and living comfortable, happy lives in a bustling city in a beautiful island nation.

 

Mr. Rice

When you’re a substitute teacher at Naperville Central High School, sometimes the teacher you’re substituting has what they call a “supervision period.” During your supervision period, your job is to sit in a chair behind a desk planted along the wall of a major hallway intersection for 50 minutes. Ostensibly your supervision post serves a purpose – one post is set up down the hall from the cafeteria so that during lunch periods a responsible grown-up like me can tell kids not to leave the cafeteria without a pass. No lunchers have escaped into the halls and lit the school on fire on my watch, so I must be doing it right. But most of the time you have no written instructions and your post serves no discernible purpose, so you just plop down behind your hall-desk, crack open a book, and try to look imposing enough that any kid thinking about breaking whatever rule you’re there to enforce thinks again. 

Yesterday, during one such aimless exertion of authority, I was occupying a post kind of between the library and the gyms, and a kid with a camera approached me and asked if I was Mr. Rice. That’s how I introduce myself to the kids, but I hadn’t taught this kid before. He just knew. He was looking for me specifically, as a representative of the Central Times newspaper, to take a picture for some upcoming story about substitute teachers. His mission was to get a picture of me with a student that liked having me as a sub. Now, theoretically, this should have been easy, since I’ve probably taught at least half of Central’s students at one point or another this semester, and enough of them remember liking me that I hear happy hellos in the busy hallways on the reg. But I had to tell the kid it was a gamble. When you’re a sub you have no routine; every hour is a total surprise.

The bell rang, and students spilled out into the hallways like a liquid fills its container (not like solids and not quite like a gas, 6th graders), and within a minute a boy I recognized from two days back in March as an English teacher said hi to me, and in seconds we were posing together for pictures. This kid, whose name I absolutely do not recall, is emblematic of a large portion of the students who appreciate me – the foundation of our relationship is two days of him trying to avoid classwork and me calling him out on it publicly in a whatever way I found funniest at that moment. Somehow this produces a kind of loyalty where he greets me excitedly in the halls. “MISTER RICE!” I’ll take it.

A couple of students – seniors, I think – got me talking about my travels, and somehow they got enough information out of that to find this blog. One of them told me so. They dug it – lucky for me I don’t have anything to hide from impressionable teenagers. Yesterday another student who knew I traveled asked if I wrote, and I told her it was findable, but I wasn’t gonna help her find it, and that there were students in the school who did find it, but I wasn’t gonna say who because I hardly remember any names of students. It’s fun sending kids on hunts.

In February when I talked about travels, it was to say where I’d been in the last few months of 2015. Now the topic of travel points towards the future, and a date: May 23rd. If you fly to Europe via IcelandAir, they let you take a free stopover in Reykjavik for up to a week. I’m doing that, Couchsurfing with a young sister and brother from Spain, on my way to see David, one of my closest buddies, who’s studying Divinity with the likes of N.T. Wright at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. He’s got a cool wife and a new baby, so as soon as my flight lands in Glasgow, I’m gonna skedaddle their way. I’m really excited to see them.

After that visit, I might see a friend from college in Dublin, and later I might see another college pal in York. London is big, so I may try to stay with more than one host there eventually, but I do have one lined up in Lucy, an old friend of my mom from when she worked there briefly in the ’70s, younger then than I am now.

At some point I’ll be ready to visit the mainland, so I’m building a map of potential hosts and possible destinations (reader, if you have any ideas for either, let me know!). The plan at that point will be to meander across the continent toward those hosts, mostly hitchhiking and largely improvising. I’m excited for this part. My departure is so soon now, and every act of preparation etches the reality of it all deeper in my mind. I’m ready to be on the move again, and if the west coast was an adventure, this will be, well, also an adventure, but more logistically complicated.

I’m wrapping things up here. I’ve been writing lots of songs that I’m very proud of this year, and I’ll be performing some of them on Saturday at an event in Wheaton that my friend Adam is putting together. He’s the one who’s been helping me record some of my songs. It’s no aggressive move into the suburban Chicago music scene, just a chance to let some of my new songs breathe and find some ears. I’m excited. These last few months have largely felt like a placeholder, a commercial break to make money for the real show, but I do have some good songs to show for it, and it will be nice to show them.

And that’s my winter. Odds are pretty good that the next time I write I’ll either be on the brink of departure or already on the road. See you then.

 

Reading: Tenth of December: Stories by George Saunders
Listening: Dig Me out by Sleater-Kinney; those new Radiohead singles
Enjoying: Star Wars, always, obviously

Personal Progress

The secret, in my opinion, to successfully substitute teaching at a middle and high school level is an unflappable attitude, a firm belief in the worth of a deep and diverse education for everyone, and proficiency at gently mocking students that think they’re really cool. I’m pretty sure they can tell I actually like them, so I think it works out for the best. Kids in the halls of Naperville Central say hi, so that’s something.

I’ve been substitute teaching for about a month now in Naperville, Illinois, in the school district where I grew up. I have almost no qualifications, but all it really takes is some money for the paperwork, proof of a college degree, and a successful in-person interview. The kids don’t know I’m a sham unless I tell them – which I sometimes do. Half of the reason I’m doing it is as an experiment to see if I want to get into teaching as a day job someday (to support the creative things I’m more passionate about), and the other half is because it’s a job where I can make decent money, work just about anytime I want, and have the freedom to abruptly skedaddle as soon as I’m ready to travel more.

Europe is next (it’s the continent where white people come from). David and Anna have a baby in Scotland, and I have a handful of other acquaintances scattered across the continent. In the next couple months I’ll be saving up for a ticket, doing research, and waiting for the weather to warm up. The lodging and hitchhiking and street performing should all be a breeze there – the only things working against me that weren’t present on the west coast will be a lack of friends and some language barriers. I’m not feeling intimidated yet.

In the meantime I’ve been living at home with the whole nuclear fam. If you’ve been in that situation as a young adult, you know how it is – a daily struggle to keep being your independent adult self and not be swept back into the self you were in high school. In some ways it’s the cushiest thing – free room and board – and in other ways it’s a constant upstream swim against regression of character. I’ve had some teenage moments I’m not proud of, but I’m trying to be self-aware enough to keep myself in check. Having good high school friends around helps, and I do have some of those here.

A few days ago I did a Google Hangout thing with the Pittsburgh friends that comprised the writing group I put together there, and I’m typing this just after having spent some time typing away on the old novel-in-progress I’ve been procrastinating on for the last year. One of my favorite people to share writing classes with at Hope, Emily Henry, just published her debut novel, so it’s about time I at least finished mine. Watching from afar as old friends like Eric and new friends like Heather write and record and perform excellent music, and watching audiences receive them well, has kept me super motivated to keep writing my own music; in the last few months I’ve written a lot of songs that I’m very proud of. So I’m making progress towards that dream, even if it’s not going to be the main focus this year. I just recorded some skeletons of songs with my old college pal Adam; hopefully that’ll yield something nice.

That about covers it. It’s still not easy being where I am in life, having retreated to the house where I grew up, working towards another big journey in the shadow of the knowledge that when I come back I’ll still have to figure out how to live a stable, productive life. But I’m not regressing. I’m scrabbling together all the progress I can find.

 

Return to the Midwest

I spent Thanksgiving in the company of my friends Jess and her visiting boyfriend, Kyle (whom I visited in SoCal a few weeks ago), cooking enchiladas and trying to play Jess’ cello and composing disastrous science jokes. Lincoln was my first repeat visit, a minor homecoming. I made a Thanksgiving playlist full of cozy and comfortable songs to reflect the familial warmth and the peace of watching freezing rain a warm house. I wasn’t quite home, but the tone of the trip had changed. I was back in the cornfield states, and only friends and familiar highway separated me from the house where I grew up.

I didn’t have to hitchhike to Omaha. I’d seen on Facebook that my new friend Heather‘s band was playing the night after Thanksgiving, and I liked the idea checking them out. Heather was able to host me, and it was easy to sell Jess and Kyle on cruising to Omaha for dinner before dropping me off and having the rest of the rest of the weekend to themselves. I’ll miss them, but their roots are planted deep in the same states as mine, and I’m sure I’ll see them again this season.

The Hottman Sisters are something special. Their music is built around their voices, two, locking into such fluid, intuitive harmonies that you know they’ve got to be related. The music is tight and often minimal, and under guitar and synth, propulsive beats underlay some really solid pop songwriting. They’re planning to tour some other states soon, so you should probably keep track of them and see for yourself. I’d see them again.

I met Heather by happenstance last August, and we kept in touch loosely. Now we spent a weekend together in brisk late-November Omaha as she found time between gig and work and church band practice to show me around. Omaha’s got some really cool areas, and like any good small city, there’s plenty of room to join the building coolness. If I lived there awhile I would be curious to stack its music scene up against the one in Grand Rapids, Michigan (half its size), another cool small midwestern city. After more than two months on the west coast, the difference between a real city and these quaint Midwestern things is a modesty wherein the urban thrum is duller but the barrier to entry is much lower. You’d never mistake Omaha for Seattle, but Omaha would not spit you out the way Seattle might.

I meant to leave for Iowa Sunday morning, but I stuck around to see Heather sing in her home church, a modest megachurch that doesn’t offend me like they sometimes do. Then I accidentally stuck around for an amazing brunch, and ice cream, and I accidentally let her show me around the area until later afternoon. Oops. It’s nice having feelings for someone again, feeling clenched parts of my spirit loosen and relax. I was pretty forthcoming to her about my situation – no life stability whatsoever, still working to reestablish my identity and ground myself, not sure if I’ll ever have the confidence and faith for a committed relationship again, although not closed off to the possibility. She seemed to understand and appreciate that, so I let my guard loosen. There really is no room inside me for a relationship right now – at best, it would cost more than I have – but if space opens up, it’s nice knowing there are still people worth pursuing.

So that’s why at around 4:00, sky darkening ominously over a cloverleaf between two highways northeast of the city, I decided I wasn’t a doofus for hanging out with Heather all day instead of traveling, that I’d managed my time just right. It was very cold, but I had a fuzzy hat and scarf and gloves from Kyle and Jess’ midwestern surplus, so it wasn’t bad. The only concern was that if I didn’t catch a ride before dark I’d want to get back to the city for a 9:30 Megabus, and that would be a major drag.

I turned down a couple ride offers – one a short ways north, one briefly east before swinging south towards Atlanta, of all places. But I got picked up by the right guy in time. He was a 20ish-year-old college student named Cray, heading back to school after the holiday weekend. Cray listens to rap and is going to Kirkwood Community College in Cedar Rapids for a career in astroturf management, or something like that. He says it’s a stable thing that will allow him to work pretty much anywhere. He would be driving through Iowa City before cutting north to Cedar Rapids, and I rode along eagerly. He’d never picked up a hitchhiker before, but he gets bored (lonely) on long drives, and he told me he’d just finished failing to get hold of friends on the phone and was at a loss for how he’d entertain himself for three hours when he saw me thumbing. It was perfect. So Cray and I and his cat Megatron (female), who stalked around the car and across our laps the whole time, cruised across wide-open Iowa in the dark, under cold rain that threatened to turn I-80 into a really boring skating rink.

I arrived in Iowa City and promptly fell asleep in McCall’s apartment, having gotten her permission via text. McCall got back from her Tennessee Thanksgiving the next day. If returning to Lincoln felt like almost coming home, Iowa City felt like I’d already arrived, only being three hours from Chicago’s sprawling domain. I restocked the Iowan parking-lot fossil stash and played McCall’s ukelele and worked on writing some of these nice blog posts while two cats and a dog shared their warmth with me. McCall is a great friend, and this time we didn’t need to do much but talk.

And now I’m home. My mom found an excuse to swing by Iowa City and pick me up – funny how after 61 (that’s a real number) hitchhiked rides, a mother is still nervous about one more. I humored her. Thanks, Mom!

I don’t know exactly how long I’ll be here, but I know I’m not done traveling. I’ll revisit Michigan at least once, and I’ll spend some of the wintertime working, planning, creating, willing myself to become the person I’d like to be when I set forth again. The posts will slow down, but I’ll keep writing here, because the journey’s still in progress. This is just the beginning of a long, much-appreciated stop along the way.

700 Miles and Nine Rides and One Day to Thanksgiving

On the morning before Thanksgiving, I stepped up to highway 285 where it runs through Monte Vista, Colorado, to hitchhike to Denver by midday and Lincoln by nightfall. That’s 700 miles. It seemed possible.

Getting my first ride was quick and easy, and in the 20 degrees minus windchill, I needed it. I don’t rememeber if I mentioned this, but in lieu of proper winter gear, I’ve been layering up the regular stuff – on this morning I had double underwear and two T-shirts under two button-ups and a hoodie. It’s enough for 30 degrees, but I’d never been so aware of the difference between 30 and 20. People drive to work in the morning, I realized – a phenomenon I don’t really notice while hitchhiking because I rarely get started before 9:00. But I was in a hurry.

Ride one: Caleb, a bearded and hatted young dude from Arizona who works as a handyman on the farms in the area. He loves the isolation of the mountains, and he’ll be happy living there forever. He took me north through the San Luis Valley, a broad stretch of perfect flatness between two epic mountain ranges. Caleb said it wants to be Kansas.

Ride two: I waited about half an hour at an intersection by Center, Colorado, a little nothing town between farmlands, and eventually caught a ride nort to Saguache from a Navajo named Frank. He’s from Arizona too, and he married a Catholic Mexican girl in the San Luis Valley. He doesn’t love it there, but he loves her and their daughter and is pretty happy with where his life is at otherwise. We talked about the reservation and its culture and problems, and the topic of Navajo+Catholic marriage led me to ask him if he sees the two faiths as compatible. He believes in the old Navajo faith, the animistic reverence for life itself. Does he pray to the same God his wife does? He thinks so, yes. He prays to creation, which isn’t so far from praying to the creator, to Jesus. Then he prays to his ancestors, his passed loved ones, something else that isn’t as foreign to Catholicism as one might think. Whatever you think about universalism and the worth of letting lines between faiths blur, I hope you can see the beauty in Frank’s prayers.

The tattoo on Frank’s neck says who he is, denoting symbolically the clans of his mother and father and the mountain where he was born. Frank is the first Navajo I met outside of the reservation, and he’s also the one who bears his heritage with the most pride. His sister dances in powwows, and I asked him he’ll encourage his daughter to do the same when she’s older. He will.

Moments after Frank dropped me off in Saguache, he called me back to his car to give me something. It was the tip of an Elk antler, with a design in it that Frank had carved and inlaid with powdered turquoise. When I look at it my mind goes blank, and I’m overwhelmed by how our happenstance encounter moved him to share his creation, a piece of his culture, with me.

Ride three: On the road leading out of Saguache I was picked up by a white SUV drawing an empty trailer. Inside was a family – mother, father, toddler son, and grandmother – on their way to buy a horse. The son was playing motor-skills games on an iPad. The father talked about the time he’d driven up to a ski lodge just moments before the mountain road he was on was closed for weather, leaving him with a whole ski resort almost to himself. The mother talked about the horse seller, and how good horse people always recognize one another. The grandmother, talking about an upcoming outbound flight, said “I don’t worry about things that I can’t change” with an earnest nonchalance that left me in awe.

Ride four: I was catching up on the phone with Heather from Omaha while holding my thumb out and was picked up quickly by a young dude, bearded and dreaded in blond, who goes by Sunshine. He’s lived a lot of places, but today he was headed to Utah, heading north for a time. It turned out he was cutting west sooner than I expected him to, and I rode with him a little while in the wrong direction because I enjoyed his company. He’s a casual philosopher like Hans, actively trying to convert lessons and misfortunes into a functional, beautiful, original life philosophy. He’s an active Christian, too, which is always a treat. He’s the kind of Christian who reads the Bible loosely and is skeptical of denominations and smokes lots of pot. He’s also the kind of Christian who picks up hitchhikers, gives freely, laughs easily, and prefers to call Jesus “Yeshua,” the way his friends actually addressed him, more or less. Hard to argue with that.

Ride five: I reluctantly had Sunshine drop me off on a roadside near Gunnison, Colorado, where I was picked up in seconds by Geoff, a young grad-student sculptor. He’s hitchhiked around New Zealand, so he knows what it’s like, and he has a healthy well of compassion for travelers. We listened to Ween and made peanut butter and honey sandwiches and talked about creative life’s various incarnations. He told me the San Luis Valley ghost/psychic scene and the woman there who runs a UFO watchtower, which I’ll definitely have to come back to check out – I mean, look at the website. Geoff was a fantastic conversation buddy, but the best thing is that he went out of his way to take me up to the far side of Denver, where I would be able to hitch towards Nebraska. Anyplace around Denver would have been fine, but without his extra benevolence I may not have gotten out of Colorado that day.

Ride six: I did get past Denver! It was only about two in the afternoon, but the clouds were so heavy it felt like evening. I was picked up along the highway by three white-collar working dudes who were driving up to one of their cabins near Fort Morgan, just outside of the Denver sprawl, to hunt some birds before rejoining their families for Thanksgiving. The driver told me about his miscellaneous shenanigans hitchhiking years ago in Argentina. When he asked me about influences, I mentioned Wilco, and he surprised me by singing an Uncle Tupelo chorus. The dude looked way too financially successful for grungy alt-country. They dropped me off at a very rural stretch of I-76, which runs northeast to meet I-80 in Nebraska. The wind was cuttingly cold, and I didn’t want to get stuck there. I walked up the road with my thumb out to little success, but when I finally reached the spot where the area’s on-ramp hits the highway, I got a ride almost immediately.

Ride seven: Donny works for Coors in a warehouse setting, near Denver. He’s from North Platte, Nebraska, and that’s where he was going. Donny’s a quiet dude with a thick beard and shaved head and a gentle spirit. He’s about 30, and he worked in the oil business in a Dakota for a while before coming down to Colorado. We listened to red dirt country, a variety of country music defined by straightforward delivery and modest production, a solid starting point if you want your country closer to folk than blaring pop.  He’s a small music library kind of guy, and after a couple hours driving he invited me to deejay and listened to my choices with interest. It was a quiet ride, and I really enjoyed it.

I stepped out at the North Platte exit after dark. I was 225 miles from Lincoln. There was a sign on the on-ramp that listed things that were illegal there, and one of them was hitchhiking. There wasn’t a lot of light to see me by anyway, so I walked down to a pair of brightly lit gas stations off the exit. I was going to try my hand at a kind of hitchhiking I hadn’t really messed with yet – politely soliciting rides at a gas station. The idea of bothering disinterested people kept me from trying this method before, though it’s a fairly common technique in the online communities – good for hitchhiking women who want more control over who they interact with. I talked to a few drivers with little luck, but when I made eye contact with T, I knew I’d found my ride.

Ride eight: T is the second oldest of eight kids, now in his early 20s. He’s got a mischievous face like a young Jimmy Fallon with a beard and the glazed eyes of a man who is very, very relaxed. He’s from Aurora, Nebraska, about an hour from Lincoln. He works for a tiny family company in Ogallala, Nebraska, that makes high-end pillows and stuff out of milkweed, with some sort of patent on whatever they do that makes their products unique. T doesn’t love working there, but he likes it. I asked him what the dream is, and we talked it out for a while. His life goals are pretty modest – do nice things for people and live simply. He’s got an idea of starting a nonprofit in the area that just helps people out. Materially, he’d like to buy a cheap trailer on a lake, fix it up by hand, and use it to host friends and travelers, like his older brother, an aspiring writer who’s moved around and hitchhiked a lot in the last few years but has yet to stabilize himself as a writer. We stopped by his brother’s place in Grand Island, most of the way to Aurora, and hung out with the guy for a little while. I liked them both a lot – they have the kind of productive sibling chemistry that lets their humor flow effortlessly and radiates warmth.

T dropped me off at the gas station in Aurora by I-80, with the understanding that if I didn’t find a ride, I could come hang out with his friends and him for the night. He was pretty sure one of them would head towards Lincoln in the morning. I’d have felt wholly confident in getting to Lincoln for Thanksgiving at that point, except that there was supposed to be a freezing rain storm overnight and in the morning that could mess up the travel scene a lot. So I opted to find one more ride.

There were fewer cars at this gas station, and a few times, having talked to every traveler there, I found myself waiting for more, rubbing my hands and watching my breath wisp in the wind. A man driving two daughters in a truck curtly declined me, but they gassed up and hit the bathrooms, one of the daughters came around and said they could probably make some room for me. They were going to Lincoln.

Ride nine, the last of 17 hours of hitchhiking. The family lives in Sacramento, and they make the drive to Nebraska to see Grandma fairly regularly, rerouting through different states and national parks each time. Though initially reserved, all three were friendly and fascinated by what I was doing, and we laughed a lot.

Jess picked me up in a hotel parking lot near the Lincoln airport, and I slept that night in a house where I’d stayed for almost a week in August, only 500 miles from home, in the company of good friends.

1,000 Miles and Two Days to Thanksgiving; AZ to CO

It was the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. I was in Kayenta, Arizona, and I had two days to get to Lincoln, Nebraska, where my old college friend Jessalyn, my second host of this whole trip, was eager to host me again for the holiday. It looks pretty doable on a map – out the corner of Arizona, across Colorado, almost to the eastern edge of Nebraska. Google Maps is telling me that it’s about 1,000 miles. 1,000 miles in two days. For a little perspective, Google maps is also telling me that from San Francisco on the west coast to Norfolk on the east coast is only about 3,000 miles. One third of the way across the country in two days, via hitchhiking. That’s a little more intimidating. But Colorado’s supposed to be really easy to hitch across, and I figured Denver in one day would have me in good shape – 500 miles.

I started early but slow, walking 45 minutes from Luke’s place down Navajo Kayenta’s main street to the intersection where I was dropped off the afternoon before. Almost a mile of that sidewalk was dotted with what looked like fresh blood, cold and puffy, glistening darkly in November’s harsh morning light, a dot or smear or thin line on every square of sidewalk.

Ride one: Julia, a mid-aged mother who works in various towns on the reservation in diabetes education. She was a little late for work, but not too concerned about it. Picking up hitchhikers is nothing new for her, but she does it less than she used to after a Navajo hitchhiker started hitting on her, alcohol on his breath, and she made him get out of the car. But she actually pulled a u-turn for me after passing me in Kayenta. Looking wholesome goes a long way – in this case 27 miles, to the teeny tiny settlement of Dennehotso, not much to look at but in the right direction – almost to the Four Corners borders.

Ride two: With little to gain by standing still in Dennehotso I walked down the shoulder of the two-lane road, over desert pebbles and roadside trash, weathered shattered glass from bottles broken in every decade. Eastbound cars only passed maybe once per minute, but they could see me from a long way off and it was easy to pull over, so I was optimistic, but prepared to be patient. The air was in the 40s and warming, and I had water. I ended up going two or three miles on foot, walking for about an hour, before a nice Navajo couple in a roomy truck picked me up. Roger and Eva live north of Kayenta and were driving to Cortez, Colorado, to buy hay for their animals. Roger’s a plumber, but he messed up his leg a few weeks ago doing some ranching – I totally forgot the story – so he’s off his feet right now. His crutches were in the back, and his wife drove. He used to hitchhike these roads, and he told me how in the ’60s you might see one car in an hour, then one every 10 minutes by the ’80s, and now the traffic was steady. They stopped for gas at the trading post in Red Mesa, where trucks towing horse trailers stop for $1.98 gas and a man speaking Navajo walks up to cars selling bags of unshelled pinyon nuts, an ancient Navajo dietary staple that’s evolved into a coffeetable snack. Roger and Eva bought three bags for $20, then called the guy back and bought three more. I tried one, and it was earthy and nutty and delicious. They bought themselves Arizona iced teas and offered me a yellow Gatorade, which I sipped it while we drove past the Four Corners monument and mesas rich with Navajo history and folklore. They pointed to a giant inverted funnel of rock and Roger told me the story of the coyote and the skunk as we drove by, Eva correcting him every few sentences. A coyote challenges a skunk to a race for the skunk’s food and the skunk outwits the coyote by faking its departure and not embarking on the race at all, flicking the coyote its scraps at the end. Summarizing the moral of the story, Roger and Eva took the perspective not of the clever skunk but the thwarted coyote – if you try to cheat others, others will cheat you.

Cortez is small, but it was the biggest town I’d been in since San Diego. I walked all the way across town looking for a place to hitch out eastward. All I’d eaten that morning was a pinyon nut and a couple bite-size Larabar samples from my small stash – a team of promotors had tipped me a generous handful when I was busking in San Diego. I walked into the Pizza Hut midway across town to gorge myself cost-effectively, and while I was scarfing my waitress told me that someone had offered to pay for my meal. When my friend Marietta hiked on the Appalacian trail earlier this year, she blogged about the provision of the trail, the magical intersection of God’s care and individual goodwill that makes a traveler feel shepherded and sheltered. In Colorado my trail provided well.

Ride three: On the edge of town I was picked up quickly by a guy about my age, Tim from Tajikistan, a country I knew exactly zero things about. He’s lived in America for a few years, and his family has been immigrating here one by one for a while. He’s with the armed forces, though I don’t remember which branch. He loves Colorado because its terrain and culture remind him of home but with all the perks of America.

Ride four: The highway that goes through Durango has the most ideal shoulder for hitchhiking – abundantly wide, very visible, low speed. I was picked up quickly by an older couple from Wisconsin in an old ’70s RV. They’re on a big road trip across the country, heading to Santa Fe that day. They’re retired, and they travel regularly down to Southern Texas to help with a missionary organization that preaches across the border in Mexico. They offered me homemade chocolate pudding and invited me to play music for them, which I did. They liked the old hymns.

Ride five: I walked north out of Pagosa Springs in the late afternoon, figuring my odds of getting a ride anywhere, anytime in Colorado were pretty good, ready to walk to a motel if the dark and cold became too much – there are lots of places to stay on any main road in the mountains. I was pretty chilly after about an hour, but I got a ride from Hans, who responded to my thumb and wave with a “hang loose” gesture and pulled over. Hans is a casual philosopher on a hunt for meaning, an identity in active transition. On the day he picked me up, he’d just quit his job as a poker dealer in a local casino to pursue a lifestyle that allows him time to work on his writing and his art. He’s on a promising upswing after hitting a rock bottom and having a sort of spiritual epiphany towards living selflessly and taking his dreams seriously. We talked about God and the harmony between living things as we drove through Wolf Creek Pass over the Continental Divide under a purple mountain sunset and a bright rising moon. He says “indefutable” instead of undeniable or irrefutable, and his creed is pronoia, a word he’s coined for himself – as opposed to paranoia – a decision to assume the best about the people around you.

Ride six: It was nighttime in Del Norte, Colorado, and I had a motel all picked out (it’s cold), but I figured I’d try my luck holding my thumb out under a streetlight – the highway slows down in the little mountain town. I was ready to give up and get warm when a minivan pulled up for me, a mother and daughter. I’d made some nice eye contact with them while patrolling the local grocery store for a bathroom, and they offered me a ride to Monte Vista, the small town a few miles down the road from which I would turn north onto highway 285 towards Denver. I forgot to copy down the mother’s name, but the daughter was Dominique. They weren’t even going to Monte Vista; they just saw me and wanted to do something nice.

I spent the night in a motel for the first time on the whole trip. My parents, concerned and kindhearted as they are, had offered to pay for any lodgings or transportation I might want on the trip, an offer I’d thoroughly declined until this point, but it was cold, and there was no reason that my learning how to accept hospitality shouldn’t extend to my own family on a night like this – I certainly wasn’t going to make it to my friends in Denver in the dark. I rested well and woke early on the day before Thanksgiving, only 700 miles to go.

 

Navajo Land and the First Bad Ride

On a November Monday midday I stood at a crossroads in northeast Arizona with my thumb out, watching cars miles away glide down a straight white road among crumbling mesas and brown, red, and white painted desert. In fewer than 15 minutes a silver pickup pulled over and T.J. offered to take me to Tuba City.

T.J. is a Navajo in his early 20s who solders for a living in power plants, which is apparently a pretty common gig on the reservation these days, as lots of plants in the area are being overhauled and there will be steady work for a good while. He wants to go back to school soon for engineering, and from the few miles I spent with him, he’s got the motivation and depth of character to follow it through. T.J. dropped me off in Tuba City, a small town of widely spaced buildings and vast skies, named for a Navajo chief. T.J. was the first Navajo I met, and this was the first time I’d ever been on a reservation. We don’t really have those in the Midwest, and I wanted to get a taste of it.

I didn’t have to try hard. The Navajo reservation, the largest in America, feels like another country, remote and foreign. My second ride was from Johnny and Annie, a quiet older couple in a white pickup who showed me their cool Navajo Bible and pointed out the horizon’s geology by name. They dropped me off at a roadside trading post, the Navajo equivalent of a rest stop – a dusty convenience store with a couple gas pumps in the middle of nowhere that seemed to serve as a community hub for the rural residents of the countryside. This part of the road runs almost in the shadow of Black Mesa to the south, and Johnny told me that across from there, where few roads run, you can find Navajo living in the traditional nomadic ways, speaking Navajo, subsisting in spite of the growing towns and the expanding power grid.

I was driven from one trading post to another by Tommy, a father off to visit his teenage daughter. He had more to say about the land around me and its significance and was happy to answer my questions about the reservation’s government and economy, the problems that plague it and what solutions might raise it from its deep-rooted malaise. He says the young people who muster the ambition to get educated and start serious careers usually never come back, and the ones who stick around don’t incite much progress. I wondered about T.J.

From that desolate post an older woman who didn’t seem to have much to say in English took me to Kayenta, the biggest settlement in the area, where I would try to hitch north into Utah. My rather ambitious goal was to get across Utah and into Grand Junction in western Colorado, where a Couchsurfer was willing to host me if I could make it. A long ride or two would have made that happen, but when I got to Kayenta, it was after 3:00 and the sun was low.

Highway 163 took me through the center of town, but not the heart of it – there is no heart, no part of Kayenta meant to be walked on foot, only a few strip malls with parking lots, sprawling lots of ramshackle homes and trailers, decrepit public buildings that look like they haven’t been used in decades – rec center, school, visitor center. It’s a bleak place.

A pickup pulled up, driven by a young Navajo lady but directed by the man in the passenger seat, a very burly Navajo with a long ponytail, a thick accent, a Sturgis t-shirt, and no front teeth. They were going to Mexican Hat (hilarious), population 31, but they would make some stops first. They asked me to hop in the bed of the truck, and I did, trusting that little would go wrong in such a low-traffic rural area.

Their first stop was to pick up their friend Luke, a soft-spoken, deep-voiced 30-something white guy in black leather, black beanie, studded gloves, and thin-framed glasses. He filled me in on the plan, which was to go up to Mexican Hat, Utah, to buy booze. Alcohol is illegal to buy or even possess on the reservation, so Mexican Hat, just past the rez border, is where they all go to buy it. The Navajo passenger running the show, Mongo, asked Luke if his roommate was coming, and Luke told him that he’d gotten beaten up while dealing with some bootleggers and was still recovering. That was a little chilling.

Before leaving Kayenta, the group drove back to the couple’s place to switch cars, getting Luke and me into some seats instead of a truck bed, then the post office, then the bank, all while Mongo and his girlfriend, Ducky, alternated between raunchy flirting and circular arguments about nothing, and Luke told me a little about growing up as a white minority, son of a schoolteacher, in Navajo Kayenta, and how he’d hitchhiked around North and South America in his 20s before settling back down here. The sky was darkening into a beautiful early evening when we finally headed north into Monument Valley, a stark alien landscape of spires and slabs and mesas, all painted by the setting sun in bright reds and oranges against a deepening indigo sky. It was breathtaking. I was getting nervous about getting another ride out of Mexican Hat before dark, but I had no reason to linger in Kayenta, so it wouldn’t hurt to try.

It was then that Mongo and his girlfriend seemed to realize for the first time that I meant to keep hitchhiking out of Mexican Hat, and they told me it was suicide at night – “Crazy Indians up there will kill you for being white up there. You’ll get jumped and they’ll hit you until you’re not breathing. Some of those Indians are crazy, man.” I thought maybe they were prone to hyperbole, but Luke solemnly agreed, saying that if it were daytime I could count on tourists, but in the evening it would become a no-man’s land. He offered to take me in for the evening, though, and he seemed trustworthy, genuinely concerned for this wimpy traveling white kid’s safety. I trusted him.

Mongo and Luke had been tackling Budweisers from a 24-pack in the backseat and sipping casually from a jug of whiskey, and it was at this point that Ducky, driving the car, cracked open a beer. I suppressed a sense of dread and began weighing my options – get out of the car and look for another ride in Mexican Hat, get out now and hitch here in the cold middle of nowhere, or trust that if these people hadn’t died yet and they were telling the truth about local stranger danger, I was still better off inside the car than out of it. I knew alcoholism was a deep issue on most reservations, and I wasn’t optimistic that my driver would have a strong sense of restraint. But she seemed composed and the car was going straight, even if Mongo, who was drinking a lot more, was blasting Kid Rock through the car’s speakers and pumping his first out the window, yelling belligerently at picture-snapping tourists parked by the road as we drove by. I now realized he had been drinking before we met – his toothless accent and loose, burly demeanor made it hard to tell at first. It’s safe to say this was the first ride of my whole trip I regretted taking.

We got to Mexican Hat safely, the sky now fully darkened. Luke went in and out of the convenience store to buy his contraband, and I reluctantly decided to risk the ride back to Kayenta. Mexican Hat was barely anything, and Luke was telling me that I’d be better off hitching east out of Kayenta in the morning instead of north. But as we started back, Ducky cracked open her second (or third?) beer, and my prayer life began to flourish.

Things escalated when the tires began to ride the gravel on the roadside and Mongo started yelling at Ducky. He’d already demonstrated a bit of a controlling streak and a childlike stubbornness, and it was then that he demanded she pull over so he could drive, and she did, in spite of Luke’s warning that that was not a good idea. I held onto a brief hope that I’d misgauged Mongo’s presence of mind. At first he drove calmly and steadily, Luke patting his arm soothingly and watching the road with concern. Then he revved the engine and started laughing hysterically. A minute later he was limp and dazed and the car was drifting across the center line, and Luke was shouting and shaking him. Mercifully there was no oncoming traffic for miles. Luke and Ducky were adamant that Mongo pull over immediately, and Mongo, laughing, turned onto a gravel pulloff. But he wasn’t slowing down. Everyone yelled at him, and he swerved in the gravel and around a fence and finally came to a stop right at the edge of a shallow dropoff, not high or steep enough to pose life-threatening danger, but enough to have seriously ruined my night.

Ducky took the keys and stepped out of the car. Luke got out to smoke, then demanded that Mongo and Ducky get in the back and he and I sit in front. Mongo laughed, then challenged Luke to fight, then seemed to nap, then laughed some more. It was probably ten minutes before he lumbered out of the driver’s seat and Luke and I took charge, but he finally did, and the crisis seemed to be over. In the backseat Ducky and Mongo kissed and giggled and fell sloppily asleep while Luke drove us home, playing his new Flogging Molly album until groggy complaints from the back wore him down and he put the Three Doors Down CD back on.

When I was back at Luke’s place, where he lives with his mother (currently out of town) and his old friend, he apologized for the debacle. He said Mongo was usually better than that, childlike but good-hearted, that he’d kicked alcohol for a while but had started to fall off the wagon again this year. Luke’s friend, Kyle, a soft-faced white kid maybe a  little younger than me, sat on a cushion on the floor eating munchies and watching South Park, his face badly bruised and his back hurting him a lot when he moved. It hadn’t been a week since he’d gotten wrecked, and he told me the story. Luke had told him not to mess with bootleggers and not to let people take him to certain parts of town, but he’d agreed to follow a stranger to get some homegrown booze. After hanging out in a bootlegger’s house with the bootlegger’s friends for a while, he finally took his wallet out to pay and was knocked out cold. When he woke up he was laying outdoors, bloody and bruised. Someone had laid a campfire beside him and was asking if he would be okay. Then he fell back asleep, and in the morning he walked stiffly home. He never got medical attention, and he thought his ribs were probably broken, but all he wanted to do was lay low.

I don’t know how likely it really was that I would have been accosted and beaten to a pulp hitching out of Mexican Hat that night, or if I’d turned down Mongo’s ride altogether and held out for another. I know I had to pick from a set of bad choices, and that I prayed sincerely, kept calm, and everything turned out okay. And I also know that Kyle really did get beaten up in Kayenta for being in the wrong place with the wrong people. Mongo’s girlfriend said that Kayenta was a dark place and always had been, that even the medicine men on the reservation acknowledged a toxic energy there and would spend as little time in town as possible. That day was the first time on this trip that I really felt threatened. I’d chosen my path out of Arizona knowing that reservations could be intense places, and I got in a little over my head. But it felt important to see the place, to have a taste of the poverty and desperation and wounded pride that these people bear merely because of the misfortune of having ancestors on the losing side of history. And without that ugly night, I don’t think I’d have come away with the right story. I wanted to meet the Navajo, and I did – I saw a close-knit people proud of their heritage and their native land, moving forward while revering the past, yet carrying with it a heavy burden, a heavy anchor in a desolate place, a beautiful land with harsh shadows.