Volume 4, Issue 36: The Empty Condor

"Bad behavior, better than yours."

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The comedian John Mulaney has a great bit about how growing up as an immersive consumer of American popular culture gave him, as a child, an extremely skewed perspective of the challenges he would face as an adult. His hilarious example is quicksand. “I always thought that quicksand was going to be a much bigger problem than it turned out to be,” he says. “Because if you watch cartoons, quicksand is like the third biggest thing you have to worry about in adult life, behind real sticks of dynamite and giant anvils falling on you from the sky.”

My equivalent of this: Hitchhiking.

I actually asked my son William if he’d ever heard of “hitchhiking” the other day. Not just what it was, but if he’d ever even heard the word hitchhiking. He had no clue what I was talking about. “Does it have something to do with trucks?” he asked, which I thought was a pretty good guess.

Hitchhiking is one of those things that was once a commonly understood (if certainly debated) practice that has now essentially vanished from American life all together. There are many practical reasons for this, from the increased visibility (if not necessarily an increased number) of abductions, ride-sharing services, everybody having a supercomputer in their pocket at all times, a pandemic that didn’t exactly encourage people to get in tight, enclosed spaces with strangers. I do not remember the last time I saw someone with their thumb out, waiting alongside the road, hoping for a ride. People don’t even do that if their car breaks down anymore. I understand that hitchhiking still has some practice in Europe—and I discovered while researching this column that it is illegal for government vehicles in Cuba not to stop for hitchhikers—but in the United States, it’s just something that’s gone.

A lot of that would seem to be for good reason, obviously. The idea of either of my children just hopping in the car of whatever person happens to be driving by is terrifying. (Though it is remarkable how I absolutely trust the assurance of a ride-sharing app run by some anonymous tech bros in San Francisco that the stranger’s car my kids are getting in is safe.) But this notion was surely terrifying for generations of American parents before me, and hitchhiking was still a regular part of American life. (My parents did it. Yours surely did too.) And a lot of that is knee-jerk worry anyway. Data shows that hitchhiking is far less dangerous than the popular public conception would suggest, and there’s a guy named Kenny Flannery who has literally been hitchhiking and living on the road since 2007 and chronicling it on his site Hobo Lifestyle for years. Of course, he is a white dude. I bet that makes it easier.

Hitchhiking is, after all, an American tradition, from the Great Depression to Jack Kerouac to Tom Robbins to John Waters. It’s Easy Rider, it’s Five Easy Pieces, it’s Melvin and Howard, it’s Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, it’s Forrest Gump, it’s Borat.

(My Lord that movie.)

There was obviously a practicality to hitchhiking—I can’t get there any other way than just catching a ride with someone already on their way—but I’d argue there was real romance in the idea too. There was a certain understanding of a common humanity, a shared sense that we are all going somewhere; hitchhiking was almost a commiseration, an acknowledgment that we’re all in this together, a brief sojourn with a fellow traveler. It was an understanding that, hey, it’s a big world out there, let’s go meet some new people, because it’s good to meet new people . Goin’ my way?

I only hitchhiked once, only once less out of any sort of fear and more out of never really having all that many places I needed to go. The trip, like any good hitchhiking trip, was a spur-of-the-moment flight of impetuous, childish foolishness. I was a freshman in college at the time, in Champaign, but there was a girl back in Mattoon I still sort of had a thing going on with but didn’t have a car on campus to drive down and see her. I had no idea where she was and had no cellphone with which to check. I have no idea what my plan was: Just wander around Mattoon until I ran into her? It was a Friday night, I didn’t have anything going on, I was sort of lonely and sad in that immature, not-really-that-lonely-and-sad-but-it-sure-feels-like-it way freshman college students are when they’ve gone away to school and don’t know anyone yet. So I walked over to Neil Street from my dorm at around 10:30 at night and just stuck out my thumb.

It only took a couple of minutes. A guy in a Chevy Blazer pulled over, by himself, chewing Skoal and listening to Alice in Chains, and asked me where I was going. I told him I was trying to get to Mattoon. He said that was way too far for him, but he was meeting some guys in Pesotum, hop in, I’ll get you part of the way there. So I hopped in. He had a beer in his cup holder and offered me one, but I politely declined: I didn’t drink back then. He asked me why I was going to Mattoon, and I told him I was from there and I was headed back to see a girl. He said he knew a few people in Mattoon, he was from Rantoul, and shoot, if I was heading down there, maybe he’d skip Pesotum and go meet up with some his pals down there.

“You wanna just come hang with us?” he said. “Maybe we’ll run into your girl.”

And here’s the thing: That’s exactly what I did. I got in the car with a random dude because I needed a ride to go see a girl (maybe, anyway), and then we talked for 10 minutes, and he seemed all right, and I seemed all right, and then we both just changed our entire plans all together—the whole reasons we were traveling in the first place—to go do something else. We ended up going to his friend’s house party in Mattoon, and of course I knew a bunch of people at that party (it was in Mattoon after all), and I saw him at the party a couple of times and we said hey and then he ended up going his way and I went mine. I didn’t run into the girl, and I kinda forgot about it anyway, because my night was going one way and then it just sort of drifted off into something else entirely. I ended up getting a ride back to my parents’ house in Mattoon, where I fell asleep in my old bedroom and scared the crap out of my mother in the morning. That is what life is like when you are young, or at least when it could be like, when we were young in the 1990s: You just sort of went wherever the wind happened to be blowing. It is in many ways the spirit of hitchhiking: An understanding that the world is big and random and, hey, let’s just see where it takes us.

It was dangerous and reckless and heedless and stupid. But that is, in many ways, what being young is all about. I cannot fathom my children hitchhiking now. Shoot, I barely trust them to go down the stairs. But I think this is my issue, not theirs. People don’t hitchhike anymore. They just get in their Ubers and don’t talk to the driver and have their destination pre-programmed for them, an efficient route, pre-determined. This works for me as an adult. But I’m glad I didn’t grow up that way. I understand why hitchhiking has gone away. But there's something about it that is foolishly romantic and optimistic and hopeful that sure feels like something we’ve lost.

So, please, get in my van. It’ll be fine.

Here is a numerical breakdown of all the things I wrote this week, in order of what I believe to be their quality.

1. I Wrote About the Three Men in Their 40s at Busch Stadium This Weekend, MLB.com. But it’s really about being a fan.

2. Please Ban My Book! Medium. It’s bad in the macro … but great in the micro!

3. Yeah, Screw Brett Favre, New York. The worst.

4. Seven Players Who Might Reach 50 Homers, MLB.com. Who’s next? A question!

5. Everyone’s Getting Sick Again, Medium. [cough] [cough] [sneeze]

6. The Thirty: Players to Watch in the Final Week of the Season, MLB.com. Everybody’s got somebody. Also: I can’t believe the baseball season is almost over already, we just got here.

7. The Thirty: Players You Shouldn’t Give Up On, MLB.com. Dylan Carlson’s gonna be an All-Star soon, you watch.

PODCASTS

Grierson & Leitch, we discussed “Don’t Worry Darling,” “Moonage Daydream” and “Athena.”

Seeing Red, Bernie and I previewed the final weekend.

Waitin' Since Last Saturday, we previewed the Georgia-Missouri game and recapped the Georgia-Kent State game.

LONG STORY YOU SHOULD READ THIS MORNING … OF THE WEEK

“Maybe We Won’t End Up Like the Dinosaurs,” Marina Koren, The Atlantic. Well that’s a relief.

ONGOING LETTER-WRITING PROJECT!

This is your reminder that if you write me a letter and put it in the mail, I will respond to it with a letter of my own, and send that letter right to you! It really happens! Hundreds of satisfied customers!

Write me at:

Will Leitch
P.O. Box 48
Athens GA 30603

CURRENTLY LISTENING TO

“The Bikeriders,” Lucero. My love for Lucero is well-documented, but do not forget, lead singer and songwriter Ben Nichols is in fact the brother of Jeff Nichols, a truly great filmmaker. (His Midnight Special is one of the more underrated movies of the last decade, and many people love Take Shelter even more.) Anyway, Jeff Nichols’ next movie is inspired by this Lucero song, The Bikeriders, which stars Tom Hardy, Jodie Comer and Austin Butler. I think it’s pretty incredible that a random family in Arkansas produced two brothers this talented.

Remember to listen to The Official Will Leitch Newsletter Spotify Playlist, featuring every song ever mentioned in this section.

Somebody got the game ball this week.

I’m in St. Louis for the final Yadi/Pujols/Wainwright weekend. We are off to a good start.

Best,
Will