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I packed my backpack full of buttery burritos, a Nikon D100 camera and a few steak knives; I was ready to hitchhike until the soles of my shoes wore through.
My friend and I parked her ‘78 Datsun at Jerry’s Market in Isleta and left a Sharpie note on the windshield: “Don’t tow!!! Will be back Saturday or Sunday or next week. Car broke down.”
We trudged beside the guardrail, thumbs jutting out, and offered ourselves to the unforgiving, tangled bowels of the universe.
When you tell people you’re hitchhiking in 2012, the reactions aren’t usually positive. “Why?” “Don’t be surprised if you are raped.” “You’re a dirty hippy. Get a haircut and a real job.”
I guess I have more faith in humanity than the average Joe, but I proved my point — the people who picked us up were more normal than your average UNM professor.
Ryan from Belen was the first person to stop. He had heavy-duty equipment in the back of his truck, and strapped our bags to the machines. He had about 10 starched and pressed slacks and shirts in the cab of the truck, just in case he entered a rodeo at the last minute, unprepared. “I think there’s enough light to rope tonight, Dad,” he twanged into his phone. He dropped us off at the last exit in Belen, gave us his last cigarette and told us to call him if he needed to beat someone up for us.
There’s something humiliating about hitchhiking. Everyone stares at you as you walk backwards, smiling, trying not to trip.
Sometimes they honk. It was unclear what the honkers were trying to say; either “Get off the road” or “I’m not picking you up, but you’re cool enough to deserve a honk.”
And then there are the people who only pick you up because they think you’ll die otherwise, such as Doris, a former pottery teacher at New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. Doris was heading to Socorro from Albuquerque after doing her monthly shopping. She smoked, listened to NPR and talked about the dire state of science-heavy education. We got out in Socorro and hiked our way along white pavement lines past billboards for Sleepy Inn and McDonald’s.
As the sun went down, so did the traffic flow. Our previous rides had picked us up within 20 minutes, but we walked for three and a half hours — six miles — in pitch darkness. We screamed at the stars, pleaded with semitrucks and flipped people off when they blew past us going 90 miles per hour. Eventually, we just sat on the guardrail, thumbs out, holding a beer in the other fist.
We looked for a place to camp, but the fields were strung with barbed wire. Just as we were about to camp by the highway, a car pulled over a couple hundred yards away. We sprinted toward it and met gifted-education specialist Geoffrey. Geoffrey laughed louder than I can shout, talked about his 5-year-old daughter and pronounced the “j” in Jornada.
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Geoffrey dropped us at the “backstage” parking lot of the Black Keys concert in Las Cruces, where a friend found us, covered in blisters and goatheads. We drove to Silver City in a cloud of stale cigarette smoke, jokingly cursing at everyone who passed us and telling stories of crushed billboards, dead prairie dogs and abandoned tires.
