On the Road: Hitchhiking in Despair

by Alison Jennings

Fabian S

In America, we hit the highway, having mobile conversation with our souls, posing questions about life and its direction, but we don’t like the answers, for there’s no deliverance from ambivalence, just potholes filled with peril.

Go ask St. Paul about the chances on the road these days for a revelation, or a light from heaven. Forget those sexy, restless numbskulls—Brando, Jean-Paul Belmondo — with their noisy motorcycles, low-slung sports cars.

Don’t bother asking Kerouac, frantic icon of anarchic freedom, searching nationwide for enlightenment, but never finding it. He disliked the danger of hitchhiking, its uncontrolled momentum, the loneliness and boredom.

No doubt Kerouac would have advised against my own adolescent joyride, hitchhiking in 1967 down California’s coastline with a wigged-out friend. Unlike fantasies of books or movies, there’s a darker side to “thumbing it.”

Our “creep” antennae were disconnected by drugs and her impending 19th nervous breakdown. Marooned on an asphalt sea without a moral compass, we endured insults and come-ons, self-ejecting from a scary car.

When we arrived (to see her errant lover), and met with shock and silent disapproval, my shaky friend wanted to return at once—like Kerouac—  to the road, to get no satisfaction, no direction home, like a rolling stone.

We’d escaped horror through unseen angels, yet she had highway hypnosis, a rock ’n’ roll addiction to keep moving. But I was weary of being a nomad, and chose the folksy wisdom of that Simon-and-Garfunkel Greyhound bus.

My girlfriend made her solo way back. Years later, I’ll pinpoint this time as when I accepted adult vulnerability, and lost the invincibility of youth, choosing wisdom over passion, in a bittersweet arrangement with myself.

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Alison Jennings is a retired public schoolteacher and former CPA; throughout her life, she has composed over 400 poems, and recently published a couple of them. She lives in Seattle.