There are two reasons my summary was so quick. The first being Evasion. When I was getting ready for my trip, one of the websites I used was hitchwiki.org, which on its recommended reading list had Evasion, by the anarco-publishing syndicate CrimeThInk. Evasion is an anonymously told story of a person or people who lived on the road, and bummed around by squatting, hitchhiking, train hopping, and shoplifting. I made it through half the book. It was terrible. The book read like a shopping list half the time. "I went here, slept here, stole some food, went here, met this guy, then slept again." My rides often tell me that I should write a book about my travels, and I always tell them no. Books are stories, even the historical ones are specifically chosen out of all historical events because they are interesting. Nobody wants to read about David Jefferson from Nebraska because his life is not a story, it is a list of things he does. My life is also not as story, it is just a list of things I do. Which brings be to my second reason. My life may be more varied than most peoples, in fact I am ok with saying it is. I know that the nuances of my day are different from day to day, where I sleep, who I meet, what I do, but they are still nuances. They no longer strike me as crazy or interesting. Some still do, but not all. For example, at the time of writing this I have had 5 rides today, I had 9 yesterday. They were all interesting people, most very nice, all memorable to me, but they were all just people. They all asked the same bland "What do you parents think?" and "Where do you sleep at night?" questions. If I did not make any effort, I would forget them in a week.
This being said, I still do have interesting experiences, even more interesting than the now common interesting experiences of my day to day. I am going to try to shift the focus of this blog to those kinds of experiences, and to the other realizations I make on the road. And again, if that is not what you readers want (if there even are any of you that are not just my friends) then let me know, and I will continue to catalog my day to day for the enjoyment of my followers.
So, onto the good stuff. (or what I think is the good stuff ie. the things that I realized on the road, and the handful of interesting pictures and experiences.)
Sometimes when people drive by, the pantomime to me that they don't have room to fit me and my huge bag. Which is fine, I don't expect them to throw out their stuff to pick up some random hitchhiker. But something occurred to me, there is no way that all of these people would have picked me up, rides just aren't that common. Which means that if they were driving a car that had room for me, they would have just driven by without giving me a ride like so many others. For some reason, the fact that they can't give me a ride allows them to think that they aren't doing anything wrong by not doing something good, but many of them would have done what they view as wrong by not giving me a ride. It seems to me that people are using the fact that they have a full car to let themselves think that they would help me if they could, or that people have a natural predilection to avoid uncomfortable moral choices. I am thinking it is the second. Once I realized that people will tend to avoid moral decisions, specifically those that are more theoretical in nature, I started seeing it in a lot of actions that people do. For example, people who just refuse to think about thought problems. Working with a dust speck problem, or any other morally tough though problem, you will hear "but that will never happen" a lot. Peoples brains are instinctively dodging the question because it predicts it will make them feel bad if they answer it. I find this to be a useful understanding when trying to model the actions of others.
So maybe this isn't what you came here for, my random realizations about he nature of people that I made on the side of a road in New Mexico. But this is the most interesting thing I have formalized recently.
Some interesting things have also happened on the road. Me and Kyle got a ride in a school bus, and I had my first experience with a snow storm, something my southern psyche could not handle. I learned that they close roads in the winter, which lead to my detour around Yellowstone, and we spent a couple nights sleeping next to rivers, which is super relaxing. I also have been super lazy about adding pictures, but I will post a couple at the end of this article.
I don't know exactly where I am going from here, but I think I am gong to travel east, to all the northern states. If anybody has some recommendations of things I should visit in this area, let me know.
 |
| The view from a hill in Utah |
 |
| Trying to get out of Provo |
 |
| 4 inches of fresh snow in Denver |
 |
| Kansas looks like Kansas |
 |
| In the Yampa valley in Colorado |
 |
| The subtle beauty of Wyoming |
 |
| The Tetons from a small highway around Yellowstone |
