Flaneur / a Memoir

“Hitchhiking is a lot like finding a poem.” - Albert Demings

            When you are a ‘flaneur’ by nature, it can be a difficult question as a youth to describe what it is one wants to become - even to oneself.  A flaneur is certainly not a recognized profession.  It is mostly regarded as a diversion from the hard question itself.  But one begins where one can.  I began where anyone would have to begin with any pursuit - by finding the time.  Not that I did this consciously, but rather along a Darwinian imperative that if we persist our destiny will emerge. 

            I had six months off from the intense prerogatives of medical school. (At the time, only one in five were admitted - but only one in fifty escaped.)  Without any pressing commitments, a day or so after the winter term’s end, I walked down to the freeway entrance with my backpack and stuck out my thumb.  At the time, (early 70s) hitchhikers representing disconnected youth still flooded the highways.  These were sunny days.  I had a sleeping bag wrapped in a plastic tarp roped to the bottom of a pack frame.  Inside my pack, I had some clothes and trail mix, apples, jerky, some cord, (might come in handy), etc.  I didn’t like preparation much because at the time my idea of the perfect vacation was drifting away until I vanished. And the open road - at that time - was a buffet of just what was so sorely lacking in the very disciplined corridors of medicine.  I had… maybe thirty dollars, so at the time that ‘long lonesome highway’, with its bright taillights, blinked, “Cheap adventure!”

            I had no idea at the time how famished seven years of competitive schooling had made me for a little time and space to think. 

            Which way to go? 

            First I tried heading north to Alaska, only to get turned back at the Canadian border for lack of sufficient resources.  It hadn’t occurred to me that an American might not be welcomed everywhere.  And as it worked out, this was especially true of the American border guards!  After I had been turned around - without even being admitted to Canada (they’d reservations) - my fellow countrymen searched me up and down too.  They had watched me leave an hour ago, and now they were pissy about letting me back in!  I couldn’t believe my being a fellow American didn’t impress them at all. 

            After my rejection, I sat in the field grass by a two-lane road wondering whether I should try my luck getting into Canada a little further west, when I was approached by a chubby, sunburned, barefoot kid in a thin short-sleeved shirt and shorts.  He had no other belongings.  I don’t remember him even having a belt. It had been a fairly warm, clear day, but by then it was sundown and the breeze was cool.  He had goosebumps prickling his arms. But he gave me an upbeat and cheerful pitch.  He said he was heading to Alaska himself!  Why didn’t we hook up together?!  This appeared to strike him as a no-brainer. 

            He looked to embody pathos - clear back to the Greeks.  And before I would suffer too much of his pitch and my sympathies allow him to attach like a limpet, I caught a ride going south with a retarded middle-aged fellow in his grandfather’s top-of-the-line Cadillac. 

            This shrunken little fellow was thrilled to demonstrate all of the Cadillac’s features and burble his babble, while we road along.  The seats went up and back, and down, and reclined.  The windows opened and closed - first the right bank, then the left, then the rear alternately, as we rode along.  He was sorry to have to drop me off when he did, but he had reached the southern limit of the distance his grandfather would allow him to go.  We said our goodbyes and he drove off, his head showing just above the driver’s door, then higher and backward, and then forward with the windows going up and down. 

            So that first time out ended headed south.  The initial ride, a lucky fluke, took me from Seattle to San Francisco.   The core people were a freewheeling bunch, in a VW bus, eventually intending to demonstrate at the Republican Convention in Florida.  Bright, but not practical, the driver was a thousand or so miles into his modern re-enactment of the Grand Tour, originating from back East via Canada, when one of his riders told him it was necessary from time to time with a vehicle to check the oil.  (It had come up in conversation.) “The oil?”  He replied. 

            We camped, squatted at various locales along Hwy 101. Locals we picked up on short hops, (“going into town”, or “up the road about twenty miles”) would clue us of good places to “crash”.  The immigrant owner of an “all-you-can-eat” restaurant chased us out after noting eight or so of us starved hippies settling ourselves in for a good feed.  We were an ad hoc community; a Woodstock in miniature. I was taught to use chopsticks around a parting meal in Chinatown, San Francisco. 

            The in-between portions of hitchhiking are mostly vacant periods of meditation with the aloneness, the wind moving across the prairies and fields and stretching deserts, the far-off blue mountains, the freedom of being, then the rush of a car passing, the shudder of a semi, the pieces of gravel in the roadside shoulder, animals who would pop up to take a look at me from the nearby field, a hawk circling.  I’d think about the girl it didn’t work out with. Isn’t it more natural to marvel over the pearls in a string than the cord itself?   For a flaneur, the narrative never rivals the scene; the prose cannot compete with the poetry.  The narrative can look after itself. (The hospital was so far away!)  Something would happen; it always does.

            After San Francisco, the group in the VW microbus turned east, and I found myself somewhere south of there on another entrance ramp shoulder.  Thirty yards or so further south sprawled another white-kid hitchhiker in a kind of Afro, but wearing a camera.  The camera was just for show, (I was told later), to separate himself from the legions of other hitchhikers and to make him appear more, established (touristy).  He was a teacher from Michigan, on his way to Mexico to seek instruction from some educational seer. 

            Seers interested me.  I wasn’t a seer (Well, yet!  Okay?).  But the occupational prerequisites seemed at the time a bit like what I was doing.  His name was Fred Belinsky.  And I can’t remember if he was wearing a hat, but I think he wore a red bandana headband.

            The reason I say this is that the other day I Googled his name out of curiosity, and his background synced with a former notable owner in the San Diego area of several upscale hat shops.  Apparently, he came to be quite a well-known local figure. 

            Anyway, a white van stopped while we were chatting.  The passenger window lowered and this attractive, curly-haired blonde, who looked something like Goldie Hawn, asked if we wanted a lift. 

            “Uhh….(yeah!)?”

            Fred, the more extroverted, grabbed the front seat and they began chatting with great chemistry, while I located in the back.   It seems she had been going somewhere to do something and seen all of the hitchhikers lining the entrance ramps and the thought occurred to her, that “maybe I could help to get them where they are going?”  So she was now headed south down 101 and picking up and dropping off hitchhikers as she came across them - rather like a free bus.

            In the zeitgeist of the times, this was considered perhaps one standard deviation from normal behavior - which placed it somewhere near the median.

            My thoughts wandered off.   An hour or so later their conversation suddenly took on a very animated quality when I noticed Fred say, “You can not.”

            “Can too.”  She smiled impishly.

            “Can not.”

            “Can too.  There’s one.”  She pointed as a car flew past going the other way.

            Fred shook his head.  “Okay how about that one?”

            She looked.  “Nope.”

            “That one?” 

            “No.”

            They watched the cars pass for a time.

            “There’s one.”  She nodded eventually.

            “No way.  You cannot tell who’s Jewish just by looking,” Fred said.  “Especially going at 55 miles per hour the other way.”

            “Can too,” she retorted.  She turned her head with a perky smile and a nod.  “For example, you’re one.” 

            “That’s very good!” Fred exclaimed.

            We picked up more hitchhikers as we motored along until the van was full.  Near Monterrey we picked up a local who led us to vacant land which was treated as a sort of ‘peoples’ preserve.  Parking off the highway we picked our way through the grassy dunes in darkness towards the growing sounds of rolling surf.  Eventually, I had lost the others and was walking down the beach in a black void, oriented only by the crashing sounds of the surf on my right. Walking rapidly but uncertainly through the sand searching for the others, I stumbled over a hillock. I saw the flickering faces of five or six other hippies clustered on the far side in the darkness and blowing fog, as I flew past, over their beach fire.

            I did a rather graceful roll I thought, picked myself up, and joined the group. 

            As they chattered, I worked to assemble faces from the flickering slices of light in the foggy mist.  Some were high on cannabis.  You could tell by the awe with which they spoke about the natural state of our situation in the misty black with the roll of breakers.  Another clue was the glowing joint.  Others spoke with whole sections redacted, in a blank pause shared by others. One or two seemed to be phoning it in from wherever they were.  And finally, one deeper voice spoke occasionally in what I’d come to regard as “Laconic Hippie with a Vague Predatory Authority”. 

            When the black of night was pulled back, I awoke to hear people chattering, and saw them in the light of day. It was as if I had passed through a future vale of haunts to the present sunny morning with the surf still crashing, a seagull spiraling, and the mist burning away with the laconic hippie walking in from his morning swim in the surf - bearded, bronzed, naked and shaking his long black hair out and with his tattoos glistening.  It was exotic, if a bit out of my comfort zone.   

            One noontime, I was humming a murmur while sitting on an entrance ramp somewhere near Yuma, Arizona, harmonizing to the occasional buzz of an insect.  It was getting hotter, and again I had neglected to carry water.  After an hour or so, I stood to stretch my legs and saw, written on the entrance sign post, “If you think you’re going to get a ride here, you might as well stick your thumb up your ass.” 

            ‘Something would happen; it always does,’ I retorted silently…

            And  sat back down to wait some more - when a blurry grayish dot appeared where the road disappeared into the sky, gradually gaining size, slowly growing larger like foraging bug in the wavering heat as it approached.  I found it very pleasant to meditate upon this slowly enlarging sense of opportunity and possible promise -which it proved to be, when it arrived and slowed to a stop, fully enlarged as an old grey ’51 Chevy coupe. 

            From inside, a smiling, sandy-haired fellow gestured to me. “Hop in.”

            Story was, he was returning to Florida after fighting forest fires in California, driving straight through, fueled by a chest full of iced champagne jammed in the foot space behind the front seat.  “Go ahead and grab yourself some.” 

            It was difficult to fully realize my good fortune - the acceleration from my other reality being so sudden. 

            ‘This must be like the sound of one hand clapping’, I decided, as we puttered on down the highway with big smiles and sweating bottles lifted to the wind blowing through our open windows.  The desert sands will never look more pleasant to me than from under the shady bonnet of that motoring ’51 Chevy. 

            Hitchhiking is long periods of idle time spent by the roadside ruminating as to why various cars stopped or passed by; wondering what would happen if days passed and no one stopped; wondering just how isolated I was.  Sometimes I felt like one with the ants and other small bugs who likewise struggled to find their way through the dirt and around the chunks of gravel.  For a while, I played God.  I stared at the wildlife that passed by or was stopped staring at me.  I engaged with two lizards staring back at me from across the blacktop.  I made small creations - assemblages of this or that - and drew designs in the dirt.  Again, time past very much like a poet’s maundering.

            Then there were the rides offered.  About a third would have been better declined. Some were terrible drivers.  I got a ride with two kids on a rainy afternoon.  My gut feeling was that they were delinquents from some reformatory just up the road who were escaping in a stolen car.  But I had no idea.  What I do know is that we were going far too fast on a slippery highway and each time we passed under a dry underpass, we would fishtail as we came out the other side. 

            I noted over the back seat that the road “seemed ‘very slippery’ at this speed”.  They readily agreed, nodding vigorously!  Then, as if to prove my point, coming out from under a third underpass, the fishtail swung into a spin.  I was crouched behind the front seat as we spun ‘round and ‘round.  The guys were screaming.   When we sunk to a halt in the soft roadside gravel, the engine stalled.  The passenger-side rider, after catching his breath and sighing with relief, stepped out to look around.  He reappeared soaked and bleeding with a scalp laceration.  “I fell into a river!” He cried. 

            Another fellow out in Kansas asked me if I knew why he wasn’t afraid to pick up a hitchhiker.  I didn’t know.  He pulled a big dark gun out from under his driver’s seat.  He stared.  I raised my brows. 

            I was given a ride by a cadre of Marxists out of a Maryland university in a red VW microbus.  They were a cheerful bunch.  While we road along, I thumbed through a nearby copy of The Little Red Book by Chairman Mao.  I’d never seen one.  It was interesting.  Stopping at the Grand Canyon Concessions area they ‘liberated’ several five-gallon plastic jugs of condiments in a kind of farcical display of Guerilla Theater. 

            One ride asked me what I knew about stealing gas.  Other drivers were drunk.  Some were just peculiar, rambling in an extended harangue, and then all of a sudden regarding me with suspicion - as I was ‘inordinately’ quiet.

            Outside Phoenix, I got picked up by a fellow in a convertible MG trailing smoke.  He waved me to hurry up and get in.  The transmission was burning up and we needed to keep moving or choke on the fumes. 

            I had been picked up by the only black cook in Northern Arizona, he said.  Offering me a berth for the night, he dropped me off at his mobile home out in the desert near Sonora with his girlfriend and new baby.  He headed off to work.  A little later that evening his girlfriend got a call.  He had gotten arrested for chasing someone around the kitchen with a knife.  She tried to relate to me the whole scenario through exasperations.  She left to bail him out of jail.  I became the babysitter. 

            Other rides were notable. I went day sailing in a slender old wooden open cockpit racing sloop, whose young owner picked me up off the highway for crew.  He was deft on the tiller and knew his way around in the boat - which had no motor.  He made our zig-zag way under sail in and out of the slip and around the breakwater with evident skill.  The sunny California day was beautiful with a light breeze.  We sailed off Dana Point on what were calm waters but which rose and fell in immense swells.  He pointed out to me how the tall homes, and then the coastline disappeared.  He complimented me on my calm nature.   

            A couple of black furniture movers hired me out of a truck stop. When they dropped me off afterward, I was warned off by the lot help whose territory I had invaded. In Nevada, I found a job picking up scrap metal and tossing it into a semi-trailer way out in the desert.  A fellow offered me a bunk for the night at his apartment in Reno where he filled me in about working the casinos, and all about Elvis.  John Denver strode into a Gas and Go outside Aspen to fuel his red Jeep.  He appeared friendly and confident as an immortal.

            I stayed overnight with a fellow who was living in the cleft of some rocks on the Hopi Indian reservation.  His car had appeared during a long vacancy of vehicles and grew in size about half as fast as any of the others had.  The car, which approached very slowly, even came to a stop very slowly, with a slow crunch of the roadside gravel and a last pop! as movement ceased. I spoke first to break the silence …and to ask if he was offering me a ride. And the answer came out slowly.  It was a situation of continuously waiting for the other shoe to drop. 

            Later, he said, that it had taken him six years to get his metallurgical degree from Stanford and six months into his first job to decide he couldn’t stand it.  He quit and was then living in his cave-of-sorts on nuts and dried fruits and whatever, like a biblical prophet.  It was in a bulldozed dirt pile of jagged boulders with just enough space to crawl about in.  I gave him some of my own food stash for a lecture on the use of the I Ching.  He also threw in some conversation on the historical relations between the Navaho and the Hopi, and the observation that the bite of the little ‘greener’ scorpions (mostly the kind he would see in his ‘cave’) would not kill you, but just hurt like hell. 

            The only other person I’ve met in my life who spoke this slowly was a cabaret dancer in New Orleans who performed in the Live Sex Act downtown in the French Quarter and would wash out her pasties and hang them on the balcony opposite mine each morning in the Garden District where I roomed.  Suffice to say, she had tremendous melon breasts and I schemed for a chance meeting - which I found one day as she arrived by the front gate as I was leaving.

            I said, “Hello”.

            Waiting for her answer to my “Hello” was like being assessed by a curious animal that mostly moved languorously and said little. We accomplished a few sentences, but lively banter was not her shtick. And though I had looked forward to our meeting, decided her conversation oozed out far too slow - melon-sized breasts or not. About some things I get impatient.

            Other rides were ordinary enough.  I got rides with Christian evangelizers - one who left me right amid a California freeway interchange - and Jews in big cars with “Fiddler on the Roof” playing on the 8 track, and a retired pot dealer who had poured his wealth into a ranch with a stable of horses. But the ones I liked the least were those who wanted to help, learn about what troubles must have sent me out on the road, thought perhaps I must need a meal, ask about my parents and how they felt about what I was doing...  Hell, I was on a break, thank you.

            Theodore Dalrymple noted in one of his essays after a lifetime of listening to patients that “few people have any real idea of a better life than the one they are leading”.  The corollary to this, I would suppose, is that we are living the life we want.

            This is pretty much true for me.

            One of the last rides of that trip that I remember was with another student of medicine,  as it would happen, traveling to and from somewhere between residencies.  We discussed things, and he tried to pull me back into the ‘club’ I suppose.  He suggested taking the time to share some of the sights around there, together.  I declined.  Before he left, he dropped me off where the Little Grand Canyon was just a hundred or so yards through a fence and across a stretch of sage.  As it was a hole, you couldn’t see it though until you were nearly on it.

            I thanked him, said goodbye, and took off across the field. And there it was, immense.  The Canyon dropped away so far, atmospheric perspective played a large role and one could imagine that it wasn’t real at all, but some studio canvas backdrop with a thin ribbon of water painted in the bottom far, far away.  There was a long slab of rock jutting out like a diving board above it all.  I walked out and sat nearby.

            Back when I was a kid, we were visited one day by a shirt-tail relation of my father’s - a lanky fellow who wore scuffed cowboy boots, faded jeans, and smoked cigarette butt ends he fished from out of his pearl-snapped pocket. He counseled me about how he had found the best of them sometimes, picking about in gutters.

            The story was he was once married and ran a popular ice cream shop back in Kansas, where my father came from. One day, he was whacked on the head during a robbery, and he was never the same since. He eventually lost his wife, (though she still talked about missing him and how fine a person he once was) and everything, and since then had become a drifter, rambling about like a hobo.

            He fascinated me.

            And it has occurred to me now - sixty-some years hence (which manifests sort of like a knock-on-the-head) - staring back as if from that Grand Canyon overlook with my memory unsteady and blurred with atmospheric perspective - that most of my life’s effort has been a struggle just to be left alone to cage some of dad’s shirt-tail relation’s autonomy which so fascinated me.

            What could be more American?

- This essay is from the book: Peristalsis - The Journey of a Poet by Carl Nelson. To learn more about this book and its author, please visit magicbeanbooks.co