Adventures in Hitchhiking

More about Adventures in Hitchhiking

I was an average hitchhiker from about the age of 15 to 31. I hitchhiked all over California and Oregon, and even down into Mexico. I hated cars, but I liked being picked up and having totally random conversations. People tend to do a confessional thing with someone they don’t know. It’s amazing how personal those conversations can get. They would last maybe 30 minutes or an hour.

I once got a ride from a professor going from Davis to San Francisco. He was very particular about how his door was shut. After that, I always shut people’s doors very carefully. It was something that stuck with me for life. I was going on about philosophy, mostly making it up as I went along, and the professor told me I didn’t know what I was talking about. It’s funny to me now, because I’m sure I could overwhelm him—not just with philosophy, but with real life.

I was hitchhiking out in the desert, somewhere east of Needles, in the Mojave Desert. It got dark, and there was nobody coming down the long road. There was no moon, nothing. Then, out at the far end of the highway, I saw a small light hovering in the distance. It came flying in and dropped down in the middle of the road next to me. The door opened, and some kind of funky music came out of the vehicle. Then the Pangalactic Brothers asked me, “Homes, do you want a ride?”

I got in. The Brothers had a really groovy-looking ship inside—some kind of futuristic funk. We lifted into the air. I looked down through one of the windows and saw the planet disappearing into blackness. We zoomed out past Jupiter and Neptune, even saw Pluto go by. We were out in deep space, in the void—what they call the Oort Cloud.

After about ten minutes, we came into some kind of planet. The whole place was covered with a mix of forest and what felt like an upgraded ghetto scene. This was the Pangalactic Brothers’ home planet. We were there to pick someone up and take him back to Earth. They had some kind of secret mission they were working on.

Then we headed back, coming into the galaxy and the solar system from the outside—past Pluto, Neptune, and Jupiter again, zipping by Mars, which looked a lot like the Mojave Desert. They finally dropped me off outside of Los Angeles.

After that, I had a kind of awareness that stayed with me—that the universe was a lot smaller and more connected than it seemed, and that there was definite funk and love out there somewhere.