hitchin’ part 2

hanging round the square in arcata, waiting for my friend to get home and give us a place to crash. sitting in the grass with all these street kids, arcata is a hobo paradise. they sit around planning where to camp tonight, a dance party at a place called never neverland, gather firewood and bring food they say. a shirtless redhead with long hair strolls up casually, ginger Jesus they call him. they’re discussing their various situations, the newly homeless and the seasoned ones living in cars, camping, making crafts, painting their guitar cases, embroidering clothing, strumming tunes, sharing smoke with each other even though smoking is outlawed in the square and virtually all over the town around business and so forth. for us, we got a warm place to sleep tonight, a shower to use, and probably have some good company and enjoy some comforts and have a fun time. i feel bad for some of these kids who are having a hard time, stuck in arcata for months, whereas we’re freshly on the road and everything is lining up easy so far. but at the same time I am a bit envious of what strange campfire street kid hobo parties must be like, and the weird delusional rainbow kid world they must inhabit.

after some sushi and cigarettes and a couple hours hanging round the plaza with the homeless kids, we get picked up, go out for supplies, food stuffs and tobacco, and head to the house to settle in. I’ve been here a few years ago, and it’s nice to reconnect with these northern california sorts. we do the little things we do anywhere, eat tuna melts and play jazz streaming off the internet into a stereo. all this and a nice mattress pad laid down with pillows and comforters. charge up your devices. the girl turns in earlier than I and I get a chance to stay up a bit later and commiserate with my friend, hear her crazy stories and all that’s happened since I’ve been gone. some people’s life stories are way more interesting than my own, as I really don’t do a lot but move around and talk to people, but I won’t print those stories here for you because they are too personal and too awesome to carelessly toss away to the public. keep the best ones for yourself.

we have tentative plans to meet up with the dude who drove us to arcata, and get coffee with him in the morning when we get up, however I sleep in greatly and the girl is packing her things and getting antsy to take off, while we’re still unsure about whether we should stay another day or head out for Oregon. it’s so nice to have a comfy mattress and a big comforter, I can’t tear myself away to get out of bed. instead of leaving we fret away the afternoon, the coffee guy never calls us back, I take another nap into the early evening. our host tells us it’s okay for us to spend another night, which is good because it’s sort of too late now to try to catch a ride for this evening. instead we’ll get a move on in the next morning.

after the second night, we’re actually trying to get up early enough to make a decent effort to press on to Oregon, but the vortex of trying to leave takes us over, waiting for our host to get home so we can say goodbye, waiting to figure out where we’ll get dropped off, should we get food, do we need to stop to get cigarettes, etc. - by the time we make it out to this onramp that we’re told should be the best ride out of town, it’s late in the day and it doesn’t seem too likely that we’re gonna make it anywhere good by the end of the night. trying to get to grants pass Oregon to stay with this nice couple I met when I was living in Eugene last year, and if I can’t get within striking distance today I’m not wanting to have to sleep outside or deal with any sketchy situations. but we give it a shot anyway.

so our routine is, we have our little sign, we look presentable, we smile and put out good energy, we present ourselves as just being ourselves, and hopefully people will respond to that. we do a little dance and shake around our arms saying, “hey, hey, going my way? take us to Oregon!” and people smile and laugh at us. some are holding up their arms doing little hand jive motion gestures at us, pinching their fingers to indicate that they are only going a little ways, or holding up one or two fingers to say their just going up to the next exit or so. our first actual day of trying to get out of arcata and we got such a late start it seems unlikely we’ll get anywhere good tonight. a guy from Oregon who moved in to town offers to take us to another on ramp he says will be better odds for us, but when we get there, there is already another hitchhiker trying to make his way out of town. territorial. a crust punk dude with a dog, and ourselves with our bags, makes it extremely unlikely any of us will get anywhere. so we hike back away from the onramp and try our luck there. I’m calling on the phone trying to get ahold of my friend in town to see if she can pick us up so we can spend another night and try again the next day. eventually a truck pulls over for us because the man driving recognized us from earlier in the day, and he takes us back to the pad we were staying at, fortunately.

we watch cartoons and set alarms to get up early, I fry some potatoes and we pick around in the fridge, eat garlic naan broiled in the oven, food and drink and music and a nice place to sleep. we reassess our plan for making it to Oregon, thinking of trying a sign for crescent city California first, about an hour and a half north, then you get off the 101 and cut up to grants pass thru the state border and some little town called cave junction, and I’m thinking maybe it’ll be tough to find someone doing that drive unless they’re coming from further south and going further north. we make another sign and I route the directions to walk to the onramp by the university in the morning.

we were hoping to get a ride but our host is sleeping in, and we slept in too, but it’s still early enough to get a move on, so after we’re all packed up, after being in town for three nights, we’re ready to go. so we hike for 20 minutes back to our onramp and seeing another hitcher there we roll up to the other side of the exchange and find another spot. we wait there an hour doing our hitching routine before we decide the spot isn’t so great, and that we should check back and see if the guy who was there is gone. he is, so we set down our stuff once more by the side of the road.

after a brief distraction of going over to smoke with these guys hanging off a hotel balcony who were hollering at us (they must have seen the girl first) we set up back again once more. the girl looks nice and I’m wearing my suspenders and a tie. “you’re dressed for success,” says a guy on a bike waiting for us to get out of there so he can hitch off the same spot we’re occupying. “More enthusiasm!” says an older couple walking by us to a pedestrian bridge. “We got enthusiasm! we’re the only hobos who dance! I would have made a great sign twirler!”

I have this whole notion about hitchhiking that I picked up from the first time I tried to get from Portland to southern california, took me four days. but at any given instance that I went out, I never had to wait more than one hour to get picked up, and generally that’s held true for this current trip as well. if your spot is good, you shouldn’t have to wait more than an hour.

finally a hippie vanagon at the stop sign gives us some acknowledgement (about 20 minutes after we post up), and beckons us to jump into the ride with him. after we get out of town a little he explains that he’s not going very far but he can take us thirty minutes up the road to Trinidad, and leave us at a good spot for getting rides. we were so excited just to get moving we didn’t think about how far we should try to make it, and I don’t know the route that well. when he drops us off, the situation looks grim. little town, not well trafficked, the onramp is short with not much room to stop, and there’s traffic coming from both directions to try to mug to. we’re a little worried, but I reset my metaphorical one hour countdown and we hope for the best.

fifteen minutes later a couple of cars stop and we run up to investigate. two young couples, caravanning in two cars, the one in the first car has a dog, they tell us they are heading pretty much the whole way we are going, except that they are going to stop at a little state park beach along the coast off the 101 on the way, and we’re welcome to either try to keep hitching from their or hang out with them and ride the whole way. we cram our things on top of ourselves and pack into the back seat with their dog.

trade stories, where are you from, talk about music, what would you like to listen to, etc. these kids are from Austin, theater kids traveling around on vacation after going to a drama workshop conference thing. they tell us we can repack our stuff when we get to this beach, not too far up. we get to spend about 40 minutes running around a beautiful foggy coastal beach day. it took me a while to piece it together that they were actually going along the whole route I wanted to take, and were going on even further to Eugene, which I was also planning on going to after spending a night in grants pass. but since these guys are going all the way up we figure we might as well just take the whole ride with them. I call up my buddy in Eugene, leave a message saying we can be in town by tonight and would he put us up? I figure it’d be cool to just show up and break into his house whenever, like a good beatnik friend would, but it’s always better to ask. so after running around the beach for a while with these nature enthusiasts, we get back in the car, and throw some of our things into the other car to be more comfy (we’re all sticking together, don’t worry, they tell me), and next thing we know we’re getting a ride all the way to Eugene.