Strange Country & a Hitchhiker
Strange country up here; New Hampshire and Vermont appear to be the East’s psychic answer to Colorado and New Mexico—big lonely hills laced with back roads and old houses where people live almost aggressively by themselves. The insularity of the old-timers, nursing their privacy along with their harsh right-wing politics, is oddly similar and even receptive to the insularity of the newcomers, the young dropouts and former left-wing activists—people like Andy Kopkind and Ray Mungo, co-founder of the Liberation News Service—who’ve been moving into these hills in ever increasing numbers since the end of the Sixties. The hitchhikers you find along these narrow twisting highways look exactly like the people you see on the roads around Boulder or Aspen or Taos.
The girl riding with me tonight is looking for an old boyfriend who moved out of Boston and is now living, she says, in a chicken coop in a sort of informal commune near Greenville, N.H. It is five or six degrees above zero outside and she doesn’t even have a blanket, much less a sleeping bag, but this doesn’t worry her. “I guess it sounds crazy,” she explains. “We don’t even sleep together. He’s just a friend. But I’m happy when I’m with him because he makes me like myself.”
Jesus, I thought. We’ve raised a generation of stone desperate cripples. She is twenty-two, a journalism grad from Boston University, and now—six months out of college—she talks so lonely and confused that she is eagerly looking forward to spending a few nights in a frozen chicken coop with some poor bastard who doesn’t even know she’s coming.
The importance of Liking Yourself is a notion that fell heavily out of favor during the coptic, anti-ego frenzy of the Acid Era—but nobody guessed, back then, that the experiment might churn up this kind of hangover: a whole subculture of frightened illiterates with no faith in anything.
The girl was not interested in whatever reasons I might have for going up to Manchester to spend a few days with the McGovern campaign. She had no plans to vote in any election, for president or anything else.
She tried to be polite, but it was obvious after two or three minutes of noise that she didn’t know what the fuck I was talking about, and cared less. It was boring; just another queer hustle in a world full of bummers that will swarm you every time if you don’t keep moving.
Like her ex-boyfriend. At first he was only stoned all the time, but now he was shooting smack and acting very crazy. He would call and say he was on his way over, then not show up for three days—and then he’d be out of his head, screaming at her, not making any sense.
It was too much, she said. She loved him, but he seemed to be drifting away. We stopped at a donut shop in Marlborough and I saw she was crying, which made me feel like a monster because I’d been saying some fairly hard things about “junkies” and “loonies” and “doom-freaks.”
Once they let you get away with running around for ten years like a king hoodlum, you tend to forget now and then that about half the people you meet live from one day to the next in a state of such fear and uncertainty that about half the time they honestly doubt their own sanity.
These are not the kind of people who really need to get hung up in depressing political trips. They are not ready for it. Their boats are rocking so badly that all they want to do is get level for long enough to think straight and avoid the next nightmare.
This girl I was delivering up to the chicken coop was one of those people. She was terrified of almost everything, including me, and this made me very uncomfortable.
We couldn’t find the commune. The directions were too vague: “Go far to the dim yellow light, then right at the big tree . . . proceed to the fork and then slow to the place where the road shines . . .”
After two hours of this I was half crazy. We had been back and forth across the same grid of backroads two or three times, with no luck . . . but finally we found it, a very peaceful-looking place in a cold hill in the woods. She went inside the main building for a while, then came back out to tell me everything was okay.
I shrugged, feeling a little sad because I could tell by the general vibrations that things were not really “okay.” I was tempted to take her into Manchester with me, but I knew that would only compound the problem for both of us . . . checking into the Wayfarer at three thirty, then up again at seven for a quick breakfast and then into the press bus for a long day of watching McGovern shake hands with people at factory gates.
Could she handle that madness? Probably not. And even if she could, why do it? A political campaign is a very narrow ritual, where anything weird is unwelcome. I am trouble enough by myself; they would never tolerate me if I showed up with a nervous blonde nymphet who thought politics was some kind of game played by old people, like bridge.