Open Road Drifter: Initiation on the Interstate (2024)

Sebastian Junger — war correspondent, documentarian, and author of The Perfect Storm — tells the story of his first hitchhike.

I was a really good distance runner when I was young — I was sponsored by a shoe company and I ran the mile and 10Ks in college. I wanted to run a marathon, the Mount Everest of distance running, so I trained and ran the Twin Cities Marathon. I was very proud, I ran 2:22:00. I was staying with a family there and the next day, they drove me out to the highway. I had a backpack filled with stuff I’d bought for my adventure. No one picked me up for a while. It was raining in Minneapolis. Then this lady picked me up, this really nice woman. The whole rest of the day, we drove together. She actually said that she passed me and went to the next exit and turned around and came back and picked me up. I don’t know what it was. I don’t think she knew what it was.

The first night, I got dropped off in the Badlands of North Dakota by this nice lady. We were going down a secondary road. She turned off the highway and we drove for a while. She was like, “Tell me where.” It’s nighttime and it’s a blinding blizzard. I was like, “I don’t know, here sounds pretty good.” I just got out and walked off into the Badlands and pitched my tent. I had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Then I woke up in the morning and the clouds had cleared and it was this unspeakably gorgeous environment. I couldn’t believe where I was. I definitely had to fight to not be freaked out by what felt like the immensity of the environment.

My dad grew up in Europe and I grew up in a liberal elite bubble in New England. I wanted to get to know America, I wanted to get to know my country. Also, I was 24-years-old in 1986 and there was a little bit of an initiation for me as a young man. I wanted to test myself and see how I’d do in an environment where I wasn’t in control. I grew up in a middle-class family and I had a good education. I was rarely in a situation where I wasn’t in control of the outcome. Hitchhiking across the country seemed like you’re leveling out all the advantages you might have in your background. You’re just by yourself, on the interstate in Wyoming, hoping for a ride. There was something about it that felt like a test. As a young man, a test seemed to be what I needed.

It was my first time encountering the geology, the geography of the American West. I got to Montana within a couple of days and I couldn’t believe how big it was. This huge dome of the sky and mountains. The sound of the wind and a car coming every 20 minutes down the interstate. It was really breathtaking and extremely intimidating. I got stuck in Wyoming. I was outside Gillette and I was getting beer bottles thrown at me out of pickup trucks. It was really funny. I’m like, come on, what’s the problem? I’m trying to get out of here. Give me a ride, I’ll leave you alone.

I slept out everywhere. I was never under a roof. I was always in the underbrush by the side of the road, in the woods, or on the beach. I’m sure all of those were technically trespassing, or vagrancy, but I never had a problem. I had food. I know how to make a fire, cook over fire, and make a shelter. And I had a bunch of good books. I had the collected short stories of Ernest Hemingway and some other great books. I wanted to be out there by myself. I didn’t want a buffer between me and the landscape and the society. It was the same thing when I went to war for the first time. I wanted to know how I would handle myself.

I was a kid and I was mostly picked up by older males. If you’re a young man, you’re like a sponge with older men. You just absorb everything. I remember one guy asked if I wanted to go to a brothel, and I’m like, “Nah, I’m good man.” But it was kind of cool. I was like, wow, this is a big boy day. I definitely felt flattered that he would say that. There was one guy that picked me up, there was something about him that I just didn’t like. I had some pepper spray, and I slipped it into my hand in my pocket. I think I was gonna be robbed and he was trying to figure out how and when to do it. Very abruptly I said, “Oh, I’ll get out here.” It sort of flustered him. He pulled over and I jumped out. But my instincts knew. I’ve found that in life your instincts are almost always accurate. You’re in trouble when you ignore them.

This other time there was a sedan. There were two guys in the front and two guys in the back. They pull over and they say, “Hey, where you going?” In my mind, I’m like, “I’m driving around with three friends, I don’t want a fifth guy in the backseat that we don’t know. This isn’t right.” They wanted something. One of them was a black guy who had a cowboy hat on. The rest of them were white. I said, “I’m going all the way to L.A.” They were trying to get me in the car, like, “Oh, we’ll take you part of the way.” I was like, “I’m gonna wait for a ride that goes a little further.” They really argued with me. If you’re arguing, trying to get me in the car… They drove on. Two rides later, a guy said to me, “Hey, be careful. There’s a group of guys driving around picking up hitchhikers and they take them up into the mountains and beat them up and take everything. One of them’s a black guy with a cowboy hat.” I was like, “Oh my God, that was two cars ago.”

This was the ‘80s in Northern California. There was a bunch of guys and they’d refurbished a school bus. It had a wood stove in it and even had a shower. I remember there was a shotgun leaning in the shower. That’s just where this guy kept it. They had no money at all and they were almost totally out of gas, so I gave them a little money for gas. They would stop and camp out and they knew how to spot hallucinogenic mushrooms. They would collect them, then they’d get to town and sell them. They were just bumping around Northern California in this school bus foraging. I was like, “They’re living the life.” I didn’t do any drugs or anything, I was a pretty straight kid, but what I liked about it was that they were outside of society. They were existing of their own initiative, partly in the natural world, and they had a shotgun in the shower. All that was cool.

I got to L.A. and I’d seen a movie called Gorky Park. There was this stunning actress named Joanna Pacula. It’s the only time I’ve had a youthful infatuation with an actress. I’d read that she lived in L.A. and I was like, “I’m going to visit Joanna Pacula.” So I went to a phone booth. They used to have phone directories in phone booths. I pulled it out and I looked under P, I tried to look up Joanna Pacula. Obviously, she wasn’t listed in the white pages. That didn’t work. So I was going to hitchhike home, all the way back to Boston. Hitchhiking out of L.A. was not realistic. I took a bus to Barstow, California, which back then was a really tough town.

I got to Barstow and I’m like, “Alright, I’m in the desert, I’ll start hitchhiking. This’ll be a breeze.” There were 20 guys at the interchange right outside the highway out of town. They were all hitchhikers that had been stuck there for days and weeks. The guys said, “The cops won’t let us on the interstate and some of us have been here for weeks. At night, there’s a church in town, they let us sleep in the basem*nt of the church and they give us a sandwich.” I spent the night in the basem*nt of the church, along with these guys I didn’t know. I slept with my legs over my backpack and a knife in my pocket. These guys were not having a little post-college adventure. These guys were looking for work.

I was talking to this one young guy. He had a wife and young child in California. He was headed to Texas because he heard he might be able to get work in Texas. He had no way to get there, so he was hitchhiking. He was gonna get a job down there and send money back to his wife and little kid. I said, “Listen, man. I’m gonna go back to L.A. because we’re all f*cked here. This is not going to work out for anybody.” Back then there were these things called driveaways. If there was someone who needed their car or their van moved across the country, you would move the car or the van for the person. You wouldn’t get paid, but it was a free trip. So I said, “I’m going to get a driveaway. I’m gonna get a big van, I’m gonna come back right here, and I’m gonna pick all you guys up. I’m gonna drop you off wherever you’re going in America.” He was like, “Oh, man, that would be incredible.”

I got back to L.A. and I tried to set this up. But the company would not take me on without a credit card. I was really crushed. I had $150 left and there was a cheap flight across the country for $149 — People Express, L.A. to New York. My parents knew someone in New York. I was like, “If I just get to New York, I’ll be alright.” So I took the bus out to LAX and got a midnight flight. It was a red eye.

I've felt bad my whole life. I mean, I’m still talking about it. I just hope to God those guys were okay. They didn’t look like they were gonna be. I was not able to make good on my promise. I was able to buy my way out of that situation and they weren't. I was very conscious of that. It’s the difference between fasting and starving. If you’re fasting, you’re doing it because it’s good for your body and you want to. Starving is a different matter. The way I was hitchhiking was very different from these guys that were looking for work and didn’t have a dime and were sleeping in church basem*nts, hoping not to get robbed. That’s a totally different experience.

(This story initially appeared on the Hitchhike podcast.)

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