The bats hunt low on the water, but every now and again, looking through my binoculars, I’ll see one silhouetted by the moon’s low orange wafer, the bat flicking into the field of view for only an instant. Shocking more than eerie, because of how large it appears, its wingspan wide as the lunar surface. And because of how clearly I can see the skeleton that’s wrapped inside the frail skin of the wings. For one moment the bones hang motionless, caught as if by strobe-light. The body saying, however briefly, Here I am.
Brief History of My Thumb
I remember how it felt to get into the car. This was the part I liked best, the part when I was a little afraid.
To the driver — who was usually a man alone — my eyes gave just a flicker. Sometimes a woman would stop and I knew what was coming: a lecture about the risk. She was trying to save me, and who knows, she may have. The next car coming along might have belonged to the psychopath who would have killed me long ago.
In the beginning, it was me and my high-school friends who entered the cars’ sweaty interiors. We girls, and it was always girls, let ourselves be borne two miles up our town’s one road. We got out, crossed the road, and repeated the process on the southbound side. The point was not to go anywhere. Then what was the point? The answer I leave to Heraclitus:
The rule that makes
its subject weary
is a sentence
of hard labor.
For this reason,
change gives rest.
Heraclitus was the one who said famously that you can’t step into the same river twice. More precisely, he said (in Brooks Haxton’s translation) that just as the river he stepped into “is not the same, and is, so I am as I am not.”
A teenager likewise inhabits two states, grown and not, though I would have scorned anyone who identified me as a child. I was a match burning down to a black spindle. When I stood by the road, its ditch-wind fed me and made my little flame rise.
Later I moved not too far away from home, but to Quebec. I chose a foreign country to give my acquiescing to this conventional duty — going to college — a varnish of the exotic. I also wanted to escape my house where the televisions blared in every room and people screamed above them. The cars, by contrast, were calm places where I was almost always free to smoke cigarettes.
In Montreal, it seemed everyone smoked and everyone hitchhiked, because of a bus strike that went on for weeks. Beautiful women stood alone in the slush at the side of the road and stuck out their thumbs. I was sad to see the strike end and the sexy French women in their high-heeled boots suddenly disappear back to whatever swanky place they came from.
In my sophomore year I transferred to the agricultural college, whose buildings squatted in a wind-scoured pasture, flat as an airstrip, between two freeways. Quivering concrete ramps and roads led into the city thirty miles away. I cut my hair and wore a watch cap and down jacket, so that I looked like a husky boy. Dimly I was aware that I was acting out an archetype from old folk songs: that of the wife who goes to war or the pirate whose bound breasts are discovered after his death. When I stood at dawn on the elevated highways, the gusts of semis nearly blew me off my feet.
But in my youth I rode inside a bubble of luck: the worst thing that ever happened was that a man pulled out his penis. I started making up rules. Number One was to never look at the driver. Then he could have his penis out until the cows came home. Rule Number Two was not to get into cars with more than one man in them, because once, when I rode squashed in a car full of man-boys, one draped his arm across my shoulder, ostensibly to save space, and then let his hand droop until it touched my breast. Just the side, just through my shirt. He was daring me to scream. When I looked down, I found myself inappropriately dressed, as in a type of anxiety dream. I wore no bra, and the shirt’s crinkly green cloth, I realized, had shrunk a bit and puckered around each button to reveal a half-dollar-size glimpse of skin.
Early on, I’d decided that it was a bad idea to call attention to the transgressions of the men, because then they might decide to hurt you. In my French gibberish I announced they’d missed their turn, and they believed me because they were unfamiliar with this part of the province. They let me out in a muddy strip between the speeding cars and the concrete barricade.
When I graduated, I went to live briefly on a farm in Vermont that was run by women, where one of my housemates made her living by crocheting vests and taking them to craft fairs around the country. Lucy did not own a car; few of the women on the farm had enough money or would have wanted a machine that was such an ecological scourge. So she sent her vests by mail and hitchhiked after them. When I asked about whether she was afraid of being raped, she answered that she had been, recently, and then of course I wanted to know why she still hitched.
“What I can’t bear to give up is the feeling,” she said. “Just me and my thumb all alone on the road.” I said I knew what she was talking about. The immense spaces inside of which the hitcher becomes tiny. And the sudden diminishment is thrilling: whoosh. Small becomes big, and there you are, standing alone with Heraclitus again. Even rape didn’t quash him.
But of course I didn’t have a clue.
These stories came to an end when I bought a truck. By then the sentiment of the highway was changing anyway, so that no one of legitimate sanity picked up hitchers anymore. For a while I felt obligated to make the reciprocal gesture as payback for all the rides I’d been given, until more than one drifter scared me when I realized he had nowhere to go and wanted to attach himself to me. Then I had to scramble for an excuse to kick him out. I usually said, you have to get out here, I’m turning back.
Some of the ones I blew by still haunt me, like the Indian woman on crutches way out in the desert in New Mexico. She’s wearing a bandana and she’s crying. I think about turning around for her sometimes, but now it’s twenty years too late.
And some of the ones I picked up still haunt me too, like the man-boy in Colorado who was traveling to an uncle who had promised him a job. He did not know exactly where he was headed, and so I tossed him the Rand-McNally road atlas. He flipped and flipped, from one cover to the other, until I realized that he couldn’t alphabetize, could not read the word Colorado where it was printed in the corner of the page. He had the name of the town where he was supposed to be headed written on a scrap of paper, but could not pronounce the words. “Booey veh. . ” he muttered before finally handing me the scrap, on which I decoded Buena Vista spelled badly in the strange glyphs of someone who didn’t know the alphabet.
Now, in the new millennium, we drive and make phone calls at the same time, and the car operates in sympathy with the clock. This is no country for backpacked young women: You don’t know what kind of river you’re stepping into, I may never be the same, but that doesn’t mean that I am good.
I trade stories often enough with women my age, about our lives as hitchers, to know it is not an uncommon history, though hitch isn’t a word we use anymore except in regard to knots. We’ve experienced middle-aged reentry, and we hunker now inside the nose cone that has returned safely (maybe), unraped (no — the other woman often has her rape story to tell, if she will tell it), as we bob in the sea. Heraclitus had nothing good to say about the state of being wet. Better to be a dry thing, he thought, ready to be kindled into flames.