Firstride
Chronicles my first and wildest ride–what got me hooked on hitchhiking, first as a mode of travel and then as a subject to research. Let off by a Greyhound bus on the shoulder of Interstate 40 just west of the New Mexico-Arizona state line in the summer of 1974, alone at the age of eighteen and almost fresh out of The Bronx, I was picked up by a couple of cowboys heading south on what was then the real Route 666 (that's 666!). They drove me more than one hundred miles through the high desert and, between the two along the way, they took rifle shots at coyotes out the driver side window, hung out the passenger side window while doing sixty to retrieve a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken and a 6-pack of Coors Beer stowed arm's reach in the truck bed, and taught me through their actions how to be generous to a stranger and to pass it "down the road," before they dropped me off at my itinerant destination high in the densely forested White Mountains near Alpine, Arizona.
