Stray Mailer 27Oct04 part 2 - the terrorists hate our freedom fries.

Though it didn’t really start out that insane. We left
(Me and my mates Dale and Emily, and some other guy)
before dawn on Monday morning, so as to avoid the mass
exodus. It was a good tactic. In fact, the whole way
back to San Francisco they were saying how
unheardofedly light the traffic was. The four days I
was there where also, apparently, some of the best
weather they’ve ever seen in the little microclimate
in which they have their home.

Mostly I just hung out and relaxed, the technical term
in Burner lingo is Decompressed. Read some good books.

Emily took me out driving through the hills and bays
in her little silver convertible with the top down.
She drives like a lunatic, and has the skills to back
it up, so it was good fun.
I was amazed by how undeveloped the area around SF is.
If I was to live in the U.S., it’d be in the sanfran
bays.

The second to last night we were invited out to the
home of a friend of theirs, a fellow burner. The
property was once an infamous hippie commune, now it’s
yours for only one point six million American dollars.
We spent the evening eating, drinking and smoking, hot
tubbing and hunting for the seven known hidden
compartments left by jack Kerouac and Alan Ginsberg
when they lived there in the sixties, which they
started painting with mushrooms before presumably
getting distracted and leaving each one half finished.

The previous night Dale and I had visited a very
expensive looking house to play role playing games
with three of his friends, one of whom has a Taliban
bounty on his head.
He’d been in Kazakhstan last year with five other
people helping the country to get its civil emergency
response in order, which also meant upgrading the
infrastructure and military access to remote areas.
Like the bit just above Afghanistan where all the
heroin goes through, as run by the Taliban, who get
really pissy if you’re someone who helps soldiers get
in their way.
Of the six, he was the only one who made it out alive.
He’s about my age.

And my last San Francisco anecdote from the night we
arrived; I watched my first North American television.
It was a documentary about Cuba, on the Discovery
channel, and I’d actually seen it before in Australia;
as an even handed look at what’s going on in the
country, good and bad. It took me a while to recognise
it though, as they’d cut out everything but the bad,
re-edited the interviews to make people say something
else, and very carefully avoided mention of embargoes
and other reasons the country might not be doing so
well.
It was followed by a very sentimental doco about how
great the explorers Lewis and Clark were for American
expansionism.

I didn’t particularly want to hitchhike in America. So
I lined up a guy through the internet who was driving
from Santa Cruz to Vancouver. There was also a girl
who was supposed to come with, but the guy pissed
around for a few days and she was in a hurry, so we
ended up with another, slightly weird obsessive
compulsive type who really reminded me of Mad Jim, the
homeless guy in Edinburgh who got into my flat and
took me three days to get out again.
(We’d run into this guy one night in the park, and my
flatmate Ross said he could stay. Then we went out
drinking, forgetting that our other flatmate, Aideen,
was home alone. She lets him in, he immediately
unleashes his full (but quite harmless) weirdness on
her and she locks herself in her room. And he just
_would_not_leave_. Finally, after politely helpful
doesn’t work, I settle for verbally aggressive and
yell him out of the house.)

We leave late, in possibly the most rusted car I’ve
ever seen, and make it to a national park where we
camp near a logging road. During the night the strange
man vanished.
We woke up to a note saying he was going to visit a
friend and pick up his passport.
So the two of us carry on north. I’d thought we would
go up the coast, through the redwoods, but it turned
out we were just taking the main boring as hell
interstate, stopping at every rest stop, and the guy
wanted to do a tour of every single hot spring in
Oregon.

I have a fetish with movement. Progression is life.
Stagnancy is death. If I stay in one place too long I
get twitchy. If I’m not moving spatially or
emotionally or careerwise I just pack up and run away.
When I’m driving somewhere I don’t want to stop for
sightseeing or stretches or food or sleep, I only want
to keep moving and moving and moving until I get to my
destination and then I’m disappointed because I’m not
moving anymore.
I didn’t resent the fact that the guy wanted to take
rests or hit thermal pools, thermal pools are cool,
but by the time we crossed the Oregon border I’d
decided that I was jumping out and heading up the
coast. If I’m not shooting through I’d at least want
to be seeing nice countryside, and we were doing
neither.
So I gave the guy an extra ten bucks (he’d counted on
two riders to pay for petrol and now had none) and got
let off in Eugene.

At times over the next few days I’d stop and the
thought would hit me; I’m hitchhiking in America.
There’s something I should know about this venture.
Some kind of infamy.

The first guy to pick me up, which didn’t take long at
all, was an ex New Zealander who’d been living in the
States for twenty years. He told me to watch out for
bad people. Look at their eyes, he said.

There were two big rednecks trying to hitch where he
let me off, they’d been waiting four and a half hours.
Soon after I took up position a ways past them, a
fancy little sports car picks up all three of us. Guy
driving was drinking a beer and talked like someone
doing a very poor impersonation of a hillbilly.
He was twenty years old, the car was his wife’s,
they’d just had their month old son circumcised that
day. The other two were off to pick mushrooms.
Somehow we got onto the topic of drugs. Somehow I got
onto the topic of drugs with every single person who
picked me up. And it was never me who brought it up. I
think Americans may take a lot of substances.
Driver was telling us about his buddy who was
currently doing five years for shooting a guy in the
back of the head, once in the shoulder, and stabbing
him seven times over the sale of five pounds of
methamphetamine. Pacemaker saved his life. Point of
the story turned out the driver thought he should have
gotten a longer sentence, he was charged with
aggravated assault instead of attempted murder because
he was hopped up on a lot of speed at the time.

In America, if you give someone a drug and they do
something like commit a murder, you are legally
responsible for that murder.
If in America you take a drug and do something like
that, you are not.
No one’s saying it necessarily makes sense.

That wasn’t the only time the subject of murder came
up over the next few days, but it was one of the guys
in the back seat who uttered the only pro republican
sentiment I heard the whole time I was in the U.S.,
and that was simply that they were tougher on crime.
And though its true that between Burningman, San Fran
and hitching I wasn’t likely to meet too many
conservatives, I think it’s notable that every single
person I met was pretty unhappy with America in its
current state. If I can make two sweeping
generalizations; Americans are suspicious, and it
seemed to me, bracing themselves for something.

That night I managed to half pitch my tent in an
extremely narrow and convoluted path that ran the
fence of an RV camp. I slept surprisingly well
considering the situation. The next morning there were
a lot of gunshots going off nearby as I quickly packed
up, but too many to be anything really bad. Who knows?
It’s America. Could be someone changing channels or
punctuating a sentence for all I know.

Took me over an hour and a three km walk to get my
first ride, but after that the rest of the day was
surprisingly plain sailing. Large black guy in an SUV
picked me up and flirted outrageously with me for the
whole trip, but not aggressively and he was actually a
really nice guy. Said he was openly gay and a closet
smoker, told him if I was either I know which I’d be
ashamed of. (Smoking is a terrible habit.)
Then a guy who thought the space missions were a waste
of money and unnecessary risk of unleashing martian
space viruses. Then a guy in an SUV who drove me way
past his turn off just to be nice. Then bouncing round
the enclosed back of a pickup truck with a couple, guy
mentioned he’d been in prison for something, called
each other Ma and Pa.
Then the RV picked me up.
Not a huge one as RVs go, it was plastered with
American flags and other patriotic sticker type
things. Oldish couple, had been large scale cannabis
growers for the last six years until their cousin and
some of his friends broke in one night, tied them up
and ripped out all their plants. Cousin’s apparently
now a junkie and one of the other guys is doing a term
for murder. And that was the last time murder was
mentioned for that trip.
So they retired. Soon after I got on they picked up
another hitchhiker, a young guy on his way back to
study in Portland at a lefty college George Bush had
personally tried to shut down because it was “a
breeding ground for terrorists.” (The hippies hate our
freedom.)

Daniel.