Tag Archives: hitchhiking

APRIL 15, 1981 – HITCHING TO FLORIDA – JOURNAL ENTRY

I walked our of the Mudd Club at dawn. The gray skies promised snow. I had my bag in hand. I headed to the Holland Tunnel and stuck out my thumb. I was hitchhiking to Florida to meet my friends, the Bertonis, in Key West. The first ride took me to Philadelphia. I wasn’t on […]

BAD MOTELS – BAD POETRY September 1978

Crossing the country I mostly slept in speeding cars Huddled against the door Hoping the driver wasn’t a murderer. Or that his destination lay beyond the dawn. Sometimes the ride ended nowhere a few hours after midnight. Out in the Nevada desert wthout a motel in sight. I stood on the highway The crunch of […]

AMONG THE REDWOODS by Peter Nolan Smith

The noon sun shimmered off Monterey harbor. The moored sailing boats bobbed with the light breeze and hundreds of pleasure craft wavered on the wake of a departing fishing boat. A middle-aged man took a photo of his wife before a large trawler tied up to a forlorn dock, while I walked toward Cannery Row. […]

HITCHHIKING PROHIBITED by Peter Nolan Smith

In late-August of 1972 my college friend Ptrov and I were bound for Boston to start our second year of university and we crashed a night with a trio of carpenter gypsies constructing a rest stop on the new interstate through Montana. Bulldozers had churned the dirt highway into a muddy bog for the passing […]

George, Washington 1972

Back in late August 1972 my college friend Ptrov Sinski and I hitchhiked west from Seattle. A rancher left us off at exit 149, serving George, Washington, a small farming community surrounded by endless fields of ripening wheat. The two of us ignored the sign forbidding hitchhiking, but within ten minutes a Highway Patrol car […]