Tales from the Road

By Mark Kneeskern

I’m not afraid to play the fool. This is an advantage to a hitchhiker. To hit the road in the attire of a jester would not be inappropriate and is preferable to a clown outfit, which would probably scare the pants off at least seventy percent of motorists. I’d much rather make them laugh. Thus, I have employed a number of elaborate and amusing thumbin’ gestures. I’ve personally driven past hitchhikers who are slouching by the asphalt, hanging out their appendages limply, a sour expression on their mugs. They get pity rides, I guess. Personally, I prefer people picking me up because I look like a fun and interesting character, or someone with good stories to tell.

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Hitchin’ in the USA – (Not a Cautionary Tale)

by Mark Kneeskern

Have you ever woken up on the floor of a one-room rock house in the Chihuahuan Desert, knowing that sixty years before a Mexican mercury miner woke in the same rock house that he built with his own two hands?? Have you scratched and yawned, going outside to find your bike has a flat tire, realizing that you’d have to hitch hike for the first time in your life to get to work, a job that entails floating on a watery border, back and forth between a “developed” nation and a “developing” one?? Did you then rush out the door with a personal flotation device strapped to your back, stumbling to the road between prickly pear and lechuguilla to receive a ride from a beautiful, sleepy-eyed creature with whom you would fall in love and spend many happy years?

I have.? Just once.? That’s all it took to hook this boy.? I thought, “So THIS is what hitchhiking is like!”

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