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!”