Koala
sleeps 22 hours a day, eats chutes and leaves
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- Nov 3, 2015
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This is a piece I've been working on from my first time hitchhiking back in March 2016. I plan on writing a full-length memoir at some point! I have a lot more that comes after this but it's quite disorganized, so I've still got a long way to go with it. Hope you enjoy what I've got so far 
It was a gray day. A day that felt dreary and like something bad was going to happen, a day mid-week in the Spring on a lonely highway in the green, green pine trees of Oregon surrounded by the gray clouds in the gray mist of the rainy morning.
“Hey is there a brown paper bag back there?” asked the man we barely knew in a voice too loud for the occasion.
“Uhh I can look”, answered my friend from the back seat. I was sitting in the passenger seat of the little gray hatchback car and the man I barely knew was leaning over me rummaging around in the back seat.
The search would’ve been easier if the car wasn’t a piece of shit. The driver door didn’t open. Actually, the passenger door was the only door in the car that worked.
“This one?” my friend said from the back, holding up a brown paper bag.
The man grabbed the bag, too forcefully.
“No. There’s another one,” he said. “Shit”, he said under his breath, scratching at his neck.
“Here, let me get out”, I said. The man took one step away from the car and I climbed out. He dug around in the back of the car, he and my friend both looking for the other brown paper bag. He pried something from under the seat, pulled it up clutching it tightly and jumped out of the car, walking fast towards the little stone bathroom with the brown doors at the rest area we were parked at.
We watched him go. It was quiet. I glanced at the ashtray in the center console, surrounded by four or five different pay-as-you-go phones. My iPod was still plugged into the amp in the back seat, but nothing was playing. The man told me I could put music on if I wanted, so I did, but after a little while he seemed irritated and complained of a headache so I shut the music off.
A few minutes passed and the man came back to the car. I fiddled with the passenger door to try and open it. After struggling with the barely-functioning handle for about 30 seconds, I got it open, and got out.
“Let’s go, let’s get out of here,” the man I barely knew said suddenly, jumping through the passenger door into the driver seat.
I got back into the car and we zoomed on down the highway.
I don’t remember exactly when I first had dreams of hitchhiking the country. I’d always known about it, sure, and I’d always known that my parents would kill me if I did it.
“So have you ever hitchhiked before?”, he asked.
He was Andrew, and my travelmate and I were sleeping on his couch in Seattle, Washington. This was just a few days before our ride with the meth head weed farmer in Southern Oregon.
“Yeah, I hitched once, but nothing long distance”, I responded.
This one time was referring to a single ride, no more than 20 minutes long. It was a time when a friend and I reached the end of a hiking trail and were walking on a dusty road into Woodstock, New York after spending three days backpacking the Devils Path in the Catskill Mountains. A young woman picked us up in her forest green Subaru and took us into town. She was going to pick up her mail at the post office. I think she’d been waiting for a tax return.
“How well do you handle being scared, like actually scared?” Andrew asked.
“I don’t know, I mean I handle stress pretty well, I’ve gone through some surgeries and some pretty serious injuries”, I responded.
But he was referring to something completely different, he was talking about the sheer and true distance of 1,250 miles that stood between us and Los Angeles, the desolation of tiny towns with no one entering or leaving, and the bone-chilling unpredictable actions of other people.
“Do you have a taser? Or a knife?”
“No, we couldn’t fly with anything.”
It was so different talking to someone with experience hitchhiking, well, talking to someone about hitchhiking who has experience hitchhiking. The dangers seemed so much more real. He seemed a little worried about us. But then again, he was a privileged white boy living in the Pacific Northwest who wiped his butt with those “big kid” frog toilet wipes.
“I would recommend you travel with a weapon, especially being girls and all”.
The fucking girl card again. It frustrated me to no end how much people worry and how much people rightfully do have to worry about us girls traveling. If we had been taking charter buses people would worry. Even if we were driving ourselves people would worry.
We were set on hitchhiking. We'd been talking about it for months and months. Plus, it felt like it was meant to happen, like it was our time to do it. We'd barely made our flight out of Miami, underestimating the long ride to the airport, but somehow we'd made it, sprinting to the gate with overpacked 65 liter backpacks as carry-on bags. Also, my travelmate now had something like $27 to her name and we had to fly out of Los Angeles in 10 days. So hitching was basically the default option anyway.
"Well, it is definitely going to be an awesome journey. A life-changing trip. I wish you guys good luck". I could tell Andrew doubted us a little, but my friend and I had survived many weird, hazy nights in 'bad' parts of Miami and felt confident in our ability to safely hitchhike.
The idea was scary and exciting. It kept us up pretty much all night the eve before we were set to head south.
The 7:30 am alarm didn’t faze me at all. I was already wide awake. (Plus it felt like 10:30am to us anyway, since we had just come from the East Coast).
I knew I should eat but I was too nervous and too excited and too much feeling like I was going to throw up to eat anything (plus I had polished off an entire box of Nutty Bars the night before out of spite).
Another friend from Seattle was to take us south of the city to a town called Federal Way where there was a southbound on-ramp that had been written about by one person on Hitchwiki. Knowing that just one other person had luck in the exact place we were about to stand was very comforting preceding our first ever hitch.
Our friend who was driving pulled into a gas station just down the road from the on-ramp. My travelmate and I got out and heaved our heavy packs onto our backs. We gave goodbye to our friend and began our first little walk to the on-ramp. We each held a sign that read PORTLAND in blue and purple letters.
The wind blew hard. It was Sunday morning and it was bright out but the sun hadn’t yet come up over the tall pine trees on the other side of the road. We shivered. My back started hurting from my pack after about 5 minutes. We smiled at every passing car. It wasn’t a very busy on-ramp. It felt like we’d never get picked up. We started feeling pretty hopeless, and thinking "Wait, what are we even doing out here? What the fuck". Every car that seemed like it was slowing down would get our hopes up, only to have the car accelerate and speed onto the highway, the great Interstate 5 of the west coast. I checked my phone. It had been 20 minutes. How long would we wait? We stood in silence, both probably wondering what we would do if we had no luck. Just then a red-rusted SUV pulled over just ahead of us. My travelmate and I looked at eachother both saying, “Is that for us?”. It was a surreal moment. We grabbed our packs off the ground and ran down the little hill of the ramp to the car.
“Where you headed?”, I asked.
“Woodland. It’ll get ya about 40 miles outside of Portland.”
“Okay, yeah sounds great!”. We both got in the back seat, me sliding in first, across the seat to the other side behind the driver.
“You can put your bags in the back”, the man said. A young girl with shoulder-length brown hair was in the passenger seat. She turned and looked at us and was playing games on a tablet.
I heaved our bags into the hatchback trunk. Everything was quiet for a moment as we accelerated onto the highway.
“Want some Pocky?,” the girl said handing out an unopened box for us.
“Sure, thanks,” I said taking the Pocky. I remembered I hadn’t eaten yet and started into the box.
The ride was relatively quiet the whole time. Thoughts of a father-daughter murder duo flashed across my mind more than once, like in the movie Kick-Ass, it’s the innocent seeming father and cute as a button daughter that are the bad guys.
But nothing happened. It turned out the man was taking the girl back to somewhere near Woodland where her mother and step-father lived. The daughter spent weekends with dad and weeks with mom and step-dad. She was in middle school and liked post-hardcore music. She snacked on Doritos and blue Gatorade and played strange simulation games with goats on the tablet which she narrated aloud to the car, laughing. Her dad smoked cigarettes with the driver side window down and listened to classic rock on the radio.
Overall it was a very uneventful ride and was kind of an out-of-body experience. The trip had begun. This was it, we were doing it.
The man dropped us off in a McDonald’s parking lot right off the highway. We thanked him and said goodbye to the daughter. I gave the daughter a little list of songs I thought she might like since her music tastes were similar to what mine were in middle school. They both smiled big smiles and waved us off and wished us good luck.
My travelmate and I walked into the McDonalds as the father daughter duo drove away. We walked in with big smiles, our Portland signs, and a fluttery excitement in our stomachs. We were hitchhikers.
It was a gray day. A day that felt dreary and like something bad was going to happen, a day mid-week in the Spring on a lonely highway in the green, green pine trees of Oregon surrounded by the gray clouds in the gray mist of the rainy morning.
“Hey is there a brown paper bag back there?” asked the man we barely knew in a voice too loud for the occasion.
“Uhh I can look”, answered my friend from the back seat. I was sitting in the passenger seat of the little gray hatchback car and the man I barely knew was leaning over me rummaging around in the back seat.
The search would’ve been easier if the car wasn’t a piece of shit. The driver door didn’t open. Actually, the passenger door was the only door in the car that worked.
“This one?” my friend said from the back, holding up a brown paper bag.
The man grabbed the bag, too forcefully.
“No. There’s another one,” he said. “Shit”, he said under his breath, scratching at his neck.
“Here, let me get out”, I said. The man took one step away from the car and I climbed out. He dug around in the back of the car, he and my friend both looking for the other brown paper bag. He pried something from under the seat, pulled it up clutching it tightly and jumped out of the car, walking fast towards the little stone bathroom with the brown doors at the rest area we were parked at.
We watched him go. It was quiet. I glanced at the ashtray in the center console, surrounded by four or five different pay-as-you-go phones. My iPod was still plugged into the amp in the back seat, but nothing was playing. The man told me I could put music on if I wanted, so I did, but after a little while he seemed irritated and complained of a headache so I shut the music off.
A few minutes passed and the man came back to the car. I fiddled with the passenger door to try and open it. After struggling with the barely-functioning handle for about 30 seconds, I got it open, and got out.
“Let’s go, let’s get out of here,” the man I barely knew said suddenly, jumping through the passenger door into the driver seat.
I got back into the car and we zoomed on down the highway.
I don’t remember exactly when I first had dreams of hitchhiking the country. I’d always known about it, sure, and I’d always known that my parents would kill me if I did it.
“So have you ever hitchhiked before?”, he asked.
He was Andrew, and my travelmate and I were sleeping on his couch in Seattle, Washington. This was just a few days before our ride with the meth head weed farmer in Southern Oregon.
“Yeah, I hitched once, but nothing long distance”, I responded.
This one time was referring to a single ride, no more than 20 minutes long. It was a time when a friend and I reached the end of a hiking trail and were walking on a dusty road into Woodstock, New York after spending three days backpacking the Devils Path in the Catskill Mountains. A young woman picked us up in her forest green Subaru and took us into town. She was going to pick up her mail at the post office. I think she’d been waiting for a tax return.
“How well do you handle being scared, like actually scared?” Andrew asked.
“I don’t know, I mean I handle stress pretty well, I’ve gone through some surgeries and some pretty serious injuries”, I responded.
But he was referring to something completely different, he was talking about the sheer and true distance of 1,250 miles that stood between us and Los Angeles, the desolation of tiny towns with no one entering or leaving, and the bone-chilling unpredictable actions of other people.
“Do you have a taser? Or a knife?”
“No, we couldn’t fly with anything.”
It was so different talking to someone with experience hitchhiking, well, talking to someone about hitchhiking who has experience hitchhiking. The dangers seemed so much more real. He seemed a little worried about us. But then again, he was a privileged white boy living in the Pacific Northwest who wiped his butt with those “big kid” frog toilet wipes.
“I would recommend you travel with a weapon, especially being girls and all”.
The fucking girl card again. It frustrated me to no end how much people worry and how much people rightfully do have to worry about us girls traveling. If we had been taking charter buses people would worry. Even if we were driving ourselves people would worry.
We were set on hitchhiking. We'd been talking about it for months and months. Plus, it felt like it was meant to happen, like it was our time to do it. We'd barely made our flight out of Miami, underestimating the long ride to the airport, but somehow we'd made it, sprinting to the gate with overpacked 65 liter backpacks as carry-on bags. Also, my travelmate now had something like $27 to her name and we had to fly out of Los Angeles in 10 days. So hitching was basically the default option anyway.
"Well, it is definitely going to be an awesome journey. A life-changing trip. I wish you guys good luck". I could tell Andrew doubted us a little, but my friend and I had survived many weird, hazy nights in 'bad' parts of Miami and felt confident in our ability to safely hitchhike.
The idea was scary and exciting. It kept us up pretty much all night the eve before we were set to head south.
The 7:30 am alarm didn’t faze me at all. I was already wide awake. (Plus it felt like 10:30am to us anyway, since we had just come from the East Coast).
I knew I should eat but I was too nervous and too excited and too much feeling like I was going to throw up to eat anything (plus I had polished off an entire box of Nutty Bars the night before out of spite).
Another friend from Seattle was to take us south of the city to a town called Federal Way where there was a southbound on-ramp that had been written about by one person on Hitchwiki. Knowing that just one other person had luck in the exact place we were about to stand was very comforting preceding our first ever hitch.
Our friend who was driving pulled into a gas station just down the road from the on-ramp. My travelmate and I got out and heaved our heavy packs onto our backs. We gave goodbye to our friend and began our first little walk to the on-ramp. We each held a sign that read PORTLAND in blue and purple letters.
The wind blew hard. It was Sunday morning and it was bright out but the sun hadn’t yet come up over the tall pine trees on the other side of the road. We shivered. My back started hurting from my pack after about 5 minutes. We smiled at every passing car. It wasn’t a very busy on-ramp. It felt like we’d never get picked up. We started feeling pretty hopeless, and thinking "Wait, what are we even doing out here? What the fuck". Every car that seemed like it was slowing down would get our hopes up, only to have the car accelerate and speed onto the highway, the great Interstate 5 of the west coast. I checked my phone. It had been 20 minutes. How long would we wait? We stood in silence, both probably wondering what we would do if we had no luck. Just then a red-rusted SUV pulled over just ahead of us. My travelmate and I looked at eachother both saying, “Is that for us?”. It was a surreal moment. We grabbed our packs off the ground and ran down the little hill of the ramp to the car.
“Where you headed?”, I asked.
“Woodland. It’ll get ya about 40 miles outside of Portland.”
“Okay, yeah sounds great!”. We both got in the back seat, me sliding in first, across the seat to the other side behind the driver.
“You can put your bags in the back”, the man said. A young girl with shoulder-length brown hair was in the passenger seat. She turned and looked at us and was playing games on a tablet.
I heaved our bags into the hatchback trunk. Everything was quiet for a moment as we accelerated onto the highway.
“Want some Pocky?,” the girl said handing out an unopened box for us.
“Sure, thanks,” I said taking the Pocky. I remembered I hadn’t eaten yet and started into the box.
The ride was relatively quiet the whole time. Thoughts of a father-daughter murder duo flashed across my mind more than once, like in the movie Kick-Ass, it’s the innocent seeming father and cute as a button daughter that are the bad guys.
But nothing happened. It turned out the man was taking the girl back to somewhere near Woodland where her mother and step-father lived. The daughter spent weekends with dad and weeks with mom and step-dad. She was in middle school and liked post-hardcore music. She snacked on Doritos and blue Gatorade and played strange simulation games with goats on the tablet which she narrated aloud to the car, laughing. Her dad smoked cigarettes with the driver side window down and listened to classic rock on the radio.
Overall it was a very uneventful ride and was kind of an out-of-body experience. The trip had begun. This was it, we were doing it.
The man dropped us off in a McDonald’s parking lot right off the highway. We thanked him and said goodbye to the daughter. I gave the daughter a little list of songs I thought she might like since her music tastes were similar to what mine were in middle school. They both smiled big smiles and waved us off and wished us good luck.
My travelmate and I walked into the McDonalds as the father daughter duo drove away. We walked in with big smiles, our Portland signs, and a fluttery excitement in our stomachs. We were hitchhikers.
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