R2E #60: A Hitchhiker's Guide to the U.K.

With special guest appearances by Ralph Waldo Emerson, J. Edgar Hoover, Leatherface, and Bill Bryson. WRITTEN & ILLUSTRATED by PETER MOORE

When the mood strikes, I run excerpts from A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG NINCOMPOOP, my coming-of-age-travel-memoir-with-funny-drawings. (The first entry is here. Most recent one is here. If you become a paid subscriber, you can access the complete archive here!)

My memoir details my road through Paris, London, and god help me, Zagreb, in search of the ultimate destination: a life worth living. The story so far: Young Peter arrived in Paris, occupied a dorm room at the Alliance Française language school, tiptoed out onto the the Paris Metro, and roared off on the road to elsewhere. I was lost, but that’s the only way to get found, right? After Paris, I moved on to Olde England, to check out where that Shakespeare dude lived. In this excerpt, I stick out my thumb on the A24 in England, yet another road to elsewhere!

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“TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT,” I wrote on the one-month anniversary of daily-journal keeping, “was my before-dinner walk up on The Downs. I walked uphill with purpose and once on top of the open ridge I became aware of the moonrise. It leapt above the horizon as I gained perspective. After hopping a fence I found a perfect spot of closely cropped grass to lie upon, and dusk gathered. How can I describe such times? I was Emerson’s ‘transparent eyeball,’ alive to the wind, the approaching clouds, the grass that grew above my head, the wild daisies, the lights in the village below, and the River Arun. I would have liked to stay until complete darkness came, but I had a responsibility to a warm meal in Amberley, and I arose and went there.”

I’m not sure where I pulled the Ralph Waldo reference from; I never read him as an undergraduate. “I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing,” he wrote, in his poetic ramble Nature. “I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God.”

I wasn’t far off from that—especially the “I am nothing” part, rather than the “part or parcel of God” part. But my channel was open to those divine currents, even as a beginner atheist. Something was stirring within, and it wasn’t just hunger for the warm meal Elinor (my professor’s wife) was then preparing for me. I was open to gloria mundi, and trembled as it (she?) brushed against my sensitive skin. I was briefly able to strip away all that intellectual pretense, and my social awkwardness, and absorb the silvery light. Whatever other locations would welcome me through life, moonrise was the ultimate destination.

I WASN’T JUST WRITING ODD SCRAPS in my journal and gazing dreamily at the ecliptic. My college friends were circling around, and they kept on initiating rendezvous.

On December 19th, my journal shows, I imposed on my professor’s family for yet another bath, plus a bowl of porridge, and accepted a phone call from my friend Catherine, who had been quite as eager to jump my bones as I had been to leap on stage and attempt rhymed coupling with Cynthia, from The Double Dealer.

On my birthday, several weeks before Cynthia and I (maybe) flirted across the fourth wall at London’s National Theatre, Catherine had mailed me a poem, about me of all subjects. It was calligraphed on parchment, and clearly meant as a declaration of some sort, but 22-year old me, and Catherine’s poetic evocation of me, were off by many degrees of separation. Still I was flattered, and briefly loved myself a little more, before my firm grasp of reality returned.

In fact, the poem is an embarrassing artifact, not because of the poetry, but because of the false hopes it casts in verse. It references my novel (bad), my smile (“taunting”), my plans (“divine,” i.e. artistic), and my intended “return to Byzantium” (William Butler Yeats got there first) to be fitted for the brocade mantle of Literature.

Good ideas, creatively couched. They just had nothing to do with the life I would eventually lead. Instead of Byzantium, I would soon find employment in Knoxville, TN, working on a movie magazine. There’s adult life for you.

But in receipt of Catherine’s laudatory poem, still in pre-life fantasy mode, I’d agreed to visit her at her JYA roost, in Wales. And so I quit my fitful story-writing (I tore myself away) and headed north, on a procrastination tour.

My professor's wife sent me off after a breakfast of pancakes, bacon, toast, and coffee, in hopes I’d never return. Soon I was standing next to the A29, the London Road, thumb out, holding one of Elinor’s watercolor sketches with my destination in block letters on the back side. After five minutes of indifferent drivers, I was snatched up by a man who informed me that he’d picked me up because he thought I was “a bird.”

That is: Female.

I was familiar with the tension over my secondary sex characteristics. I was always a little too petite for my own good, especially after the Beatles started all of us on a hair-growing mission. After leaving my barber behind in the U.S., I developed a luxuriantly curling thatch, but had no capacity to raise a mustache. So I had to keep insisting that, no, I was male, to people who used female pronouns on me. The Village People had just released Macho Man, but I wasn’t much of either, it seemed.

Once my benefactor on the A24 rebooted on my sexual identity, we settled in for a companionable run up to London. He worked in production on The Daily Mirror, a London Tabloid that, during the 1960s, had a daily circulation of 5 million copies, or just under 10% of the country’s population. But at the time of my ride, it was losing a decades-long battle to its competitor The Sun.

The driver seemed untroubled by the threat to his livelihood, leading me through discussions of the excellent design of his Citroen, the desirability of fusion energy, the miracle of bird migration, the underappreciated intelligence of animals, the reality of UFOs and a coming close encounter with space aliens, the horrors of war and the folly of military expenditures, the untapped resources of the human brain, and the complexities of computer typesetting.

After two hours as his conversational captive, he dropped me at Waterloo in London, near the National Theatre, for my date with Cynthia in The Double Dealer. It wasn’t the only time I’d crash into romantic illusions on this jaunt.

The next day I caught the Tube out of London, and stuck out my thumb on an entrance ramp for the Wales-bound A4. Hitchhiking was still an option in this version of the world. It all seemed so innocent. But it was already on the wane, with the debut of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in 1974. The early action of that movie introduces us to the straight-razor wielding hitchhiker Taylor Nubbins, brother to Leatherface and member of a family of cannibals.

Thanks for that, Toby Hooper.

One year before Chainsaw, the FBI anticipated that plot point with a poster bearing the headline DEATH IN DISGUISE?, and a drawing of white guy—trim haircut, nicely tailored blazer, and a resemblance to Anthony Perkins in Psycho—sticking his thumb out and being picked up by the nuclear family, in a convertible sedan. The text below this weirdly upscale scene: “TO THE AMERICAN MOTORIST: Don’t pick up trouble! Is he a happy vacationer or an escaping criminal—a pleasant companion or a sex maniac—a friendly traveler or a vicious murderer? In the gamble with hitchhikers your safety and the lives of your loved ones are at stake. Don’t take that risk!” Signed—I’m not kidding—J. Edgar Hoover.

Anybody who had seen the film, or Hoover’s warning, would have rolled right on past me, and I wasn’t yet using a razor of any kind. As it was, it took me precisely three hitches to arrive at my first destination: the Welsh capital Cardiff, 150 miles west of London.

“Suddenly, in the space of a moment, I realized what it was that I loved about Britain - which is to say, all of it. Every last bit of it, good and bad - Marmite, village fetes, country lanes, people saying 'mustn't grumble' and 'I'm terribly sorry but', people apologizing to me when I conk them with a nameless elbow, milk in bottles, beans on toast, haymaking in June, stinging nettles, seaside piers, Ordnance Survey maps, crumpets, hot-water bottles as a necessity, drizzly Sundays - every bit of it.” —Bill Bryson, Notes from a Small Island.

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