Tag Archives: hitchhiking

BAD MOTELS – BAD POETRY September 1978

March 26, 2023 – 2:56 am

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 […]

By Peter | Posted in 70s, hitchhiking, Poetry | Also tagged | Comments (0)

AMONG THE REDWOODS by Peter Nolan Smith

October 2, 2022 – 2:42 pm

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. […]

By Peter | Posted in 70s, California, hitchhiking, semi-fiction, Sex, youth | Also tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

HITCHHIKING PROHIBITED by Peter Nolan Smith

July 8, 2022 – 12:12 pm

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 […]

By Peter | Posted in 70s, hitchhiking, semi-fiction, The West | Also tagged , , | Comments (0)

George, Washington 1972

February 21, 2022 – 6:08 pm

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 […]

By Peter | Posted in 70s, hitchhiking, semi-fiction, youth | Also tagged , , , | Comments (0)

The Death of the Road

September 3, 2021 – 12:18 pm

In 2013 my summer holiday plans fell apart one by one. The Nantucket house had too many guests, my friend in Millbrook had accepted an invitation to the Rockefeller’s’ Adirondack estate, and my sister was leaving Maine for a conference in Boston. All the flights to Thailand were out of my budget and Labor Weekend […]

By Peter | Posted in hitchhiking, semi-fiction | Also tagged , | Comments (0)