Hitchhikers

I had anticipated returning from my vacation with oodles of books to write about. I was going solo on the great wide road, and solo time meant reading time.

But it seems I can't help but pick up hitchhikers along the way. Through fortuitous circumstances, one of my best friends from high school just happened to be doing nothing all week, and we decided that a road trip for the two of us would be ten times more fun than me in a car singing loudly to myself to Dolly Parton (which I still managed to do all the way from Denver to the New Mexican border, when I lost my voice and was forced to silently contemplate the scenery for the rest of the journey).

And what a great hitchhiker Dana turned out to be. Neither of us was a "spring breaker" in high school (my most memorable spring break involved a minivan, my mother, her best friend, and Barbra Streisand guiding our journey up I-90 to visit colleges in Minnesota). This was the first time we'd been on a girly vacation together. We talked about boys. We contemplated doing yoga and did wine tasting instead. We roasted vegetables. We bought jewelry and watched movies involving animals in human clothing. We donned aviator shades and car danced to Daft Punk.

All that car dancing, however, all that laughter, all that chatter (and how rarely we stopped) left little quiet time, and while we both enjoyed blissful hours on the deck reading to the soundtrack of a rushing river, I certainly had no time for War & Peace.

I did manage to finish two books: The World Without Us, and the truly enjoyable Things I Learned About My Dad (in therapy). But rather than shrinking the stack, I seemed to pick up more books along the way. Before I hit the road in Ohio, fearing I'd packed all the wrong books of my own, I'd hijacked my parents' seventies copies of The Ghost Writer and The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter, and my own nineties copy (with half its cover replaced by white electrical tape) of White Noise found lingering on a shelf in Ohio. When visiting Tattered Cover Books in Denver, I couldn't resist throwing some money down for Yiddish Policemen's Union and the long lusted-after Andrew O'Hagan's Be Near Me. So my little band of travelers grew.

And then I had to pack for the flight home.

"What am I going to do with all of you?"

Tolstoy, Roth, McCullers, and DeLillo were all left in New Mexico to hitch a ride back to Ohio and resume shelf duty there. The World Without Us went home to Dana's dad, the geologist, and Nicola Barker snuck into her bag somehow as well. That lightened the load. But since I've been back, I've picked up more wanderers: Tove Jansson, Robert Walser, and Octavia Butler. They all had their thumbs out as I browsed the book store. A girl can't help herself.

The road is just so full of them.

(This sounds like another video in the works.)

© Zan McQuade. All rights reserved.