Moral Lessons From the Side of the Road
Anything can happen on the road, and not just the less traveled ones of poets. Venture far enough and one might encounter unexpected riches, violent acts of nature or bandits.
Few people have seen as much road as the professional hitchhiker Juan Villarino, who has to persuade passers-by that he’s not one of those roadside thieves.
“A driver has less than three seconds to make a decision,” he told The Times. “And that decision is made in response to unconscious factors and subliminal communication.”
After the economy of Argentina collapsed in 2001, he surrendered to the “siren song of the highway,” Wes Enzinna wrote in The Times. “I realized that you could work your whole life for a house, a career,” Mr. Villarino said, “and overnight it all could vanish.”
He has been hitchhiking ever since, paying his way by writing about it. Despite the dangers of his travel, the only weapon he said he carries is “an idiotic smile.” That’s partly because of one of the trade’s paradoxes. Like romance, Mr. Enzinna wrote, the people who need a ride the most can seem desperate, which makes them the least likely to receive it.
“Hitchhiking is a process of reconciliation between the haves and have-nots,” Mr. Villarino said. “I like to put myself in a position of powerlessness and see what happens.”
Had he been seeking a lift on Interstate 70 in Indiana recently, he might have joined the “haves” — at least temporarily. An armored truck’s door opened and bags of money fell out. With more than a half million dollars blowing around, Matthew Haag wrote in The Times, “the timeless hypothetical question became reality: What would you do?”
What a lot of people did was pull their cars over and grab the cash, which Mr. Haag said had “gathered like leaves and formed piles in the grass off the highway.” People living nearby rushed over to stuff their pockets with $20 bills.
“People know right from wrong,” Bill Dalton, a police officer, said in a statement, “and anyone we track down who kept a dollar of this money will be arrested for theft.”
The choice to pick up money or a hitchhiker from the side of the road raises an existential question that Mr. Enzinna asks: Are people bad or good? The road, he wrote, “could make and break that faith, over and over again, often multiple times in a single day.”
The faith of Mr. Villarino might have been tested had his travels led him to Hawaii’s Big Island. Lava from the Kilauea volcano has burned highways and homes on its way to the ocean. As Mr. Villarino knows, material things can disappear in an instant — a lesson Mike Hale recently learned.
Mr. Hale fled his home because of the volcano’s toxic fumes. When he came back to rescue some belongings, lava had blocked the road. A time-lapse video that went viral had captured the lava eating its way across the street, swallowing Mr. Hale’s Ford Mustang and his mailbox.
“I guess it’s just kind of surrendering to nature,” he said, adding that seeing the video, “felt like ‘O.K., you have what you have, it’s done.’ ”
Rufus Daigle, a poet who sells coffee and books at a stand along a nearby road (which is certainly less traveled now), says the volcano is demanding respect.
He told The Times: “That’s the Earth farting, man.”