Hell of a Place to Lose a Cow : My American Hitchhiking Odyssey

by BROOKES, TIM

• ISBN13: 9780792276838
• ISBN10: 0792276833
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-07-01
• Publisher: National Geographic

Summary

Tim Brookes was a 20-year-old Oxford student when he first succumbed to the lure of America's open road. Equipped with a change of clothes, a cheap guitar, and the youthful wanderlust of the Easy Rider era, he spent the summer of '73 hitchhiking from the East Coast to the West Coast and back again, an exhilarating experience that ultimately led him to leave old England to settle in New England. He's been here ever since. Twenty-five years later, he hit the road again, traveling light and following his thumb in a free-form re-creation of his first cross-country trip. His friends told him that times had changed, that fear stalked America's highways now, and that the only drivers who'd pick him up were bound to be as crazy as he was to undertake such an odyssey. But his friends were wrong, as this vivid and eventful book makes colorfully clear. Highlighted by wonderful photographs, "A Hell of a Place to Lose a Cow" revisits old stomping grounds and discovers new ones, tracks down old friends and makes new ones, remembers old impressions of America and deftly sketches new vignettes of a country at once very different and surprisingly the same. In Manhattan, a rendezvous with an old girlfriend evokes all the changes wrought by a quarter-century of passing time, but it's not long before the seventies spring back to life in Sausalito when a hippie couple in a classic VW microbus pull over to offer Brookes a ride. He barrels across Nebraska with a gay trucker whose semi is linked by satellite to his home base a dozen states away, and blasts through the switchbacks of a mountain pass on a hair-raising ride in an ex-con's battered pickup. In Las Vegas he finds a neon-lit 24/7 time warp, while only a few miles away a high-desert ghost town summons up another kind of timelessness. On a back road in Ohio, we meet a beautiful Amish girl driving a horse-drawn buggy to a birthday party; half a continent away, a leather-jacketed Harley chick, is one of 300,000 bikers who roar into a little South Dakota town every year for a week-long blast. And these are only a few of the American originals who populate a book that captures all the spontaneous serendipity of the hitchhiker's vagabond life. Keenly observed, entertaining, and eloquent, "A Hell of a Place to Lose a Cow" weaves past and present into a unique, ever-changing tapestry of intertwined roads and lives.

Table of Contents

A Barometer of Goodwill	1	(9)
Anywho	10	(6)
Clothing Technologies	16	(4)
The Road to Jericho	20	(4)
Searching for That Wonderful Tribe	24	(5)
Been a Long Time Since I Did the Stroll	29	(19)
The Vagabond, When Rich	48	(9)
``Public'' Being a Dirty Word	57	(13)
In the Silverware Drawer	70	(8)
Dysgeography	78	(6)
Missile Silos Would Make Great Condos	84	(12)
A Frontier Planet	96	(8)
``A Hell of a Place to Lose a Cow''	104	(9)
Red Wind at the Mirage	113	(10)
Another Casualty of the Sixties	123	(20)
Between Me and the Basted Egg	143	(4)
Laundry on the Freeway	147	(5)
Don't Start Singing Before the Money Gets Through	152	(9)
Fundamentally Nomadic	161	(13)
An Overlapping Assortment of Fantasies	174	(5)
Trodden by Rogues	179	(6)
The Last Don	185	(9)
Idiot A, Idiot B, and the Journey Back East	194	(7)
Hate Kickin' This Thing out of Cruise Control	201	(12)
Jeff Bridges Has a Ranch Up Here	213	(15)
Where My Dead Lie Buried	228	(8)
The Hitchhiker Remains at Large	236	(6)
The Lord Said It Was All Right	242	(7)
Falling by the Wayside	249	(5)
Between Order and Chaos	254	(8)
Bitumen in Their Veins	262	(4)
You Aren't Going to Blow Us Up, Are You?	266	(19)
Dowsing for Kindness	285	(11)
We Should Do All Right	296	(5)
Appendix A: A Short History of Hitchhiking	301	(5)
Appendix B: Product Testing Notes	306