On Sunday, The Atlantic published our editor-in-chief’s reported essay on contemporary hitchhiking. For it, the director and novelist John Sayles talked about his time thumbing around America, which helped inspire his seminal film Matewan, about the brutal suppression of a West Virginia coal miners’ strike in 1920. Only a short quote from that conversation made it into the article, and it seemed a shame to leave the rest on the cutting room floor. This is a longer version, edited for concision and clarity.

At the time I started, which was in ‘69, I had never been west of Buffalo, New York. I had heard about all these places and never seen any of them. Gas was probably under a dollar a gallon back then, but it still was a lot of money to me. I’d been working in high school a couple summers. I worked at a plastic factory, I started working in hospitals and nursing homes as an orderly. So when I was hitchhiking, I had some money. I always traveled with $200 folded in my shoe, in case the cops picked me up for being a vagrant. But it was really just to see the country.

The first time, I angled down through West Virginia and Kentucky. That’s when I heard all the troubles that were happening with the UMW, the miners' union, between Jock Yablonski and Tony Boyle, running against each other [to be president of the union]. It was that winter that Tony Boyle had Yablonski and his family killed. I heard the word Matewan Massacre, even though I didn't know what it was. They were talking about, “A lot of contention down here. We’re gonna have us another Matewan Massacre if things don’t get better.” Then I veered up and got onto Route 80, all the way to Los Angeles. I went up and down the coast a little bit. I got to San Francisco for the Haight-Ashbury thing, sleeping out in Golden Gate Park.

Especially in the Midwest, you’d get a lot of truck driver rides, which would be pretty long because there’s no towns in between. You’d get these drivers who make money by not stopping. The ideal was to only stop to get gas, you eat when you’re doing that, and the tanks are big, so you don’t stop that much. For these guys, amphetamines weren’t working, coffee wasn’t working. They’d see a hitchhiker and, “Okay, tell me a story, kid.” Sometimes I’d just have to make shit up, because they really were going to fall asleep if I didn’t keep them going. So I might tell him a story I’d just heard from the last person that picked me up.

I think it was in ‘74, I did my last hitching. That was right when the 55 speed limit went in—several states adopted it first, and then Nixon made it national. I wasn’t getting as many truck driver rides. Getting rides because truck drivers needed to stay awake, and truck drivers who were just being nice and were constantly on the CB radio was really different. By ‘74, everybody had a CB radio, because they were driving more than 55 and they wanted to know: Where are the cops? “Where are the Smokey Bears?” They’d say, “Well, around exit so and so, there’s Smokey Bear with his campfire blowing,” meaning that the light was on. Or they’d tell each other about whether the weigh stations were open or closed, because sometimes you’d be with a driver who would clip around the weigh station. The weigh stations moved around, kind of like the ICE stations now, if you’re near the border. That led to my first big short story that I wrote, “I-80 Nebraska.”

That was obviously a pretty tumultuous time in the country. I ask this because in 2016, I was hitchhiking around the country and was, like the other people I've talked to who were hitchhiking around the country then, less surprised by that election. Did you feel like you had a better sense of the pulse of the country than your peers who weren’t hitchhiking?

Yeah. The summer before I went to college was the police riot at the ‘68 Democratic Convention. So it was pretty lively times. We had Nixon in. They were beating up hippies or people with American flags on their persons in the wrong place. I was hitching with Elvis-length hair, a little longer than what you see here. So I wasn’t really on the “We’re going to catch that guy with a rope and cut his hair off” thing. I had my father’s World War Two army duffel bag with my sleeping bag in it. This is before Goretex and all that stuff, so this wasn’t the lightweight packs.

I got a lot of rides from guys who’d just come back from Vietnam, so I did a lot of amateur psychology, basically by just listening. You’d hear, “I’ve never told anybody this, but...” It was kind of the perfect thing because somebody could dump their stuff on you and then never see you again. And you could lend a sympathetic ear. You just had to say, “Oh, wow, that must have been something.” There were a lot of pseudo hippies out, some of them ex-military people who’d just gone swirly. They’d tricked up an old school bus and they were living in it. They were just picking up anybody for the company. Sometimes you’d share gas. You’d get young guys who were going short distances. They’d have a revved-up car. The words you don't really want to hear are, “You want to see what this thing can do?” It’s like, “Okay, well, I guess we’re going straight, so it’s not that dangerous.”

You got such a range of people that you got this little window on what people are thinking about what’s going on. Usually, it was not national. It was pretty local. When I hitchhiked in the South, I’d get a belly full of people worried about this Civil Rights Movement and outside agitators. I had spent a lot of time in the South, so it wasn’t surprising to me, but I was happy to be, at least in those instances, included as a white person, because sometimes it would be explained to me why Italians weren’t really white people. So you got a mix. On the California coast, you got mostly hippies picking you up, or hippie friendly people. Some nice people picked me up out of a tornado that was about to happen in Minnesota.

The mix of cops was the whole range too, from really hostile people to people who are really good at their jobs. I remember getting out of Denver, they said, “There’s this one place downtown, right near the capital, where you can pick up a ride, but otherwise, we’re going to bust you if you’re on the entrances to the interstate.” I went down there and the waiting line was all these people with their backpacks and bags. It was going to be hours and hours. I just took a bus and got to the next town. So I took some buses now and then. “Riding the dog,” it was known as.

I was pretty aware of what was going on and where you had to be careful. And that it was a very, very—kind of like today—polarized country. It was definitely more urban-rural polarized than just state by state. You could run into rednecks anywhere in the north, easily. So it wasn’t just, “Oh, southerners are this and northerners are that.”

There’s a bit in your book on Matewan where you talk about giving the Baldwin-Felts [anti-union thugs] a war hero background to complicate them as characters. Did that empathetic nuancing come out of your hitchhiking?

Certainly, running into a lot of guys who’d been in Vietnam and were having a hard time dealing with it influenced that. Some of that from hitchhiking, some from just life. But also, it’s 1920. Guys are going to have just come back from that shit. I finally read The Sun Also Rises recently, and when I finished it, I was like, “What a bunch of assholes. All they do is drink and fuck around.” And then I realized, “Oh, they’ve all been to World War One. They’re trauma cases. Of course, they don’t want to go home and they’re drinking. Kind of given up on life in some way.” So that influenced it, just looking at the date and thinking who those guys would be.

What were the most intense things that people confessed to you? Or the most intimate rides you can remember?

Some of them could be kind of humorous. There was this totally Type A, full-of-energy guy. He was alternating between being a Ranger instructor, which is like the Navy SEALs, and a traveling salesman. He had been in the Rangers, got out, got married, got the house, got the kids, was making all this money being the supervisor for a bunch of vacuum cleaner salesmen. “I’d drive the van, I’d give them a pep talk, and I’d drop them off. And then I was the closer. I’d come in, ‘Ma'am, have you gotten your carton of coke today?’ And then I’d have stuff on her floor that had to be vacuumed up, and I closed the deal. Boom, boom, boom. I was making all this money. Then I just spent too much of it and was on the road too much. So, lost the wife, lost the kids, lost the home, and I went back into the Rangers to clear my head.” The idea that you’d go back into the Rangers to clear your head!

You’d get people who were drinking. Another guy in the oil fields, he was drinking Colt 45s. I don’t drink, so I’d just say, “I’ll watch the road for you. You go ahead.” I did have a guy, I think it was Nebraska, a truck driver at night, not confess helping do a murder, but brag about it. So that was a long ride. He had so much bile in him, he couldn’t finish the sentence without going [throat clearing sound], and then finishing the sentence. You never know if that’s somebody bragging something they didn’t do, or bragging something they did do. There were a couple rides where, when they said, “Where do you want to be left off again?” you’d calculate what’s the quickest way I can get left off.

You’d get Vietnam guys who’d done awful things or felt bad about what they had done or hadn’t done. And then you’d get people talking about their divorces. I was a psychology major. We always had a joke about “Some of you are pre-med and some of you are pre-patient.” I was more the pre-patient thing. But I had a good feel for, “What does this person need to hear?” You’d get those things. “Well, do you think you’re better off? I mean, I know you’re not happy about it, but do you think you’re better off now? Or that it would ever get any better?” And you’d actually have a session. You knew, “It's going to be an hour and a half before we get to the next city where I could get dropped off, so I can go down this road.”

I know you did some acting in college, you mentioned telling some stories to truck drivers, and I assume you have to sort of take on a role in these more intense situations. Were you sticking to your reality, or were you inventing a character?

Sometimes I’d feel like I don't know if I want to tell this person my real name, so I’d make up a name. Then I’d have to remember it when they’d say, “What was your name again?” But I was careful, because I hadn’t really done very much. My experience was limited. I had had jobs. I’d worked in hospitals, I’d worked in factories, so I could talk about that, but a lot of times I really just asked questions. I was interested. A guy was growing beets. What’s that like? How do you do that? Somebody had lost their small farm and they were now working as an employee for agribusiness. I’d get them talking about that. They were happy to talk about it. So you’d actually pick up a lot.

Were you already writing at that point?

I was writing and sending things off by ‘72, so when I was hitching in ‘73 and ‘74, I was already writing. I got one short story that’s in my first collection. I was in Ventura above LA, on the way up the coast, and slept on the beach. Getting up in the morning, these two winos—this old, grizzled white guy and this Mexican guy whose mind was kind of fried—came up to me. They introduced themselves as Daniel Boone and Cervantes. The white guy was a speed rapper and he laid this rap on me. After I gave him the dollar and 48 cents I had loose on me, to go make a bottle of wine, I took out a pad and I wrote down his rap, because I have a pretty good short-term memory, for dialog anyway. That became a short story.

But I was truly much more trying to see the country. I would sometimes have somebody I had gone to college with go, “Oh, I know somebody in Minneapolis, stop there and take a shower.” A friend of mine was going to the writers' school in Iowa City, so I got off 80 and got down to Iowa City. He was mostly a poet. Going to a poetry class, we stopped by to get a friend of his who was also in the class, and that poet said, “If so and so says anything about my poem when I read it out loud, I’m gonna bust this nose.” Oh Jesus, getting intense here with the poets. It was an interesting view, because I never went to a writing school or a film school, of what that hot house thing was out here in the middle of Iowa.

There occasionally was a destination. I wanted to see the Tex-Mex border. I got to Houston with a long ride, and then I went down to Corpus Christi and Brownsville, then I think I cut up to San Antonio from there, to just get a feel of that, which I remembered when I started writing Lone Star.

Did you pass through any reservations while you were hitchhiking?

You kind of have to going west. I remember I was just sleeping out in the bush, seeing this thing advertised in one of the little towns. I went and I saw, with a bunch of Indians in folding chairs, an old western movie. I don’t know if John Wayne was in it or not, but people kind of laughed. They liked Westerns too.

You stopped around the time that the nationwide decline began. Do you have any sense of what drove that?

The Zodiac Killer had bumped off a bunch of people. I just got the feeling that the psycho killer to normal person ratio of drivers who would pick you up was getting worse. For instance, I knew people went to Bennington and some people who went to [Williams] college where I did. I noticed that a lot of the colleges in New England were having these hitching posts where the girls who were going to hitch home or to another college would go. Somebody who wanted to pick somebody up and give them a ride would come there, somebody from the college would write down their license plate. So it would be, “We know who you are. You, young lady, don't take another ride. Go where they’re taking you and that’s it.” There had been enough incidents that it was getting hairy in that way.

And I was working in hospitals. Then I moved into Boston and got a union job in a meat-packing place. I could afford a better car. So if I wanted to zip down to Florida, I’d drive down in two days. It’s definitely faster. One nice thing is, [when I was hitchhiking,] I’d get stuck in places for half a day, but, hey, I'm in Nevada. I’m in some place I’d never been before and it’s pretty great. An eagle just crossed the road in front of me and I saw coyotes. The good thing is, I’m not an impatient person. When young people would ask me about trying to raise money to make an independent movie, I’d say, “Well, it’s very much like hitchhiking. It might be the first ride that comes by or the 500th. You have to know when not to get in the car. If you have a bad feeling about it, just say, ‘I’ll think about it.’”

Were there any rides that changed the way you wanted to live your life?

I remember getting a ride from a guy on the West Coast. He was only 38 and he was officially retired. He’d done 20 years in the military, so he was getting his pension. Now and then, he’d take a job and make money under the table if he wanted more. But he was just saying, “I’ve been married once. I’m not married now, I want to go and do some stuff. It’ll be low rent, but…” He had tricked out an old delivery van so he could sleep in it. That was interesting to me, to see what people were doing with their lives. He was not necessarily a hippie. He was a guy who kind of admired them. “All these hippies, when I was a kid, you couldn’t do that kind of stuff. People would shoot you or think you were an asshole.”

Then to see some of the regular people at their jobs and see the ones who were miserable and the ones who were doing fairly well with it. They’d be turning up or down and let you off somewhere. You got a little window into their life. You're meeting a lot of people you would not ordinarily meet. You take a job, you meet the kind of people who would do that job. You go to college, you’re talking to a range of college kids, but they’re kids who got to go to college. But you hitchhike, in a day, you might run into a lot of really different kinds of people. 

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