Photo: The photo has nothing to do with the meat of the post, but I don’t have any photos of hitchhiking, you know? Anyway, I’ve been trying to capture the changing landscape thanks to all the rain we’ve been getting (we’ve been in a drought! The rain is a lot, but very welcome!). I love this time of year when the world is so very green and alive.

---

To shield myself against potential burnout (always, always looming) and yet keep feeding my muse before Clarion West, I have tried to be flexible about my media consumption. That’s meant finishing books I was listening to (Watership Down, my first read of that, which I enjoyed! And A Prayer for the Crown-Shy, which I also loved.), get through shows I really want to finish (Common Side Effects, Andor, and The Pitt), and make sure I watched multiple streamers play the endings of Expedition 33, which is an absolute masterpiece and so much fun to watch in multiple chat communities.

I guess I should explain: I have a TV in my office and I often have Twitch running in the background. I really love watching speedrunners practice their craft, puzzling over how to get faster or how to break a game. There are many kinds of Twitch streamers and those of us who watch are always watching for different reasons. I love the speedrunners because I like sharing the deepwork brainwave with them. I watch the casual variety gamers who play that games I’ll never get to because I don’t have time to play anymore (I also use them to find games I think the boys might like). There is a guy who streams the grand sumo tournaments who has gotten me absolutely addicted to all things sumo. Best stream ever! There is also a 70-something man who does amazing traditional Japanese printmaking who I watch, and a guy who walked from one tip of Japan to the next and streamed the whole way… There is a very cool Black man who streams his fishing adventures, including ice fishing in the middle of winter, which was fun to watch…

And anyway, because I have watched so many hours of such different content, the algorithm is always showing me new streams to check out. This week, a hitchhiking stream caught my attention.

So there is this guy, Trevor, who goes by the screenname Hitch, a Canadian who decided to hitchhike his way across Europe on his way to TwitchCon this weekend. Armed with a full backpack, streaming equipment, some cardboard signs, and a tent to sleep in, he stood at the side of many roads and hopped into the cars of absolute strangers to head down the road toward his destination. It took him 10 days. I watched the last 3, which ended in a riveting bike ride across Rotterdam in a race with his girlfriend (who was coming in from another direction, also live-streaming the experience with a different chat).

These three days had everything:

• An impromptu guitar concert at the side of the road. (the guy was pretty good!)
• Hockey talk with Ovechkin mentioned!
• Introduction to a random band that we all loved and followed on Spotify.
• There was this minute when it was just him with his thumb out, a song from said was band playing through his phone speakers, and us in chat watching him and it was just… cinema, as the kids say.
• Schnitzel fries with gravy that looked delicious (though the schnitzel might have been tough?). I guess this was in the equivalent of a turnpike travel plaza? But the fries looked golden hot and the gravy had real mushrooms. I’d try it!
• Learning that you have to pay to pee in some bathrooms in Europe (?)… which means that Urinetown is real? (I mean, it’s kinda like that here, what with the “customers only bathroom” policy in many places…)
• Learning that you can camp almost anywhere in Sweden, something I told my three Scouts here. Their eyes lit up. “We should go there!”
• Reading an international chat talk about sports and politics and border crossings and judging cars. The shared worried. The universal love of hating Boston hockey.
• Listening to Hitch talk about having to trust other people and being trusted during the journey. The feeling of connection with strangers and the freedom of movement being key for how he wants to live his life.
• Seeing parts of Rotterdam by bike (“Their infrastructure for biking is AMAZING! Wow!”)

It was a journey. His journey that he made our journey. And I really do mean that–he was very generous about what he was doing, how he was feeling, why he was doing what he was doing. That openness mattered. This is a key thing I love about IRL streams, honestly. As much as chat loved (jokingly) declaring everything scripted and all people paid actors or NPCs (there were multiple moments when a person familiar with the stream showed up to offer a ride–which he didn’t take– or some help or a “hey, I know you!” which was funny!), what makes the IRL streams so fascinating and magical are the quiet moments of just doing, or a raw moment of speaking some truth, or organically reacting to what’s happening in the chat or in the moment. We say that in storytelling, it’s “life, but skip the boring parts,” but the boring parts make IRL streams what they are. 15 minutes of waiting for someone to pick up Hitch on the side of a rest stop off ramp was riveting and full of tension for me!

I admit that I spent some time feeling salty about all this at first. Here’s this young, fit, not unattractive white guy doing a thing and feeling pretty safe and secure while he does it. Watching him stick his thumb out, holding his handmade cardboard sign with his intended destination, his face bright and affable, a graceful nod of thanks when a denied ride goes by, made me feel many feelings. When cars came by to pick him up, the drivers often asked where he was from, to which he’d answer Canadian, which I think made the drivers more open to accepting him (that’s likely conjecture, but I do wonder). And anyway, my salt came from my own feeling of insecurity: this is a thing I would never do and don’t think I could ever do. In what universe could I safely hitchhike without fear of any level of violence or just, you know, not being picked up at all? I guess I’ll name the jealousy for what it is: it’s not that I really want a life of hitchhiking across cool places as my day job, I want the the feeling of full and unencumbered freedom of being able to do so if I wanted. (And I think there is a story engine in that… I don’t know how it will manifest yet.)

Eventually, that salt fell away… because it didn’t really matter for the experience, ultimately. The stream was a gift. How else would I have seen what I’d seen or learned what I learned? My eldest child wants to be an architect and now I dream of somehow taking him to Rotterdam so he can see those streets that so easily shared bikes, trains, and automobiles so he can start dreaming up his own beautiful, accessible communities here.

And anyway, I left the whole thing feeling really inspired. Not because I want to write a hitchhiking story (but who knows!) but because I’m reminded are doing just about anything at any given time. People are still picking up strangers on the side of the road. Someone is riding a bike across a bridge over glistening waters while a commuter train goes by. Another person is camping in the woods without a care. Many more are watching other people do those cool things while they’re sitting at their desks sorta getting work done. I am certainly feeling inspired by the combination of bravery, trust, and the embodiment of that beautiful challenge to “Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence.”

Amid the noise and the haste of a world succumbing to the fear of the other, to the strong man, to the inequality of a stratified world, there are people like Hitch… going placidly from place to place, carried on the kindness of strangers passing by who are equally open to welcoming the stranger.

If you’ve never heard of Twitch and you just happen to be a storyteller, I really do invite you to check it out. It’s more than the hottub streams you’ve probably heard about, it’s even more than endless Elden Ring streams (though I’ve watched my fair share!). There is a lot of humanity in there if you know where to look and certainly glimpses of great stories to be told in any and every genre. There are even indie writers on there who do really interesting coworking streams. There are just working people who happen to do coworking streams! Those are fun… there is nothing better than a pomodoro timer and some lofi sometimes.

And if you are a Twitch viewer who just happens to follow any travelers of color who are making similar content, I’d love to follow them and their stories, just so I can compare and contrast.

Want to get inspired and write some stories with me this summer? I’m teaching a StoryStudio Chicago class on Speculative fiction this August! Learn more and sign up here!