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Last night we tried to hitchhike out of Lone Pine. Southbound traffic was sparse and it was getting late; we decided to make camp in Lone Pine for the night. Stopping at the "Frontier Market" to use the bathroom, a white volkswagen vanagon pulled in to the gas station. "I'll take it as a personal affront if they don't give us a ride," I joked, as a fellow vanagon driver. At a lull in the traffic we walked across the highway to hitch back into town; from there we'd walk into the hills to camp. We hadn't been hiking up the highway more than five minutes, hadn't yet so much as put an arm in the air, when who should pull over but the white vanagon. "Need a ride some place?" "Yeah, the Alabama Hills." The driver, upbeat and amiable, had recently retired to Lone Pine. "Been coming here since the 30's! Bought the lot in '94. Just finished building the house, moved in last year! Wouldn't trade it for anything in the world!" He drove us all the way up into the BLM campsite in the Alabama Hills without us even asking. "It's a bit out of my way but for a couple of nice people like you, it's nothing," he explained. Dropping us off at campsite number fifty-five, "Here you are, this is the best campsite in the whole place." So there we camped, between the golden-brown rock piles of the Alabama Hills and the sharp silver teath of the Sierra jutting skyward to the West with the full moon rising over the Owens Valley.

Lone Pine to Los Angeles

We hitchhiked all the way across the Mojave today, four rides from our campsite in the Alabama Hills outside of Lone Pine to my grandparents' house in Camarillo, completing our hitchhiking tour of US-395, Bridgeport to Los Angeles.

The first car to pass us on our hike out of the hills gave us a lift. The driver, coincidentally enough, was "Rochester born and raised." The couple described themselves as "vagabonds, gypsies, or wanderers, whatever you want to call us," camps in the high desert for the summer, Yuma for the winters, gets by by selling toy binoculars and telescopes, refers to their friends by CB handles ("some because they are hiding, us just because it's fun"), dropped us off at the town library.

Thirty minutes thumbing from the sidewalk in central Lone Pine got us a ride with Lee in his old Ford Ranger XLT to Olancha, more just a highway juncture than any municipality, with a downtown consisting of exactly a Mobil station and a beef jerky stand and an icky hot spring (not visited on this trip) aptly known as "dirty sock." There on the highway with the hot wind whipping through and the traffic zipping along without so much as casting a sympathetic glance, I thought we might be there for a while. Out of the high desert, it was hot and I couldn't help but think of the crazed hitchhiker in Fear and Loathing. You have to keep the faith when hitchhiking, it will work, it's just a matter of time.

I held a sign that simply said, "LA." It wouldn't do to get halfway there, get stuck in the morass of LA that's spilled over the hills. One driver got out to take our picture; she was going North anyway, she explained. After an hour all the rides came all at once. We turned down two rides who weren't going all the way to Los Angeles, who were turning West at Tehachapi, one car a single woman who looked like she was commuting to work, the other a foreign-accented family off to Sequoia.

We waved off that car with thanks-but-no-thanks, and then there was another car waiting there as if from no where. "Burbank," the driver said when I asked where he was going in a little, I don't know, Honda Accord perhaps. This was that promised car you have to keep up the faith for, going exactly the right place and with air conditioning. "Really? Via highway 14?" "Yup." We nestled our backpacks on the back seat next to his hung-up button-down shirts and were happily on our way. We'd gotten out of Olanacha after all. The driver kept us smiling as two hundred odd miles rolled by with tales of adventure. That Yugoslav freighter he happened to be aboard during the Cuban Misile Crisis. The time he hopped freight trains across the country, Bakersfield to New Jersey on $20. The year he lived in Tangiers. The best part of hitchhiking has been the people we've met.

Tomorrow: Amtrak through Los Angeles to Orange County.