Sympahy for the Hitchhiker, Iran

Chapter 9 - Hand to Mouth to India

"And I lay traps for troubadors who got killed before they reached Bombay"
(Rolling Stones, "Sympathy for the Devil")

What is it to be alone? To be really alone. One way was to stand out in the middle of nowhere and try to hitch a lift. When no one knew me, my identity became just an arbitrary story which didn't seem to mean all that much. My name is Tom. I'm twenty years old. I play clarinet-blah, blah, blah-what does any of that have to do with who I am today and what I'm experiencing? Nothing. When hitchhiking, I had to continually maintain the foundations of my world and hold up the sky with my own hands. There was no one to haul me up from the ditch when I fell over and the only person who made sure that I ate, drank and stayed warm was myself. Naturally, when hitching I met people who extended their love and care to me but when I moved on I was a stranger in a new town, once again alone.

Maybe this doesn't sound so cheerful but it was a far-out state of mind to achieve for, by handling the lone travelling trip I could sometimes access a kind of self-contained strength that was the springboard for true independence. By the roadside, I entered into a kind of a dialogue with the silence around where for my every thought, word and action, there was a kind of complementing answer in the world about me. A response that could only be heard when there was sufficient quiet.

When alone, that existential silence was plentiful. Without any fixed schedule or responsibilities, there were often times when I had nothing to do except look within and talk to myself-the first sign of madness; the second was when I began to feel more comfortable on the road than when staying put. And if, of course, I chose to make my home in India I'd be a complete write-off as far as the rest of the world was concerned.

But the roots of travel are as old as our species. The anthropologists tell us that there have always been people possessed of the unshakeable urge to go walkabout and the the nomadic way of life was the norm untl the Egyptians discovered agriculture and made farmers of the civilised world. For the far greater part of human history we lived as nomads and hundreds of thousands of people still live the roaming life today. They live off their livestock and move on to find fresh grazing pastures, new markets to trade their wares or to stay with the friendly drift of the seasons and avoid the harsh extremes of climate.

This was once common practice from the aborigines of America to the Bushmen of Africa, from the Bedouin of the Sinai to the Rajasthanis of India; all lived within temporary tent structures of varying design and sophistication, roaming as a tribe with no one owning more than they could bring with them. Because of the necessity of travelling light individual wealth was not an issue. Possessions and equipment were mostly of the communal domain, efficiency being the soulmate of survival.

Hand-in-hand with this way of life was the ancient paradigm of a close and personal relationship with the world; the fortune of a tribe would depend much upon the favour of the seasons. Every culture had shamans, priests or sages who could place themselves in contact with the various spirits and deities of the Earth and Sky, to determine how best to align their activities with the elemental forces at play.

These practices don't require our belief or faith in the supernatural because the power that they thrived upon was largely based upon certain poetic symbols. Meaning itself is an arbritrary construction that helps us navigate our world. Maybe it doesn't make any difference to the comig of the rains if you pray to the Monsoon God but it is a medium that would allow you to channel your thoughts and feelings about the prospect of dying of thirst.

For nomads on the move, the distinctions of the outside world became a blur as their surroundings changed by the day. Most of their waking hours were filled with the sounds and smells of their way of life, moving with the jangle of kitchenware and breathing the musty scents of the pack animals. Their steps in time with the beat of their hearts.This lifestyle taught non-attachment to possessions, the caprices of their daily fate teaching them that the only thing permanent was change.

This nature began to die when people first started to cultivate their own land on a wide scale and erected settlements to last longer than a season. Wealth and personal power now had the opportunity to accumlate and the status quo was born. The rich didn't particularly want to harvest their own rice and the subsequent segregation of labour brought about the first real class system. Families began to vie for influence and prestige and feudal politics was born.

It can be imagined that in the lust to acquire enough gold to last a lifetime their values changed. No longer was it so important to be as it was to have. Religions sprouted that protected or even idolised the ruling classes and they lost their harmony with life itself. Death had previously been a companion, an eventuality understood and accepted, giving more vitality to the moments they lived. Now society began to accumalate as many possessions and luxuries as it could in a vain attempt to satisfy a thirst that would always be insatiable.

"Life is a bridge," say the Aborigines of Australia, "Walk across freely but don't build your house upon it."

And look at things today-most people are utterly tied up in debt and fears about their financial security, as they endure lives of drudgery and misery in a gargantuan effort to 'stay afloat', for fear that the ground will suddenly open up and swallow them. No one buys anything or goes anywhere without extensive insurance policies to cover them in case the worst happens and hardly one person in every ten thousand can hold all he owns in both arms.

But the nomadic urge dies hard. No matter how neurotic and paranoid the culture there always surface individuals who are ready to leave town for the next horizon. 'Drifters', 'hoboes' and 'tramps' they're called by those who stay put, these people are regarded with suspicion and wariness wherever they arrive. However, that's often overcome by the relief from monotony these drop-outs bring. People of the road are often also story-tellers and musicians, singing of the blues that comes with a freedom of movement that the common people both envy and fear.

Such a man was the blues maestro of the 1930's, Robert Johnson and he epitomised the image of the smooth itinerant musician. A comrade of his is quoted as saying:

"Me and Robert would be on the road for days at a time; sleeping in ditches and barns and playing on street corners and low-down bars for nickels and dimes; I'd just as soon as catch myself in the mirror and see myself looking like a dog-and then I'd turn around to see Robert, looking like he just stepped out of church!"

But it wasn't long before the black folk of the Mississippi, jealous of his freedom, began to make rumours and gossip that Johnson had sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads to gain his amazing musical skills. A legend that grew in strength after his first wife died in premature childbirth while Robert was off hoboing somewhere. The only way he could deal with these blues was to sing them:

"I've got to keep moving, blues falling down like hail, And the day keeps on my need, Like a hellhound on my trail."

The tradition continued with types like Woody Guthrie in the 30's and 40's Depression America. Tens of thousands of men, women and children got on the road to head for the sweet waters of California, to find health, wealth and prosperity in the promised lands to the West. Of course, they found only miserable refugee camps and hostility.

These migrants from Oklahoma and Arkansas, whose lands had been desolated by dust storms, discovered the truth that travelling men like Guthrie had always known-the dreams of modern society were a con and that there never would be any absolute security from the perils of the world-not if you owned the largest farm in Texas. Everything could at any time depart just as easily as it came. You either gripped your handful of dollars until you developed heart cancer or you shrugged and moved on your way with poverty and insecurity as friends that you knew, rather than as dreaded enemies who haunted your dreams at night.

This spirit was maintained by the Beat generation, as Kerouac, Cassady and co, screamed across America in stolen or borrowed convertibles. They introduced a healthy intake of drugs to the picture, generating an intoxication of the present that recreated a mystic appreciation of the relationship with the road, not so different from the ways of the nomads thousands of years before.

These trends ultimately coalesced into the reunion of Eastern and Western thought, as the psychedelic explosion in the West instinctively sought its partner in the strong esoteric traditions of the Orient. Long-haired freaks began to establish a physical bridge between the two by means of the overland trail, that many thousands successfully made in the 60's and 70's and that many hundreds didn't:

"And I lay traps for troubadours, Who get killed before they reached Bombay!" So sang the Rolling Stones, in a well-decerved tribute to those who went down along the way. Victims of illness, murder and overdoses, the casualties were high. The movement reestablished a culture of being on the road. Modern counter-culture needed to get away and out there in the real Journey to the East, where they hoped to find some match in the philosophies of India and South-East Asia for the discoveries they were making in their own heads.

So what was I doing hitchhiking the overland trail 20 years too late? I'm supposed to be a Thatcher's child! Where was my portable phone, credit card and filofax? I guess I've always spent too much time hanging around with a crowd 20 or 30 years older than me, soaking up their stories and ripping off their anecdotes. Sigh, a mis-spent youth.

In some warped corner of my mind, I conceived of it all as a pilgrimage in tribute to the various influences that had turned me on to this whole new way of life. I had to earn my freak stripes, in order to really understand the origins of the whole Asian freak scene. I was due to finish my trip in Goa where I'd first really been turned on and I hoped it would be there that I would find a clue of what to do next.