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Man on the Road
After reading Girl on the Road by Louis Adamic, the thing that puzzled me was the writer's perception of this girl he has picked up. Why did he do it to begin with? It seems for a moment, he could have felt very bad for the girl and decided to pick her up on a whim, but he doesn't ditch her somewhere and he buys her food. For a person who makes so many kind gestures to this stranger, he seems to have no interest in her story. I think that his choice to pick up this poor girl was mostly out of his desire for adventure. The short story begins with Adamic saying that there was no one on the road for miles. He writes, "when the wind occasionally lurched into me with great force and threatened to swerve me off the road, I almost enjoyed the sensation I experienced." In travel, we are driven by the unpredictability of what may come from every decision that we make. People travel(ed) to get a chance to have a story worth telling, even if it was someone else's. The hitchhiker has a lot of pride and energy for someone who had her share of bad luck. It seems that telling her story to the writer, a stranger with a car, she was almost justifying her bad experiences with the fact that it now made a good story to tell. You get the sense that she wants to tell her story, that she is proud of it, in a way. Although she had had money, two lovers and lost it all, she has an air of optimism in what awaits her in Baltimore. Maybe the success of a trip depends on the story that comes from it.
Pickin' Up the Hot Bums
I think you're right in your observation of this man picking up the bum girl. When it happens, it seems like such an obvious thing to do, it's only human nature really. But almost immediately after we're riding in the car with this girl, there's a feeling like maybe we'd be better off without her. Maybe we'd all be better off. Maybe she'd be better off dead. The author is doing something very brave here which I think we've only seen in the realism of Waiting for Nothing. In his feelings that he's made a mistake in picking up this girl, he's admitting his weak side, his faults as a human being. He's expressing the very core problem of the bum / civilian hate problems that so tormented the country throughout all our readings: there is a clear class difference, and a duty to uphold the American system in it's light. This was for sure the bravest article we've read yet.
I wonder if the hitchhikers
I wonder if the hitchhikers optimism is exaggerated by the author. As you pointed out a good story sometimes makes a whole trip worthwhile. When I was reading this piece her optimism also struck me as a bit odd. Perhaps the author's perception of the girl's emotions were merely her outward expressions rather than the true pain inside? Or, perhaps she truly was optimistic? What I find in these readings is a sense of confusion over the authenticity of the story telling by these authors. They might come across someone with a great story, but between the actual event, the storytelling, and the eventual written product there is probably a significant gap in the reality of the situation.