Lost in moments…
There’s a feeling I’ve had a few times in my life. It comes in that moment when I am standing in some place I’ve never been before, heading toward somewhere new. The starting point is random, the final destination uncertain. Yet instead of any trepidation, all I feel is joy. The sun on my face, no obligations other than following the road (or the rail) before me, leading into that unknown, exciting future.
The summer I was twenty, I hitch-hiked from Granada, in Andalucía, back to London. There were many such moments on the road, thumb out in some small, strange place — a hinterland village perhaps, or a simple stretch of grass before a crumbling wall. One I remember so clearly. I’d got a ride with an English lorry driver at the truck stop of Junquera de la Frontera on the Spanish-French border. He was heading home; I was aiming for Germany. He took me overnight to another truck stop in the middle of France, a place he told me I was sure to pick up a German ride. Once there, however, even though I smiled my best hitcher’s smile at lots of drivers, not one offered to take me. I went back to my fellow Brit, and asked if he’d drop me somewhere along the autoroute. He told me it was illegal to stop but grudgingly agreed. He basically came to a slow roll, I jumped down, hopped a fence, ran across a field, and climbed another fence onto a B road that headed into the rising sun — towards Germany. It was 8 AM, the sun was…
